12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Adam Sol

Adam Sol [photo credit: Barbara Stoneham] is the author of three books of poetry, including Jeremiah, Ohio, a novel in poems which was shortlisted for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry; and Crowd of Sounds, which won the award in 2004. He sits on the Poetry Board at House of Anansi Press, and has published fiction, essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including The Globe and Mail, The Forward, Joyland.com and Studies in Jewish American Literature. He is an Associate Professor of English at Laurentian University’s campus in Barrie, Ontario, and lives in Toronto with his wife and three sons.

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

I had a very good year in 2000-2001. I finished my PhD. My first child was born. And my first book came out, after winning one of those shots-in-the-dark first-book contests in the US. It all amounted to a major period of feeling like I was entering a “new stage,” whatever that meant — of my life, my career, etc.  So it was big on its own, but it was part of a constellation of events that was even bigger. 

How does my most recent work compare to my previous? I suppose I’m worrying about different things, struggling with different things, at peace with different things. I tend to write about topics while I’m still deciding how I feel and think about them. Once they resolve themselves — temporarily, no doubt — then I move on to other things. I’d like to think that I’m capable of some things that I wasn’t capable of then, and I had some annoying tendencies that I’m more conscious of now, and so am more able to tone down. It’s hard to say, though, because I read those poems and still recognize the person who wrote them. He had more hair then, though.

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

I was experimenting with fiction, and continue to do so. I learned eventually how to write some academic prose, and some other kinds of non-fiction. But I was leaning towards poetry from when I was a teenager, and the clincher came when I was an undergraduate at Tufts and had Philip Levine as a prof. He sealed the deal for me. In a terrifying, inspiring, and eye-opening way.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I write my first few drafts by hand. It’s a big step for a poem when it makes it onto my hard drive.  Other than that, the patterns are fleeting and unpredictable.

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’ve done both on this. My last book, Jeremiah, Ohio, was a book project from the beginning, and the first thing I had was the title. It took me ten years to write, but I knew I had a “book” very early on. My other three — my first two, and the one I’m close to completing now — have recurring concerns, but they’ve only emerged as I’ve found myself writing poems that I think of as discrete and separate. It’s only when I start putting them together that I realize, “Oh, I must have been thinking about this.”

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

I enjoy public readings, a lot. I’m more of a performer than I’d like to admit. And I occasionally try new things out to see how they sound, but I don’t think of public readings as having a significant bearing on my creative process. A new poem has to feel like its skin has stabilized in order for me to bring out into the world for others to look at.

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 multiple theoretical concerns, including a concern about how to answer this question theoretically. The biggest concern I suppose I have these days is, What’s it all for? I’m not the first one to ask this question, of course. Nor will I be the last. I’m just trying to add my little voice to the void.

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?

This is one of the central concerns of my next book, and I’m hesitant to try to be very articulate about it, because as soon as I try to think clearly about it, I will stop writing poems about it.  Stay tuned.

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

Generally very good. I’ve been very lucky with editors, though.

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

I’ve said this one before, but Yusef Komunyakaa told us not to “write what you know. Write what you’re willing to discover.” I resist the tendency to write directly from personal experience as if personal experience is inherently valuable just because it’s “true” or “real.” Discovery, though, especially the kind of discovery that you can bring a reading follow along — that’s interesting. The challenge is how to transmit the sense of discovery or mystery.

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

I wear a lot of hats in my life — professor, administrator, father, grocery buyer, son, point guard, husband, scholar, brother, Jew, board member. The transition from “writer of critical prose” to “writer of poetry” has its complications and rewards, but it’s far from the most complicated one I have to negotiate. I would say that teaching literature, and writing critically about it, have certainly helped shape the way I approach my own writing. And vice versa.

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’m evolving into a sort of seasonal writer, since I have a pretty heavy academic load during the school year.  Fortunately, the university “school year” ends in May, so May and June tend to be my best months. That’s been true for the last few years. I tend to get a lot of my writing done in coffee shops — I like the white noise of a public space, and the fewer personal distractions of email, household chores, etc.

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

Caffeine plus good books. Stir well.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

Purim, Judaism’s quasi-Haollowe’en, was in February, so that was more recent, and I shaved myself a bizarro beard and went as the bad guy, Haman. My kids thought my biker beard was hilarious, but my wife made it very clear that the thing would only be allowed on my face for a few hours.

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?

Music is a major influence for me. I listen to it all the time, have pretty eclectic tastes, play a couple of instruments, and think a lot about music when I’m working.

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

Too many to name.

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

Go to Alaska. Dance at my son’s wedding. Write a novel.

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?

A salesman, like maybe in a haberdasher, like a chapeau shop or something.  You know, like, “What size do you wear, sir?” And then you would answer me.

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

I took classical piano for 10 years and thought about being a musician for a while, but at some point I realized that I wasn’t enough of a performer to do it right. It always bothered me that I could practice a piece or song and nail it at home in my room, but that didn’t mean that the next performance, or the next one, or the next one, wouldn’t be a total flop. You can get that with readings too, to a certain extent, but I choose to believe that a person’s literary career isn’t determined by a single performance in the way that a musical performance can be. Not sure I’m actually right about that, but anyway, that’s why I started leaning toward poetry and away from music.

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

Just finished Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women.  Still thinking about it.  Not sure yet if I think it’s brilliant or a load of beautiful hooey. I like feeling this way. And I loved Mark Richard’s memoir, House of Prayer, No. 2. Last film — two “small” films really charmed me recently.  I finally saw David Bezmozgis’ Victoria Day, and really enjoyed it. And Mike Leigh’s Another Year was just superb. Understated, serious, and deeply moving.

20 - What are you currently working on?
   
I’m coming close to my next collection of poems. Hopefully it’ll be ready to come out around 2013. No title yet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

fwd: Priscila Uppal's Roger's Cup Tennis Poetry Details

Hi Friends and Colleagues,

 

PLEASE CIRCULATE TO ALL APPROPRIATE LISTS:

 

To follow Priscila Uppal as the first-ever Roger's Cup Poet-in-Residence visit http://www.rogerscup.com/  or go straight to her "Poet's Corner" at

 

http://www.rogerscup.com/women/english/poetsCorner.php

 

for daily poems and for the free Poetry Contest information (SEND IN YOUR OWN TENNIS POEMS!

The winner will be published in the finals daily draw sheet, a circulation of 10,000 copies and in a commemorative chapbook sent to each player in the tournament!)

 

Also, visit http://www.lovemeansnothing.ca/ 

for Priscila Uppal's daily "Art of Tennis" article about tennis books, movies, songs, and more!

 

And visit her own website at http://priscilauppal.ca/ for more information about Uppal and her books.

 

(Also, be on the look out for special poems and interviews featured on CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and more.)

 

Love to all,

Priscila Uppal

Roger's Cup Tennis Tournament Poet-in-Residence 2011

rob mclennan, Christine McNair + Jill Battson read in Perth, ON

First Edition Reading Series

Hosted/curated by John Pigeau

August 12, 2011

Backbeat Books, Music & Gifts

6 Wilson Street West, Perth, Ontario

Starts at 7pm; suggested admission $5

With readings by Jill Battson, rob mclennan & Christine McNair

[link to facebook invitation]

Jill Battson, Poet Laureate of Cobourg, has three collections of poems published with a new one, The Ecstatic Torture of Gratitude, coming out this fall. She is juggling a myriad of projects including a play, a CD and a suite of odes to percussive instruments. Dark Star Requiem, for which she wrote the libretto, opened the Luminato Arts Festival in June 2010.

Christine McNair’s work has been published in CV2, Prairie Fire, ditchpoetry.com, Arc, Descant, and sundry other places. She was shortlisted for the 2010 Robert Kroetsch award for Innovative Poetry and her first book is forthcoming from BookThug in 2012. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Ottawa writer rob mclennan is the author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottwater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Mont Gabriel, Quebec, just by the pool;

Yesterday afternoon, Hôtel Mont Gabriel, where we attempted a new photo in the footsteps of another, my father’s parents with a man we don’t know. The grandfather I never met. Christine dressed deliberately in one of her mother’s dresses, found in a closet. By the pool, realizing theirs a mid-autumn pose, as ours, on the other hand, mid-August warm, crowded and well overdressed. Even the bartenders gave us strange looks. Ten minutes walking around the outdoor heated pool before we realized the original picture’s vantage, as the “Mont Gabriel Club” sign long gone, and the stone wall of the lounge replaced with large windows. A girl in pink bikini snapped a couple of photos. I stood with hands in pockets, much like my grandfather, not nearly as relaxed. Christine replicated my grandmother perfectly, even down to the dress. We confused many swimmers. As we left, catching full view of the scale of this tourist mecca, large buildings and stretches of golf courses, tennis courts, basketball courts and a chalet-stretch of buildings that went as far as the hills. It’s one thing to visit a friend or a relative, but what would my grandparents have been doing visiting such a stately, imposing, and, dare I say, expensive hotel?

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Maxine Chernoff + Paul Hoover on New American Writing

Maxine Chernoff [see her 12 or 20 questions here] is the author of 12 books of poetry including the forthcoming To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn, 2011) and Without (Shearsman, 2012). She has also written 6 books of fiction including the NYT Notable Book, Signs of Devotion (Simon and Schuster), and the novels American Heaven (Coffee House Press) and A Boy in Winter (Crown Publishing). With Paul Hoover she translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin, which won the PEN USA Translation Award in 2009. Also with Paul Hoover she is editor of New American Writing. She has been chair of the Creative Writing Program since 1996 at San Francisco State University. 

Paul Hoover is the author of thirteen books of poetry including the forthcoming Desolation : Souvenir (Omnidawn, 2012); Sonnet 56 (Les Figues Press, 2009), Edge and Fold (Apogee Press, 2006), and Poems in Spanish (Omnidawn, 2005), which was nominated for the Bay Area Book Award. With Maxine Chernoff, he edited and translated Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Omnidawn Publishers, 2008), which won the PEN USA Translation Award in 2009. With Nguyen Do, he edited and translated the anthology, Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed Editions, 2008). Beyond the Court Gate: Poems of Nguyen Trai, edited and translated with Nguyen Do, was published by Counterpath Press in 2010. He is editor of the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) and, with Maxine Chernoff, the annual literary magazine New American Writing. His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, was published in the Poets on Poetry series of University of Michigan Press in 2004. He has also published a novel, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage Contemporaries, 1988), a chapter of which appeared in The New Yorker. He has won the Frederick Bock Award for poems published in Poetry in 2010; with Sharon Olds, the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review in 2002; the Carl Sandburg Award, Chicago’s leading literary prize; the General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers; and an NEA Fellowship in poetry. A founding board member of The Poetry Center at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he curates the poetry reading series at the deYoung Museum of San Francisco. He has read his poetry and lectured in Vietnam, China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Lithuania, England, Scotland, and Belgium.  Born in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in 1946, he is Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. 

1 – When did New American Writing 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? NAW began in 1971 as OINK!, a student-edited small magazine done on the University of Illinois, Chicago's, student activities budget, by grad students Paul Hoover, Dean Faulwell, and Jim Leonard. After all finished their MAs in the Program for Writers, it became an independent journal edited and published by the 3 on a small printing press done first at Jim Leonard's and then at Paul Hoover's apartment. It was side-stapled with a long stapler and folded by pressing hard with a coffee cup in its middle. By issue #5 both Leonard and Faulwell had gone elsewhere, and Maxine Chernoff joined Paul Hoover in editing, publishing and printing the magazine. By issue 9/10, a double issue, it had the look and format of the current NAW. At issue twelve we began getting it printed professionally though its cover for #12, an elephant-headed man with a penis, was a problem for the printers we had chosen. They thought it was obscene—it was actually an old drawing from a travel journal of perhaps the 1600s when people speculated on how "foreigners" would appear. We published OINK! for 20 issues and had several special issues which were single author editions, one of which was Russell Edson's Edson's Mentality. In 1985 when we, the editors, had twins, we ceased publication; in 1986 when we resumed publication, for reasons of maturity and hoping for better distribution, the magazine was "reborn" as New American Writing. Its circulation did miraculously grow at that point—many bookstores now deceased were then alive, and at our highest circulation, we would print 5000 copies. With so many bookstores gone, we, now in our 29th issue of NAW, are down to a respectable 1500, the same, say, as Denver Quarterly.

2 – What first brought you to publishing? Why was it that you started the magazine? I can't really speak for the three original editors, but I assume it was for the same reason most people do—to see oneself in relation and speaking to/with other writers on the topic in this case of poetry, to create a community through publishing of significant others who see the genre similarly, and to stretch one's view of the entire project of writing by being in a dynamic relation to it. Also, we began in Chicago, which was slightly off the poetry map, and we saw this as a way of connecting with a larger group of writers with whom we felt affinities.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing? Responsibility is a funny word--am I as an editor responsible to the world? Of course I am positing a role for a type of literature which I view as valuable and in doing so, I am of course articulating a "wish" for an audience who might very well at the same time be made of many current and future contributors. As a project over many decades now, this relation keeps changing and including new people, tendencies, and views which at the same time are possibly shaped by the role(s) and responsibilit(ies) of the magazine. 

4 – What do you see the journal doing that no one else is? Publishing spectacular poetry by some unknown and many well-known writers over a long period of time, thereby sustaining itself as a particular "culture." By making available to an audience an anthology of approaches to writing innovative poetry in a national/international sense rather than localizing or the project.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new issues out into the world? I wish I knew. We have distributors, subscribers both private and institutional, and also a website and FB page with about 800 members. Our website has had over 100,000 visits. The best libraries in the world have us in their collections --but we are not Vanity Fair. Nor have we ever been paid as editors or had a cushy budget. At some universities (and we've been affiliated with two, Columbia College, Chicago, and SFSU's College of Humanities) Editors such as ourselves have entire jobs or release time for teaching to do as we've always done because we care about this project and want to continue to be a part of a community and serve it well.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch? We are meta-editors in that we conceive of projects such as special issues and covers, etc., far more than we line edit. We are not a writing school nor do we have that kind of relationship w/our writers. We rarely take work that does not fully satisfy us.

7 – How do issues get distributed? What are your usual print runs? By Ingram, by SPD, by subscription and through bookstores. Currently 1500 copies per issue.

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? There are only the two of us. At a few points in life we've used screeners or interns and then the job becomes greater, to supervise them. As it works in life, I do more of the early reading and Paul Hoover does more of the production issues. We decide together what we will publish.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing? It has kept me constantly attentive to what people are writing and has kept me reading and therefore writing with a sympathetic and keen eye. Those attributes make one's own writing alive to oneself and also perhaps an "audience" or group, shall we say, of listeners or readers?

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? I think it is fine in a long career to include oneself in the project now and then. And it is my co-editor taking the work if I am published and the reverse, of course. To publish oneself overly much would be odd, given the vast numbers of fine writers to publish.

11– How do you see New American Writing evolving? As we have organically over the years. You can trace in our issues our current interests, our enduring interests, our former interests and our newer ones. As one's own writing needs to feel "current," so does the focus of a magazine. Some people in early OINK!s still are published in late NAWs. Many newcomers arrive. Some writers have probably been published 10 or 20 times over the years, others only once or during a certain smaller period of time.

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? I am proud that we have published at least what I view as a vital and often lovely magazine for nigh onto 40 years, that we are appreciated by other poets, and that so many young poets whose early publications were in OINK! or NAW have gone on to become well-regarded writers.  In addition, we have always published many translations and special international features, and other finer writers who haven't necessarily reached a wider audience despite their excellence, as is too often the case.  My biggest frustration is probably in this regard that life isn't fair, that too much writing, particularly poetry, published in magazines is dull or less than interesting, that people who don't sometimes deserve wide acclaim make too much noise and that many deeper, wiser people are largely "quiet" as to having listeners.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out? I'm not sure we had an exact model. One of the great early magazines though it no longer seems very great was Paris Review. Of the other magazines in our time one would have to mention Sulfur and Conjunctions and often Chicago Review and Denver Quarterly. Who knows finally what is important or necessary....so many magazines are but none were really models. We were young people who loved poetry; now we're older people who love poetry.

14– How does New American Writing work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see New American Writing in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations? We engage with the community by publishing many newer writers for the first time and including them w/the more established community of writers with whom they are in dialogue. 

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events? Sometimes we launch issues locally, but so many of our authors aren't located here. We had a lovely 40 year anniversary at AWP Washington. DC, in winter 2011. We've also had NAW-sponsored readings in NY and Chicago.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals? We have a website, newamericanwriting.org.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for? Every fall and winter. We aren't looking for boring or overly expressive poetry or extremely long work we can't fit in our pages.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special. Regular issues with special features: #29: eleven poets from Quebec, #28: many different translations including a long Osip Mandelstam and Aime Cesaire section. I could do this for every issue. Features are either suggested to us or given to us or sometimes solicited. Often when we've traveled, issues arise:  an Australian issue, a British issue, a Brazilian issue, a Chinese issue, a Vietnamese issue, for instance. In all cases these are sections in the larger magazine. The only topic issue we ever did was #5 about censorship.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

CALL AND RESPONSE Poetic responses to photographs in the Red Wall Gallery. Curated by: rob mclennan

CALL AND RESPONSE 
Poetic responses to photographs in the Red Wall Gallery.

Curated by: rob mclennan

Ongoing: August 5th, 2011 to July 31st, 2012

First Response
The Walls of Jerusalem - Selected Poems and Process Notes
Writer: Pearl Pirie
Exhibition: Cities of Stone - People of Dust by Leslie Hossack
Vernissage: Friday August 5th, 2011, 18:00 - 21:00
On View: August 5th - September 2nd, 2011

Second Response
Writer: TBA
Exhibition: Moment(o) by John Hewett Hallum
Vernissage: Friday, September 23rd, 2011, 18:00 - 21:00
On View: September 23rd, 2011 - October 29th, 2011

Remaining schedule of responses and readings to be confirmed.

The CALL AND RESPONSE project engages two creative communities in a year-long exchange of images and words. Artists showing work in the Red Wall Gallery will have their photographic statements poetically responded to by writers curated by rob mclennan.

This interaction can be experienced as poetry and images come together in the Red Wall Gallery for the duration of each exhibition. There will also be scheduled readings, and a poem/image card for each pairing, as well as the inclusion of selected images and poems in the next edition of Push/Pull magazine.

The Red Wall Gallery is located in SPAO at 168 Dalhousie, at the corner of Bruyère, in the Byward Market. Viewing/reading hours are from Monday to Friday 10:00 -18:00, and Saturdays from 10:00-15:00.

Further responders include Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair.

For more info contact: 613.562.3824 or info@spao.ca

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Gail Scott

Gail Scott’s novel, The Obituary, is a kind of ghost story with a fractalled narrator set in  a Montréal triplex (Coach House: 2010). Her other novels include My Paris (Dalkey Archive), about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in contemporary Paris, Main Brides and Heroine. Spare Parts Plus 2 is a collection of stories and manifestoes. Essays are collected in Spaces Like Stairs and, with Nicole Brossard et al, in la théorie, un dimanche. (to appear as Sunday Theory from Belladonna in 2012). The anthology Biting The Error edited with Bob Gluck, Camille Roy, and Mary Berger, was shortlisted for a Lambda award. Scott’s translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in translation [2001]. Scott is co-founder of the critical French-language journal Spirale (Montréal), Tessera (new writing by women), and the Narrativity website out of the poetry centre at San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing at Université de Montréal.

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

I was a successful journalist before I published a book of prose fiction, and I was young and felt the fame I was achieving as a journalist was premature, embarrassing. I began writing for underground publications often under a pseudonym. For me writing has always been an investigation, not a marketing strategy to promote a brand. My later work is the same continuing investigation of language as an expression of the intersection of the everyday and the social, as has been from the get-go. It is an attempt to pressure thinking/language to work in freshly relative ways. 

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

I’ve always been interested in sentences and the relations between them. For me putting together a piece of writing is a process of composition. I borrow devices from many genres, including story-telling. Hybridity is normal.

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?

Your question puts a lot of emphasis on arriving at the ultimate product. I’m always working, which is the same as living. One investigation folds into another, producing a piece of work that immediately raises new questions in my mind. The main concern being to compose appropriate sentences and relations between them for a particular intersection of space and time. Sentences come from everywhere but will be fashioned « on paper » in a way that makes sen(ten)se to my own ear ; my ear is a secret agent.

4 - Where does fiction 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?

See question 3

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

I die with nervousness before reading, still. Since the sound quality of the work is important, I prepare well, in part, to steer people away from looking for straightforward narrative. Sometimes a reading comes off marvellously and sometimes not.

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?

Of course I have theoretical concerns. Writing is thinking. A story on some level, like a good poem, is a performance of a rhetorical posture. To really make it work requires tremendous artistry. The fundamental theoretical question is how to write, and that is a how to that is nourished by many vectors of thought and creative impulse.

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?

See question 6.

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

It depends on the editor. I have often had to explain to editors that writing a « novel » from a singular POV is not what I’m doing and furthermore seems retrogressive.

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

Write every day.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to critical and/or journalistic prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

All of my work moves, as I implied above, between genres in the making. I am surprised that genre takes on such importance as an issue, here. Imagine if visual art had stuck with the traditional divisions between painting, sculpture, text, especially as regards notions of representation.

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?

Coffee.

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

Like most writers, I stop and listen or else open a book or else try to generate language by some electronic means.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A great question : hmm, a musky basement, a dry forest, wet laundry, meat cooking slowly, especially if game, or baked goods fresh from the oven.

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?

See above.

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

Writing is conversation. It’s an ongoing conversation with writers and writing over time, in my case, avant-garde or post-avant or feminist or conceptualist or Indigenous or anyone who knows the species is both in serious danger and yet takes life as a thing of wonder.

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?

Probably something that would land me in trouble.

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

Faith.

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

There are so many great books, let’s say relevant, instead. Antwerp, an early completely paratactic Bolano novel, read of late. It is an remarkably paratactic novel that makes total sense. Also, Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise. Last week I saw the Terence Malick film Tree of Life. The narrative devices seemed similar to the way I think about narrative in novel writing—a tale told on many fronts at once.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m rejigging a radio play (actually a prose poem) I havent been able to find a home for, working on a cross genre piece set in New York and Montréal called Printing Dollars, etc. I have recently published The Obituary, a hybrid « novel » about hybridity.

12 or 20 (second series) questions:

Another weekend in Old Glengarry;

Another August long weekend at the homestead, the first of my sister’s roasts since mum died, which felt strange. My father nearly a year in the house by himself. Who would yell at us for no reason? And also, who would make the devilled eggs? Christine and I were left to do such, making two dozen, and with sea salt, which apparently made all the difference. I suggested to my sister that we take turns yelling at each other, but then completely forgot.

Christine and I never actually made it to the Glengarry Highland Games on Saturday, but dad pulled us out to the backyard on Friday night, where we got a full view of the fireworks, five miles distant. An impressive display I didn’t know they even did, only over the past decade or so. An impressive display just after 10pm, which was fortunate, with the storm not coming through for another hour or so. Fireworks bursting over the horizon of trees, between the lights poking up from the radio tower, from MacEwen’s. An hour later, both Christine and I on two sides of the house saw blue sparks burst through the house during the massive thunderstorm. We immediately turned off the lights (and dad’s computer) and watched the windstorm rage rain through the yard, with the worst of the storm sitting directly over the house for a good twenty minutes. Hard to believe the house wasn’t hit. But now the automatic light in the garage won’t turn off. Odd.

We saw some deer on the road, and, every so often, caught glancing whiffs of the skunks that live somewhere in my sister's garden.

Saturday morning, at least, Christine and I managed to get over to the Avonmore Berry Farm (she had a coupon), and we picked up a pie for the roast. We even brought my sister’s eldest, Emma, along for the ride, and she played in the haymow. Later on, we ended up in Cornwall at the Cornwall Square, and Emma showed us the baby ducks by the water (we had to keep watch, as to not step in Canada Goose leavings); Water Street, looking out into the St. Lawrence River, in the shadow of the International Bridge and the industrial site formerly known as Domtar. Monday, before we left, we were able to do another outing to Casselman, where Christine, Carmel and I took Kathy’s middle child, Rory, out for ice cream (I took the youngest on an outing in March, so it only seemed fair).

Kate couldn’t make it to the roast this year, as she was working her new retail job, but our friend Carmel Purkis came by, her first time out at the farm. It was apparently exactly the stress release that she needed, and a new person for my dad to tell stories to, for me to point out all of our history, surrounding. Up at my sister’s house, already her three kids have more than made their new pool worth the price, and on Sunday, Christine and Carmel helped too. Not as many came to the roast as previous years, and unfortunately, none of our extended family, and even less of Kathy’s in-laws than are usually around, either. Where were all of their friends, even? Was it simply good weather that everyone left town?

Is there ever anything as nice as a day spent lounging in the yard on the clearest-blue of days (we’ve been rained on, never out, so many times before), and an evening of stars? As they came out one by one, three-year-old Duncan pointed them out, counting them, but only to four. In the twilight, a couple of photos of Christine by the edge of their lawn, just where the barley field begins. Behind the barley, the bush where my grandfather once kept a sugar shack, boiling up maple syrup, long before I was born.

And from the farm, Christine and I are spending a week at her mother’s cottage in St. Adele, Quebec, hopefully spending our days getting as much writing done as possible, before she goes back to work on August 8. Might we finally get that long-awaited collaboration begun?

Aufgabe 10

It makes no sense to speak of contemporary French poetry—except in the sense that, increasingly, all literature that doesn't fit into any other category gets called poetry, a trend I highly champion, as it broadens the definition of the art. And that's also what contemporary French poets are doing: broadening the definition of la poésie to include and encourage an ever-diversifying array of approaches and forms. The one constant is exploration, and much of that is eroding the boundaries of the genre, of genre itself, and even of media.

Much pressure has been put on the line in contemporary French poetry, to such an extent that for many writers it has disappeared altogether as a formal principle, and in many cases that pressure has been transferred to syntax, either underscored through elaborately formal or distorted sentence structures or spotlighted through inventive violations and innovations. Where the line does remain, it is often given a performative stance and at times, in turn, performs an immediate graphic gesture on the page. (Cole Swensen, “Dossier: Contemporary Poetry in France”)

The tenth annual issue of the poetry journal Aufgabe, produced out of Brooklyn, New York by Litmus Press under the poetry editorship of E. Tracy Grinnell, Paul Foster Johnson and Julian T. Brolaski, includes a lengthy feature on “French poetry & poetics guest edited by Cole Swensen.” With works by various poets unknown to larger North American poetry audiences, it includes writing by Oscarine Bosquet, Marie-Louise Chapelle, Sabine Macher, Anne Parian, Nathalie Quintane and plenty of others, and seemingly extend a series of conversations throughout American publications, from Verse magazine's triple-issue on French poetry and poetics (2007), or even back to an anthology of French writing edited by Norma Cole, one of the translators of the current issue, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000). Given the amount of attention that English-language American journals and publications (Burning Deck features regular book-length translated works, and has for years), might the south-of-the-border audiences have the ability to be far better informed of such French-language works than we, here? Even translated works from French from Quebec seem harder to find, since the days of Coach House Press, or even more recent Anansi works. Where has all the translation disappeared to?

Africa is a Flat Tint

On the entirely devoured dirt the difference

between consonants hardly

distinguishes

O O / I O

I O / I

E IA /

A /

A E OU /

the ones lilt in the others

it is between them that savagely we say

indistinct in the haze of the land far from here

Africa is a flat tint

I'm afraid of the you

shine up to here the precious names of ore bed

and it is not about loosing your grip. (Oscarine Bosquet, “from Present Participle,” trans. Ellen Leblond-Schrader and Sarah Riggs)

I, myself, have been fascinated, specifically, with the movement of the poetic line over the past few years, and so many of the translators in this issue, themselves, are poets that have altered my consideration of what is possible with the line, including Norma Cole, Lisa Robertson, Eleni Sikelianos, Cole Swensen, Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop and Andrew Zawacki (one of the editors, also, of Verse). Many of the translators and translated in this issue also seem to work heavily within the prose poem, some of whom are doing some quite magnificent things.

3.

I myself will I haunt. Maybe one day find an elbow a hand of Harry to mark them later on their side of the wall to be a memory in the body of the other a shadow in a movement.

An elbow in a gesture in two parts for who knows how to play the rerun and when I'm already dead then while the one to feel immense sky the other to stay around friends become (Caroline Dubois, “from How's that I say not sleep,” trans. Stacy Doris and Chet Wiener)

On top of this, it might even be easy to overlook that the issue also includes over a hundred pages of poetry not included in this feature, with new works by G.C. Waldrep, Robert Glück, Catherine Meng, Alli Warren, Harold Abramowitz, Joan Retallack, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, her “Draft 107: Meant to Say,” that includes:

I wanted to know about making art and telling the truth.

Where does this thing come from

why does this engineered apple taste dull, how did we get here

from what to what and

how did we decide to? or what flood of slough

drowned us where we stood.

The issue also includes a number of critical prose works at the end, including Robert Glück's “CUNY Talk: Uncertain Reading.” As he writes to introduce the piece, Glück's talk “was for TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice, a series at the CUNY Graduate Center curated by Tim Peterson. My panel included Trish Salah and Rachel Zolf and took place on October 29, 2009. TENDENCIES explores the poetic manifesto as it intersects with writing practice, queer theory and pedagogy.” I'm intrigued by such a series; might a collection of such pieces appear in print at some point, or might these pieces be available somewhere online?

Many of Acker's strategies keep the reader off-balance. That's why it's rather difficult to write about her work, because the best reading is an uncertain reading. I want to offer my confusion as an ideal. Rather than drawing conclusions, developing identifications or thematic connections, that is, making judgements that lead to knowledge, Acker creates a reader who is lost in strangeness. She pitches the reader into a welter of contradictions that do not resolve themselves, but replace each other continuously: a text that hates itself but wants me to love it, sex that dissolves and amalgamates, a disempowered self that tops its heated bottom-act with cold manipulations, a confession that is therapeutic without the possibility of health. Her aesthetic is founded on double binds whose brilliance captivates me as I struggle against them.