12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ian U Lockaby

Ian U Lockaby is the author of Defensible Space/if a crow— (Omnidawn, 2024), and A Seam of Electricity (Ghost Proposal, 2025). Recent work can be found in Fence, West Branch, Noir Sauna, Washington Square Review, Poetry Daily, etc. His translation of Mexican poet Diana Garza Islas was recently published by Carrion Bloom Books. He edits the online journal mercury firs, co-edits the chapbook press LUCIUS with fahima ife, and lives in New Orleans. 

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

It has not been out so long, so looking back on its publication in terms of a life narrative turn is difficult. But having a book to share and knowing that the work and the object is having a life beyond me feels strange and expansive. I don’t want to over-legitimize the book for book’s sake, but it’s true that a reader can live more immersively in a poet’s world with the physical fact of a book, or can co-create a world with them, and I feel lucky that some people are living and co-creating with mine. It was also cool as hell, very lucky, and very affirming to publish a book with Omnidawn, which has long been legendary to me. Learning I won their contest (back in 2022) encouraged me to keep doing my thing—after much rejection and discouragement, of course. I wrote most of that book like 5 and 6 years ago, so it feels like a different era of aesthetic attentions and impulses. Life has changed a lot since then. I always feel like my new work is very different—I like to chase new music!—but there are certainly shared concerns.

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

I don’t think I came to poetry first—I think I wrote prose first, in a poets’ manner. I read a lot of fiction as a kid. I wrote everything/anything through high school and college, honestly don’t think I considered genre much, maybe because my favorite writers even then wrote in-between things. And I also didn’t have much conception of doing it for any other reason than the making of it, so I didn’t have to decide on a genre or figure out what to call it. I never really tried to publish anything until much more recently. A professor senior year of undergrad told me what MFAs and suggested I consider one, and I said thank you, ain’t no way. I was done with school, until years later, you know how that orientation changes sometimes. But I was still fully engaged with literature, it’s always been a main obsession in my life.

I guess my last year of undergrad is probably when I stepped more firmly into poetry. I began to feel that poetry could contain or obtain the possibilities of all other forms of literature because poetry is beyond literature. It’s the form that felt most porous to life itself and opened new pores in life, and life was my main concern. I was exposed to some important things that year—I read Aimé Césaire for the first time, when I was assigned Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Clayton Eshleman’s translation, and I read it in one sitting late at night and everything was different afterwards. I couldn’t believe it. Carried the book around with me for days rereading it. I was also working with a poet named D Wolach who introduced me to George Oppen and a lot of contemporary experimental poets—David Abel came to our class; Rob Halpern’s work was another revelation. That was an important dive into more contemporary poetry and after all that I just kept going deeper.  

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 varies a lot. Though it does tend to all be very slow for me, and rarely do first drafts appear close to their final form. Things come in bursts, then I tinker endlessly and put things away for long periods. Everything is long gestation, and things get shuffled around. In a way, I feel like all the writing projects are just the writing project, because anything might belong to another thing.

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?

They begin everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes I write fragments in notebooks or notes app when I’m driving, or voice-to-text dictations (I like the errors), and later—days or months—I cull and combine lines and see what’s there. Sometimes I work out a few stanzas by memory over the course of a couple hours before I write them down. Sometimes I decide I’m working on a longer thing and find a form and start throwing everything into that vessel for weeks or months at a time. I get ideas for “books” a lot, but you know, very few of them have actually happened.

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

I enjoy doing readings a lot, yes, usually. Especially if it’s a good space with some good people (‘good’ can be a lot of different ways, ofc). The poems change when I bring them to a reading, and I get excited by that. One thing I love about poems is their ability to shape-shift, to be different things at different times. I like to see what poems can be when they are arranged differently, new cadences, in new rooms… I don’t ever want the poems to be static. The pressure before performing is good for editing too. Sometimes I edit as I’m reading—like suddenly I realize just in time that a line or stanza really ain’t going to hit, or I decide I don’t like it, so I skip it and know it’s never coming back. Or other times, I might accidentally say the wrong word and roll with it—gotta roll with it in my opinion—sometimes you say a better word. All that is fun, making it live in whatever present.

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 theoretical concerns behind my writing, sure, some are lasting, and some are constantly changing based on whims or readings or various encounters. Sometimes I figure them out after things are written. Lately I’ve been thinking about metaphors for God, and the language of infrastructure. I do not try to answer any questions; I prefer finding more questions. Answers in poetry and literature generally usually feel like dead ends, or concerns for the marketing, and I don’t care for that.

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?

There are so many kinds of writers, so it seems tricky to pin that one down. But the kinds of poets I love best—I think they make things new (and/or to show how they are very old)—to expand what’s possible in language, and therefore in thought.

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

Depends on the editor? I’d say both. I like being made to question choices or defend them, when I feel like the editors have something of an aligned vision or imagination. It was great, for example, working with Kelly Clare, Nora Claire Miller, and Alyssa Moore, the editors at Ghost Proposal on A Seam of Electricity, a chapbook of mine they published. They pushed me to expand and sharpen it.

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

Here are two that often come to mind, from my teacher Laura Mullen:

“Notice what you notice, that’s who you are as an artist”

“See what happens when you try to test your endurance in the wilderness of experimentation”

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

Very easy. They move through each other. Translation can be very difficult of course, but it can also at moments, feel as easy as good reading. And it opens new possibilities for my own poetry constantly. Questions of translation are also the essential questions of language.

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?

No routine. No typical days if I can help it. I have little discipline in such things, and I suppose I avoid routine. I always walk my dog in a different direction. I drink coffee. I look out the back door. I keep a garden in my yard, and sometimes I look at it while the water boils. If I can read or write first thing when I wake up, I love to, but that’s rare, unfortunately.

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

Anywhere but a screen. I like to walk. I also like to drive. And to read, of course. Talking to certain friends puts a faith back in me—I remember that a few people care about what I’m doing and are doing it too.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

River water or frying garlic.

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?

Encounters with good visual art make me want to write. Music is everything, it’s all music. One time I thought suddenly that my love of DMX as a kid had been the basis for my entire understanding of poetry. Not the specifics of his lyrical style—but his sonics. I not sure that’s true, but I’m not sure it’s not. The cadences of rappers I listened to growing up (Ghostface is a big one) are like bedrock in my mind.

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

Aimé Césaire, Alice Notley, Etel Adnan, Ed Roberson, Henri Michaux, Lisa Robertson, CD Wright, Jimin Seo, fahima ife, Laura Mullen, Sebastian Gómez Mátus, Javier Raya, Carlos Cociña, Diana Garza Islas, many more.

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

Get these two chapbook/press projects in operation that have been long in planning. (On the way! LUCIUS, co-edited with fahima ife—first chap summer 2025—& mf editions, physical branch of mercuryfirs.org, coming…soon…). I’d like to be able to publish full-lengths someday.

Also, I’d like to put out a few albums of my own music that no one listens to.

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?

If I hadn’t decided to go back to school when I was 28 or so, and ended up teaching as I’m doing now, I might have kept farming, which was my occupation for most of my 20s. Often I wish I were a good carpenter. I don’t dream of employment; I do dream of non-employment. And I do think about useful skills for the commune.

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

I have done and do plenty of something else’s, but I think I always come back to writing because, for one thing, it’s always available, always an option, there as “a refuge but also a centrifuge,” as Eric Baus said to me once. Like back in high school, which I did not like and did not excel, I’d ignore lessons and write long free-associative prose-poem things for pages and pages, getting into a trance—that shit was thrilling, life-giving. It is a sort of meditation or transportation that I need—desperately then, and still now. I was semi-serious about music from my teens through my mid-20s, wrote lots of songs, moved to Austin for a while with a band. We were a mess and it fell apart quickly but I loved it and I miss that mode of creation/attention/collaboration. But it’s a lot to get band members and space and equipment together. And I tend towards solitude—being in a band and playing out is very social. Writing has been the most consistent thing, partly because it was something I could do under any circumstances—moving around, broke, odd housing situations, etc. Poetry stays free.

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

The Grimace of Eden, Now by Cody Rose Clevidence. I’ve been watching Kiarostami films for the first time—can’t stop thinking about Where Is the Friend’s House? Also, Close-Up. Great-great-great.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A life outside of time (nothing doing). A book of poems called Vegetable With, that I’ve been working on quite a while. A translation of Chilean poet Sebastián Gómez Matus’s collection Animal Muerto. Another bunch of poems collectively called Half the Soybeans of the World Float by Me on the River, and maybe another bunch called 2 or 3 Houses. Always a lot of different things. And always the editorial/organizational/etc. work of running mercury firs, and the aforementioned LUCIUS. All that is a ton of work, but I love it a lot.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

Alex Cuff is learning to metabolize grief into a presence that keeps her in relationship to herself and community. A public school educator, and an editor of the Brooklyn-based poetry magazine No, Dear, she is the author of Family, a Natural Wonder (Reality Beach) and I Try Out A Sentence to See Whether I Believe (Ghost Proposal). Her first full-length collection, Common Amnesias, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse on May Day in 2024. She lives in Flatbush, Lenapehoking, with her partner, and feline extended family: Karl, Kuma and Medb.

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?
When I first encountered this question my instinctual response was, it didn’t change my life. I’m referring to my first book since it’s the most recent first for me. But over the past couple months that the book has been out, and having read from it several times, I’m realizing that I do feel a shift, a subtle change in life, with regard to my relationship to myself as a writer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the publication of Common Amnesias has given me a sense of accomplishment. I received an email from Dan Owens of Ugly Duckling Presse letting me know they wanted to publish the book just after a field trip with high school students to the Whitney to see no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. It was December 23rd and had just begun to snow, and I was walking the High Line to visit my partner at work. I was used to so much rejection by then and had sort of steeled my heart in a way that I hadn’t expected to have room for the small joy of a YES. Between that moment and the publication in May 2024, the shine of the yes flickered but the shift was that no matter how awful anything writing-related seemed, I knew that an intelligent & generous group of people were taking care of a collection of my poems and preparing them into a beautiful object that I could share with friends. At the moment of answering this question–5 months from publication–I feel a sense of gratitude. I’m a person with many unfinished projects and I’m still amazed that I wrote poems, organized them into a manuscript, shared them with other people and asked for feedback, and sent them out to many presses and contests. The other shift that I didn’t expect is a deepened intimacy with the body of poems. A sense of relief that came with the acceptance of the book for publication was a feeling of getting to cut the umbilical cord from these fucking poems I’ve been looking at for a long time. But now that I’m reading from the book, and having to select which poems to read in a given amount of time in a particular sequence to an audience who has heard or not heard the poems has forced us—me and the poems--to say heyyyy more often than I expected. And reading the same poems again and again with different people receiving them, and different types of responses, has helped me gain some tenderness and perspective toward poems I thought I was tired of. It’s hard to say how my most recent work compares to previous because much writing that made it into Common Amnesias has been written over the past ten years ago. I think I’ll need a lot more distance from my writing to be able to look back and know what has changed.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think that keeping a journal led me to poetry. I started keeping a journal when I was 8 years old – I only know this because I still have the journal–and journaling has been the most consistent writing I’ve done in the almost forty years since. I think that the type of writing that is journaling for me–jotting down notes and fragments–most lends itself to becoming the form of writing that we call poetry. I don’t remember reading any poetry before college though I’m sure I did in high school. I do recall I appreciating what felt like opacity in poems I first encountered. First perhaps because it matched how I felt moving through the world—a sort of heaviness and confusion—but also because it was a genre where adults seems to say it was okay to not understand, and I encountered not understanding many things I read, but poetry was like something it was okay to say we didn’t get.

I’ve never had any desire to write fiction. I enjoy reading it but would never have the stamina, or the planning capability or interest that goes into what I imagine a fiction writer needs to do, to create fiction. I don’t know if I can hold onto a beginning, middle and end at the same time in my head. I have written non-fiction – a couple of essays about teaching that I worked on with the support of an amazing editor and writer, Matthew Burgess, and both were painful experiences that I could not have done without an editor. I simply would have talked myself out of the necessity of the piece. The stamina I have is to return to what’s been written as opposed to the stamina to write one sentence after another sentence and have them together move towards some meaning.

I relate 100% to how Tonya Lailey answered this same question for you: “And I’ve also always been a day dreamer, space-cadet as we called it when I was a kid. I think poetry is kinder to dreamers than fiction might be.”

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?
Nothing writing wise ever comes quickly for me. There are two poems that I can think of that remain close to their first drafts. One is a poem titled “Noun Noun” which is basically a transcription of a series of text messages between me and my dad. The other is titled “Desire” half of which is a recounting of giving myself an enema, and the other half is a list of catalog items I read about while encountering the aftermath of the enema. I journaled about the experience afterwards and that’s basically the poem.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I dreamt once that a friend, the painter Jamie Chan, told me that if one can create the perfect sculpture then there’s no reason to write poems. I don’t agree with this because I don’t know if I can separate the process of sculpting or writing poems from the more or less finished piece that a reader experiences. But I like thinking of poems as sculptures and in that analogy, my process is less like creating a sculpture from a mass of material, and more like piecing found objects together into some sort of whole that constellates like a group of magnets that snap together once they are placed in each other’s orbit. I’m definitely, in your words, “an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project.” There is a project I’m working on now in which the idea precedes the writing, which is new for me, and I’m understanding that even in that case, the writing is stringy and fragmented and has not yet found its form.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I appreciate this question because I’ve never thought of public readings as either part of or counter to my creative process. While public readings definitely cause a good bit of anxiety for me, which at the time leading up to the reading absolutely feels counter-everything, I have to say that reading end up nurturing my creative process because they help bring to focus which poems feel most necessary to share in a particular time and place. Preparing for any reading ends up inscribing the sounds and articulations of the poems into my body. I get super nervous at readings and rely on muscle memory to deliver the poems – if the poems aren’t embodied, my brain will be elsewhere during the reading and I get lost in the language. Additionally, I inevitably end up continuing to revise the poems that I practice for a reading – even poems from Common Amnesias have changed over the past few months of reading from the book.

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?
This is a difficult question for me because I really do not think of my writing as trying to answer questions. My relationship to writing is so fraught that it’s hard for me to zoom out to that level of thinking! I feel like this is a bad answer though. So hmm what is immediately present for me when I sit down to write a line, or revisit some lines I have written, is the question of whether I can communicate tenderness and thinking at the same time--the poignant feeling I walk through the world with, one that makes it both gorgeous and terrible to be in a body, in a way that others can relate to, and in a way that isn’t unbearably cliché. I am also curious about the question of whether the speaker of any poem I write can be separate me as an author, from my own subjectivity.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think there’s space for all sorts of writers having different roles in the larger culture. I’m grateful for the writers thinkers artists activists journalists who are currently putting energy into bringing attention the genocide in Palestine, and organizing to change systems that normalize genocide and war. I know there are particular people who identify as writers (as they should!) but I also think it is difficult to distinguish the writer from anyone else who is creating and communicating in our world. But yes to people who write and create: wake us up, make us feel, help us think, make us realize that we aren’t alone. I can’t speak for others but in this moment I am believing that my role (as a writer, as a teacher, as a friend, and community member) is to stop dissociating long enough to overcome fear and lethargy in order to act in a way that interrupts the harm caused by systems that only give a shit about wealth + power + land accumulation.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I think collaboration in general to be essential, and in the few times I’ve worked with an editor, my writing got a push that I don’t think I could have achieved on my own. I’m grateful to Kyra Simone and Lee Norton from UDP for their editorial guidance over the few months of preparing Common Amnesias for publication—from the macro level of structure, to a few lines or words that I can spiral for hours wondering if I should cut. And for the years before that, many friends had read through the manuscript and contributed to its evolution. Nope I couldn’t imagine being a writer without editors!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

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?
It’s rare for me to wake up without being totally soaked in dream images. A typical non-work day begins with coffee asap and then I sit at my kitchen window and write my dreams down. The only other writing routine I consistently keep is journaling in the morning. I do this on the bus to work or at one of the windows in my apartment if I’m not rushing off to work. My partner knows to not strike up conversation during these early moments. Really the only other times I tend to writing, to poetry!, is when I’m enrolled in a writing workshop. So I try to do that yearly.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Once I had a dream featuring a scroll unrolling to reveal yards and yards of text. About 95% of the text was in an unremarkable font, but every now and then I’d see a word or phrase glowing yellow as if it was burned into the scroll and glowing like coals. In the dream, I realized that my unconscious was revealing my writing process to me. The scroll represented all of my language – not necessarily everything that I'd written down, but all of the language that lives through me and in me and arrives through dreams. What I learned was that my writing process isn’t linear at all and in some ways, I need to trust that it is accumulative if I keep jotting it down when I can. So when I’m stuck, if I have energy, I search past scrolls aka google docs. Otherwise I move on with my day.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean. A Catholic church. A pizza place.

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?
I don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t influence my work. But I don’t work with a particular form to inspire writing. At this point, I’d say dreams and relationships with other humans have most influenced the poems I’ve written.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This question is what makes me feel like a fake writer. I started reading contemporary poetry around age thirty so since then I’ve felt like I’m in catch up mode so I there are few books I’ve read more than once. Every writer I read and love, every book or poem, gets filed into my waxy brain as important. I will say though that Dorothy Allison was the first writer I recall reading and thinking about the person behind the book. I thought they were so brave to be writing about shame.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I think it would be cool to write a long poem or a chapbook over the course of a couple weeks. My writing practice is so sporadic and collage-like that I can’t imagine showing up to the same piece of writing daily for several weeks and have it like a dysfunctional family stick together in one poem.

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 occupation really is more educator than a writer. I spend way more time in my life as a teacher of reading and writing than as a writer of poems. But my alternative callings are: herbalist, caretaker at an animal sanctuary, farmer, seamstress, arborist, paid non-competitive swimmer, film-maker (once there is technology that allows us to download our dreams into film).

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
LOL I do almost everything else instead of writing on a daily basis.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This is a hard question but I’ll do it. Not that I believe in a strong line between what we call genres but…for non-fiction, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger. For poetry, Saretta Morgan’s Alt Nature. For fiction, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I just rewatched all of the Alien films so gotta say Alien.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Answering these questions!

Bigger picture: A few years ago I dreamt that I was in a basement rummaging through stacks and piles looking for anything of value, and I found a desk I knew to be my uncle’s, and I found a stack of poems he’d written and realized, in the dream, that he had been a poet. A few weeks later IRL my partner and I were helping my parents clean out their basement and I found a suitcase full of hundreds of letters that this uncle had written to my grandmother while he was in seminary, studying to become a Catholic priest, in Rome, Italy, during the early 1960s. I’ve been working with those letters on and off for the past couple of years. In fact I’m waiting for emily brandt to host another Docupoetics workshop so that I can get back to that project.

I also have so many dreams written down and have been inspired to shape years of dreams into a book along the lines of Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang. I’d love to collaborate on this with a visual artist!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lindsey Webb

Lindsey Webb is the author of Plat (Archway Editions, 2024), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and two chapbooks: House and Perfumer's Organ. Her writings have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she is a Graduate Research Fellow in the Tanner Humanities Center and PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She edits Thirdhand Books.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Plat, hasn’t been out very long, but it’s already brought so many lovely people to me. That is perhaps my favorite way it’s changed my life. That said, I finished writing it a few years ago, and I’ve since moved on from some of its obsessions, its frustrations, and its questions. It’s been interesting to time travel back into those preoccupations. My current work feels less angry, perhaps — but I also don’t quite know what the shape of my current work is, either. Perhaps it will take me a few years to look back and know, as it did with my first book.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I always thought I would be a novelist, and only started writing poems when I was a teenager. When I took an introduction to creative writing class as a college freshman, my teacher suggested that I sign up for a poetry class, and I took her advice. It was one of the best decisions of my life. I still have aspirations to write a novel, and I'm at work on a collection of nonfiction — but at this point my brain has been fully corrupted by poetry and its strange relationship to time and scale. Thank goodness.

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?
All of my projects have arrived differently. Some things (like my above/ground chapbook Perfumer's Organ) take shape relatively quickly; some begin with a burst of energy but change over time as I come to see the project more completely. Plat started out as a thought experiment to see whether I could construct a building in language that couldn't exist in the real world, and was primarily a way to inject some play back into my writing after finishing my MFA. Only much later did I realize I was, at the same time, writing through bigger questions, like death and capitalism and the afterlife. Some projects, like almost all of my nonfiction and many of my poems lately, feel like they have to be dug out of the earth bit by laborious bit.

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 to work on a project that extends across multiple pieces. I always hope to find a thought that is too big for one poem, where an obsession bleeds over into the next day, the next approach. And I like to go back and mercilessly cut, rearrange, and reshape. I find stand-alone, slice-of-life poems extremely difficult to write.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
When I've been fortunate enough to be part of a local literary community, I like to read brand new work to see how it feels in my mouth and how it feels landing on the ears of others. It can be a useful gauge for me to see whether a poem is working, and can help give me a new perspective on things I don't understand about my own work. I get a little bored reading old work in front of people.

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?
Ultimately, I think I am always writing about sensory perception, God, and capitalism. What do my senses help me understand, even if erroneously, about Big Things like God, capitalism, and power? What kind of knowledge, what kind of experience is available through and despite these “errors”? Even when I think I'm not writing about these things, they end up making their way to the page.

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?
My favorite writers are mischief-makers, agnostics, and seamstresses.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like being asked what I meant by a particular line, or phrase, or image, because sometimes I don't know. And sometimes I don't know that I don't know. Being asked to account for my words, at least in an environment where an editor or peer genuinely wants to understand, is incredibly valuable. It's a kind of generosity that, while sometimes difficult (usually the most useful questions are the ones I don't have answers for in the moment), is something I hope to never take for granted. When I’m in the role of editor, I try very hard to approach an author and their text with that mutual generosity in mind.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I don't know if this is something anyone ever spelled out to me, but it's something I learned by osmosis studying under Peter Gizzi: a poem's social life is more valuable than its craft or its aesthetic perfection. Poetry is a form of communication, both despite and because of its inefficiencies. And all poems are always speaking to one another, and have something to say to one another, across time and distances and languages. And if a poem cannot touch a social life, broadly defined — if it feels walled off, somehow, perhaps via an empty craft perfection or its perspective or something else, from the vibrancy of both the history of poetry and the now of daily speech — it can't be called alive. A good poem must have, in this way, a spiritual life.

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?
Routines are difficult; I think I might be allergic to them. When I feel restless, I implement some discipline and do very low-stakes writing in the mornings. Lately, that’s been things like playing rhyming games or attempting to write down dreams. Eventually, some problem or question will begin to assert itself, often through something I've read, and I attempt to write about it or around it in order to understand it, or play with it, or follow it to an end. Sometimes these beginnings fizzle out very quickly, but sometimes they build into a long poem or, if I'm very lucky, the beginning of a book project. In those situations I can't get away from the page, and end up writing a large amount very quickly.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
This process means I go through long fallow periods. I've learned to not be too anxious about them. These can often last weeks or months, and during that time I read. Usually I have several books going at once and end up abandoning most of them. (A terrible habit.) But many times a project will begin to take shape from something I've read — even just a line, or a throwaway reference, that I want to chase down somehow. I find I get ideas that make me want to write from books that are nothing like, on the surface anyway, what I want to work on. That means lately I haven't been reading much poetry, mostly nonfiction and novels, such as the work of D.W. Winnicott, Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, and Kate Briggs' The Long Form.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
On rainy June evenings in northern Utah, where I'm from, the fragrance of blooming sagebrush is everywhere, even downtown. It gets carried down from the mountains and from the gigantic sagebrush steppe to the west. It makes me feel very teenagerly and romantic — probably because when I was young, I thought that no one else could smell it, because no one ever talked about it. It felt like a completely mysterious and private scent, whose source I only learned many years later.

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?
As I said above, I find myself most interested in exploring in language what feels — on the surface, at least — radically different from language. So, lately: perfume, sculpture, physical sciences. I'm also a classically trained pianist and vocalist, so music is probably the art that got wedged in my brain the earliest, and seems to be something I can never get away from.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I could list so many: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Etel Adnan, Clarice Lispector, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer. And those are just the ones who are no longer alive. That said, probably no book has been more influential on my language-sense than the King James Bible. (It got there first.)

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Give birth to and name the baby I'm currently carrying.

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 don't see writing as an occupation in the traditional sense. I made a commitment to myself long ago that writing is something I will do no matter how I make my money. Even as I attempt to find a career teaching writing, I find it important to separate the two — I'm highly skeptical of the careerist mindset when it comes to the actual writing. I get bummed out by people who are "on the submission grind," constantly publishing, fetishizing productivity and networking relationships. As much as I, too, hope to find readers, I find it important for my own work to keep it sacred, to question and resist that mindset. To embrace what, to some, might look like non-productivity or anti-productivity.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Language is interesting to me, endlessly, in a bottomless way. It's interesting to me socially, aesthetically, and historically. It’s something that feels big enough to devote my life to. Perhaps there will come a day when I plumb the depths of that interest and I won't write anymore. In that case maybe I'd go back to music, or get better at making clothes, or go to divinity school. But for now it's the primary way I think about nearly everything.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm in the process of reading Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book, and loving it. Not too long ago I watched Bergman's Persona for the first time. It was all the things everyone said it would be — disturbing, beautiful, etc. — but I couldn't help but feel I came to it too late. By that, I think I mean it's possible to know too much about a movie before seeing it.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I'm working on a book of essays about land art and land use in the American West, heavily influenced by Lucy Lippard. The project started because I noticed that few people who write about land art actually live in the same communities the most famous pieces do — and, as someone who grew up a drive away from Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and other works like Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, I wanted to try to say something about them. The project, as projects tend to do, has ended up being about much more than that: it's also about extraction, and sonograms, and my own family history as miners and Mormon settlers in the west.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mike Lala

Mike Lala is the author of The Unreal City (Tupelo Press, 2023), Exit Theater (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2016), and several chapbooks, including Points of Return (Ghost Proposal, 2023). Poems appear in A Public Space, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Boston Review, Fence, New American Writing, the PEN Poetry Series, and Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula. Lala’s installations, performance, and libretti include Whale Fall (2021), Madeleines: Tell Me What It Was Like (2020, with Iris McCloughan), Oedipus in the District (2018–19), and Infinite Odyssey (2018). They have been shown widely in New York City, where he lives. www.mikelala.com

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? Exit Theater didn't change my life, but it did as give me an excuse to rethink my process, as I could look back and see what it took to make a book, how to have a healthier and more rigorous practice toward that making, and what the limitations and possibilities of poetry are. The Unreal City takes up many of the same thematic and formal concerns, but expands on and pushes into them further.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? I took a few classes with the poet Diane Wakoski in undergrad. I've been writing poetry ever since.

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? Wasted work, thinking, notes, outlining, lost dreams, emails to self, written-down fragments of dreams and insights in the middle of the night—at some point it all becomes unbearable and I put down a terrible draft, then add and slash and revise dozens of times. Often the initial shape or impulse is recognizable, but it's become something entirely other.

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? It depends on the poem and the project, but I like the way poems can support each other, so I gravitate toward unity.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I do not enjoy giving readings but they are an opportunity to enact the work in a different way, so I do 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? The questions are different for everyone. For me, some are: Why should anyone care about this? Is it worth a reader's time? What is the work doing in relation to the history of the form, and what does it contribute? What are the ethics of its formal qualities and of conveying this subject in this way? What might it do in the mind of a reader and what might that do in the world?

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? Art, as it is received (or not) in the public, reflects the culture that receives it at least as much as the artist who made it. A writer's job is to make work that is true to them and their time—to follow their desires and instincts, to push into the hidden and uncomfortable or taboo—and then to let work be in the world, with others, to live its own life. What exactly the work should be or why you should make it—no one can tell you what to do or who to be.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? "None of the books I've written were published in the order I wrote them." - Anselm Berrigan

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to sound installation to performance to libretto)? What do you see as the appeal? Not easy, but fun.

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 do my best writing in the morning, and since I work full time, I usually write for two hours before work, starting at 6 a.m. When I can't sleep, I write at night.

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

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? I grew up many places, so there is no one home in my life. But sometimes the fragrance of someone I love will trigger a feeling 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? Mostly books, but yes, paintings, videos and films, journalism, music, memories and experiences, meditation—it's all available.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? There are too many to count here—in some sense everything I read is important for it.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? I would like to write full time.

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? For a long time I wanted to be a journalist in environment or nat sec. I'd also have liked to have been a filmmaker or a painter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I struggled with perspective in visual art, and reading and writing came naturally to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Truly great? Javier Marias' Your Face Tommorrow. Jia Zhangke's Ash Is Purest White.

20 - What are you currently working on? A new book of variations on Catullus' poems, another group of new poems, and, for once, some fiction.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-September, 2021: Gala Uzryutova + Lindsey Webb,

So, right now I’m basically attempting to get another two dozen books reviewed before the semi-annual deluge of new titles begin to land. That sounds reasonable as a goal, doesn’t it? Gadzooks!

Cobourg ON: The first Proper Tales Press title in some months is All the names are occupied, but one is vacant (2021) by Ulyanovsk-based Russian poet, fiction writer, playwright, and sound and visual artist Gala Uzryutova, translated “from the Russian by Stuart Ross & the author.” These poems appear to be the first of Uzryutova’s poems translated into English (and she has translated some of Ross’ work into Russian, also), which make me immediately curious to know if they’re potentially working on something book-length.

all the snow I missed
for the five years
I didn’t visit my father’s village
fell today
and does not fit in the shovel
you gave me in grade three.
I crammed the snow
into the pockets of your coat,
shoved it through the windows of your old car,
and still the snow grows in the root cellar,
and we can’t even see the windows of the bathhouse,
and your boots, too, are full of snow.
it heaped over the fence and soon
will cover the bottom of the Volga.
a little more—and the snow will fill my throat 

father, give me a bigger shovel

The poems in this collection are untitled, relatively short and self-contained, each beginning on a new page, and the surreal aspect of the work provides the possibility of both individual pieces and the grouping of a particular suite. Uzryutova employs a dark surrealism with an elegant, light touch, accumulating lines that stretch wide across the lyric. “the shore’s not as cold as the river,” she writes, “it’s cold as an empty house at the beginning of winter [.]” I am curiuos to see more of her work.

Chicago Il: Salt Lake City, Utah poet Lindsey Webb’s debut chapbook is HOUSE (Chicago Il: Ghost Proposal, 2020), an accumulation of twenty-six short prose poems, set as one per page. As the chapbook opens:

When I first considered my career in time, the house installed its kin. Busy setting up for the party, though I thought they weren’t organs. I thought I had a purse. In your photograph, a white door dries in the morning sun, though in my memory it was red. It bursts into hives when I talk about it, and telescopes my relation to the true.

Her writing wraps itself around both lyric and philosophy, attending space, motion and the body, as well as the body and the framing of her subject, the house. I’m enjoying the scope of this small project, one that, much like Uzryutova’s collection, allows for each poem to remain self-contained, but to simultaneously open up into the structure of a suite, writing her subject and idea as complete as possible. There are echoes of Sarah Manguso’s short story collection in her structure, but just as much of poet Sawako Nakayasu, who recently offered the writing prompt of taking an idea or subject, and simply writing every poem on and around that.

How does the house desire me? I sit in a soft chair among the group, and a dog bites its own ankle. I’ve been asked to ponder as a market ponders. When a child comes to the window to kiss it, It desires my time, I posit. The dog always dies, dies again, a satin duration. A scolding: Things do not appear from nowhere, though an aloe leaf suddenly colors my hand. This will impede my progress. My desire will color the next room.