Writing fatherhood: Open Book: Ontario

My essay "Writing fatherhood," which may end up being the first of a four-essay suite, is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dan Thomas-Glass

Dan Thomas-Glass is the author of The Great American Beatjack Volume I (Perfect Lovers Press), Kate & Sonia (in the months before our second daughter's birth) (Little Red Leaves' Textile Series), Seaming (Furniture Press), and 880 (Deep Oakland Editions). He works as a middle school teacher and administrator, and lives with his wife Kate and their daughters Sonia and Alma in California.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well... I'm not sure I've published a book, exactly. I've published a photo-essay-poem on a freeway, a single-poem pamphlet, a textile chapbook, and a collection of record-poems. I'm hoping to publish an actual book-shaped collection soon. What I can say is that the process of writing and rewriting a book ms has been hugely informative: it has brought my attention, ideas, and investments into sharper focus.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Walt Whitman, more or less. In 10th grade we read various parts of Leaves of Grass and it exploded a lot of things for me. I started writing feverishly, in every shape and direction I could find. I was very spongy for a long time—I tried on vispo forms, performative work, narrative, just whatever. I've often worried that I'm too omnivorous, in that way. But lately I've stopped worrying, and just let myself write.

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 write a lot, and quickly. I revise a lot as well, but also quickly. I try to listen for language, then write what I hear. I'm very ear driven—a lot of the drafting process is about sound. And then the revision is often about form. Frequently I forget to think about content—about what I'm writing about. Usually I figure that out after the fact, or not at all.

It is also true that sometimes the form comes first, and those poems tend to have a different arc, and move more slowly. Some projects (like the Beatjack) are slower just because of the formal work of scanning poems and then writing into those stolen meters.

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?
I don't work on a book, no. I write in seasons—I've had poems organized in files on my computer by season (Fall 2012, Winter 2013, Spring 2013, etc.) for about a decade. Those seasons often collate questions, experiences, explorations for me.

Lately poems begin with being a parent, and extend to what intrudes on daily life—anything from drones to economic collapse, occupy, television, music (a lot of music), work, dead loved ones, whatever.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like readings because they bring writing into a kind of social contact that is different from other less physical forms like email or facebook. That is often generative. I try and bring my daughters, but often the time doesn't work—they're usually in bed by 8pm.

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?
How to put the blooming optimism of being a parent to two brilliant & loving daughters into conversation with the crushing horror and enduring pessimism of contemporary life.

But in a long spring poem I'm working on I just wrote

I decided

on no theory

for these words

but what small

hours unmoored

in days

reveal. 

—and I believe that's true, or something I'm working toward, too.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To love people, to help people, to make life better than it is, to find meaning, to care without shame, to seek the edges of systems, to slow down and observe, to be honest, to connect with ancestors and long histories, to create ritual, to imagine other possible worlds.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
When I list the editors who have helped bring my projects into the world, I am embarrassed at the riches I have enjoyed: Stephanie Young, Christophe Casamassima, Ash Smith and Dawn Pendergast, and Dana Ward. Essential doesn't even begin to touch their importance to my ongoing thinking.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Not exactly advice because it isn't written in the command form, but this quote is on our refrigerator (typed by my mom some once upon a time on an index card)—

"A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving." Albert Einstein. That is the short version the internet here at work is offering me. The longer version, on our fridge, includes being drawn to the simple life, and notes that class difference is fundamentally based on violence.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
They are in different places in my brain. I write a lot in many forms for work and life—those are all often similar, and poetry is distinct from them in that it leads me more than I lead it.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My day begins when either Sonia or Alma wakes up. Sonia usually yells for me, and Alma usually yells for Kate. We make coffee, eat, get dressed. Go to work. Sometimes when I bike to work I hear poems. Sometimes I write them down when I arrive. But being a writer who is also a parent and with a very full-time job that is not about writing per se, my routines are not centered on writing. I write when I can steal the time to write.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Some seasons and some years I write more than others. I've never worried about stalling.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Jasmine, ocean, eucalyptus, that big-street smell of lots of cars and corner stores.

14 - 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?
Music. Lots of music. But pretty much anything. I read a lot, and most of what I read influences what I write in some way or another.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dana Ward's prose turn in his poetry since Typing Wild Speech has been hugely important for me. Brenda Hillman's poetry, its attention to landscape. Roberto Bolano's playfulness in history. Ash Smith and Anne Boyer's recent writing and thinking about domesticity and parenting in poetry, some of which is about returning to Bernadette Mayer's work. There are so many, really—isn't that what being a writer is about, reading too much?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit New Orleans.

17 - 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?
I love cooking Mexican food.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don't know. I was drawn to words, as far back as I can remember.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I read too many books, many of which are great, to pick just one. I never watch movies though, so that's easy—the only movie we went to last year was Beast of the Southern Wild, and I cried. It was beautiful.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Books—Daughters of your century is a complete manuscript, and then there's another book about daughters.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Little Red Leaves: Thomas-Glass, DuPlessis and Kaminski

“[D]esigned and sewn by Dawn Pendergast in Houston, Texas,” the little red leaves textile series produces some of the most attractive poetry chapbooks I’ve seen in a while [see my previous reviews of their titles here and here and here], hand-sewn with recycled textiles including bedsheets and other fabrics. Produced in limited edition, these are beautifully-made, and more than worth their weight (I might even be slightly biased, since one of the earlier chapbooks in this series was something of mine, but I don’t really think so). 

In her most recent package, Pendergast sent along Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011), Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012), Lee Gough’s Future Occupations (2012), Kevin Varrone’s Eephus (from Box Score) (2012), Todd Melicker’s King & Queen (2012), Mac Wellman’s The Rat Minaret (2012) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss (2012). It seems as though her productivity has been increasing over the past year or two, which is impressive, especially when one considers that every copy of every book is hand-sewn by the editor/publisher herself. 

Something’s always doubling the double.

Shadows of trace remain intent.

Something explores its own excess.

Something pulses, never spent.

Littler and littler,

seely after seely

only a fine-meshed, mesh-fine net

can deal with this kind of real. Really.

Poetic technology always registers

smallness in the count.

With large-bore machinery, tiny details

are filtered through and out. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Draft 108: Ballad and Gloss)

Ottawa poet Monty Reid keeps reminding me (as though I needed reminding of such) that chapbooks are the ground level of where the best writing is actively happening. I’m paraphrasing, if only slightly; how could I ever disagree with him? If he’d seen any of these chapbooks, he’d most likely be even more certain. But what I’m really looking forward to is more work by Pendergast herself [see my reviews of such here and here]; when might that be happening?

Sonia screams against the order

                days insist on packing

into the stretch: minor

impossibilities like toes

arched up to generate

                 space straining to switch

the switch. This possible world

Sonia screams against. I

glance at Kate—where are

                our options? To lift

or light? Shushing by

reflex my art motions

toward quiet. (Dan Thomas-Glass, Kate & Sonia)

Subtitled “in the months / before our second / daughter’s birth,” Dan Thomas-Glass’ Kate & Sonia (2011) is a meditation on the imminent birth of his second daughter, a subject far too common in poetry, yet rarely done well. I’m interested in writing on parenting, yet have noticed that the poems on motherhood (some of the finest from New York poet Rachel Zucker) far outweigh the poems on fatherhood, nearly to the exclusion of the latter. “Kate, Sonia I wanted to write / a poem for you that a mother would write,” he writes, to open the third section, nearly echoing the sentiment. The poem writes out, as his bio confirms, “his wife Kate and their daughters Sonia and Alma (born 9/21/11).” Parenting is a powerful thing, and too often I’ve seen the dismissal of father-specific writing, and even the fear of attempting such. A sequence of eleven poems plus epilogue, his meditation focuses on the small, and the close-to-home, as a kind of sketchbook of thoughts during his wife’s second pregnancy. As the final pre-epilogue poem ends, “Sonia I am sorry for all this moment’s failures.” I’m glad Thomas-Glass has produced this; not as physical, obviously, as motherhood, how does fatherhood become so easily dismissed?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been composing her ongoing poem “Draft” for some time, so far collected in five trade volumes. The second of DuPlessis’ “Draft” poems to appear as a little red leaves chapbook (her chapbook Draft 96: Velocity appeared in 2011 [see my review of such here]), this poem exists as a kind of call-and-response, composing a binary piece; each poem is paired with an italicized addendum. Is this a call-and-response, or something more akin to Greek chorus? Paired with the poem quoted above is this, her italicized chorus:

I cannot solve what is done in my name. they send 100 million to the killers from my insistent taxes; I sent $500 to some other side. This has been going on for years now. Cannot solve, cannot absolve… And “orange” is not an absolute; it has been worked with—for it itself is generally hybrid. It comes from bud unions and tree grafts and sometimes spontaneous mutations. Fusions of root-stock with something from elsewhere. Much more rarely from seeds. What then counts as “normal”?

The collage aspect of the piece picks from multiple sources, and her “Drafts” have lengthened since the poem first started, years ago. An interesting question: has anyone attempted to write critically of her “Drafts” work as a whole unit?

Dear cabbie, dear comfort

perchance could you drive faster

ruefully abide your own speaking space

we’ll wrangle sweet nothings through that

window if you like it’s only plexiglass

my dear plastic really that keep us apart

just split the avenue open vivisect districts

flower shops mechanics pantries

glow orange green silver as we pass (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)

Author of four previous chapbooks and the trade collection Desiring Map (2012) [seemy review of such here], Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski’s GEMOLOGY (2012) is a letter to the city, writing out her neighbourhood in a sequence of short lyrics. “Vowels roll drip down thighs / conjunctions across backs,” she writes, later continuing: “Name me modesty / name me vexation[.]” Kaminski’s immediate city is as sensual as it is physical, composing a lyric love letter for a neighbourhood and even city unspecified. Does her love lie in the immediate physicality of wherever she hangs her hat?

Dear night, dear misplaced images

blanketed silver singed crystalline

cold I gather icicles sew flack jackets

encase late night wonderings

parks shadowed sharply street-lit

dear avenue if I follow floor me

carry me and my lost children

wordspent gangrened unburied (Megan Kaminski, GEMOLOGY)