12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dobby Gibson

Dobby Gibson [photo credit: Zoe Prinds-Flash] is the author of Polar; Skirmish; It Becomes You, a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award; and Little Glass Planet. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book didn’t change my life, much to my surprise at the time. I eventually realized the disenchantment was a kind of gift. As poets, it is our job to be forever in search of a transformation we never quite attain.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I did come to fiction first! I even have an MFA in fiction and an underwhelming graduate-thesis novel to prove it. I began writing poetry on the sly in my second year of the Indiana University fiction program. Poetry wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, in the eyes of the institution. I’m happy to report that its lost none of its transgressive thrill.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m writing all the time and tend not to think in projects. I wake up most days and write a poem, and then, over a few years, the poems point toward the book.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Every poem begins in an encounter with language.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I want my poems to connect with actual people—people who aren’t necessarily poets or academics. If I’m interested in a poem I’m working on, I’ll eventually read it out loud when no one else is home. I suppose I’m imagining an invisible audience being there with me, but this imaginary reading is just as mysterious to me as a real reading. Who is listening? As a poet, you can never be sure, unless you’re reading at a Monsters of Poetry event in Madison, Wisconsin, which is the greatest reading series in America. It’s not even close.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I’m trying to capture the texture of lived experience. Its astonishments. Its befuddlements. Its outrages. All its bizarre simultaneities.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In “The Nobel Rider and the Sounds of Words,” Wallace Stevens says the role of the poet is “to help people to live their lives” through the power of the imagination. This may require working within the culture, or it may require working outside of the culture. In my experience, it often requires not thinking about the culture at all.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Over the course of five books, I’ve worked with three different editors: April Ossmann, Jeff Shotts, and Carmen Giménez. Each of those relationships has been essential. If April, Jeff, or Carmen have something to say to me about my work, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and listen. I may not act on what they say, but I will listen.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Never wear light brown shoes with a dark suit.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

On a good day, I have 30 minutes with my notebook in the morning before anyone else in the house is awake. But I’m un-fussy about routines and protocols. I voice-text poems and parts of poems to myself while driving my car all the time.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Reading Tomaž Šalamun cures anything. It’s like splashing cold water on my face.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Kimchi. A red sauce after it’s been simmering on the stove for 30 minutes. The air just before it snows.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Anything can spark a poem. In this most recent book, one was inspired by the sight of a tiny hotel soap.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Aphorisms of all kinds. The comedian Steven Wright.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Retire.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

An Olympic badminton player. But I would still write poems.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I wish I could tell you. I have no memory of making the choice.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and Grosse Pointe Blank, which I just rewatched. It still holds up (pun intended)!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m surprised to find myself working in prose lately. And, as Dean Young’s literary executor, along with Matt Hart, I’m also focused on bringing Dean’s first posthumous collection of poems into print. It’s called Creature Feature.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Bad Weather Mammals

 

Sweet Sixteen

Mum said I had to call Dad to find out where he was.
I didn’t want to think about the day he would stop
coming around, the fist of his mouth. My mother was
always attempting to reassure herself by reassuring me.
She promised we would go to the funeral together; all of her
little foxes in the same part of the forest. Before the funeral
we walked into a field as a cast of hawks stroked a November
morning into a gaslit day. Time measures itself in a scatter
like those hawks. My social worker says I can be the axe
to break through the hold of my own misery. I’m learning
to be invisible, but these hands refuse to lift the axe.
Mum knew how to make me jimmy her heart loose.
She could be gentle then, whispering tunes her grandfather
left tucked behind her ears. I am learning what is not mine to tell.
I am not as free as I would like to be.

Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s latest full-length poetry collection is Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024), a follow-up to her full-length debut, Slow States of Collapse (ECW Press, 2016). Bad Weather Mammals explores illness, depression, trauma, disability poetics, and a history of violence; working through and across an array of ongoing and lingering, old and new, challenges across a first-person lyric. To open the poem “Good Sick/Bad Sick,” she writes: “The sick should be good. / It is a kind of undoing.” As the back cover offers, the collection “navigates the devastations and joys of living in a disabled and traumatized body. By taking a backward glance, Best traces how growing up under the maladaptive bureaucracy of social services with a single disabled mother and five younger siblings led her to a precarious future in which she is also disabled and living on social assistance.” Opening the collection, the prose-poem “Chapter of Accidents” sets the tone, introducing all that might follow: “I am thirty years old and this is the first year of my life I have lived in an apartment that did not have a mould problem, that did not have a man problem, that did not have a man with fists in your face problem.” This is what one needs to know before she begins, before she moves further back to where she had been, compared to where she is now. Further on in the same piece:

Disability meant housewife, meant I do everything else and he makes the money. Eleven years of water-bloated walls, mould an encroaching boundary of black on the carpet. It didn’t take much to lay my mood flat then, for the dishes to coalesce into a pile of grime that neither of us wanted to deal with, until he decided it was my responsibility. Oh, what of my joints, the sullen pop of knees as they straighten the body. Tender points signal illness, swollen knees require needles to release the fluid. I flattened myself, expanded despite my desire to thin into invisibility.

The poems in and across Bad Weather Mammals represents an unfolding, an unfurling, of reclaimed and repurposed self, despite and through whatever else had been, has come and still is. “Bronwen suggested the body / is the limit we must learn to love.” she writes, to open the poem “I Am Becoming a House,” a poem which suggests a reference to the late Kingston poet Bronwen Wallace (1945-1989). “I’m not one to love my limits: / I’m practicing being an empty house.” She writes of disability and poverty, both through her childhood and into adulthood, and the reduced options available to her through either, both. “My words,” she writes, to open the nine-part sequence “Pathography,” “always pale reflections for the language / of my organs. They say I am so lucky, to not have / a nephrostomy tube intubating my kidneys, delivering / my body of its own fluids, like E. I was lucky a nurse / didn’t have to come every other day to clean bandages / and disinfect the open wound like E. I got to stay in school, / collect a scholarship and student loans, pay rent, groceries.” She writes of agency, even when and through a seeming lack of such, forcing her way through, and hopefully past, the worst of it. As she writes, further along in the collection: “Consider: it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own / narrative as surely as you know your name.”

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

some Thanksgiving, Sainte-Adèle, etc.

Another weekend, another Thanksgiving [see also; two years ago], at mother-in-law's cottage, Sainte-Adèle, up in them Laurentides (roughly an hour's drive north of Montreal, if that situates you a bit better). Christine, myself, our two young ladies and irritable cat, Lemonade, hosted by my most favourite mother-in-law. I think this is only our third weekend up here this whole year [see also: labour day weekend], unable most weekends due to the array of child appointments: ukulele lessons, choir practices, ringette, German language school, etcetera. What have we done to ourselves?

We saw no deer on this trip, but there was wind. And squirrels, running up and down the side and the back of the building. As ever, I attempt these get-aways as marathon reading sessions, most of the weekend focusing instead on poking through the larger manuscript of my ongoing "the green notebook," recently subtitled "a writing vigil" [see a variety of excerpts of the project at my substack], as well as putting the final touches upon my essay on Christine's new book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024), thanks in no small part to an assist by Kim Fahner [see the final essay here] (I think at least half the time up there was dedicated to that particular essay). I might have poked at the beginnings of a short story, also. I'm not sure yet. Otherwise, Rose and I did get part of an evening of chess (her eldest sister and I played a great deal when she was roundabout Rose's age, also): we're already rather evenly-matched, so we keep landing into positions where we've almost no pieces left, simply chasing each other around the board into uselessness, but we enjoy it enormously.

Still, there's a whole mound of material I'm attempting to get through. Did you see the new Stephen Cain poetry title? The new Leonard Cohen biography? The new Ashley-Elizabeth Best poetry title? The stacks of brilliant items produced through Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative? I mean, holy crap: previously uncollected or unpublished works by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (what I was most excited about, honestly), Adrienne Rich, Diane Di Prima, Muriel Rukeyser (some very cool things in there), Edward Dorn, etcetera. Have you seen the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry that Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone edited? I've been recommending it to everyone. I spent the weekend working up many notes on many things. A flurry of notes, and then the final morning as I woke completely wiped out, unable to do much of anything (Christine did the driving en route home, due to my brain-fog), confirming Covid-positive once we landed back in Ottawa (today is day five: second day the kids out from school), which is very irritating. So the past few days have been fallow: those notes, as of yet, are still only notes.

And the young ladies have been requesting I minimize photos of them in this space, but here's the youngest during a walk we took down the road, on our final evening there. The tower in the background. The slight pink-purple of sunset and encroaching dusk.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Courtney Bates-Hardy

Courtney Bates-Hardy is the author of Anatomical Venus (Radiant Press, 2024), House of Mystery (ChiZine Publications, 2016), and a chapbook, Sea Foam (JackPine Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Event, Vallum, Room, PRISM, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, among others. She has been included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2021 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is queer and disabled, and one third of a writing group called The Pain Poets.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, House of Mystery, was proof that I could do it, I could write a book and get it published, and people would even read it. My second book, Anatomical Venus, was different from the first because I really wanted to take my time with it and be picky about the poems I included in it. House of Mystery was very inspired by fairy tales and the ways I could mix them with stories from my childhood and young adult years. Anatomical Venus became much more concerned with the chronic pain I was experiencing after being in several car accidents and I started to write about disability and pain through the lens of movie monsters and anatomical art.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I can’t recall if I wrote a poem or a short story first when I was young, but I kept going with poetry in a way I didn’t really with fiction or non-fiction. It’s much more difficult to find sustained amounts of time for fiction and non-fiction, so I’ve stuck with poetry. I love poetry and what I can do with it that I can’t do with fiction or non-fiction, and my brain tends to think in poetry-sized chunks, so it works out pretty well.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

It really depends on the poem. Some poems come quickly and appear looking close to their final form, some need more notes before I even start writing and go through multiple drafts, and other poems change completely from conception to final draft and might not even look like the same poem.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Typically, I have an overarching idea for a book in mind but it might shift and change as I start writing the individual poems and do more reading and see what comes up.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

They should be more a part of my creative process. I try to read my poems out loud while I’m editing to get a sense of them but reading them for an audience gives more information about how the poems are landing—what lines are working, what parts are funny, which poems resonate. But there are always some poems that I’ll never feel comfortable reading at a public event, if I feel they’re too personal or too emotional to read though. I enjoy doing readings, although I do get nervous. I’m always happy to hear from the audience about what resonated for them, even if it’s just in the “hmms” and “aahs”.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In Anatomical Venus, I wanted to answer the question about disability posed by Amanda Leduc that I included as the epigraph to the book: “What sort of happy ending can be found in constant struggle?” The final poems in the book are my response to that question.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I write because I enjoy it and because I like to create meaning and art out of my life and my interests. If other people read my work and feel that I have captured something that they have felt or experienced, that makes me happy. If they read my work and it shows them something they haven’t felt or experienced before, that also makes me happy. I’ll leave the question of the Role of the Writer in Modern Society to the philosophers and greater writers than I.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I find it essential. I need an outside eye to tell me what they see in the work and what they don’t. Sometimes I need that extra little push to put something on the page that I’ve been dancing around in a poem. I worked with Jennifer LoveGrove on Anatomical Venus, and her feedback was immensely helpful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My supervisor for my Master’s thesis was Kathleen Wall, and she told me that if I ran into a problem or a block in my writing, to put it in my back pocket (figuratively speaking) and let my subconscious work on it for a while before returning. It’s served me well.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t have a regular writing routine. Work takes up a lot of my time and energy, which is why it took eight years to finish and publish my most recent collection. I write when I can, when inspiration hits, when I go to writers’ retreats, and whenever I can type something into my notes app.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My reading. I’m always reading something, so I’ll turn to other books for inspiration or to learn more about something I would like to write about.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of my girlfriend’s hair, my cat’s fur, and good food cooking on the stove.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Absolutely, you name it: visual art, film, tv, nature, science, music, ballet, on and on. Some of the inspiration for poems in Anatomical Venus came from the tv shows Penny Dreadful and Hannibal; monsters from Godzilla, Hellboy II, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Blob; and anatomical art by Ercole Lelli, Eleanor Crook, Jaques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Oh my goodness, so many. Amber Dawn for her queer poems, Amanda Leduc for her writing about disability and fairy tales, Joanna Ebenstein for writing about the history of the anatomical Venus in the first place, Sandra Ridley, Katherine Lawrence, and Jennifer LoveGrove for helping to shape the collection at different stages in the process. I’m also endlessly grateful to my writing group, The Pain Poets.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to go on a writing retreat at Banff, I’d like to be guest editor for a literary magazine, and I’d like to publish some of my non-fiction someday.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Considering my full-time job is in marketing and communications, I don’t know that I would be doing anything else except writing. I thought about other things: teaching, publishing, library sciences, but they all circled around writing or reading in some way. If I could write full-time for myself, that would be a dream come true but that will have to wait until I can maybe, someday, hopefully retire.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I loved any kind of art growing up, but writing drew me in because I felt like I was better at it than things like drawing or painting. I had a poem published in the school newsletter in grade one, and that was it, I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I recently read Jes Battis’ forthcoming collection of poetry, I Hate Parties, and I’m very excited to read at their launch in September. It’s a beautiful collection, so tender and meaningful, all about growing up queer and autistic. I also loved Joelle Barron’s new collection, Excerpts from a Burned Letter (historical lesbians!), Emily Austin’s Gay Girl Prayers (queered Biblical poems!), and Kayla Czaga’s Midway (stunning poems about complicated grief).

I just watched Alien: Romulus in theatres, and I loved it. I’m a big fan of the Alien movies, so I was pleased to see a new Alien movie that was so much fun to watch and paid tribute to the previous installments. Monkey Man with Dev Patel was another great one I watched recently that was a total surprise.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on my next collection of poetry, which doesn’t have a working title yet. So far, it’s about my experience of coming out as queer and polyamorous and reckoning with the religious trauma of my past while also celebrating the joy and care of having two loving partners. I’m doing a lot of reading on queer and lesbian figures from the past that I think will come into the collection in ways that remain to be seen. It’s a fun stage to be at and one of my favourite parts of the creative process.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

four recent (short) essays: Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross + Christine McNair,

As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.

Spotlight series #102 : Gale Marie Thompson

The one hundred and second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan and Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is a poet, publisher, and political economist living in Greater Boston.   His most recent book is And Yet it Moves (MadHat, 2023) and recent books are The Wild Goose, and Loom. His poems and reviews have appeared in the Partisan Review, Harvard Review, ArtsFuse, Green Mountains Review, and beyond.  Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston area annual of poetry and poetics.  He works as a political economist at Boston University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

I started identifying as a poet when I was twenty, but didn’t publish a book until I was forty.  I had published poems in the Partisan Review and the Harvard Review a decade earlier but in those earlier days I spent more time focusing on publishing the work of others through the magazine compost I co-published.  When I turned forty I published two chapbooks,  Isolate Flecks with Gloria Mindock’s Cervena Barva press and Looking for Lake Texcoco with Mark Lamoureux’s Cy Gist.  When I held those collections in my hands they propelled me with affirmation and inspiration.  Now And Yet it Moves, published by Marc Vincenz’ MadHat Press, is my eighth book—my fourth full length book.

And Yet it Moves is quite different than my last book, The Wild Goose published by Paul Marion.  The Wild Goose was (largely) written when I was a poet in residence at the Heinrich Boll cottage in Achill, Ireland for two summers. I’m a quarter Irish if my last name didn’t give it away and my father had recently passed.  That book is an exploration of Ireland, my life with my father and beyond.

And Yet it Moves is a pandemic book.  I was shaken by the denial of science and reason in the United States but like Seamus Heaney during ‘The Troubles’ I saved my descriptive rage for the kitchen table but wanted to engage differently as an artist.  As I say in my introduction, this was not the first time we lived in such an era.  I delve into the Medici era in this book, a poetic journey of the rebirth of wonder followed by its denial manifest by Galileo’s imprisonment.  The book is a series of poetic monologues of that time, telling that story.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Our mother took us to the library every weekend and we had to get books.  I read mostly fiction and was taken by Orwell, Thomas Wolfe, Mark Twain.  I read poetry in school but would never pick it up on my own—until I heard Bob Dylan and it was all over.  Wow did he fuse the ‘raw and the cooked’ into one inside and out with a new post-modern sensibility but a meter that sang on its own.  From Dylan I worked backwards being most struck by Williams, Levertov, Rexroth, Patchen, PAZ, Seamus Heaney, O’Hara, Walcott, John Brooks Wheelwright, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Olson and others before I hit a wall in the early 20th Century.  Then I time machined to Homer, Virgil, and Catullus.
 Through Rexroth I entered the world of Tu Fu, Li Bai and Japanese poets too.  Non-fiction is another story.  I’ve written nine books on the global economy.  Let’s save that for another day.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

There are two kinds of poems I write.  The first are those that just hit me, I’ve referred to those as ‘lightning bolt’ poems.  Something happens or I see something or reflect and then comes what David Hinton calls ‘contact’ and boom I start writing and yeah perhaps 80 percent of what happens when the lightning hits my tree stays on the page in the end.

The other kind of poetry I write are more ‘projects’ as you say.  My first book like that was LOOM, also published by MadHat.  That book, in method, is the most similar to And Yet it Moves because it is an exploration and conversation with a history to make sense of the present—an ‘archaeology of mourning.’   The older and busier I get—rhyming ain’t the day job—the more important these projects are because they are always there for me.  At this point in my life I’m dodging a lot of lightning bolts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

To finish where I left on the last question I guess, for the lighting bolts I end up collecting those in loose books.  The ‘projects’ are seen as books.  My book Radio Plays published by Dos Madres is somewhere in the middle.  It is a collection of shorter set pieces many of which were lightning bolts—or short storms!

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

A poem doesn’t work for me until I’ve read it looking into a pond of eyes and seeing if I can connect.   Readings are essential for me.  I don’t think I’ve published anything I haven’t read in public or at least walking around my house beforehand.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I think we are all asking who are we, where are we, what are we doing, what are we being.  Like Duncan and Olson I see poetry as an open field for these questions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The poet is the point of contact with a reality revealed in the creation of the poem and shared.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Most publishers and editors I have encountered either don’t like the book and won’t publish it or like the book and largely publish it as is.  Actually, And Yet it Moves is an exception.  The poems were originally all fairly straight sonnets but Vincenz helped me hone them a bit more to true projective verse and they are now more like those of Ted Berrigan and Bernadette Mayer.  Since they evoke the ruins of the Roman Empire in Renaissance Italy I am calling them ‘ruined sonnets!’

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Don’t try to be someone else.  Sing your own songs and most importantly in your own voice.  Everyone’s is unique and each person is equally incredible.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I work full time.   For the past five years I have had the privilege to be a poet in residence each summer for a few weeks but I use that to take things to the finish line.  In my case I turn off the work laptop at around half time of the Celtics game with the sound off and start working on my poems.  If the game is close I stop the poems and bleed green.  If not I can go on very late sometimes or hit a wall and go to bed.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

As I said earlier, the longer run ‘projects’ are what I move to.  I also write reviews, most recently for the Arts Fuse and Harvard Review… That can help.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The robust smell of my German Shepherd, REXROTH!

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

And Yet it Moves is all of the above—triggered by science, but there are poems in there about Michelangelo, Vasari, Botticelli.  In the background the New York painters of the 1950s and slapping away on a big canvas above me when I write.  On many levels I am engaging with climate change in this book, so nature is there.   In The Wild Goose I evoke Dr. John playing his piano and Desolation Row is always playing in the background.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I listed a bunch earlier in our conversation.  I go back to those the most but am always on a new quest to learn something new.  Homero Aridjis is the poet I have been diving into the most lately, as well as Cid Corman.  I’ve been reading plays a bit more than poetry though, particularly Brian Friel and August Wilson.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Play for the Boston Celtics!

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

NBA Basketball Baby!  But that’s a joke, I’m five foot nine.  That said one of my best friends’ grandma was the Red Auerbach’s secretary and I majored in Physical Therapy for a few semesters thinking I’d be the trainer for the Celtics.  Poetry broke through.  

I should say that part of the motivation for all this is a social justice.  The poetry can go in one way, action in the other.  In my day job I work as a political economist trying to get the institutions of global economic governance to align with the goals of financial stability, human wellbeing, and environmental sustainability.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I played instruments when I was younger.  My mother had us in art classes all the time too.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

That’s new?  I just read Ron Padgett’s DOT, Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens, and the new selected poems of Larry Eigner edited by Jennifer Bartlett. Best book though I’d say has been Homero Aridjis’ new Self Portrait in a Zone of Silence.  Wakefield Press has just come out with an incredible crop of Max Jacob in translation that I recently reviewed for Harvard Review.  Great film?!  My son and I had a blast yesterday watching The Instigators.  Was great to know every neighborhood it was shot in!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am almost finished with another archaeology of morning, perhaps in some way it is a prequel to the book LOOM I discussed earlier in our conversation.  This book deals with the Tempest of the settlement of Massachusetts, the translation of its land and people to the West, and to the final battle that confirmed colonization.  A truth that lies in the names of so many roads, rivers, and streams here, but is never discussed.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;