Ongoing notes: early April, 2026 (poetry month!): Andy Butter + Maria Cyranowicz (trans. Malgorzata Myk,

Another VERSeFest, come and gone. But most of our sixteenth annual festival was livestreamed, so if you missed any of it, be sure to catch either via our website or through our YouTube channel, yes? And now it is poetry month! Be aware that we’re posting a daily poem (at 3pm, Ottawa time) once more across Aprilvia the Chaudiere Books blog. Who might be first? Who might be next? And I’m reading later this month in Victoria, British Columbia, by the way, through Planet Earth Poetry, as well as hosting a podcast (recorded, on stage) while I’m around. Are you around?

Brooklyn NY: I’m just now working through American writer and editor Andy Butter’s debut chapbook, To Circumambulate A Sacred Lake (Brooklyn NY: Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2025), a curious and extended chapbook-length lyric meditation. Butter has a good sense of the extended lyric, the long line, stretching out as far as possible across multiple pages, which almost makes me wonder if this poem is (or will be, or can be) far more than what is presented here, within the boundaries of this particular chapbook-sized unit. If Lorine Niedecker’s “Lake Superior” was attending the space of that landscape, so too, Butter’s poem, providing a similar shape through articulating an outline, slow and careful and almost delicate. As the poem, subtitled “[Allowing the materials their errors]” begins: “Here is where I start after ending. We walked, turned and touched. / Here we held and the trees of paradise lurched.”

We ran around Lake Superior—the center of the universe.

 

Our footprints a pearl-string of pressurized gravity wells.

 

We ran through rain, through broad open glades,

nights we knew the moon was near.

Rising as incense in a cathedral, slow and sluggish,

our voices tittered like old monks. In minutiae, in daily minuets,

 

within minutes skin sloughing and the egress of love,

we slept beneath the shroud of mosquitoes a buzz thin as muslin.

Poland/Texas: It is curious to see more work from Polish poet, literary critic and performer Maria Cyranowicz, translated into English from the Polish by translator Malgorzata Myk, as the chapbook a species of least concern (El Paso TX: Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024), as generously passed along from the translator (and through Polish poet, translator and critic Kacper Bartczak, recently in town for VERSeFest). The poems hold themselves as accumulations of long thought-lines, set as one foot following another, into a depth or a darkness or a particle of light. “and then I understood,” begins the poem “funeral,” “I am Alexander and he is Fanny / it’s me who is following still following the absent father / I keep saying damn it or much worse / smiling through my teeth to those stroking my [.]” As part of a folio of eight Polish poets at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics from 2024, Cyranowicz writes: “To me, language is a social construct inside of which the speaker of my poetry is bound to be trapped and to which they are frequently subjected. Linguistic conditioning, which entails the socialization of individuals to such ‘delusions’ as religion, education, politics, or even literature, does not proceed without oppression.”

the forty third sunset
watched by the Little Prince 

 

when I open my eyes the sun is still shining,
a small rusty orb close to the evening;
I’m turning it in my thoughts like a hot potato,
it’s setting too fast beyond the thin line of eyelids. 

the horizon fills with blood. I can’t not look.
I touch it with my eyes: it’s pulsing. I smile a little.
I’m trying hard to feel less sad.
I’m rubbing eyelids with my fingers and I don’t feel
reluctance in me, only astonishment.
there’s something beyond this line. there’s something in this color.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geoffrey Olsen

Geoffrey Olsen is the author of Nerves Between Song (Beautiful Days Press 2024) and seven chapbooks, most recently In Sleep the Searing (New Mundo Press 2025) and Neck Field (Portable Press @ Yo-yo Labs 2025). He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

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?

The primary change for me is that the creation of Nerves Between Song allowed me to conceive of writing “books”. As a young poet, I could write series -- 5-7 poems -- before losing focus, then I eventually shifted to chapbook length forms for the next decade of writing. NBS accumulates from these 10 - 20 poem series. Now, I write in terms of the book-length work, as if the book gave me permission for this practice.

I feel more assured in my activity as poet and it’s been nice to have more people reach out to me. More friendships, more sense of the visible nexus of poets and our community that invigorates the writing.

In some ways, Nerves Between Song is my “previous work”: the oldest poems in the book are over a decade old, though edited and changed over that time. Across my work there’s an attention to the motion of the poem -- a sense that the poem beckons, but does not dictate meaning. The writing that follows is always going to play against the impulses driving the previous work, as I try to ascertain what new possibilities can emerge.

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

I wanted to write fiction at first: it seemed the only way to  be a writer. I soon realized that I was not interested in narrative, in character, and that instead I was interested in the emergence of detail and language as in motion. I’ve always been drawn to improvisation when it comes to creative activity, and poetry seemed the ideal medium for me to explore this.

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?

Each work is continuous on some level, though I have been interested in exploring particular forms. Despite writing within somewhat similar structures throughout my work, on some level it is impossible to repeat the form of the poem as it moves with a continually altering pulse of consciousness. We respond to unceasing change: the conduits of material crisis promulgate poetic intent. Writing exists as accumulating gesture of undercurrent and submerged energy.

Poems start in motion and do not change much from initial writing. There’s a pruning of the work that always happens: cutting away here and there, growing out other aspects.

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 is difficult to think of the short pieces that I write over time and the final book itself as distinct. It tends to morph as it moves along. That said, my recent manuscript, Rend, -- a portion of this has just been published as the chapbook In Sleep the Searing -- was intentionally prepared as a book-length series of formally united poems: my first time writing a sustained work where the form is stable and self-contained, rather than determined in its gradual unfolding over a series of poems.

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

I love doing readings! In the past, I would get so nervous and do them rarely, but I’m fortunate to have had enough opportunities to do them over the years so that the anxiety they generate can be channeled into excitement. I want to think more about my reading practice, particularly in relation to music. Readings with the musician Ceremonial Abyss, who generates a sonic field alongside the poetry, have been incredible experiences and helped me hear the work in new ways. I know I’m not alone in this -- Ceremonial Abyss has been relentlessly touring and reading with so many poets across the US. It’s energizing to see the collaborations he’s convening, not just with him but with other musicians, such as with composer and movement artist Lia Simone, who performed with poets Jared Daniel Fagen and Jessica Elsaesser the evening of my first reading with Ceremonial Abyss.

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 huge question! The current question for me is how can the US continue to exist in this way where it exploits beings all over the planet so as to perpetuate the control of the wealthy? And then the second question, which comes from this, is where does poetry arrive and occur in this calamity? What is the space of imagination as interwoven with our concerns for survival? I also wonder at what can be “said” with the poem, and become more immersed in it as beautiful noise, churning within what I experience, what I want to know, what I fail to understand, and yet still drawn to a more abstract music that moves with this, vacated of me. There’s always a certain skepticism involved in my approach to language, and with that a lot of uncertainty.

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?

Reading Eleni Stecoupolous’s wonderful new book Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing reminded me of the George Oppen quote that poets imagine themselves “legislators of the unacknowledged”. This brings to mind Robert Kocik’s call for poets to make law. I don’t know where I stand. In the unknown probably.

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

Working with Beautiful Days cofounders and editors Joshua Wilkerson and George Fragopoulos was such a satisfying and supportive experience. They were very thoughtful about the work and only lightly intervened to refine Nerves Between Song. Poet and novelist Brenda Iijima, who published my chapbook NECK FIELD several months ago, is a longtime friend and influence. I am deeply fortunate to have her as an astute reader of my work for almost two decades now, and as an editor she helped me hone in on the underlying root structure of the poems. It’s essential!

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

Alan Davies once told me that one has to do the same thing again and again first before the new emerges, but to do this without repetition. Something about being in the dialectical tension of the repetition and the seemingly new is where poetry happens for me. I feel the process is generating a personal syntax, and rhythm, as if one is improvising on an instrument. That all the discipline is turning toward the practice in motion.

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?

My practice is centered on reading and listening. “Writing” is a continuous occurrence, typically inside as I move about my day. I usually write in the interstices of my reading, since with poetry or theory and then turning to my notebook and writing out a poem. I always handwrite poems and type them out usually months later.

I work a fulltime job as a staff at the New School, so most days start with a commute, but I do try to read poetry in the morning.

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

Back to music, back to reading, back to film. Medium transfer transmutes stall into flow.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Decaying leaves. I grew up on the edge of a forest. Teenage afternoons were spent on the paths that ran through the woods. I just would walk and be slightly spooked by the surroundings. 

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?

Music always and often film. The poetry I’ve been working on lately has been influenced by electro-acoustic music and field recordings, and often pieces of music that operate in both genres. Taku Unami and Toshiyo Tsunoda’s Wovenland series heavily influenced my recent chapbook NECK FIELD, particularly their attention to estranging “natural” sounds, generating a sort of anti-pastoral of parks and streams and other populated outdoor spaces. The established the field in which the horrors of the genocide in Gaza were reverberating through my daily attention and remain the focus of my political activity outside of poetry. My work is (for better or worse) never direct, yet something about how they were approaching sound obliquely let me register more in the poems the dire urgency of this moment, when the United States continues to arm Israel’s war machine over 600 days into this intensification of the genocide.

As for film, I’m still trying to clarify its direct importance to my work. I often reference films in my poems -- frequently it’s been the filmmakers Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Tsai Ming-Liang. They both offer a duration of image that feels like thinking. I like to write alongside and into the feeling that opens up.

Recent work has been engaging with the films of Robert Beavers after I had the chance to see many of his films at a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives. Rebekah Rutkoff’s incredible recent book on his work, Double Vision: On the Cinema of Robert Beavers led me to read his film almost as poetry, and as a medium of language, even if that may not have been his intent. I’m into rendering as poetry that which cannot be truly held by it.

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

My core poets: Leslie Scalapino, Will Alexander, Larry Eigner, P. Inman, JH Prynne, Myung Mi Kim, Roberto Harrison, kari edwards, Brenda Iijima, Nathaniel Mackey.

For theory (recently): Samir Amin, Vladimir Lenin, Raymond Williams

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

Write many essays and reviews. This has been something I’ve found very challenging for some reason. It feels abrasive in relation to my poetry practice, requiring a focus that does not come to me easily. I would also like to write a long poem, though this may or may not already be underway.

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 honestly don’t know how to answer this. Maybe a musician, though part of why I became a poet in the first place is because that dream of music collapsed pretty quickly.

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

I wanted to be a musician at first -- I play the piano, pretty much purely improvisation in solitude. When I began to recognize that wasn’t going to go anywhere, I switched to poetry as an improvisational mode that seemed more suit me much more, and not require performing with others, which seemed impossible at the time.

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

The last great film was Frederick Wiseman’s Essene: his documentary of a Benedictine monastery in upstate New York, released on public television in the 70s. There is a beautiful intimacy and fragility to how the monks relate to each other. It was moving, even if religion is not a part of my existence.

The last great book is challenging so I will list three! Tessa Bolsover’s Crane is a uniquely ambitious work that straddles theory and poetry. I was rapt reading Jennifer Soong’s My Earliest Person. Thomas Delahaye’s Numéraire was a work that truly surprised me, a work that delights as the poetry turns inward on itself.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I started a second manuscript in 2021 while I finished editing Nerves Between Song and submitted it for publication (which took three years from the completion of the MS).

This work, Rend is much more dense and led by sound that the more diffuse and ambient Nerves Between Song.

While wrapping this work up on Rend, I have started a long poem. It’s not clear to me yet what this will be as it’s still unfolding. I want it to be something unspooling wildy, playing with the sentence, which is not usually the level I operate on.

12 or20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late December, 2023 : Karen Solie, Paola Ferrante + HR Hegnauer,

Another year, another what? And so it goes; if you can imagine, The Factory Reading Series will be turning thirty-one years old in January (keep your eyes out for another event come the new year), and above/ground press as well, by the summer. Madness! Just what might 2024 bring? And hey, publishers should be mailing me more chapbooks! I’m really not seeing enough these days.

Montreal QC: I was very intrigued to see a chapbook by Karen Solie, WELLWATER (2023), produced as “Vallum Chapbook Series No. 37” by Montreal’s Vallum magazine. Solie is a writer that doesn’t seem to publish chapbooks that often, and I don’t think I’m aware, offhand, of any by her over the years save for those days prior to the publication of her debut, her chapbook Eating Dirt (1998) that appeared with Victoria chapbook publisher Smoking Lung Press (although a quick Google search offers that a further chapbook, Retreats, appeared with Toronto’s Junction Books in 2017). Otherwise, Solie is the author of six full-length collections: Short Haul Engine (London ON: Brick Books, 2001), Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Pigeon (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2009) [see my review of such here], The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi, 2015), The Living Option: Selected Poems (Northumberland UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2013) [see my review of such here] and The Caiplie Caves (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2019) [see my review of such here]. Solie writes of basement suites, landscapes, foxes, and trees of a particular park, offering echoes of content familiar to anyone who follows her work; first-person lyric observations finely honed and crafted across a line any bird, to paraphrase Don McKay, would trust to light upon. As the poem “THE TREES IN RIVERDALE PARK” begins: “Diagonal paths quadrisect a square acre / white as the page in February.”

The fourteen poems in WELLWATER offer a curious grouping: as much as Solie is an author of individually-crafted lyric narrative poems, her collections offer an ebb and flow of deliberately-structured book-length compositions, and a shorter selection, then, moves in a slightly different manner; enough that I am curious to see how these poems interact with the book that might eventually come (her author biography does offer that a new collection is due to land in 2025). “I can’t make it right. Not the shadow lying on the snow,” she writes, to open the poem “BAD LANDSCAPE,” “not the snow, terrain sloping crudely toward / the poor outcome of a structure neither representational / nor abstract, and the sketched-out town beyond / ill-proportioned, depthless, and basic. There isn’t any sense / of an origin, of what Plato called the lower soul, / to animate what’s lacking with the spark of its / remainder.”

Toronto ON: Another title I picked up not long ago from Toronto publisher and poetry bookseller knife|fork|book [see my prior notes on other titles from the past few months here and here and here] is Toronto writer Paola Ferrante’s THE DARK UNWIND (2022) [see her recent ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], a chapbook of poems wrapped in lyric anxieties, climate change and the Anthropocene. “The dinosaurs that didn’t die went slamming into windows,” the poem “Descendants” begins, “dazzled / by the colour of a gold. Instead of flight, they had their houses built / on tree tops, over many single blades of grass; they learned to run / on fossils of their dead.” Wrapped in cultural markers and large-scale historical trauma, this assemblage of first-person narrative lyrics an intriguing offering, and one, I hope, that will lead into a follow-up to her poetry debut from a couple of years back. There’s an increased sharpness to her lyrics, and clear evidence of a honed line and fine eye. Listen to the ending of the opening poem, “Asch’s Line Study In The Current Anthropocene,” that reads: “Before the river in the sky became a mudslide, / we stood for elevator talk about the weather as though we’d never / tried to buy the rain, as though the rain was not canaries, slamming / into windows. We chose, but stood in grocery lines and talked of / whether, as though we could still choose a time to see, as though / we’d get to choose when the power would go out.”

Brooklyn NY: Another title lost upon my desk until a recent mini-excavation is Excerpts from CONTRADITION AND NIGHT : GRACE (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2021) by Denver, Colorado poet and designer HR Hegnauer, published by Brooklyn poet, writer, editor and publisher (etcetera) Brenda Iijima. Hegnauer is a poet I’ve been aware of for some time but hadn’t yet read, author of the full-length collections Sir (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2013) and When the Bird Is Not a Human (Subito Press, 2018), as well as a handful of chapbooks, none of which I’ve seen, and now, curious as to why her work wouldn’t have made it across my radar before. Set in two sections, this work-in-progress excerpt offers the opening section “CONTRADICTION,” subtitled “To speak against,” a cluster of individually-numbered and repeated “DAY” poems, followed by the section “GRACE,” subtitled “The unmeried divine,” a cluster of individually-numbered and repeated “Thought” poems. As the opening piece to the short collection reads:

DAY 1

Life is like a small bus in the desert of your human. You can’t feel the heat unless you’re standing in the dirt. In which case you must ask yourself, would you like to stand in the dirt?

I look out the window towards the desert. Black walnut, organ pipe, saguaro, jumping cholla, sage, brittle brush, globe mallow, fish hook barrel, prickly pear, ocotillo. Scorpion, rattlesnake, collared lizard, horned lizard, fox, rabbit, coyote. I can’t see the people.

Hegnauer’s website describes this chapbook as “vignette essays,” which I’m curious about; intrigued, even. I’m curious, also, about the divide between “CONTRADICTION” and “GRACE,” between “DAYS” and “THOUGHT,” wishing to know a bit more about what makes those divisions, those divides. And where the presumably-eventual full-length collection might meet amid those clear demarcations. “It’s the sparseness that’s so loud here.” she writes, to open “DAY 5,” “Look up, look across the / desert. All that emptiness shows me at least twelve miles of itself, but / putting measurements in the desert is not a natural thing to do.” There is an enormous amount going on in these pieces, and these poem-essays are as deeply thoughtful as her lines are striking. As the poem “Thought 6” reads, in full:

“How do you say? My family hung themselves because too much torture,” you say.

Six nights by truck. Now it is time to walk. Get out and walk.

Om mani padme hum.

“Okay. Where does the sun set? Okay. We’ll go that way.”

A bit of yak butter to eat.

“Our eyes became sick. Because of the snow and the sun. You know, eye sick.”

Om mani padme hum.

“If we die, then we die together. But if we are life, then we are life together.”

Thirteen years old. Om mani padme hum. Where does the sun set?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Miranda Mellis

Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications (Solid Objects); The Instead, a book-length dialogue with Emily Abendroth (Carville Annex); The Quarry (Trafficker Press); The Spokes (Solid Objects); None of This Is Real (Sidebrow Press); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs); and The Revisionist (Calamari Press). She teaches writing, literature, and ecological humanities at The Evergreen State College.

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?

Beginnings can go on for years. Sometimes a beginning gets worked over so much, so hard, that’s all there is. Beginning can feel precarious, so uncertain. A beginning is a kernel, an idea, a resonance of some kind, an attraction, an arrival, a rumor, an invitation. The middle space is more grounded, like when you know love is reciprocal and you can start to count on someone – when, in the story, you’ve got enough material to shape it, to work with. It’s also still indeterminate – how long might this be, or take?

Like starting to ask, in middle age, how long will I live?

Having been so preoccupied with just getting off the ground in the beginning of a story (or a life) one is still working out: what is this? Over time you begin to understand it (which is another beginning, as if every insight is a beginning), to know its shape, to be able to tack more knowingly, more intimately between chance and intentionality.

An edge may start to flicker into view – “the sense of an ending” – a horizon; a cliff; a place beyond which you’ll no longer write (or live); a closure that also opens out. Ending shapes everything that comes before and usually leads to more revisions, as the ending casts its light back; writing an ending is beginning all over again; seeing things anew (re/vision) is playful, rather than goal-oriented. Writing is more like an organism than a machine or tool in that sense. You don’t make it, plug it in, set it going, use it until it breaks. Instead you are created, you create, you change something, it changes you, in a symbiotic enacting, auto-poietic and transformational, of spiraling co-creative cyclicality.

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

I started out writing poetry and couldn’t understand why anyone would write fiction. How would anyone every decide what story to tell, among an infinity of possible narratives? I had a word for this: infinitivity. Fiction-curious, I took a weekend workshop with Rikki Ducornet.

She spoke of seeing an enormous jackrabbit in France, an impossible rabbit the size of a deer, and how that image became emblematic, a point of departure for writing. I wrote a piece in her workshop, as a way of exploring my skepticism about fiction (infinitivity). It was called “Novellas by the Hour.” It took place over 24 hours at 24 different moments: “8:13AM – a squirrel sticks her head out of a gas pipe.” “9: 45PM – a veteran naps on a park bench; has a flying dream”, etc. I found pleasure pursuing these images, figments and fragments of diction, seeing where they might lead, what they might say. I wrote stories from that weekend onward.

Coming from poetry has shaped my approach to fiction. Love of and curiosity about language, about where it leads, interest in metonymy, sound, all that remains. I find writing about culture, writing essays, writing about what other people make and do a welcome respite from vicissitudes of fiction. Poetry is a constant, a way of thinking and being that we could describe, if we imagine it in relation to liberation movements, as a multilinguistic front line where opacity, difference, and multiplicity are at the fore. 

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

The Revisionist (2007) was my first book and it did change my life, or in writing it I was changed. I was writing this strange book in the early 2000s very much in the minor key, taking up the positionality of someone paid to lie about climate change. This narrator was in my head as I tried to imagine the psyche of those who understood the dynamics of global warming and nonetheless lied, Exxon et al. (See Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway for a precis of the actions of the corporate mafia of the fossil fuel industry and their paid minions, terrorist members of what McKenzie Wark calls the “carbon liberation front.”) Those executive facilitators of our current extinctions should be tried for war crimes. They have waged a war on all species, a war on animals, a war on futurity. My book was a response to the dissemination by the Bush administration of junk science about climate and the refusal of that administration to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, an existentially disastrous mistake and a cause of despair. The Revisionist was very much a working through of environmental depression. I got revenge on my narrator by causing them to lose the capacity to perceive anything at all by the end, as a result of knowingly lying about climate change. That was almost 20 years ago. Think how different things might be now if the government had not been in bed with big oil, not only lying about climate change with propaganda campaigns, but invading Iraq on false pretenses to control the oil supply.

As for how my recent writing compares or connects, the venality, stupidity, and the infuriating, fatal incompetence of the reactionary capitalist state continues to be a source of inspiration. Ha ha! As we flee fires, floods, and droughts.

My current manuscript is a piece of forest writing that centers on a house sliding down a ravine due to monsoon rains and clear cuts which destroy stabilizing root systems causing mudslides and soil erosion. But it’s different from The Revisionist and other books in offering a vision of a good enough future, and pointing, in homage to The Dispossessed, to an ambivalent utopia.

Where does a work of prose 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’ll start to draft something and often I just abandon it after a few revisions. (What about an anthology of most successful failed beginnings? Call it False Starts.) Other times the whole gesture is there. It’s compressed. One dream; one idea; one move; one scene. Other times something takes hold that’s too complex and indeterminate to sense its duration. It’s not a gesture, it’s a problem, a cluster-fuck, an open-ended question, something you’re going to be wrestling with for a while, that won’t let go of you, maybe for the rest of your life, for example grief.

Those can end up being “books” –  I like that you’re putting quotation marks around that word. The quotation marks hold the telos of the “book” in suspense, in a state of potential. It’s fraught to have “book” in the mind, but it can also be generative, whether the imagined book comes to be or not.

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

Especially if sharing from a work in progress, public readings can become part of revision. Hearing the work out loud, anticipating real listeners, this can be clarifying, a tool for editing. You gain extra eyes, extra vision with that sense of address. If the work is complete – in a “book” – there are still questions about which parts you will read, in what order, and why, and you keep learning about how your writing registers in ways that might be surprising and that teaches you about the work itself, about the relationship between techniques and effects, especially comic effects, because you hear the laughter.

There are other things you can sense going on in the intersubjective space of a public reading, absorption, disinterest, identification, empathy, criticality, amusement, surprise, curiosity, judgment, care. You can also sense your own projections, what you imagine is going on; what you hope is going on; your own conflicts and intentions, your own befuddlement and absorption, curiosity and surprise, etc. Feeling into why you might feel drawn to reading one thing and not another at a given time develops sensitivity to what might be uncooked or overcooked in the work in progress.

Parts of your text can feel saturated for you, weighed down in a way that makes it difficult to read from. Conversely, it can be energizing (if also vulnerable and risky) to read something you’re unsure of, or haven’t read aloud before.

As for enjoyment, I’d say I have mixed feelings. You’re dealing with a whole range of things: how much sleep did you get the night before? How many other demands on your time, energy, and emotions were you dealing with that day? What shape are you in? People drink coffee, alcohol, take beta-blockers, find all kinds of ways to try to regulate themselves to be in the right frame of mind for appearing before a public. It can be terribly dysregulating. Readings can evoke a range of feelings, from enjoyment, excitement, curiosity and pleasure, to nerves, dread, shame and resistance. Over time one gets to know what the ride is like, as if a reading is a mind-altering substance: set and setting matter, but there is only so much you can control. After you’ve given a lot of readings over years, you’re not surprised by the feelings associated with the lead up, the range of things that can happen during a reading, and the roller coaster ride that it can sometimes be. You learn to phase shift, to discern, and not to get too caught up in any of it.

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 disability and premature death of my mother, who was a communist, an activist, a teacher, an actress and a single mother (so a really complex interesting person who I didn’t get to know for as long as I wish I could have) is what started me writing seriously. Death is still my subject, but presently I am writing about it, in a manuscript called Two Problems in Three Parts, in different contexts: the context of sacrifice in a polarity with tyranny; and the context of ecologic in a polarity with industrialization.

Ecology and sacrifice are interrelated. Some people write (or live) towards an ending. Ending is a death, and deaths happen in a wide variety of ways. Some lives/stories have satisfying conclusions. They end with integration and closure. Others end abruptly, inconclusively, wrongly, unhappily, unfairly, tragically, suddenly, broken off, leaving wounds in their wake, so to speak.

Some endings allow for mourning to change its tenor. Others leave us with interminable, persistent melancholia.

The eco/logical way to think about it is that what dies is recycled, becomes and feeds new life. When we begin a new story, it is as if it begins where something else was left unfinished, as if every beginning points to something left. Something left that is usable is something that, in dying, gives itself to new life. It breaks down, is used, and is changed, rather than breaking and becoming an immutable, problematic object that can’t be used or changed, like tyrants who refuse to step down. Of what use is a tyrant who won’t give up power, to a democracy? Not only are they useless, they are toxic. The difference between squirrel bones or a gun, for example. Or a fallen tree, which feeds millions of microbes and life forms, and a microwave. Or a plastic bag thrown into a river which feeds nothing and no one, and chokes out life. Of what use are guns, microwaves, and plastic bags to the living biosphere? None whatsoever.

For life forms, every ending is a new beginning. For non-regenerative manufactured things, they never begin again, because they can’t rot, so they don’t accommodate change, and that is the true meaning of garbage. Nothing that can rot is truly garbage. Anything that can become something else, that can change, partakes of the genius of the living world and is not garbage. Only things that refuse to rot, to be transformed, to be changed are garbage, and they are filling up the world such that we have two worlds: a living world that self-regenerates, transforms, and symbiotically evolves through reciprocity, and a garbage world of tyrants, objects and toxins that don’t have lifespans but instead death spans: they are forever dead, never coming back to life, never changing. This is reflected in the culture of productivism, supported by necro-political, capitalist formations that require factories, mines, and extractive industries and police violence to enforce exploitation.

The normalization of all this produces people who misconstrue existence. A friend once told me about a neighbor of his who wanted all the trees on their street cut down because she thought of the leaves that fell from the trees, and the soil in which they grew, as garbage. Imagine how she feels about her body, which produces waste every day. But this would be a great person to write a story about, to do a character study of.

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?

The writer is in a hard position. The culture doesn’t really support artists, so to be a committed artist is automatically to have to find a way to live against the grain. Artists are set up to compete, the way athletes are. In other professions, you learn your trade and hang a shingle, get a job. U.S. artists are precarious, have trouble getting a salary, getting work, and constantly have to scramble, unless they were born wealthy. That means that automatically privileged people have an advantage: they can make art, write, without worrying about how to make a living. Thus men of leisure with wives, servants, wealth have historically been very productive, and it’s no mystery why. It’s not because of any innate talent, it’s because they were free to do as they liked, supported by armies of working class people, including their wives: wives as servants.

Historically inequality resulted in men with tiny purview and very limited experience of life, having enormous platforms. Still to this day, some writers are rewarded over and over again in huge ways, while most struggle.

So my answer would depend upon the writer’s position. If you are someone who has already been highly rewarded, then stop hoarding awards, opportunities, social capital, prizes, grants, and start finding ways to redistribute the affordances that foster social ecologies in which working class and poor artists can make their work.

Don’t believe that those who are most rewarded are most talented and deserving, it’s simply not true. They are more likely the most well connected and the most economically advantaged. Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young have done great research on the self-licking ice cream cone that is the literary prizes circuit. It’s shocking but not surprising. Coteries, schools and scenes are part of literary world-making. Social capital accrues as people reward each other and cliques build their reputations. It begins as community building rather than careerism. But when and as these scenes become reified, self-enriching, and self-involved, ethical contradictions must be addressed.

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

Simone Weil: “All true good carries with it conditions which are contradictory and as a consequence is impossible. Who keeps attention really fixed on this impossibility and acts will do what is good.”

What fragrance reminds you of home?

As someone raised in San Francisco it would be fog, nasturtium, eucalyptus, wild fennel, gas fumes, pot smoke. I love this question. Thanks rob!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio is the author of the books, why letter ellipses (selva oscura, 2020), : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*, 2020), and After projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016), and the chapbooks, a cell of falls (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2019), and solitude being alien (Dancing Girl, 2013). She’s a tenure-track drop-out, once-and-future adjunct, ex-high school history teacher, and MFA poetry candidate at the University of Arizona. She lives in Tucson with her partner, the poet Stacy Szymaszek.

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?

For more than ten years before my first poetry chapbook and first poetry book, there was a shadow book on U.S. Filipinx history that refused to find its way into the world. This book had an advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press that remained on file long after I left academia. The amazingly patient and persistent Robert Devens, when he left his job at the press, handed my chapter drafts over to Timothy Mennel who emailed me to ask whether I was still working on it, ten years later. He kindly let me out of my contract but technically has first dibs on it should it ever manifest. My relationship with those editors was probably one of the most sustaining relationships I had in academia. Academic book editors were kindred spirits of a sort, but small press poetry publishing was an alternative universe of valuation.

For most of my life, I knew things were going to come out of me and take the shape of books. Whether it was something “I” had to say or something that had to be said through me is hard to say. But I do admit that all along I just wanted one book with my name on the spine. After three books, I’d like to think the “I” has worked its issues out.

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

I didn’t. As an adult, I was fully identified with being a humanities scholar of U.S. empire, critical ethnic studies, and Filipinx Studies, and not with the poetry that I wrote consistently through high school and college.

I had an exit year working as an assistant professor at the University of Texas after being dismissed for not submitting my research manuscript to the promotion-and-tenure committee. During that year, I took my first poetry workshops with Abe Louise Young and Hoa Nguyen. I subsequently attended whatever I could — VONA/ Voices, Kundiman, all four weeks at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program — while on a postdoctoral fellowship and various adjunct gigs. I wrote my first book while teaching high school, the first supportive workplace I ever clocked into. My second and third books came together the summer after my first year in an MFA program.

To gain writing time and resources, I’m again in an academic institution. Even so, I still come to poetry for the breathing space not afforded by the research university’s neoliberal rationalizations, moralistic humanism, and standardized versions of innovative thinking, diversity, and language-use. I have very specific expectations for poetry as a field akin to Duncan’s meadow rather than as a discipline.   

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?

My inquiries and interests, if there’s enough breathing space, are usually all over the place. They become “projects” on their own time. Not too long ago, I was writing a hybrid New-Narrative-ish book that eventually broke apart into two poetry books and a poetry chapbook – no prose anywhere. The whole process was gnarly, probably because I was busy upending my life at the same time. Once I settled into a supportive partnership and living situation, the books and chapbook quickly took shape.  

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’m starting to play around with the idea that a poem begins for me as a humming vibration or frequency. And as a space of communion. Where gestures begin to work with linguistic units. That’s about all I can say about words, sounds, utterances, lines, forms, the page, sequences, and books.

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

In our self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic (it’s April 22, 2020 6:34PM Arizona time right now), my partner, Stacy (who answered these questions seven years ago!), and I made up a game of “Guess Who This Is.” The game goes like this: one of us picks a book from her shelf and reads aloud until the other one guesses. Stacy’s really good at it. And honest, too. I picked up Helping the Dreamer and Stacy yelled, “I can see it’s Anne!” Rookie mistake because I really wanted to perform Anne Waldman.

Part of my writing practice is to listen to a lot of recorded poetry readings. And I love and live with a person who programmed poetry readings and oversaw poetry reading curation from 1999 to 2018, at Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee and at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. I think a lot about what poetry readings have been, what they seem to be now, and what they could be.

At this moment, I wonder what a poetry reading might be for. What ethics and practical concerns inform attending as a reader or as an audience member? To celebrate and gather? To participate in unilateral and/or inauthentic obligation? To make sure people know you’re alive and matter? To uphold some idea of the local or the ethnic? To clock into your gig? To sell an image other than a book? Is it deeply felt work?

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 surprisingly, I do. Each of my books has an endnote indicating those concerns. None of them tries to answer the questions it raises, though.

There are a lot of questions of this current moment. If we could get into a space of communing together, let’s say in a half-hour, we could draw up a mighty list of urgent and beautiful questions. Different ones would arise between us tomorrow. And the next day.

Right now, I’m wondering: What is care? How are we living this moment? To borrow from Latour’s questionnaire, Where to land after the pandemic?: What suspended activities do we want to see cease or change? What do we want to see begin anew? How do we propose that people transition, change, or begin anew?

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?

Poets can care about and for the language used to pose questions. We can make multi-dimensional macro-micro inquiries into the language used to pose answers. As much as we are typically tasked with imagining, we can attend to what is present and to what is already arriving.

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

My poetry editors have included Marthe Reed, Brenda Iijima, Krystal Languell, and Fred Moten. In each case, there’s been real trust and joy.

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

Over the past two Januaries, I’ve worked with the writer Selah Saterstrom’s divinatory readings. From her latest: “Claim the resources you’ve gained from surviving loss.”

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t keep a writing routine separate from other routines. But I try not to keep separate routines. I go through my day and reflect on how any labor and any experience relates to a writing and reading life.

I don’t associate writing with time but with space. I try to sit at my desk in my studio in a routine, ritualistic way and do whatever I need to do to inhabit that space, to keep it vital and energetic.

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

I don’t know if I’ve experienced this as a poet in a way that I lived it for many years as an historian. If writing is stalled, other aspects of my life are likely to be “stalled,” and I have to go figure that out. I’m happy to no longer follow the academic model of subordinating all aspects of my life to “writing a book.”

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Presently, creosote. This question is raising a question about what and where and when “home” is (sigh). I don’t know — jasmine rice in my rice cooker. My chicken adobo. Old Bay seasoning? Chlorine.

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?

U.S. modernist poetry cut its teeth on all those things. They’re all in the poetry.

I love queer visual art, performance, and dance.

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

My life and work are gloriously gifted by the experience of writing and reading poetry in relationship with an amazing poet. So, most immediately, Stacy Szymaszek — her lived experience with poets, her lineages, and her projects — past, present, and future. And her bookshelves.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney helped me to write After projects the resound, and an excerpt from Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior Journals guided my second book,  : once teeth bones coral :. My third book, why letter ellipses, is sort of crowded with all sorts of people, like Yayoi Kusama, Amiri Baraka, Andrea Dworkin …

Lately, I’ve felt a queer, kindred relation to certain writers associated with U.S.-ian Language Poets: Tina Darragh, P. Inman, Steve Benson, Ted Greenwald, Stephen Rodefer. Susan Howe continues to be important. I have a tongue-in-cheek aim to reclaim Language Poetry, generally held to be antithetical to the expressive, subjective, and even experimental poetics of BIPOC/ LGBTQIA+ writers, for a poetics of queer-of-color, postcolonial, cross-lingual synesthesia.

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

Work with others to build alternatives to neoliberal, racial, settler-colonial, carceral capitalism and figure out how to end it.

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?

Being a poet is not an occupation. But: I would have liked to have learned to be a painter, sculptor, or dancer. (Please don’t @ me with O’Hara.)

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

Language wants me.

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

Duncan’s The Opening of the Field. Akerman’s No Home Movie.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Care and consciousness amidst the pandemic. Reading poetry in translation. Writing experimental, creative translations of Pangasinan-language poetry — a language of my mother’s that I neither speak nor read but a language that helped to raise me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;