12 or 20 (second series) questions with Nathan Hoks

Nathan Hoks is a poet whose books include Nests in Air, The Narrow Circle, Reveilles and Moony Days of Being. His poetry has been awarded the National Poetry Series, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and the Iowa Review David Hamilton Prize. He has also published translations of work by Vicente Huidobro, Henri Michaux, Tristan Tzara, and Christian Dotremont. He teaches poetry writing at the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives in Chicago with his family.

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

Publishing my first book (Reveilles) made it possible to write my next book. It made it possible to move on from the writing I was doing in my 20s. It made space, it cleared a pathway. The recent work feels of the same mold. In the immortal words of Popeye, I yam what I yam. But (hopefully) better, stronger, clarified like ghee. 

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

As if I had a choice! Poetry came for me in the thick of the night. Something moved my hand. I couldn’t sleep.  

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 feels both fast and slow. I’m almost always writing poems. Most of them are pretty awful. The ones that become parts of books usually have little resemblance to their first drafts. I have many, many notebooks, digital and analog, through which the work is always shifting and evolving. 

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?

Sometimes a poem begins with a phrase or word that gets lodged in my head. Sometimes what happens is I start to mix and match various fragments I’ve jotted down in notebooks. I tend to write clusters of poems and then I try to figure out how they talk to each other, what kind of community they form, and revise accordingly into a book. With most of my favorite poems, I have very little recollection of how or why or wtf was going on! They all involve extended processes and other parts of myself and the cosmos that I can’t always access. 

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

Yes and yes. They are important and yet they are quite distinct from what poetry means to me as a form of solitary writing and reading. I cherish both modes. Readings are communal—they help me feel connected to other travelers, which in indirect but definitive ways is vital to writing poems. In a practical way they also give me a chance to try out new work and go back to the lab with findings. I think I dread them as much as I enjoy them, but the truth is I almost always say yes to them.

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 do I make language talk back? What else can a sentence do? What word combinations alter consciousness? What’s living in my basement? Who’s there? 

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?

To explore the verbal imagination by challenging language and exploring the consciousnesses it makes available. To invent strange or marvelous verbal constructions. To wake us up. These tasks have obvious social and cultural value. Whether or not anyone’s listening is another question. 

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

I am humbled whenever someone gives attention to my work!

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

Start small (Richard Hugo). Gardening, not architecture (Eno and Schmidt).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

In my practice, poetry and translation are natural extensions of each other. I approach critical prose the way I approach house work. I like to clarify ideas like I like to have a (somewhat) orderly house; but it ain’t easy.

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?

Like the academic calendar, my routines come and go and are often subject to arbitrary, incomprehensible, and invisible administrative processes and planetary alignments. 

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

Tarot cards. AP News’ oddities. Walking. The Dead Kennedys. The Cure. Meditation. Yoga. Brian Eno & Michael Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cinnamon. Pancakes. Woodburning stove. Windex. Dog hair. Chips Ahoy dipped in milk. Bergamot. Coffee (Metropolis’s light roast, Schweik’s blend).

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?

All of the above. And donuts. But more in a “vibe” kinda way. Moss, for example, influences my process. I aim for airborne spores in going from draft to draft. I spend a lot of time with visual art and music. For my work, the most direct influence is always other poetry.

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

Some things I often come back to include: Wuthering Heights, Blake, Bataille, Ashbery, Murakami, 1000 plateaus, Koch, Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred, Kim Hyesoon, Bly’s Leaping Poetry, Tzara’s manifestos, Basho, Issa, James Tate, Notley’s The Descent of Alette, Homer, Hopkins, Keats, Lorca’s Poet in NY, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, the Tao Te Ching. 

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

I would like to get my kids through college.

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?

The answer to both questions is televangelist. 

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

Some weird combination of ego and compulsion. 

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

The Brothers Karamazov. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a collaborative project with the poet Joseph Bienvenu in the works. Spitball Ballet, the first of a 3 volume set called Bad Arguments for Living, is now out! I also have a manuscript called Astronomic Gargle. Like the cosmos, some days I think it’s finished. Other days it looks like total chaos.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Shane McCrae, Forgiveness

1. The Subject

Little Brown Koko goes by Koko

in the book as I remember it

Although he is    / Little and black although he is

Subject to the book

in the book as I remember it / Nobody calls him Little Brown Koko

nobody in the book

The writer calls him Little Brown

Koko and    / It doesn’t seem to matter that he’s little what

Matters is that he’s black

And even without the illustrations the

Reader would know he’s black

Because his name is Little first    then Brown

although     / Nobody calls him Little Brown

Koko in the book as I remember him

Although he is

subject to the book (“The Visible Boy”)

Sometimes the difficulty with receiving so many books in the mail is the occasional reminder of what might have slipped by, as other packages of books appear, one by one. While cleaning out some poetry titles from my office recently, I realized I had a copy of one of New York poet Shane McCrae’s earlier titles, Forgiveness (Hadley MA: Factory Hollow Press, 2014), discovered well after having read and reviewed his fifth and sixth full-length collections In the Language of My Captor (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and more recent The Gilded Auction Block (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Forgiveness is McCrae’s third full-length title, after Mule (2011) and Blood (Noemi Press, 2013), and opens with a fascinating examination of racist tropes through what not that long ago was considered appropriate children’s literature (I remember the same, from my own childhood, only half a decade older than the author), moving through the fictional “Little Brown Koko” to pull apart the inherently violent and debasing stereotypes of black people, and black “boys” in what presented itself as children’s story. As this first sequence of eleven poems ends:

I saw him also in the words

but wrong in the words / In my    head as I read the words

His body    / Hadn’t been

flattened swelled until it wasn’t anymore

a body     until it was

a white man’s black boy’s body

“Koko” returns in a further sequence, later in the collection. I’m fascinated, through Forgiveness, to get a clearer sense of how McCrae has been utilizing poetry as a means to explore and critique cultural trauma, legacies and their ongoing effects. How does one negotiate with and navigate through such an ongoing history? Through “Koko,” and  among other poems that thread throughout the collection, Forgiveness exists almost as a character sketch of the accumulated effects of racism and its myriad abuses—from slavery and repeated murders to racist depictions of black people to the daily micro-aggressions of ongoing discrimination—articulated into a precise and powerful lyric. As Annie Won writes in her review of the book for American Microreviews and Interviews: “It has been said that unlike other memories, trauma continues to make its presence known until we make our peace with it; all other memories run currents around the trauma to understand and reconcile what has happened.” The book opens with forgiveness, but speaks to how the very idea might even be impossible, especially without, at the very least, the open admission of continued abuses and further trauma; he speaks to trauma, and to how trauma could change anyone. As he writes to end the poem “The Sweet Kids”:

Lord if I smashed his nose with the end of the pipe

Lord if I wept    Lord when I found

The sparrow with the broken wing    on the path in the forest

Lord if I took it home and killed it

blubbering as I threw it / Against the guest room wall

how I am spared

If I killed what I could

Seth Landman, Sign You Were Mistaken

COFFIN

There is nothing. There is your city.

Right there, the streets out of sight.

Call me a little, pausing funeral; hats off

to the feet set going, the chief element of landscape.

There is nothing. There is the roasted river

when I go, a hand on the universal shoulder

in the face of invisible surveillance, secret dogs,

unaccountable influences. There is nothing

in not ignoring it. What is good? My curiosity

sways on an island with sounds. Things with seas.

Quick and still with wild, inmost, endless,

grand disguises. I am here exactly on this

stage, and there is nothing looming

in the world like snow on the hill in the air.

In his first trade poetry collection, Sign You Were Mistaken (Hadley, Massachusetts: Factory Hollow Press, 2013), Northampton, Massachusetts poet Seth Landman has constructed a series of dislocated lyrics, writing one line that does not necessarily follow the previous, and yet they blend together into something beyond the sums of their component parts. Landman’s is a surrealism based in statement and fact, composed out of a sequence of questions that sprinkle through the collection, such as in the poem “ZONE BY ZONE,” asking “Is the lie of the first part of life / apparent to the duration?” It’s as though Landman’s poems disconnect and connect in that space between the lines, somehow composing poems that exist almost entirely inside the mind of the reader, and nowhere near the page.

The title itself, Sign You Were Mistaken, lends itself to more than a couple of questions. Are we meant to read this as a chastisement, informing the sign that it, indeed, was incorrect? The deeper the reader enters the collection, the more it is obvious that it is impossible to know where you might end up, as Landman dismantles basic tenants to unfold a range of possibilities that might have existed otherwise. Landman is both explorer and guide, composing a certainty into the unknown. Through the prose poem and the sentence, Landman’s poems explore perception, referencing dreams, rifling through metaphor, statement, queries and a wide array of uncertainties. “This is my home town,” he writes, in “SOMETHING GOOD HOLIDAY HUMOR,” “and I am pretty much like it. Now that I exist / is true, I guess, but, anyway, I wish you were here.”

FOR YOU

Finally there is the map that continues larger than the folds and beyond shadows and hidden space. It is not enough to describe what is not yet rendered, as a brain fills in lines on the sky. It is not enough to lay the space out flat, to describe coastline as formula, as perfect math of impossible love. Home is oxygen: necessary, corrosive. When it feels terrible in the interior, maps call the outside into view. I pour over them for hours, never leaving my kitchen. Finally, I am unfamiliar with my own house. The routes possible from one spot to another increase geometrically. It is not enough to know inside that I might travel anywhere. Great forces are shifting us and there may be nothing we can do. Each day, if you are okay, if you can remain, you remain. Though you may be cold, you may be the cold water surrounding my continent.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Seth Landman

Seth Landman lives in Massachusetts, and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press collective. Recent poems have appeared in Ghost Town, jubilat, Jellyfish, io, Lit, and other places. He has published a few chapbooks, most recently A Note on the Text (above/ground press, 2012), and collaborates with the poet Seth Parker on Tyoyeu (@tyoyeu and www.tyoyeu.blogspot.com). His first trade poetry collection, Sign You Were Mistaken, appeared in January with Factory Hollow Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
In many ways, the title of the book itself, Sign You Were Mistaken (SYWM), changed the way I went about writing poems. I used to worry a great deal about the quality of my poems, but when SYWM came to me—not as a collection of poems, but as a phrase repeating in my head over the course of a great deal of time—it coincided with a realization that not only would it be impossible for me to ever feel like I got a poem “right,” but that no such thing as “right” existed in the first place. This was extremely liberating, as I’ve never been much of an editor.

The title does not come from the first line of Paul Simon’s song, “American Tune,” but is helped along by that line in retrospect. “Many is the time I’ve been mistaken.” What a great place to start! That’s where I want to begin everything, really. My preferred rhetorical situation is one in which I am already apologizing. For what, I can’t begin to explain.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t know. I’ve always been a far more voracious reader of prose. My favorite books are mostly novels. Also, autobiographies by people like Larry Bird. The first poem that ever stopped me in my tracks was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As I’m answering this, I have a vague sense that the writing I like most makes me feel as though time is flying by and I can’t catch it. Or rather that the writing engages with that feeling in a way that feels honest to me. I don’t have a good answer for this question, even though I think about it quite a bit.

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 hesitate to say this, but generally I do write quickly, and the writing does resemble the finished product pretty much. My 10thgrade English teacher, Mr. Murray, reminded us one day, “It’s easy to hit the target if you use a machine gun,” and while it’s a troubling metaphor, and he meant it as an argument for concision, I like to think of it in another way. I’m interested in the scatter—all the weird crap I need to say to get at a target I didn’t know I had in the first place. After a reading I did recently from a long poem, Heather Christle told me (I hope I’m getting this right!) that she felt like the poem was made up of episodes, and that sometimes it felt like I was saying, “And now for a very special episode of…” I like that. They can’t all be special episodes. I’m not interested in showing you a bunch of special episodes.

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?
Poems begin when I get the urge to write them, usually starting with a line or a few words. I never have much sense of what is going to happen to them, but more and more I find myself settling into forms over time. When I’m finding myself writing lots of poems in a particular form, writing feels so easy. Other times, it’s excruciating. The best is when I’ve gotten familiar enough with a pattern of thinking that I can write a whole poem alongside a thought I’m having in such a way that the poem itself feels like a scale-model of a moment of my thinking. Those poems are life-savers. I mean that in the most serious way possible.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t know how to answer this. I’ll say that for a few years now, I seem to be getting worse at reading my poems with each subsequent reading. It’s not a skill I’m improving. I’m getting more nervous, to the point that I’m legitimately worried that I’m going to pass out or worse one of these days. At the same time, I love that this is true. For a long time, I wasn’t sure exactly how much I gave a shit about my own poems, and I’m learning that I give a shit big time. When I am reading, I am having a highly emotional, overwhelming experience from which it takes me a lot of time to recover. I’m kind of glad to be able to say that, even if it’s difficult.

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?
Not sure what the questions are, but I’m sure I don’t have the answers. I’m trying to express myself. I can’t think of anything else to say about this that would be true.

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?
It would be convenient to imagine that by expressing myself, I am like a small-town cable access show. Maybe it matters to a few people; probably I already know them. My ambition, certainly, doesn’t go beyond that. Sometimes, I’m trying to explain something to someone, and by the time I’m effectively communicating anything, the whole exercise seems so stupid and pointless. Other times, I’m doing something mindless and/or mundane, and it feels imbued with heavy, almost religious importance. What can I possibly make of these moods? And yet, as a writer, when it works, I feel like something is actually communicated. Something gets across. It’s a total fucking privilege, and I’m afraid that giving a shape to the role could just explain it away.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Difficult sometimes, but with SYWM it has been so wonderful. Emily Pettit edited the book, and she had so many great suggestions about the sequence of the poems. She really took the time to consider my hang-ups and ride out my fleeting moments of bullshit. The book she helped me make—I’m more proud of it than the book I would have made otherwise. I feel like editors often try to change shit just to justify the protocol. There was none of that going on here. It was all essential, and all focused on enhancing the poems as my poems, with all of their problems and warts retained, and not on making them more likeable or something ridiculous/impossible like that.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Shut up.” (I’ve heard it many times.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (solo to collaborative)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’ve done a lot of collaborative writing, and for a while it felt really easy to flip back-and-forth between my own writing and collaborative writing. More recently, I think my writing has gotten a bit more honest. As a result, it’s harder to feel engaged in shared products. On the other hand, I love the experience itself of writing with another person, so long as the finished product is unimportant. I love the recklessness of writing the best poem ever and not even writing it down, and I would never, ever have the guts to do that all by myself.

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?
I don’t have a routine; I’m a slave to whim. I always start the day with a shower ASAP.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Moby Dick, mainly. Failing that, I’ll go to music—Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, stuff like that. The truth is that when my writing stalls, I’m usually pretty content to just turn elsewhere for a while—I watch a ton of sports—and not worry about it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I can’t think of one. My brain keeps going right to light and color. My mother is a quilter—she makes quilted wall-hangings. Here is a write-up of an exhibit she had a couple of years ago in Danvers, MA. It includes a photograph of a quilt she made for me on the living room wall in my parents’ house. Turn down the lighting a little in this photo, and it smells like home.

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?
Oh, I think all of these things do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
First and foremost are my friends who are poets, but there’s too much work to list. Melville’s Moby Dick. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. A whole lot of James Schuyler, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. A stranger—but no less important—influence is Mike Gorman, the TV play-by-play man for the Boston Celtics for my entire life so far. He has this amazing musicality to the way he calls the game. He sounds effortless, but I know he’s not. One time, when I was a kid, we were playing the Bulls, and Gorman—just in the middle of all this chaos—goes, “Tough shot, won’t go down; Pippen’s there for the rebound.” It’s a gorgeous sentence, and he pretty much sang it, and I remember it, like, a thousand years later. You can’t beat that. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to travel to Finnish Lakeland.

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 couldn’t honestly call “being a writer” my occupation, unless I was referring to the freelance writing I do about basketball. Even then, it doesn’t really ring true. I write poems, but there’s nothing occupational about that. That’s answering the letter of the question, but if I’m going to answer the spirit, I don’t know. Maybe a basketball coach? I haven’t figured this out yet. There’s a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin suggests that he could be a caveman. That sounds pretty good.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
First, I liked writing for whatever reason, and I also loved reading. Later, I wrote enough to become confident in the act itself. Now, when I have an inspired thought, it is instinct to go write it down, and since there’s no way of exactly doing that, I end up writing poems.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just re-read Housekeeping, which I’ve done probably once a year for the past decade. It’s a perfect book, and during this most recent reading I was particularly tuned in to notions of the afterlife. Lately, I don’t feel so stupid hoping there is one. On the other hand, the last great movie I watched was The Virgin Suicides. I hadn’t seen it since it came out on video. Such a beautiful, weird movie! Now that I think about it, both of these works deal with family and loss in some pretty profound ways. Can whatever is broken ever be fixed? Fixed is the wrong word, of course, and certainly there are harms done from which there is no recovering. Not to go too far off on a tangent here, but it seems to me that one of the things we should be learning from science is that our questions matter! Where have we looked, and what have we noticed, and what do we already think before we begin looking, asking, wondering? I’m trying to make a habit out of reminding myself that no one knows anything. I’ll go out on a limb though and suggest that we should probably be nicer to each other.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing up two book-length poems. They go on a bit, and they’re messy, but I really like them. At the end of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau talks about an “unwritten sequel,” and in Moby Dick, Ishmael says, “God keep me from ever completing anything.” I’m not sure how smart it is to embrace this stuff, but I’m writing with it in mind. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;