DUSIE : ISSUE 22, kollektiv 9 : for Marthe Reed, curated by elisabeth workman & susana gardner

A while back, I participated in the 9th dusie kollektiv, one of an array of poets self-producing chapbooks composed and published in tribute to the late American poet, editor and publisher Marthe Reed (1958-2018) [see my obituary for her here]. All the participating chapbooks (including mine, produced last year through above/ground press) are now online as free pdfs, which you can very much download. 

s o m e w h e r e i n t h e c l o u d o r i n b e t w e e n
dusie.org          ISSUE 22         kollektiv 9          
D  U  S  I  E                  ISSN 1661-668  
jessenissim  lauramullen  michaelkalish marthereed   gillianparrish  erintrapp adraraine  johnbloombergrissman bronwentate elisabethworkman julietcook barbaratomash  charlesalexander  jaredhayes  ejmcaddams  eileentabios jonathanskinner  carriehunter  danateenlomax skrave cscarrier annareckin fengsunchen paulacisewski haleylasché  megankaminski kenningjeanpaulgarcia andrewpetersen robmclennan michaelruby aliciacohen margrethekolstadbrekke marklamoureux crischeek  annalenabell susanagardner meganburns
 

Ongoing notes: dusie kollektiv 9: Bronwen Tate + Elisabeth Workman

A couple of months ago, Dusie-maven Susana Gardner solicited a number of poets for the ninth Dusie Kollektiv, soliciting poets to produce chapbooks in homage to the late Marthe Reed [see my obituary for her here], aimed for an event in her honour—“Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween,” A Tribute to Marthe Reed—at the most recent edition of the annual New Orleans Poetry Festival. While some chose to produce theirs as pdfs-only (pdfs for all of the chapbooks will eventually appear on the Dusie site; see previous kollektivs here), there were more than a few (including myself, here) that produced physical chapbooks as well. Here begins the first of my notes on those chapbooks participants have been generous enough to send along:

Vermont: I’ve been enamoured with the work of Vancouver-born American poet Bronwen Tate (raised in Portland, Oregon and moved variously around the United States before relocating north to Vermont not that long ago) for some time (she’s an interview soon over at Touch the Donkey), so was very pleased to see a copy of her Mittens (2019), a chapbook subtitled “Songs & Patterns.” As with her above/ground press chapbook, Mittens focuses on her immediate, from writing to her domestic, composing lyric bursts of self-contained poems that accumulate gracefully into a sequence on the precariousness and preciousness of living, being, parenting and writing:

Repetition seeps in even while precarity ebbs. Ebbing, the tide completes half its burden. To move forcefully, then, to travel even with the difficult small children, out of the span of habit, to an unfamiliar shore. Shored by discipline, still seeking the sweep of vision. All perceptions in the flush of arrival flawed, partial. Partial, bites from a browning apple. My reflection, then, unwashed hair and tired body, is belated, obscured, unfaithful. Faithful now, I trust to the future self who will revise.

The author of a handful of previous chapbooks, including Souvenirs (Dusie 2007), Like the Native Tongue the Vanquished (Cannibal Books 2008), Scaffolding (Dusie 2009), if a thermometer (dancing girl press 2011), The Loss Letters (Dusie 2011) and Vesper Vigil (above/ground press, 2016), I’m a bit surprised she hasn’t a full-length title out yet, but am confident it is simply a matter of time.

Think of a mitten: useful in its season, warm, shaped by its purpose. Tear out what’s gone wrong, the remnant kinked by its former shape. Soak, lie flat, return. If it’s hard, do it every day. Think of a bowl left outside—it can’t help but collect the rain when it comes. Hold still. Fill and overflow.

Minneapolis MN: From poet Elisabeth Workman comes THE BOX IS THE WOMB OR (2019), a poem-essay, as she writes in her colophon, that appeared “in a slightly different form” in the anthology The End of the World Project, eds. Richard Lopez, John Bloomberg-Rissman and T.C. Marshall (Moira Books, 2019). She writes: “It was Marthe who connected me to the project, and though this chapbook may be more of a reiteration of the prompts for this Kollektiv, it is ‘staying with the trouble’ that seems in kinship with Marthe’s poetics.”

THE BOX IS THE WOMB

(the box is her womb) Among the Greek writers who feared the void, women, and poetry: Hesiod is writing in the 7^th century of Pandora who is sent down to punish men….Hesiod calls Pandora the first of the species, a separate species from men. The myth in our English ideology comes armed with a box, but in Greek what she comes with is a pithos and pithos is the Greek word for jar. Now, the Greek had a though that a woman’s womb was shaped like a pithos, so really what Hesiod is talking about here is Pandora being made the first woman comes with a first womb and when inevitably that womb gets opened and the opening of course is from intercourse, what flows out is all the evils of the world.

I’m really taken with this extended poem-essay, and am curious as to whether or not it is part of a longer project (as it easily could be). This piece is vibrant, provocative and striking, and has even further relevance, given the terrifying and needless assault on women’s reproductive rights and choices currently moving throughout parts of North American (Georgia, Ontario, etcetera). Exploring the language and history of women and women’s bodies, THE BOX IS THE WOMB OR sits as both a remarkable poem and a worthy tribute to the work of Marthe Reed.

THE TURIN HORSE

I was vexed at an angsty point in my life the first time I watched Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse. If you’ve seen the film maybe you had the experience too of a kind of restless body syndrome while watching its slow black-and-white expression (a cruelty in itself) of the long tail of cruelty. How it comes back. How you have to eat it. How it’s yours. How ourosboros. For weeks after the experience, and even now in just thinking about it, the repetitive rhythm of the windstorm that courses throughout the entire film comes to mind and by mind I mean my entire body.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Scott Sweeney on Grey Book Press

Grey Book Press has been publishing hand-crafted chapbooks, off and on, since 1996. In addition to their poetry journal, Momoware, recent titles include the work of Elisabeth Workman, Leigh Stein, Brian Ang, Megan Kaminski, and Jordan Stempleman.

1 – When did Grey Book Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
Grey Book Press started around 1996, when I put together the first issue of bound, which was a very limited-run poetry journal. At the time, that was all I really thought the press would do . . . publish digest-sized poetry journals.

I stopped bound after six issues (spread out over about five years). Life was just complicated at the time (with a new baby), so I had to pull back . . . not really clear whether anything would follow or what it would be. But in 2007, I started to feel the pull again, so—rather than pick up where I left off with bound—I started a new journal (Momoware). It felt nice to get back out there, make something happen.

Then my friend, poet Jay Snodgrass [http://shamblingdarkness.blogspot.com], convinced me to jump into doing single-author chapbooks. It was something I thought Grey Book Press would eventually evolve toward. And now, just about all I sell are chapbooks.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?
When I was an undergrad at Florida State, I collaborated with a friend on a series of chapbooks called The Night Brings Violets (taken from Plath’s “Paralytic”). He was publishing it under his own imprint, New Apathy Press. We went to readings around town and half-heartedly requested submissions from others (I don’t think we used any).

When I decided to start publishing poetry journals, the original idea was to do a series that would sort-of culminate in a larger “greatest hits” book, which would be titled . . . the Grey Book.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
I like the sort-of call to arms presented at the DIY Publishing [http://diypublishing.blogspot.com] blog: “You are a micropress . . . you just don't know it yet.” I don’t know about responsibility, but everyone could have a role to play. I kind-of imagine it as a global, creative conversation.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
Probably nothing. I’m the antithesis of innovation. All my journals and chapbooks are digest-sized, saddle-stapled, and of very similar length (I don’t trust guillotine cutters, so I control “center creep” by limiting page count). But I think the length I’ve settled on is ideal for a chapbook.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
Giving them away for free, but that’s not a sustainable model when you have limited resources, right? I’m really intrigued by the Dusie Kollektiv [http://www.dusie.org/about.html] and the idea of sharing/trading/exchanging work that way. I’ve seen that echoed a few other places.

I wonder, though, about the idea of books. How is that going to evolve? How is what we do going to change in five years? I can’t saddle-staple your Kindle. I keep hearing that books are not going to go away, but the flipside is the expansive potential of manipulating and changing these new distribution/interactive technologies to get work out in a new way.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
Depends on the project, maybe how well I know the author. If the manuscript is really clean, strong, and arranged thoughtfully, maybe it’s, “Let’s go straight to layout.” But more often than not, I have at least a few minor suggestions. Most people don’t have a huge problem with that. Some writers, like Elisabeth Workman [http://geotypografika.com/2009/03/09/elisabeth-workman], have been very open to suggestions on arranging the poems.

The problem is I’m a technical copy editor. That’s what I do for a living. So my biggest editorial weakness is narrative/prose poetry wherein I want to “fix” the grammar.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Mostly, I sell directly through our website. I do 25 author copies with a handful more to have on hand (initially) and then print another batch to stock the store, and then keep printing batches until the orders slow down or stop. I haven’t reached 100 copies printed of any single title.

Lately, I’ve been doing more “limited” runs, which are 50 copies (the author receives 15). Those are all printed at once and numbered.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
Mostly just me and the saddle-stapler. My wife has been known to thumb through things while in proofing and production phases, but not really in an editorial way. I’ve worked on one or two collaborative productions (one with Sandra Simonds’ imprint Wild Life [http://sandrasimonds.com]), and we teamed up on the folding and stapling.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
It’s been making me realize I don’t send my work out nearly as much as I should be. While I should be taking the press a little more seriously, I should be taking my poetry a lot more seriously.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
A “rule” I came up with early on (for the journals) was, if I included one of my poems, I wouldn’t list my name with the other contributors for that issue. I was, essentially, using my work to fill space and not as a means of self-promotion. I did a chapbook of my own through the press last year and made sure it was limited edition and promoted no more than any other book.

I can certainly see, and perhaps sympathize more with, the argument that no-one should use his or her own press to promote his or her work. Not that I actively consider the question, but I’ll admit that I have read mastheads of many journals and then seen work from editors featured prominently and I’ve found it a little off-putting. But I don’t think that is necessarily wrong.

11– How do you see Grey Book Press evolving?
Slowly?

I’m going to do some more active promotion and networking. I’d love to reach out to and collaborate with other like-minded and/or activist presses. Perhaps even in the near term.

I honestly don’t see our chapbooks evolving dramatically. But I am interested in, at some point, doing longer projects.

12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
I’m going against type here, but I want to focus on the positive. Actually, almost all of my interactions with authors have been positive, which I consider the biggest accomplishment. I want everyone involved to consider this a rewarding creative exchange. Any shortcomings have been mine, for the most part (e.g., slipping publication targets, lazy marketing practices). Maybe I’m my biggest frustration. I really hope to change that.

Thinking about “overlooked,” I’ve had this ongoing struggle that, perhaps, I’ve been holding back on blanket marketing pushes to avoid becoming too big for one person to essentially handle and maintain a steady stream of titles. As a result, I’m relying on authors to do most of the marketing themselves, which I suppose isn’t entirely fair, so I’m going to change the balance a little to get the word out about the books we’re doing (as opposed to just promoting the press).

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
I think when I started out, I only knew one way of doing it, and didn’t have a lot of imagination to switch it up. And, largely, I’m still doing it that way. The fun is trying to find new ways to tweak the model in small ways.

A few years ago, when I was breathing new life into the press, I did reach out to Kristy Bowen from Dancing Girl Press [http://www.dancinggirlpress.com]. I’d always liked what she was doing and, if I was going to do chapbooks and work with authors on larger projects more directly, I needed some behind-the-scenes tips on how others have made that work. I took what I learned from Kristy and added that to what I was already doing.

14– How does Grey Book Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Grey Book Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
I think any literary scene, like any music scene (of which I’m also a part), can be cliquish. Tallahassee is a relatively small town with a literary scene dominated by its universities, with their own publications and their own readings. I’m not complaining, but you have to actively engage local teacher-poets and attend a lot of local literary functions, which I guess is true of any community. But I don’t get out a lot. And I’m horrible at networking.

The importance likely lies in the goals. I think there has to be a unifying “cause” to bring people or groups together, whether it’s activism or entertainment.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
Not so much. Many of the writers we publish are out-of-towners, and no-one’s doing a chapbook “tour.” Early on, we held readings featuring recent local chapbook poets (Sandra, Jay, and Kristine Snodgrass [http://almostdorothy.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/kristine-snodgrass-an-interview-with-a-fledgling-starlet]). We had a reading to launch our second issue of Momoware (with many of the same poets), and it was like a rock show. But we had a recent reading to benefit Save our Shores [http://www.sosfla.org] and sell copies of our oil-spill chapbook, Welcome to the Dark Water. And no-one came. We had Mary Jane Ryals [https://sites.google.com/site/maryjaneryalspoetlaureate], the Poet Laureate of the Florida Big Bend, and no-one came. I think the success of the two readings had a lot to do with local universities. Sandra read at the first event and gave her students extra credit for coming. The second event was during the summer, when tens of thousands of students are out of town.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
I don’t use the internet in any “special” way. I’m not much of a “marketer” and don’t do a lot of networking, but I do try to get the word out with emails and using Facebook. Obviously, I could be doing more which, in fact, is part of why I’m going to lay low this month . . . invest some time in sending out review copies and making some connections.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
Yes, although I’ve not settled on a successful strategy for soliciting and gathering them. Which is complicated by my publishing priorities seemingly changing on a whim.

For manuscripts, the focus is currently on chapbooks, so we’re not looking for full-length manuscripts right now. If we did start doing books (or similar longer projects), they would likely be by solicitation only.

Beyond that, it might be easier to focus on what we are looking for. Each issue of Momoware (three so far) have come together under very different circumstances. The last issue was put together rather quickly after I decided to try an issue weighing heavily on erotica and/or Asian forms. It was an experiment in seeing how that would work (both the process and the final product). I’m happy with how the issue turned out, but I had to do more legwork than usual in gathering submissions, so I decided that I would put off doing another issue for an indefinite period. So, of course, submissions have been trickling in, so I think I’m going to do another call and plan an issue around those poems. Maybe a new theme will emerge or maybe I’ll do some more erotica. Who doesn’t like erotica?

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
The most recent title (finishing up now, actually) is a chapbook of cinquains by Evie Ivy [http://www.poetrycentral.com/ivy/index.html]. I wasn’t sure, initially, how I felt about doing a whole chapbook of one form, but I wanted to do something different, and cinquains are nice in their haiku-like brevity.

Before that, continuing the “something different” theme, was a chapbook of prose poems by Chandra Dickson [http://poetryforthemasses.org]. I have a short attention span, so I usually don’t consider publishing anything prose, or prose-ish. But Chandra’s collection stuck with me and it was something I ultimately decided would be an adventure.

This past spring, on the one-year anniversary of the Deep Horizon rig explosion and oil spill in the Gulf, we distributed a chapbook of semi-related poems to Gulf State lawmakers, including all five governors from Gulf-bordering states, U.S. senators, key U.S. House members and state lawmakers, and other government officials (e.g., President Obama). I’m really happy about the poets we got to contribute, like Sharon Mesmer [http://www.thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/05/getting-to-kn-1.html#tp], Michael Rothenberg [http://caribbeanbookblog.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/100-thousand-poets-for-change-looking-for-organizers], Denise Duhamel [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/33], and Christine Poreba [http://www.christineporeba.com]. We sent out some press copies, too. I figured it wouldn’t generate a lot of press/interest or outrage, but I felt like we should keep the dialogue going . . . but in a creative way.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Elisabeth Workman

Elisabeth Workman is the author of the chapbooks a city_a cloud, Opolis, Maybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf (Dusie 2006, 2007, 2011) and Megaprairieland (Grey Book Press, 2010). She is the recipient of a 2009 Jerome/SASE Emerging Writer Fellowship, a 2010 McKnight Artist’s Fellowship in Poetry, and honors/grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Born and raised in the pharmaceutical suburbs of Philadelphia, she’s since lived in Boston, the Netherlands, on/around the Standing Rock Reservation of the Dakotas, and most recently, in the Middle East. A member of the Flarf Collective, she lives in Minneapolis with the designer Erik Brandt and their daughter Beatrix.

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

When I was living in the relative remoteness of Doha, Qatar, I had submitted some work to the journal Dusie (in Switzerland), and was, in response, invited by editor Susana Gardner to be a part of the first Dusie Kollectiv—which turned into a dynamic international community of poets creating, producing, and distributing their own chapbooks to each other on an annual basis AND a vital alternative to rote, dubious publishing paths. Having lived in a sequence of fairly isolated places (South Dakota; Happy Valley, Pennsylvania; and, then a little peninsula off of Saudi Arabia) and having somewhat willfully detached from any kind of academic poetry scene, being part of the Kollectiv was a way of becoming part of an alternative community that was previously unforeseen, as if Susana Gardner suddenly flipped the switch on a secret, impossible power grid. And maybe in my case I was Amish and had little exposure to electricity before. Likewise, the invitation presented the formal opportunity (and deadline) to collaborate with two of the most talented artists I know—visual artist Barbara Campbell Thomas and designer Erik Brandt. The chap—a city_a cloud—ended up being a sort of anti-chap as conceived by Erik, a fold-out map-like grid comprised of Barb’s collages and 26 text fragments/collages of mine. I still thrive on collaboration. Content-wise, my current work is somewhat different: less melancholy, more surly, less oblique, more wired, less spare, more spastic, more “bad,” more WTF.

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

My first “collection” of poems was called “Poetry for All Ages”; I wrote it when I was eight. I remember the blue folder with the title scrawled in purple marker, but not much about the poems themselves, other than that some of them were vaguely ripping off/riffing on those sailing-weather mnemonics (“Red skies at night/sailor’s delight”). Regardless it does seem to suggest that from a fairly early age poetry was part of my M-O, along with my love for the high seas. And marauding.

Also, it was a nightly ritual that my mother would read to my sister and me,  from in utero until we could read to her. I remember resting my head on her lap or her shoulders as she read and hearing the language in her body, feeling its vibrations and resonance. Language was physical, alive, gurgling, kinetic. Maybe poetry over fiction or non-fiction because its privileging of rhythm and texture over transparent meaning more fully vivifies language (or my original experience with it).

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?

This varies, but generally I like to have several projects going at once (as the bedside pile of books--some a lot dustier than others--in the process of being read is symptom).  Since my process is generally heavily collage-based, I like to have a variety of material on-hand before starting.  With the interwebs, access to material is greatly increased and accelerated, though so also is the potential to get lost or distracted or to slip into various rabbit holes (which can end up being poems all their own).  Generally, drafts look close to their final shape and edits are mostly homophonic, but there are exceptions, like a poem I finally finished that took me almost a year to get to its final form; only a few lines from the original draft remain. 

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 love restrictions, or really “the liberation in stricture,” so it’s my ideal to be working within a project of set parameters—formal (I just mistyped “feral”--which is probably more accurate) or thematic. E.g. Opolis was an abecedarium with very specific rules, while Megaprairieland grew out of a small three part poem, partly out of a desire to further explore the passive aggressive Super Target supper club depravity and simultaneous anarchic longing and beauty of living in the Midwest and to find poem homes for these episode titles I came across from the Japanese anime series based on the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, called “Laura, The Prairie Girl.”

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

Though I don’t do them terribly frequently, I enjoy doing readings, especially for boisterous, slightly drunk audiences.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?

When I was studying with Cecil Giscombe, he asked me one day, “What is your elevator speech for your manuscript, Ms. Workman?”and I (after a pause) replied, “Fuck you, Descartes,” which Cecil, understandably, found insufficient. (He was the first mentor I had who encouraged the theoretical and even more importantly--the articulation of a poetics.) What I was trying to get at, then, and what I still think I am actively working against now are the reductive forces that pigeon-hole people and thought and realities into limiting bipolarities (mind vs. body, red state vs. blue state, good vs. evil, us vs. them), and working against these forces by plugging into the generative capacities of  binaries through juxtaposition, parataxis, multiplied perspective, mutation, collision, and invention as a means of blowing up reductions.

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?

There are so many different kinds of writers that we could probably form our own ecosystem. Lots of roles, and narcissism for all.

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

In 2009, thanks to the Jerome Foundation, I had the opportunity to work with the redoubtable poet Sharon Mesmer--an experience inspiring awe, rabid verse, and slight head trauma. Though she was more mentor than editor, her perfect pitch and uncanny ear would put a lot of editor-editors to shame and so should be noted.

As for an editor of a press, Scott Sweeney at Grey Book Press was fantastic--a careful reader with great suggestions for the ultimate sequence and grooming of a weird and gangly manuscript.

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

In the Advice as Advice category: “Wait.” (The giver of this piece of advice actually wrote it on a Post-It note for me, so I would remember. I still have it, pressed to the inside cover of Satan Says.)

In the Literature as Advice category: “If you think of something, do it.” (from Lydia Davis’s “Extracts from a Life.”)

In the Advice as Literature category: “Don’t burn your bridges, bomb them.” (courtesy: my spouse)

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 a mother of an eleven-month-old. Everything is hand-to-mouth.

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

Depends on what’s called for. Included in the first-aid kit:

being with my two great loves, Erik & Beatrix, then, in no particular order:

movement (yoga, walking, booty shaking)

the poets of the Flarf Collective (new and old and post-)

writing letters

meditation

looking at art

ubu web

The Onion

TMZ

Das Racist

The Old Testament

Bruce Andrews’ I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States

Lydia Davis’s shorter stories

Issa’s anger

Marina Abramovic’s Balkan epics

Alice Notley’s owls

John Ashbery’s gnomes

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs in the cul de sac. That sounds like a suburban perfume. Speaking of which, I have a memory of a bottle of cologne in my father’s medicine cabinet that I’m not sure ever existed or if I’ve fabricated it, but I’m 99% certain that he had a cologne called “Gravel” that had actual tiny rocks in the bottom of the bottle--such a perfect name for a cologne of the suburbs. Okay, I just googled it, and it really existed. The follow-up scent should be “Macadam.”  Also, this is nasty, but true--that very distinct meat packing plant odor that emanated from Hatfield Meats, “Home of the Smiling Porker” (I’m not making that up),  next door, into my clammy middle school cafeteria. The confluence of puberty and slaughter and chicken nuggets.

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?

Visual art (especially right now: Farhad Moshiri, Barbara Kreuger, Jenny Holzer); music (anything that doesn’t suck, and of course live is usually best); performance art; art as social intervention; history; typography; dance (particularly contact improvisation); science, technology, and society studies (a la Ivan Illich); astronomy; satire in all forms; YouTube memes, email memes (via my mother), and others, like the “Haters Gonna Hate” panda.

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

This could be a very long list. In addition to those works already mentioned, I always have at least one of the Poems for the Millenium anthologies off the shelf and my copy of The Politics of Poetic Form (ed. Charles Bernstein) has traveled everywhere with me since I came across it (belatedly) in 2000. I am continually humbled and inspired by the work of many contemporary poets, including this partial list: Stan Apps, Ann Boyer, Brandon Brown, Maurice Burford, Shanna Compton, Maria Damon, Kevin Davies, Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Nick Demske, Brandon Downing, Chris Funkhouser, Ben Friedlander, Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Lacey Hunter, Jennifer Knox, Rodney Koeneke, Michael Magee, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Mel Nichols, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Jess Rowan, Sandra Simonds, Rod Smith, Gary Sullivan, Edwin Torres, Alli Warren.

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

Open for a show at First Ave.

Run a collaborative press called Yeti Research Center.

Live in a yurt (with a wireless signal).

Etc.

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?

I would definitely not be a skyscraper window washer.

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

I spent most of my adolescence training to be a professional dancer (ballet, but something about the way I say it always has people hearing “belly” dancing--a far cooler, and much more sustainable enterprise). Anyway, even though I always wrote, it was not my creative ambition as a youth. So, in a pubescent way, writing IS my something else.

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

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov & Miranda July’s The Future.  Common motif: talking cats.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A series of poems “translating” coded office talk

A serial poem,“Small Suitcase Society”

A collaboration with Erik Brandt (always)

Finishing this interview so I can go read some more chapbooks submitted to Grey Book Press’s second annual chapbook competition.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-June, 2011

Ralph Franklin's recent facsimile edition has at last made available to readers Dickinson's particular intentions for the order the poems were to be read in. But a proliferation of silly books and articles continue to disregard this great writer's working process. Is it because a poet-scholar in full possession of her voice won't fit the legend of deprivation and emotional disturbance embellished and enlarged on over the years, with the help of books like John Cody's reprehensible biographical psychoanalysis? After Great Pain is the rape of a great poet. That Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar continue to draw on his dubious and reductivist conclusions, and even seem to agree with him in places, is a sorry illustration of the continuing vulgarization of the lives of poets, pandering to the popular sentiment that they are society's fools and madwomen.

– Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (1985; 2007)

Vancouver BC: For years now, Vancouver-based poet, editor and publisher Warren Dean Fulton has been writing an array of small poems, some of which have appeared through his Pooka Press, or in various other publications, including the recently-produced The Dusty Owl Quarterly, edited by myself. I was only recently made aware of three small chapbooks of his produced by Californian publisher POEMS-FOR-ALL, his I'll Always Lie To You (2007), Swallowing Spiders While Sleeping (2007) and crickets in the city: a tiny collection of poems (2007). Self-described as “an ongoing project of the 24^th Street Irregular Press” out of Sacramento, California, POEMS-FOR-ALL has distributed tiny chapbooks by a whole range of writers, including d.a.levy and Robert Creeley, with over a thousand different publications “scattered around town, on buses, trains, rest-rooms, coffee shops, left along with the tip; stuffed in a stranger's back pocket, whatever, wherever.”

poem starting w/ a line

from a poem by Sylvia Plath

love is a shadow

a silhouette of

something

somewhat

proportional

to its source

that only the light

of the other

will reveal

Fulton's poems, when effective, read like tiny revelations, as a series of little epiphanies, nearly in the Frank O'Hara style of “I-did-this, I-did-that” school. These small pieces, of the past near-two decades I've been aware of his work, read to be some of the most effective of his pieces, written in small moments, focusing on the pinprick, there. There.

Doha, Qatar: Digging through shelves while seeking something else (Fred Wah's So Far, by the by), I discovered a copy of Elisabeth Workman's opolis (typografika, 2007), stunningly produced with images by Erik Brandt as a dusie kollectiv chapbook that year [see my review of the chapbook she produced for this year's run of same]. Why can't I remember receiving this?

“ASSUMPTIONS, OR TO SET INTO OPERATION”

01:01

zeal is another approach to mapping blood, any, adagio, and the point at which I tongued the slope of your nose. I do this when no others might notice because we are public and the risk is spectacle. Every door is an open mouth but the trees like bronzed contortionists are the whisperers. Type A. Silencio. Voyeurs appropriate transitively. Otherwise we would wait out the display aimlessly. I mean we and all the others, so that masturbation is not singular—rather, more like tourism. Quite appealingly the view is not available for reproduction; it cuts a part of you so preciously, so what. I tasted afternoon and anthrax but only overheard that we had caught up with ourselves unexpectedly as if the windows were really only an avalanche of apologies. In the distance, obstructed or artificial, we could still hear the iambic ah-ha's of the highway, and I made it about myself by myself with a warning about bullshit and bliss and architecture

I am fascinated by these prose-poems, held in breathless space each at the bottom of an otherwise open, empty page. Would these pieces read as breathlessly accumulative and overflowing as they appear? How exactly might these sound? They read like the water rushing over an entirety of falls, washing away all else.

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollectiv,

Here are some brief reviews of more of recent chapbooks received as part of the “dusie 5 kollectiv” [see my three notes on such here, here and here].

San Francisco CA: I'm enjoying the wonderment of Bay Area poet Sarah Anne Cox's MEDEA 10-18 (2011), following up her dusie 4 kollectiv offering, MEDEA 1-9 (2010). The character Medea, in Greek myth, of course, is the wife of Jason and mother of his two children. Abandoned by Jason for another woman, Medea's story centres around seeking revenge on her errant, former husband, a story that Sarah Anne Cox slips in, around and through in peripheral and direct ways, twirling lyric around the narrative structure in a sequence of poems. Might Cox be slowly composing and releasing this sequence only in association with dusie? I'm intrigued by the slowness, but wondering how many years must we wait for a larger, longer and possibly complete manuscript? There's a part of me, though, that doesn't mind waiting to see what might come of this, next.

11

Let yourself slide into the lines, slip in unnoticed

and live there in the dirt and coarse gravel beach

once we stepped off the boat it was difficult to

get back on, we did see the ships coming, laden

we lived among wealth and so the items

arrived for trade. sometimes I'd walk to the beach

where the ships pulled up to see if I was there,

some part of me, some eastern black sea part

but all those red faced men dissemble calling

themselves from

no where. from the future.

I've been looking her name up, and keep finding scatterings of listings, including for trade poetry collections Arrival (Krupskaya, 2002) and, possibly, Parcel (O Books, 2007), but uncertainties abide. Where might all her poems be, and will perhaps some even manage to cross a border or two?

12

To get to the beginning you must go backward.

You must file an affidavit of intent

You must pull up the claims in newspaper reports

You must listen patiently to every version

You must be prepared to argue anything.

You must stop cradling the baby and let him go

You must stop cradling the baby and murder

Minneapolis MN: I have to admit, it was the title of Elisabeth Workman'sMaybe Malibu, Maybe Beowulf (2011) that really reached out and grabbed me, forcing me to sit down with this (compared to many other of the dusie 5 kollectiv chapbooks) relatively straightforward-looking pink chapbook (see a review someone wrote of a previous of her dusie chaps here). Are all of her titles this good? Moving through her collection, poems include “HARDCORE BRADY BUNCH ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION,” “HOW NOW MUFF-FED RUMPUS,” “THE CANADIAN TUXEDO IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION” and “THE UNSPOKEN REVERENCE THAT IS DWARF QUEEFING,” so I'd have to say unequivicoally yes. Yes they are.

A DICK DESTINY

The difference is “a factually correct object.”

I may be missing a subtlety here but it is Toledo

and we are rotating in a rolodex of wuv

in a hot air balloon over Sarajevo

something like another monolithic Post-it Note against the firmament

the message cut into tiny pieces with a steak knife

spoon-fed to the mouths of cows at the expense of

another quality docudrama

a probe, a hole, a “Burger King.”

I do like the near-electric movement of some of Workman's lines, the sing and the pop of her turns and snappy breaks (one online source I found refers to her as a “Flarf poet”), weaving in cultural references, all in a way that reminds me of Canadian poet Marcus McCann, weaving language play with irreverent pop-culture stings. Where might I find more, I wonder?

San Francisco CA: I've been reading the work of Bay Area poet, editor and critic Sarah Rosenthal for a few months now, so was quite pleased to see her small and graceful dusie offering, The Animal (2011), including text by Rosenthal and images by Amy Fung-yi Lee. What is this book, The Animal? She writes a narrator with possibly her own name, having conversations with birds, blurring the line between what is animal and what just might be human, and wondering exactly what the difference is. Constructed with hand-sewn dos-à-dos binding, the chapbook includes lyric and prose poems, a fragmented collation that may or may not be part of a larger project, writing:

The animal is

hungry in winter

after wars

Stories are made

from footage

as if this

and that animal

cared, broke bread

or bones together

The narrator

states the happily

ever after tale

Forget the narrator.

The choices are

vegetable, mineral,

or animal

Rosenthal, through books such as Manhatten (2009), seems interested in the book as unit of composition, writing out longer sequences that collage themselves into being, and into a kind of structural and thematic unity, and The Animal seems no different, while still allowing enough vibrancy and space to perhaps grow much larger.

Dear X,

You're real, but I can't come meet you because I'm sitting in a bar looking out through a picture window at orange geese with red beaks. The color must be natural but it's easy to suspect something's amiss and think Agent Orange and Red Dye Number Something. The geese have landed and are facing their leader who's honking directions at them and then they'll take off again.

This is a dream idea of geese infused with lack of expertise. Agent Orange wasn't orange.

I'm sitting at a Lazy Susan table thinking if it were filled with food and there were a family, how perfect to spin and share. But this place is deserted except for a couple of waitresses, one of whom just served me a beer, dark and rich like a piece of the most wholesome bread. I drank most of it immediately and as you know I can't handle alcohol. So we'll see. This place used to be a top establishment but the guys who recently acquired it have let it go to hell, keep a minimum crew and just squeeze whatever they can out of it. At least they can't ruin beer, or the solid, oak wood of the tables and bar. The geese took off at some point in this writing. They were a surprise in three dimensions, tinted with fear. By the way—they weren't outside plate glass. They were right here.

I love you,

S