Posts Tagged ‘Ken L. Walker’

spotlight: Harmony Holiday

Friday, April 27th, 2012

Interview by Ken L. Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think of this one:

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

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

You write in the poem, “Ambassador:”

Bafflement and its quotient climate, apathy and its quotient climate

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

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

You should speak to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s something to dress that:

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Fence Books, Harmony Holiday, Jen Bervin, Ken L. Walker, Lil B, Major Jackson, Michael Dickman, MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, Nathaniel Mackey, POPRally Presents, Rita Dove, Sun Ra, Terrence Hayes, Weldon Irvine
Posted in features

spotlight: Typecast Publishing

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Interview by Ken L. Walker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Adam Day, Amanda Smeltz, Fritz Ward, Jennifer Woods, Ken L. Walker, Kentucky, Louisville, Lumberyard, Matt Hart, Matthea Harvey, Matthew Lippman, Sawmill, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Typecast Publishing
Posted in features

spotlight: Kate Schapira

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Make Me An Offer for A New Position

Interview by Krystal Languell

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

***

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

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

JS: How about yourself as a writer?

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

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

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

JS: And your contemporaries?

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

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

KS: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JS: Bourbon, you mean?

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

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

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

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

KS: Probably.

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

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

JS: Would you like to make another movie?

KS: Yeah, I’d love to make a movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KS: One third.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JS: Do you read your contemporaries?

KS: Yes.

JS: And Freud?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: 1956, How We Saved The City, Jean Stein, Kate Schapira, Ken L. Walker, Krystal Languell, Sigmund Freud, The Paris Review, William Faulkner
Posted in features

spotlight: Forklift, Ohio

Wednesday, February 15th, 2012

Interview by Ken L. Walker

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Amanda Smeltz, Ball State University, Brett Price, Chad Sweeney, Cincinnati, Dean Young, Forklift, independent poetry press, Ken L. Walker, Kiki Petrosino, Matt Hart, Ohio, Ohio University, philosophy
Posted in features

Tribute to Louis Zukofsky’s “A”

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

New Directions published a beautiful reprint edition of Louis Zukofsky’s “A” in 2011. Here is a tribute to the book featuring poems and short essays by Marina Blitshteyn, L.S. Asekoff, Adam Day, Ted Dodson, Seth Graves, Michael McDonough, David James Miller, and Erika Moya.

Introduction

by Ken L. Walker

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

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

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

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

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

“Heimweh Funicular” by Adam Day

Two Poems by L.S. Asekoff

“Pulp” by Erika Moya

“Uppity Young Women Exit Your Zenana” by Michael McDonough

“This Boy is a Dead Man” by Seth Graves

“I’ll Bite” by David James Miller

“Dangling Modifier” by Ted Dodson

Two Poems by Marina Blitshteyn

Tags: A, Adam Day, Alexander Hamilton, Barry Ahearn, David Miller, Erika Moya, Karl Marx, Ken L. Walker, L.S. Asekoff, Louis Zukofsky, Marina Blitshteyn, Michael McDonough, New Directions, Seth Graves, Ted Dodson
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spotlight: Carmen Gimenez Smith

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

The Questions of Men

Interview By Krystal Languell

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

What did you do during your summer breaks?

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

KL: Would you?

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

Were you publishing already?

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

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

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

What about Federico García Lorca?

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

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

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

Do you collect your images in notebooks?

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

So images just pop up while you are writing?

Um, sure.

Who else were you reading in those years?

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

Do you revise a lot?

Yes. I only revise. All writing is revision.

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

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

So it’s a form of meditation?

I’m too neurotic to meditate.

Were you always a reader of dictionaries?

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

What about satire?

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

When did you first start enjoying jokes?

When I was two.

What makes things funny?

If I say them.

Is this the American condition?

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

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

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

Do you believe in God?

Nope.

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

Yeah: fuck off.

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

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

KL: Is this a narrative book?

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

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

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

What does that mean for you — interrogating the lyric?

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

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

The truth is out there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Tags: Aldon Nielsen, Angela Carter, Belladonna Books, Belladonna Collective, Carmen Gimenez Smith, Charles Simic, Eleni Sikelianos, Harry Matthews, James Tate, James Wright, Keith Waldrop, Ken L. Walker, Kristin Prevallet, Krystal Languell, Li-Young Lee, Noemi Press, Robert Bly, Roland Barthes, Surrealism, Susan Howe, The Paris Review
Posted in features

spotlight: Argos Books

Friday, November 11th, 2011

Interview by Ken L. Walker

***

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

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

***

KW: What was the impetus to begin Argos Books?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Anna Moschovakis, Argos Books, Cate Marvin, Eileen Myles, Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Erin Belieu, Iris Marble Cushing, Ken L. Walker, Lyn Hejinian, Maggie Nelson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Monica de la Torre, Stray Dog Press, VIDA
Posted in features

spotlight: O’clock Press

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Interview by Ken L. Walker

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Andrew Durbin, Ben Fama, Ben Mazer, Charles Bernstein, Christie Ann Reynolds, David Antin, Dawn Lundy Martin, K. Lorraine Graham, Ken L. Walker, Kit Schluter, Macgregor Card, O'Clock Press, Pierre Alferi, Pierre Reverdy
Posted in features

spotlight: Mark Nowak

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Sort of Uncharacterizable

Interview by Seth Graves

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Was that with Ted Genoways?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly—that whole social documentary tradition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Coffee House Press, Cole Swensen, CS Giscombe, Documentary Poetics, Jonathan Skinner, Ken L. Walker, Mark Nowak, Seth Graves, Shut Up Shut Down, Susan Howe, Ted Genoways, Thalia Field, Wesleyan Poetry Series
Posted in features

spotlight: Melissa Kwasny

Monday, August 22nd, 2011

The Possibility of Wholeness

Interview by Melinda Wilson

* * *

Melissa Kwasny’s first three books regularly engage various thinkers and “philosophies of the land.” Her fourth book, The Nine Senses, uses her earlier work as a launching pad to something fresh: an enactment of “what [she has] learned.” The spellbinding prose poem series is a can’t-miss in 2o11; the following interview was conducted by telephone and e-mail in May 2011. Kwasny’s other three books are Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed Editions), Thistle (Lost Horse Press), and The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press). She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 (Wesleyan University Press) and co-editor, with M.L. Smoker of the recent poetry anthology in defense of global human rights, I Go to the Ruined Place (Lost Horse Press). She lives in western Montana.

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MW: During our phone conversation, you told me a little bit about living in Montana – the very long winters and the fact that there can simultaneously exist “mounds of snow and buttercups.” How does the sometimes contradictory nature of your surroundings impact your writing? And how did it change or inform the writing of your latest collection The Nine Senses?

MK: Montana is, on the one hand, a recreationist’s paradise, and on the other, the site of massacres, of the military defeat of native peoples and a take over of their land. It is a place where pictographs and petroglyphs from visionary ceremonies a thousand years ago and more still mark the stones and caves and cliffs around me, though they are now often the site of beer parties and racist graffiti. As a white person, this contradiction—knowledge of the painful and on-going history of American colonialism along with a sense of the beauty and power of the mountains and rivers—is felt as more immediate in Montana, what with its seven reservations and its twelve tribal Nations. It is a contradiction I live with and write with. In my own work, what I have learned from the American Indian people I encounter as friends, artists, colleagues, as well as in the diverse literatures that make up the body of what we call traditional and contemporary Native poetry and fiction, exists alongside Western European traditions and poetries, especially in regard to ideas about how to forge a meaningful relationship to the earth.

My previous book Reading Novalis in Montana was my most direct engagement with these contradictions; studying early Romanticism, with its notion of a correspondence between the natural and spiritual worlds and its emphasis on the dialectic between inner and outer realms of thought, made me aware of its similarities in world view with many American Indian beliefs and practices. (I have often wondered if the fascination and popularity with which Europe greeted the discovery of tribal life in America in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century played a part in the development of thought in European Romanticism.)

In The Nine Senses, I pay less attention to naming the continuities and discontinuities among philosophies of the land, less to mapping them, and more toward actually living what I have learned. What might it be like to live in resonance with the natural world? In the epigraph for the new book, I quote the eminent Sufi scholar Henry Corbin speaking of a way to imagine the earth that seems akin to the visionary practices of certain American Indian tribes: “It is much less a matter of answering questions concerning essences (‘what is it?’) than questions concerning persons (‘who is it?’ or ‘to whom does it correspond?’) for example, who is the earth? who are the waters, the plants, the mountains. . .?” In the poems that make up The Nine Senses, I am trying to enact that switch in pronouns in my own consciousness, asking of all those I encounter, including the non-human, who are you?

You also mentioned that you write early and everyday. Can you talk a bit more about your writing process?

I know someone who makes her living talking to animals, often when they are ill or bad mannered, hired by their owners who cannot figure out what is wrong with them. Whether one believes in this ability or not, I recognize something of my own practice in hers: she simply begins by asking the animals if they will talk with her. Then, she pays attention to thoughts on the margin of daily consciousness, to dreams at night, to insights and intuitions until she feels that they have said yes, that she has established a connection. When I am interested in something, whether it is a particular flower, a shell, a grove of bamboo, or something larger, like the inner mysteries of illness or the history of shamanism, the difference between a city of art and a city of love—all subjects in The Nine Senses— or when I am worrying something I read, I put out the call. Well, really, I don’t know who initiates the conversation, attention being one of the holiest of mysteries. The poem becomes the collaboration between us. I talk into the Image. I have faith in an individual and intimate response. Much occurs in the writing itself, of course, the writing by hand, the writing out of doors, in particular the doors of the self.

Both Reading Novalis in Montana and The Nine Senses reference the work of philosophers Novalis and Henry Corbin. How and why were the poems in these collections informed by their ideas?

Novalis, as you may know, was a German mystic poet who lived from 1772 to 1801 and was one of the early proponents of what we have come to call Romanticism. The German Romantic idea—one that greatly influenced poets Wordsworth and Coleridge and through them, writers like Emerson and Thoreau—was posited on the notion of correspondences, that the natural world is a mirror or lens or double for the divine presences symbolized by it, a correspondence between inner and outer worlds. Reading Novalis in Montana is an exploration of those correspondences as well as a dialogue with other writers—Romantic and otherwise—who have thought about our relationship with nature, asking the question of what it might mean, in this country, at this time, to read the images of the inner and outer world.

There is also the notion of a lost world, not an Eden, not a paradise taken away by a god but one lost to our modern consciousness, one where humans spoke with animals and plants and where we were, thus, more whole. (The poet “blends himself with all the creatures of nature, one might say feels himself into them,” Novalis wrote.) Novalis, like many Romantics and later modernists like Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Joyce in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, H.D. in her Trilogy, Eliot in The Wasteland, believed in the possibility of wholeness, that if we could amass enough knowledge, if we could just see the larger picture, we, as creative beings, could see into the mystery that is the wholeness of the world. Novalis was collecting fragments toward an Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge when he died, in his twenties. Pound famously said, “I cannot make it cohere.” Eliot talked about “these fragments I have shored against my ruin.” Novalis said, ” The incomplete still appears the most bearable.” In Reading Novalis in Montana, I am exploring some of these Romantic and Post-Romantic ideas through the lens of living in contemporary Montana, a place, as you say, of many contradictions.

In The Nine Senses, I wanted to expand my attempts to “feel” myself into the many forms of non-human life I encounter. Henry Corbin, whom I mentioned earlier when speaking of the epigraph to the entire book, is my preceptor here, in so much as most of his explanations of Iranian mysticism, i.e. Sufism, center on the visionary properties of the Image. In many marvelous books that have framed my thinking on the dialectic of inner and outer image—Spiritual Body, Celestial Earth; Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi: Avicenna and the Visionary Recital—he articulates a creative process that begins with the image as “an organ of perception.” If, as Novalis and the Romantics would say, all appearance has an exoteric and esoteric presence, an inner and outer being, how can the imagination be a tool to navigate between them? The Image, Corbin would explain, is a door, a way to see that opens up to the fullness of being. In the Sufi meditations which Corbin speaks of, which he calls “visionary recitals,” the mystic brings the outer image inside, converses with it, sees herself in relationship with it, a method of utilizing the Creative, as opposed to passive, Imagination. In this way, he distinguishes vision from dreams. I find this to be a wonderful description of what can occur within the experience of writing a poem.

Incidentally, the title of the book, The Nine Senses, comes from something I read in a book now lost and forgotten, but one also about the Sufis. It said that, for them, there were nine senses. In addition to the five with which we are familiar, there are four more: telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, and clairvoyance. I am sure that there are many more. I think of the poems in this book as a result of my own practicing of this kind of “recital,” albeit far less disciplined and more westernized in its approach.

These two collections also differ in many ways. The first things I notice, for instance, are the visual representations of the poems on the page. The long lines of Reading Novalis . . . obviously contrast with the block prose poems of The Nine Senses. What do you see as the two books’ primary differences?

In addition to what I have spoken of already, there is the obvious formal difference: lined lyric verse vs. the prose poem. It seems obvious to me only now that I have been moving from the short-lined tight lyric of Thistle to the longer line in Reading Novalis (which allows me to say more and more widely) to the next step, that of prose. But there are other differences, perhaps generated by change in form—H.D.: “A new cadence means a new idea.” I learned much from the Imagists when I was young, especially from H.D., who was an early love, from her Modernist museum of moments caught of light or wind or weather. But, as I say in a poem in Reading Novalis, “Even she knew that image was not enough.” One sees an Image. One responds. A knowledge comes out of it, not explaining it, but disclosing something else. My response lets me see more, whether the response is intellectual or emotional, and hence, the progression of images and responses in what becomes a weaving—or sometimes careening—back and forth between inner and outer perception, something that seems fitting for the prose poem. Image as ongoing revelation in ongoing syntax. Placing things next to each other as our lives do, and moving on. As the Syrian poet Adonis writes, in his Introduction to Arab Poetics, “The image is a becoming, a change of state.

What attracted you to the prose poem style which you used in The Nine Senses?

The Nine Senses is very much influenced by my reading of René Char’s poems, both the prose poems and the aphoristic sequences in Leaves of Hypnos. During the years I was writing the poems in this book, my friend Robert Baker was translating a late book of Char’s, The Word as Archipelago, forthcoming from Omnidawn Press. Every few days, or weeks, I would get an exquisite newly translated poem in the mail, a quiet and slow, almost liturgical way to read and absorb poems of such mastery and complexity. I saw that Char was doing what I had wanted to learn to do, i.e. follow the image into its mysteries. He is able to leap from image to statement to image, each disclosing the other, in a form that is always surprising, never narrative: “An earth that was beautiful has entered its death throes, beneath the gaze of fluttering sisters, in the presence of insane sons,” he writes in the poem “We Have.” It seemed to me an internal language, a shamanic language—in the aforementioned book, he has a series of poems inspired by his visits to the cave paintings at Lascaux—one emerging out of trance and great pain, one that seems to come from the earth itself. Helen Vendler once said of Char, “he writes with absolute candor, but in a secret language.” I continue to learn much from his employment of this secret language, though my poems do not pretend to reach his heights and depths.

Many of your poems also speak to the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Can you describe this relationship and perhaps comment on the role of plant life in the new book?

The Persians had a language of flowers, which was a sacred language. Flowers were seen as instruments of contemplation; as I say in the first poem of the book, entitled “The Language of Flowers,” they are “the liturgy of the angels.” Plants have always been a source of healing for me, not only in their medicinal power, but also in their beauty. Shape, color, fragrance, even the names of flowers set us dreaming–rose, hyacinth, lavender, violet, iris—as if by merely saying them we could move from the ordinary into the magic.

In an essay on the flower image in a manuscript I have just completed, entitled “Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision,” I reference an article I read by John Felstiner about Paul Celan. In it, he speaks of a form of Romanian folk elegy called the doîna, wherein a specific plant is matched to a specific grief. He writes that Celan often did this, as if the presence or name of the plant could mitigate some of the pain. I do this, too, albeit not so consciously, but it is rare to find a poem of mine without some plant in it. They are a touchstone in my days, their world one I am always paying attention to.

The poems in this book are pensive. “The Nightingale’s Excuse,” for instance, contains the lines, “Our lives have changed. How is it we didn’t notice? We are gray haired, wandering among the ruins,” alluding to questions regarding mortality, loss and the passing of time. But in the poem, the speaker notes, “Perhaps we are at the end of time.” What is the speaker feeling in this poem?

“The Nightingale’s Excuse” is inspired by the epic Iranian poem “The Conference of the Birds,” written by Farid ud-din Attar in the twelfth century (I write more in depth about this poem in an essay with the same title, which appears in this summer’s issue of Pleiades). In the poem, all the birds are summoned to go on a quest for god, but they each have their excuses. The pigeon has its work to do. The owl wants to stay within its ruins. The nightingale cannot bear to leave the rose. I was thinking of the feeling of being too in love with what one knows to venture into the unknown, in this case, into the bewilderment of new love, specifically new love when one is not young. In the Iranian poem, “the conferences and talks and discourses of the birds ” take place in what is called the 6th valley, the Valley of Astonishment and Bewilderment. Love asks us to give up what we know, whether it is our time on earth, our way of being, or the self, which often makes us lose our orientation. This is what the poem ends with, the image of the self as a “nest constructed of field grass and flower paste,” one that , if we want to continue to grow, we must give up.

You mention many different artists throughout this book—poets, painters, filmmakers, philosophers. Which have had the greatest influence on your work, and why?

Well, Morris Graves is certainly a tutelary presence in the book. Known as one of the Northwest Metaphysical painters, his titles, like those of Paul Klee, are poems in themselves: Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye, Bird Maddened by the Sound of Machinery in the Air. I appropriate some of his titles in the poems, especially from the last series he did, which were paradoxically, for someone engaged with depicting spiritual reality, of bouquets of flowers: Ground for a New Goddess. Winter Bouquet. What drew me to Graves was, naturally, his love of both inner and outer vision, his capacity to paint flowers in the street market that look as if they are glowing with spiritual light. Char, Corbin, and, of course, Gaston Bachelard, whose thinking about the image is brilliant in one of the touchstone books in my life, The Poetics of Space, where he says that the image allows us “to think and dream at the same time.”

How long do you typically work on a collection of poems before you feel the manuscript is complete?

There is no typical. The first book, The Archival Birds, was the longest, possibly because it took so long to be accepted and I just kept writing new poems and throwing the weaker ones out. On the other hand, it took me over a year to write the long poem entitled “The Directions” in Reading Novalis. It felt ceremonial. It felt as if I had to live each stage of it before I progressed to the next. Right now, I’m writing poems focused on pictographs and petroglyphs I have been studying and visiting here in Montana, Canada, and other parts of the Northwest. I have been doing this for over two years. I don’t see the end of it.

Tags: German Romanticism, John Felstiner, Ken L. Walker, Melinda Wilson, Melissa Kwasny, Milkweed Editions, Morris Graves, Paul Celan, Reading Novalis in Montana, Rene Char, The Archival Birds, The Nine Senses
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