Jocelyn Saidenberg, Kith & Kin

[birdbrain] there’s a sequence called time: she’s sick, she dies, she’s still dead, no matter the voice, passive or active, but the other won’t have it that way not in that order or tense. It figures apprehension & owing. No promise or debt to pursue. Is it like grains of sand? like stars? what’s myriad? Not quite, without senses. Then while reading the letter by Bruce I find a compositional circle ringing & containing that draws us together. (“NOVEMBER”)

Constructed as a year’s suite of poems, Bay Area, San Francisco writer Jocelyn Saidenberg’s latest title, Kith & Kin (The Elephants, 2018) is composed as an elegy, one that weaves through confession and the domestic as well as the elusive details of the lyric. Compiled, seemingly, in chronological order, the poems accumulate as multiple poems-per-month from September to August, as Saidenberg both plumbs and alludes to the details of Beth’s (the exact nature of the relationship isn’t defined, but Beth is clearly an intimate) illness and death, and what occurs in the space of such heartbreak. Across forty-one poems, a period of care and caregiving eventually gives way to grief, and to absence, as she writes: “& it’s / too stupid to list those with whom / & a stupid list of losses those who abandoned / the dead & those whose suffering / held them possessed like those owls do” (“SEPTEMBER”).

NOVEMBER

less the more not exactly

a pair not oblivious either but

not familiar the less I do

the more she is or the more I

sleep the less she is not or the less

light less love to trust to live

if not to person a dream

we’re winking so Beth kings it

because she’s making

a racket repairing a bucket

will they let us keep what makes

it most alien is to unkind it

being with what before what is

found as a dirge for before what

we court to keep measuring

distances & inward longing

for extremes to count

that no one go hungry

all hallucinate nightly

it’s difficult being

against being

the more now

the less to undo it

The author of four full-length titles—Mortal City (Parentheses Writing Series, 1998), Cusp (Kelsey St. Press, 2001), Negativity (Atelos Press, 2007), Dead Letter (Roof Books, 2014)—as well as three chapbooks—Dusky, Dispossessed, and Shipwreck—one can clearly see a thread or two emerge in Saidenberg’s work through her titles alone (this is the first collection of hers I’ve seen), one that does work to engage some darker, deeper elements of the personal, interpersonal and intimate, and the collection manages a fine line between language writing and narrative. Saidenberg presents the story slant, fragmented and allusive/elusive, but in the most straightforward manner possible, managing a lyric that embraces the full emotion of language and bodies, and everything the heart and the mind might want. As she writes at the end of the collection, in “some notes”:

Kith & Kin is born of a desire to write about what I tend to deny or avoid: my body, my organizational obsessions, the banality of my everyday, my mistakes and messes, that is, my desire to invite the exclusions in and to entertain the excesses. By attending to what my attention resists, my inattention, I had the hunch that in approaching my withdrawal, shame, and omissions, I might find myself in proximity to others, ones who mumble, who yell in rage, who are recently or long dead, who dream me at night, those who are lost to me, yet whose beings compose my beings. As Judith Butler writes: “I find that my very formation implicates the other in me, that my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.” We are traversed by others, by their traces and impressions. Who we are is never fully knowable, for we constitute an assembly of others and selves. In this sense, the writing summons and is summoned by others collectively, enigmatically as our elaboration of losses and assemblies.

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Broc Rossell and Jordan Scott on The Elephants

The Elephants are an independent, open-genre press publishing heterodox materials as acts of love and solidarity with the communities in which they’re created, especially those underrepresented in the literary arts. We’re with the underdogs

Broc Rossell is the author of Festival (Cleveland State 2015) and with W. Scott Howard co-editor of the forthcoming anthology 'After' Objectivism (University of Iowa Press). He teaches in the Critical and Cultural Studies Program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), and from Coach House Books: blert (2008), Decomp (2013, a collaboration with Stephen Collis and the ecosphere of British Columbia) and Night & Ox (2016). Scott’s chapbooks include Clearance Process (SMALL CAPS 2016), and Lanterns at Guantánamo (Simon Fraser University), which treat his experience after being allowed access to Guantanamo Bay in April 2015. Scott was the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University .

1 – When did The Elephants 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?

Broc Rossell: We’re a little more than a year old. I was the senior poetry editor at Brooklyn Arts Press for about six years (I owe Joe at BAP a lot what I learned there, esp. about working with writers on their manuscripts; Caryl Pagel at Cleveland State is my editorial role model, she’s the best). I’ve long had the goal of starting my own press and when I got the chance to work with Jordan Scott I took it.

Jordan Scott: Broc first approached me with his idea for The Elephants on a drive to Mount Baker in late 2016. I learn so much from Broc about poetry, poetics and editing that I knew being a part of The Elephants would be a necessary education.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

BR: I’ve wanted to do something that isn’t about my work for a while, I like working on projects that aren’t my own, and I like the idea of building something over a long period of time. (I’m a new parent, too.) Writers sharing their work with each other is a pretty basic definition of the lyric, and so of literature. And without small presses (at least in North America) literature would be a shit.

JS: I like that idea too. I also like the idea of giving back some of the energy, love and support that I’ve benefited from as a poet over the years. 

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

BR: We’re both poets, and deeply informed by it, but not limited to publishing it. We’re not a poetry press per se so much as a press that uses poetry or the idea of poetry as a way of seeing things, and we publish work that redefines what and how we see. Deviance and heterodoxy are what we want. 

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

BR: Make them beautiful and hope for word of mouth…events…and flogging the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

BR: It’s always interesting to discover a writer’s expectations. Some writers want or require manuscript development, some have specific, pressing questions they want answered, some people give us work that doesn’t need a thing. Jordan tends to have a light touch, but it’s always on the money. On the rare occasion he offers a line edit, most people take it. 

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

BR: SPD, and directly through our website (theelephants.net). Standard small press print runs, a few hundred copies. Depends on the title.

 

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?

BR: Jordan Scott’s the consulting editor, he works with me on the books with me, and he’s (I think) one of the best readers + poets working today. He reads everything I write. Anybody that gets a chance to work with him is a winner. I’m a winner!

JS: I find myself reacting often very instinctually / viscerally to work and he’s usually able to ask me the right questions so I can better articulate whatever the fuck is going on. Broc has some serious editing chops (it’s incredible to witness, actually) and we work well together. We trust each other, and that matters a great deal.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

BR: It’s more like the press reflects ways I want to grow as a writer? I guess one specific thing is that I don't write for Microsoft word anymore, I imagine book forms when I’m revising, how it’s going to look in the trim.

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?

BR: I can see why someone would do it (I like Ben Estes’ book a lot, for instance), but I don’t think I could. I mean I’m always grateful when someone reads something I wrote, but I don’t feel comfortable with being the one who also shares it with people. It’s not like I’m emotionally invested in the means of production and distribution; more like I don’t want to be the particle and the wave. I don’t write a blog either.

11– How do you see The Elephants evolving?

BR & JS: Evolving is kind of the goal. We've published books of theory, fiction, poetry. We did an online magazine, we do books, we’re publishing digital chapbooks this year. We have no idea what comes next, other than the two books a year, which we're committed to.

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?

BR: Too early to say, I reckon, but I really love our books. I don't think I could choose. The magazine and chapbooks were huge projects, no less than the printed stuff. No serious frustrations J

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

BR &; JS: There’s so many presses we’ve stolen from / been inspired by. Omnidawn’s commitment to community, same goes for Talon Books, Krupskaya’s decades-long, almost libidinously swerve-y aesthetic, Song Cave’s instant credibility, Coach House’s decades as a center of publishing the transgressive, just to name contemporaries. I mean, if we were to try to answer this question historically we’d never stop talking. Small press history is practically a history of deviant thought unto itself.  

14– How does The Elephants work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see The Elephants in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

BR & JS: We’re based in Vancouver, a border town. I’m American (now dual), Jordan is Canadian, we’ve published work from luminaries and first publications from new writers, work from folks in Ireland, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, China, Spain... Solidarity is the thing.

We read political and scientific as much or more than literary journals…we probably read the same journals you do! To answer the question directly, though there are some incredible ones out there, we don’t really publish to engage in dialogue with like-minded folks, so much as we use the press to find new directions for reading.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

BR & JS: Sure, we do local book fairs. And readings too, mostly west coast, we love seeing people. Our new authors, Johanna Drucker and Jocelyn Saidenberg, will be reading up and down the west coast in May and early June (details on our website, theelephants.net). We did the Whale Prom at AWP this year, and it was lovely.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

BR & JS: It’s a big part of what we do. We do online pubs and digital-only pubs, we sell through the website, we IG at @the_elephants__ and we’re on FB.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

BR: We hold open reading periods every May. I’m happy to say we don't know what we’re looking for! But we aren’t looking for things that confirm what we already know—we want to be turned around and see the thing we were missing.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

BR: We published our first two books last year, Joanna Ruocco’s The Week and Helen Dimos’s No Realtor Was Compensated for This Sale. I think it’s Joanna’s eighth or ninth book and Helen’s first. Helen wrote hers in Athens, a center of neoliberal geopolitics, and Joanna’s book is unclassifiable prose. We just published Johanna Drucker’s daring and brilliant act of imaginative thinking, The General Theory of Social Relativity, which uses the case study of Trump and quantum physics to make an argument for radically reconfiguring the social sciences. And Jocelyn Saidenberg’s kith & kin, is a book-length durational elegy that floored Jordan and I when it came in. So smart and so deeply felt, what she can do with a line…quiet fireworks on every page.

12or 20 (small press) questions;

P-QUEUE #14 : Revenge

Are we too bold to present this city, Sanctuary?

[17 January 2017, 2 days after MLK Jr day,

3 days before Inauguration of the Tyrant.]

Am I entitled to my father’s whiteness? Did I believe?

in his return, every scotomizing son to every MacArthur,

pipe and drape, pomp and puddle, replenishing from

boat, leap you from that leak, or lack and muddle,

white liberals here visa hack no safe return nor

safe passage, between venues, or famished strip tease,

adopt to basic frights, and you still want muster to

head of line privilege no white wants against garrison,

a garish rubber bullet, give me a recruiting narrative,

I can believe, in gush we trust, but tarry malevolence

so it does not factfire, your disguise as vacant homily

to rule of law, how to not flirt in white spcaes,

because collaborating sheriffs need not explanation

ache to book private prison, promise me reading

material for my vagrancy, service one white master

for another, and isn’t that what my master[s] is good for,

here chaw like covenant, I’ve returned. Agsubliac Pay!

is so much fun, to jig a brown dance on milky stage,

let’s do it twice,

let’s do it thrice? (Sean Labrador Y Manzano, “REBLANCHEMENT”)

Buffalo poet Allison Cardon’s first issue of P-QUEUE as editor is #14 (2017). For anyone paying attention, P-QUEUE has long been one of my favourite American literary journals [see my reviews of #10-13; #7-8; #5 here], and it appears annually through the Poetics Program and the English Department at SUNY Buffalo. Edited and produced by students as part of the program, it’s comparable to Concordia’s annual headlight anthology; unlike headlight, which attempts to focus on immediate students and graduates, bringing their work out into the world, P-QUEUE has always been more of a mix, allowing students and more established writers to meet and mix within its pages. Subtitled “Revenge,” Cardon ends her introduction to the issue offering that:

It should be clear that revenge is not the only thread weaving this issue together. And yet all of the pieces here do take up a related interest in reckoning: approaches that distinguish structural, historical, and personal accounts from the kinds of bookkeeping in which sunk losses are only to be forsaken, ignored, or forgotten.

The new issue features a wide array of writing and artwork by Sean Labrador Y Manzano, Stacey Tran, Laura Henriksen, Shayna S. Israel, Eric Sneathen & Daniel Case, Woogee Bae, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Brandon Shimoda and Adam Mitts. Highlights abound: I’m always fascinated by the work of Brandon Shimoda (despite being very behind on his work), and am curious about the forthcoming debut chapbook that Laura Henriksen has with Imp. The author of numerous poetry titles, and founding editor of KRUPSKAYA Books, Jocelyn Saidenberg is a wonderful discovery; a poet I hadn’t even heard of before this (which is my failing, obviously). Her poems included here, “from KITH & KIN,” meander and flow in the most incredible ways, writing out loops and twirls and line-breaks that somehow seem both straightforward and disjunctive simultaneously. I’m very keen to see the full project emerges, most likely as a full-length collection (I would suspect) down the road.

OCTOBER

fewer birds are bolder coming closer

as curiosity’s companion for light

to a dream place in that used to be &

is no longer a self interloped & poaching

            I did repair the hole in the rug

with the tools she’d given me

I did repair the breach with Bob

when horrible things happen

the smallest lapse an insult felt

but when intensity

lessens which is worse

to pause to remember to remember

            reading word disorder for order

humiliation for friendship for what

guarantor what author for Martial

making a book makes the book a debt

for its maker & that’s literal when

what costs grow augmented

or not towards the growers

of what may be matter

then I look with solicitude

& console the impossible