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?
Jalousie is my first book, so I’ll have to report back! My first chapbook, The Further Away, was published by artist Jonathan Rajewski, when he was running a small press called [sic] out of his home in Detroit, in 2012. I was just starting to think of publication in terms beyond the creation of a book object, that a book is not only its contents or even its material properties but a document that marks—and makes—relationships to other people, to particular places, and moments in time. Going to Detroit for a reading when that chapbook came out and then giving away (and occasionally selling) copies of that chapbook over the next months and years helped me to learn that.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Even in grade school, I liked sentences more than plots. I liked arguments and ideas, but I paid closer attention to the words that made them happen. When I was a senior in high school, a beloved teacher, the late Marty Sternstein offered a course in twentieth-century American poetry. He gave us this packet of maybe fifty poems to read over the summer. I found it a few years ago, and surprised at the variety—Baraka, Eliot, Harjo, Jeffers, Niedecker…At seventeen, I knew nothing; these were meaningless names to me. But I loved my totally uninformed encounters with the texts. Two poems in particular I read and reread all summer: an excerpt from Spring and All (yes, the red wheelbarrow part) and “Susie Asado.” I picked up Williams’s selected poems and Stein’s Tender Buttons sometime that fall. The attention to language I’d felt I was sneaking around for in other kinds of literature was suddenly there in the fore.
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?
S-l-o-w. Slower than slow. So slow I sometimes don’t know it’s happening, or I worry that it’s not. I write regularly in that I set down language, but most of the time it’s not toward anything. Once in a while, I’ll start to see something in my notes—usually a tension in logic or sound—that I recognize as part of the shape of a poem. Usually some part of that language stays through to the end. But the revision process continues for a long time. There’s often not even a single version or document I can point to as a first full draft. And I scrap a lot. The poems in Jalousie were written between 2011 and 2021. A postcard featuring cartoon snails sits above my desk, but when I see living snails on the move, they look to me like they’re going pretty fast.
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?
Depends. Jalousie is truly a collection but contains two long poems. Over the years that I writing the poems in Jalousie, I wrote a different manuscript that is a single project. What I’m working on now began with the form and length of a book in mind.
5
- Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Both
part and counter, and I enjoy it. Sometimes, if I have a reading coming up, I
take it as a deadline where the stakes are social embarrassment. It helps me to
cast the language I’ve been keeping so close out, toward others. But I admit,
it’s happened before that the reading is drawing near, and I’ll cut parts of a
poem I’d felt committed to if they’re not working yet, or even change them to
something I think will land. The lure to write what you know you can already
write well is a conservative one. It’s is a concern I have about the workshop
model in most contexts. But without the chance to share with others at a
particular time and place, I’d burrow into the mess of my notes without end.
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 have this idea that most artists—most people—have a few fundamental questions to follow that become the arc of their creative work, their lives. They’re so close to me, they’re hard to articulate. One, though, has to do with the relationships between the language and the real, especially in description. I used to teach a creative writing course on writing and the visual, and it began with examining the mechanics of literary images—what relationships do they have to sight, and what extra-visual elements come into play? How about to any particular referents? I’m not trying to answer that question so much as to write alongside it.
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?
Definitely not one. As in, I think different writers have different roles, differently perceptible. Sometimes that has to do with what a particular piece of writing offers others, but sometimes it has to do with how one enters any social space (and I would argue that any social space has—or is—a culture). For example, at my job, I often track how language is being used (or withheld) in non-literary contexts, like in policy memos, or at meetings, say, and that gives me a different—I’d say, fuller—picture of what’s happening than I would otherwise have.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential, and a gift.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My undergraduate adviser, choreographer and dancer Leslie Satin, had just watched a dance in progress and was giving me notes about a part that didn’t work. She said to “fix the mistake or make it more itself,” meaning, to work the mistake into the piece, to follow it.
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’m in an extended moment of transition. For a long time, I wrote every day before work, and at least one afternoon every weekend. I still like those times, but at a certain point, I needed more sleep and the rigidity of my routine was producing more guilt than writing. Lately, I’ve been writing in whatever moments I can carve into the day, and I try to set aside a longer block of time a couple times a week.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
To reading, usually something I haven’t read before. And I run.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
In New York’s warmer months, after the sun goes down, the sidewalks give off a particular scent that feels to me like home. It’s different than the New York City summer garbage/urine stench, but I do associate that smell with exuberance, excess life, celebration, even though I don’t like it.
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! Dance and the visual arts especially. There are some ekphrastic poems in Jalousie, and one poem is a performance score, it’s one in a series I was writing for a few years, eventually published as a chapbook called Score Poems (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016).
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Too many to name, from the canonized to the to small-press writers from other generations to my friends. But there are a handful of books I read in my mid-to-late twenties that spoke to me differently than others I’d read before: Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed, Lucy Ives’s Orange Roses, Sawako Nakayasu’s The Ants and Texture Notes, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Hello, the Roses. I felt a kind of proximity to these works—not that I felt my writing was comparable; I admired these books tremendously and still do—but like they were opening the way into my own concerns. Although he’s not contemporary, I had a similar feeling in those years when I was reading the collected poems of George Oppen.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Why is this question stumping me? Maybe because I’m so attracted to dailiness and harbor such distrust of goals.
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?
My full-time job is as a university administrator and writing teacher, so I do have another occupation. But it’s one I came to in figuring out how to make a life and livelihood in writing, so maybe that’s not a good answer. I’d be interested to work in sanitation, but I’d need more physical strength and a lot of practice to drive a vehicle as big as a garbage truck.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Continuing in dance meant rehearsal space, money to rent it, and time to coordinate with others; writing was so flexible and available by contrast.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Bob Gluck’s About Ed. Film: Hong Sang-Soo’s A Traveler’s Needs.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a manuscript that is in some ways a breakup story, and in some ways an extended work of ekphrasis. At the end of a long-term romantic relationship, as I navigated the impulse to parse what was happening, what had happened, etc., I found affinities with questions that have long interested me about narrative, representation, and figuration. Some of the artworks that come up in the book are Nam Jun Paik's 1962 Zen for Head, the 15th century Noh play Ashikari (The Reed Cutter) by Zeami Motokiyo, three 18th century still-life paintings by Anna Maria Punz.
