12 or 20 (second series) questions with Prathna Lor

Prathna Lor is the author of Emanations.

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?

Not sure yet but so far refreshing and lifting. Publishing a book is like watching yourself from 5-10 years ago come onto the stage. Meanwhile you are in the present trying to figure out what to do.

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

I came to poetry via fiction, specifically through Woolf. In her work, each line is like a bent horizon and I’m always trying to figure out what is emerging.

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?

Slow, agonizing, and always surprising.

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?

Trying to write one poem continually, trying to say one thing, continually; always emerging though never fully glimpsed.

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

Yes, something happens between voice and text on and off the page – it is essential to be in the body of your own work, to live in the sound of your own voice as fully and boldly as possible.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

How can we hold onto each other at great distances?

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?

Living beautifully, out of mind.

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

Essential and never difficult, in my experience, since a good editor (and I have been blessed in this regard), will always want the work to reach its potential.

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

Let others gift and receive you.

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 is complete chaos.

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

Outside.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pork bone, incense, lime leaf, dried persimmons.

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?

Just walking.

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

Anything I can get my hands on.

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

Sculpture.

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

An intractable feeling or being bad at most everything else.

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

Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos.

18 - What are you currently working on?

A novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Prathna Lor, Emanations: Poems

 

I write endlessly in the register of prayer
Inside of my voice is our sound
Thinking the fractures
Where I emerge
From every monument
Listening for my footsteps

So, unloved – can the body ever speak? (“ON SEVERAL SERENADES FOR BENEVOLENCE”)

The full-length debut by Prathna Lor, following the chapbooks Ventriloquism (Future Tense Books, 2010) and 7, 2 (knife│fork│book, 2019) [see my review of such here], is Emanations: Poems (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn, 2022). Emanations is constructed as a triptych of suites—“ON SEVERAL SERENADES FOR BENEVOLENCE,” “RED BEACON” and “PEDAGOGY OF RIDICULOUSNESS”—each assembled as accumulations of lyric fragments, halts and hesitations stretching the boundaries of narrative and connective tissue, moving forward without clear endings or closures. “Think like a painting.” Lor writes, to open the second section. There is such an openness to Lor’s ongoing, meditative lyric, one that wrestles simultaneously with spirituality, self-determination and the boundaries of commodification, as the opening to that second section continues:

In a cavern before a headless Buddha, heads stolen and sold, now common as decoration, where refuse was lost because the cities were emptied, because labour triumphed over thinking, over beauty. Because it was in the name of the people. I hear the serpents’ call. They cloak the Buddha, shading reverie.

I follow the agony as a descendent of the viper.

Cadmium can be a beautiful word. And I a bang.

 

Lor writes across the contours of self-creation and discovery, articulating values of both the collective and the personal, and the ways through which so much is lost through commodification. “How a poem / never lies,” the second section offers, “only / dilutes what is given to speak / what is given to breath [.]” Later on, in the same sequence-section: “And there you are thinking light / an incomplete fabrication / moved by a pronoun / I am living, finally, / because I learned the death in the line [.]” Lor’s lyric presents a metaphysics of concrete language, writing out the nuts and bolts of the space where language speaks, and not only informs but holds meaning. “You can dream in another tense.” Lor writes, as part of the second section. In Lor’s 2020 interview via Touch the Donkey (which offered a slightly different title of their full-length forthcoming than what emerged), they offer:

The difficulty, again, for me, is thinking about the breath of the poem, the work of voice and reading, over a longer period of time, or via a larger scale, when the poetic tenor I am trying to explore is so punctual, economical, propulsive. Rhythms and intensities would have to change, modulate, etc., but, of course, over the course of one’s life, I feel as though it is a single line, a single rhythm, towards which I am relentlessly returning, and I suppose that part of my anxiety about sustaining over time/distance is the fear of it dulling over each reiterative sensation.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Feld, Campos, MillAr, Samuels, Lor, Bowering + hanna,

Anticipating the release next week of the twenty-eighth issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the twenty-sixth issue: Kate Feld, Isabel Sobral Campos, Jay MillAr, Lisa Samuels, Prathna Lor, George Bowering and natalie hanna.

Interviews with contributors to the first twenty-six issues (over one hundred and seventy interviews to date) remain online, including: Jill Magi, Amelia Does, Orchid Tierney, katie o’brien, Lily Brown, Tessa Bolsover, émilie kneifel, Hasan Namir, Khashayar Mohammadi, Naomi Cohn, Tom Snarsky, Guy Birchard, Mark Cunningham, Lydia Unsworth, Zane Koss, Nicole Raziya Fong, Ben Robinson, Asher Ghaffar, Clara Daneri, Ava Hofmann, Robert R. Thurman, Alyse Knorr, Denise Newman, Shelly Harder, Franco Cortese, Dale Tracy, Biswamit Dwibedy, Emily Izsak, Aja Couchois Duncan, José Felipe Alvergue, Conyer Clayton, Roxanna Bennett, Julia Drescher, Michael Cavuto, Michael Sikkema, Bronwen Tate, Emilia Nielsen, Hailey Higdon, Trish Salah, Adam Strauss, Katy Lederer, Taryn Hubbard, Michael Boughn, David Dowker, Marie Larson, Lauren Haldeman, Kate Siklosi, robert majzels, Michael Robins, Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Strickland, Ken Hunt, Rob Manery, Ryan Eckes, Stephen Cain, Dani Spinosa, Samuel Ace, Howie Good, Rusty Morrison, Allison Cardon, Jon Boisvert, Laura Theobald, Suzanne Wise, Sean Braune, Dale Smith, Valerie Coulton, Phil Hall, Sarah MacDonell, Janet Kaplan, Kyle Flemmer, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, A.M. O’Malley, Catriona Strang, Anthony Etherin, Claire Lacey ,Sacha Archer, Michael e. Casteels, Harold Abramowitz, Cindy Savett, Tessy Ward, Christine Stewart, David James Miller, Jonathan Ball, Cody-Rose Clevidence, mwpm, Andrew McEwan, Brynne Rebele-Henry, Joseph Mosconi, Douglas Barbour and Sheila Murphy, Oliver Cusimano, Sue Landers, Marthe Reed, Colin Smith, Nathaniel G. Moore, David Buuck, Kate Greenstreet, Kate Hargreaves, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Erín Moure, Sarah Swan, Buck Downs, Kemeny Babineau, Ryan Murphy, Norma Cole, Lea Graham, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Oana Avasilichioaei, Meredith Quartermain, Amanda Earl, Luke Kennard, Shane Rhodes, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Sarah Cook, François Turcot, Gregory Betts, Eric Schmaltz, Paul Zits, Laura Sims, Stephen Collis, Mary Kasimor, Billy Mavreas, damian lopes, Pete Smith, Sonnet L’Abbé, Katie L. Price, a rawlings, Suzanne Zelazo, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel, Deborah Poe, Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming twenty-eighth issue features new writing by: MLA Chernoff, Geoffrey Olsen, Douglas Barbour, Hamish Ballantyne, JoAnna Novak, Allyson Paty and Lisa Fishman.

And of course, copies of the first twenty-six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe? Included, as well, as part of the above/ground press 2021 subscriptions! We even have our own Facebook group. It’s remarkably easy.

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part four,

[knife│fork│book’s infamous and brilliant Kirby]

See the first of my notes from our most recent fair here and the second of my notes from our most recent fair here and the third of my notes from our most recent fair here. There was so much fair this year!

Toronto ON: Published as part of knife│fork│book’s “What Queer Reading” imprint, edited by Fan Wu, is Prathna Lor’s remarkable 7, 2 (2019). A chapbook-length accumulation of lyric fragments, halts and hesitations, 7, 2 is composed with an incredible sense of sound, rhythm and pacing. Made up of two poems—an untitled opening sequence and “LOVE POEM”—Lor’s poems sequence and collage, written as ongoing meditation, mantra and yawp. As they write:

I drape your name over canvas and rock.

And tell the tides to go slow.

Locked in choreography a still burn.

Homunculus-lipped

Gnashed teeth

Tupperware,

            ozone.

                             Dizzying, it calls for warm tea

            and sculpted attitude.

According to their website (given the author biography at the back of the collection admits to nothing more than “Prathna Lor is a living poet.”), they are also the author of a previous chapbook, Ventriloquism (Future Tense Books, 2010), and Lor “is a poet and scholar who teaches and writes on race, sex, ethics, and poetics. Prathna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto and a 2019 graduate fellow at the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.” I really need to see more work from Prathna Lor. There is something incredible happening here.

I should have told you

                that which

when a woman

solids falling off the place

a would be better

in low light in low steel

I got dressed

and then the thought of being somewhat

“someone says”

dribble, cold butter

a misstep

and hierophany

divine me this

little shit

lateness is tragedy in miniature

try to think about removals

hurl the body against confidence

stepping out onto a street

the sound of lowering blinds

rest (n.) lying flat on the table

hard laundry

a coin purse

[natalie hanna, of battleaxe press]

Ottawa ON: Over the past few months, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis has been asking writers and publishers to challenge him, to see what he might come up with, and Marilyn Irwin, editor/publisher of shreeking violet press, challenged him to compose “cat poems” (unaware, or perhaps not, that he hates cats), a prompt that has resulted in his small chapbook Caterwaul: Nine Poems (shreeking violet press, 2019). A curious small chapbook, Dennis’ first-person narratives weave through stories of and around his disinterest in and hatred of cats, from the opening line of “Chinaski” (“I didn’t want another cat but I wanted the woman / who wanted the cat”), to the opening line of “Cat fight” (“I once broke up with a woman I loved  and blamed it on the cat”) to the opening poem, simply titled “Cats,” that reads:

I never met one I really liked

but over the years

circumstances and women

have forced them upon me

totally unreasonable assumptions

about mutual cohabitation

luckily I’m now married

to someone who loves cats

as much as I do

our catless home

just the way we like it