12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tamar Rubin

Tamar Rubin is a writer and physician, and has published her poetry in both literary and medical journals. Her first full-length collection, Tablet Fragments, was published in 2020, by Signature Editions. She currently lives with her husband and two young children in Winnipeg, the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Metis nation.

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

After my book was published in April 2020, I stayed home from work for 6 months. I hardly saw friends or family in person. I was staying up all hours of the night, reading and writing. Our little street in Winnipeg was closed to traffic, thrumming with hundreds of pedestrians and cyclists, dawn till dusk. It kind of felt like the apocalypse.

But also, my second son, Jonah, had just been born, only weeks after my scheduled (then rescheduled) book launch. It was the height of the first COVID lockdown. I had a very energetic and under-stimulated toddler on my hands.

I don’t know if the book changed my life, or my life changed coinciding with the book. Getting it out there was anticlimactic, after so many years of hard work, but I was also strangely relieved. I had managed to safely smuggle a relic of my old world into this bizarre new one.

The clean and dramatic transition has filled me with energy and excitement for the next project. My first book was almost a decade in the making, but this next one feels more intentional, urgent, focused. Again, maybe it’s the deadly virus and impish toddlers lurking in the background.

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

I think I was born wired that way. I think in poetry. When people talk to me, I’m listening to the rhythm of their words, rearranging sounds and phrases in my mind. Visualizing how the sounds would fall onto a page.  

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 style is intuitive, flowing. The poems come out quickly. I edit them just as fast, multiple times over, over years and months. Sometimes the earlier versions work better, and sometimes the final version is unrecognizable from the first.

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?

So far I am only one book in, so it’s hard to say. This recent book grew out of many shorter pieces that came together. The next one is a more focused project.

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

I am an introvert at heart. I also love to see the words on a page when I read other peoples’ poetry, and sometimes my own work is quite visual too. I think slowly, and I’m always trying to catch up with the last metaphor when I’m listening to others’ readings. So I feel like something is lost in a live reading. I prefer to sit down with a book and digest it slowly. That being said, sometimes the exercise of reading a poem out loud in front of an audience has unearthed flaws in the piece, or elicited useful feedback that subsequently led to improvements.

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?

While studying medicine, I learned about the concepts of “narrative reflective practice” and “critical reflection.” These ideas have always resonated with me, and so in my own writing I am trying to construct and deconstruct stories. What makes people see things the way they do?    What makes people act the way do?

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?

The writer is a spiritual leader: a person who can draw people away from loneliness and toward communion. It does not matter what the story is about, or even if that story is part of your accessible experience as the reader. The writer unlocks worlds, teleports you into their beauty, or banality, their vulnerability and their power. A writer is anyone who can do this.

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

For me it was a wonderful experience working with my editor, Clarise Foster. She challenged me and then challenged me some more. She was usually spot on in her assessments, and my work emerged stronger, as a result. I am always profoundly grateful (and also amazed) that someone is actually willing to sit down and analyze my work so carefully.

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

I read somewhere that there should be two criteria for deciding when to say something: 1. Is it kind? and 2. Is it necessary? Whenever I’ve messed up, it’s often because I didn’t adequately consider these questions. But I’ve also learned as a writer, that sometimes, even when things are not kind, they are necessary.

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’m currently in a challenging (but also wonderful) phase of my life where my full-time medical practice and (full-time) motherhood have superseded any other structure in my life. These days I’m up at (or before) the crack of dawn, and I sleep as soon as my kids fall asleep. I’m a pretty disciplined person in general, and so I’m hoping that once my kids figure out how to read, or at least sleep, I’ll get back to a regular hour or two of writing every morning or evening. At the moment, I write when I can!

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

I read great writers. I get myself to Algonquin Park (or Lake of the Woods, more recently). I go to work and I listen to peoples’ stories.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs.  

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I read a lot of medical literature. I talk to people about their health. I studied science and math before I became a doctor. Sometimes when I write a poem, I feel like I am balancing a complex equation, making each word and sentence add up when read up and down, or left to right. 

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

Here are a few, in no particular order: Alice Oswald, Edward Jenner, Leonard Cohen, the Hebrew Bible, Rita Charon, Ocean Vuong, Ken Babstock, Shmuel HaNagid, Yehuda Amichai.

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

Dance at my childrens’ weddings. Will there even be weddings then? Will they even want one? I’d also love to take some formal literature courses. I fantasize about going back to school on a daily basis.

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 feel pretty lucky to have two wonderful jobs. I can’t imagine doing anything else right now. I always wish there was more time in the day.

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

I know that double negatives are bad. But I can’t not.

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

Last great book: Tell them it was Mozart, by Angeline Schellenberg. Also: Difficult Women, by Roxanne Gay. I don’t think I’ve sat through more than a few minutes of a movie in a few years.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a series of “genetic poetry,” exploring such things as how experience integrates into your DNA, and how your immune system forms memories.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Two short story collections: J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams,

Further to our time away in Picton, I went through recent short story collections by American writers J. Robert Lennon and Joy Williams. All the adults were two weeks-plus beyond double vaccination (and seeing anyone else, obviously), and everyone was super careful. The children spent the week in the pool.

I’ve previously only read one book by New York State fiction writer J. Robert Lennon: his short story collection Pieces for the Left Hand (Graywolf Press, 2005), and recently read through his Let Me Think (Graywolf Press, 2021). Whereas Pieces for the Left Hand was made up of one hundred very short stories organized into thematic section-groupings, the stories in Let Me Think are assembled via multiple shapes and sizes, from the short burst to the longer narrative. Lennon’s stories explore odd, small moments that can’t easily be explained, like droplets of magic sprinkled in to shift the narrative. His stories explore how certain experiences or interactions shift perception, from the repetition of a single day into infinity, the experience of a painful divorce or the seemingly-simple matter of sweeping up dust. As he writes to end the flash story “Unnamed”: “The road has no name. This is the commonest name in the world for a road.”

The stories in Pieces for the Left Hand were structural echoes of each other, offering twists and unexpected turns of perception, something that collection shares with this one, albeit through an equal exploration of form: a story might be propelled almost entirely by dialogue, for example, while another is composed closer to a flash, or even a prose poem. Listen to the story “Monsters,” that reads:

The blind man, who everyone agreed was exceedingly handsome and who had married a woman widely regarded, among their acquaintances, as extraordinarily beautiful, was chosen to participate in the trial of a new medical procedure that doctors  believed might fully restore sight to certain patients. The surgery was a complete success, but when the handsome man saw, for the first time, his own face and the face of his wife, he was horrified, and could not be dissuaded of the notion that they, and everyone around them, were hideous monsters; and when, six months later, the procedure’s efficacy unexpectedly faded, and the handsome man was plunged again into darkness, he said that he was not, as his friends might have predicted, relieved, but rather more horrified still, because now, and forevermore, he could not know with any certainty where the monsters were.

American fiction writer Joy Williams is someone I only discovered recently, thanks to catching a tweet (and subsequent recommendation) by Denver poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert. After moving through Williams’ extensive catalogue, I decided to pick up a copy of her short story collection, 99 Stories of God (Tin House Books, 2016). An assemblage of ninety-nine short, self-contained stories, each story is numbered, with their titles only set at the end. There are echoes of Milan Kundera through Williams’ prose, moving easily from big ideas to specific actions and ideas. The twenty-ninth story, “IGNORANCE,” writes of a man on the beach, rescued from the water by a pig: “Would the pig have rescued the man if she had known that he and his companion had just enjoyed a picnic of ham sandwiches?” With the response: “The pig’s owner replied that pigs are intelligent, more intelligent than dogs, but they are not omniscient.”

What is fascinating through this collection is how it is the framing that allows for these seemingly untethered and unconnected pieces their book-length shape and anchor. Hers are short bursts that suggest more than they say, and hold far more than they might easily let on; indirectly, and even directly, these are stories about and around God, even utilizing God as a character, moving around the earth, interacting with others in curious and even mundane ways. Should he adopt a tortoise? At another point, he answers questions for the wolves. These are stories that refuse to provide easy answers, instead offering openings of thought; offering, instead, a way through which to contemplate ideas. Offered as story number thirty-nine, titled “BURIED IN COLORADO ALL ALONE,” she writes:

The girl from the pharmacy who delivered Darvon to Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer, wore a gold fish necklace.
            “What does that mean?” asked Dick.
            She touched it and said, “This is a sign worn by the early Christians so that they would recognize one another.”
            “In that instant,” Dick writes, “I suddenly experienced anamnesis, a Greek word meaning, literally, loss of forgetfulness.”
            Anamnesis is brought on by the action of the Holy Spirit. The person remembers his true identity throughout all his lives. The person recognizes the world for what it is—his own prior thought formations—and this generates the flash. He now knows where he is.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Wainscott

Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System, winner of the 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (Persea, 2020). She lives outside Chicago.

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

My day-to-day life hasn’t really changed. Maybe it’s that writing the book, surviving the circumstances of the book, changed my life more than having the book published did. Maybe it’s that the pandemic upended my sense of change. To be fair, I think my life has changed in ways that so far I haven’t fully experienced or haven’t processed. My recent work feels like an extension of my past work, though as with all work-in-progress I think my new approaches are more urgent and more interesting.

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

Poetry was one of the first things I felt really serious about. Also, I didn’t have much sense of what made poetry “good” and this was ultimately a kind of freedom.

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 writing process involves transcribing and dis/associating fragments of encounters and experiences, and the writing happens in bursts with slow periods in between. Recently, I tend to write a poem or several every day for a few days, and then nothing for a couple of weeks. In general, I work without tracking drafts or keeping notes, so it can be hard to say what happens between the early stages and the final shape, but I think it’s true to say that I revise extensively as I go, moving from place to place in the book, adding and deleting, writing and tinkering, some of which happens during the slow times.

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?

My work involves less thinking and more following thoughts, so poems begin with intuitive leaps between my experiences and my memory. At the outset I have some sense of form or tone but no plans for content. Since my process is associative and spontaneous, the constraints of a book give me a focal point. One constraint I like is to have a book title in mind early on, even before I fully understand it as the title. Then I can let my poems take shape without seeking any specific “aboutness” at the outset and instead explore how my daily life and interior life coalesce toward resolving the title.

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

Once I figured out that the reading isn’t only about the work, I really started to like readings. I like the shared (real or virtual) space and atmosphere, the threads that emerge between the readers’ work, and the conversations afterward. I like the feeling of collective minds being centered in their attention and the flow of being pulled into and through and out of language. Sometimes I think of my creative process as blissfully solipsistic, but this question helps me remember how grateful I am to people who organize and attend readings because readings can be both a provocative and a restorative influence for me.

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 do my recollections form an interiority accessible to me alone? What access do I have to other people’s memories? to collective memories? How do these recollections make up my sense of self? of privacy? of family? of community? of simultaneity? How do I experience the present and the future against my reactions to the past? How to understand or represent memory (and memory through language) that fails, fissures, erases, revises? What are the responsibilities of collective memory? How is language an apparatus of time (and vice versa)?

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?

The current role of the writer in larger culture seems mainly to entertain. Amusement and pleasure and diversion, or whatever it is to be entertained, I think are good and necessary to human contentment. Consideration and close attention, in other senses of entertainment, are also necessary to counteract the possible dangers of human contentment, and that gets closer to what I think the role of writers should be. I think the role of writers is to write, but there’s more to it than writing, isn’t there? There’s empathy and memory and ire and humor and discomfort and humility and aspiration and many other ways we seek out or attend to one another with language.

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

My experience with working with outside editors isn’t very extensive, but I’ve been appreciative of those encounters. There is no substitute for a reader who approaches the work with deep curiosity and the ability to balance care and calling bullshit.

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

Don’t let the motherfuckers steal your joy.

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 write here and there when I feel like it, more within the routine of parenting and housework (and work, when I have it) than as a separate ritual. Usually, I’ll write in ten or twenty minute increments after the breakfast-and-off-to-school time and throughout the day between my other tasks. In the evening calm I might write for an hour if I’m really into a project. Some days I write a lot, some days I write down one or two words I like, and a lot of days I write nothing.

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

I loathe the notion of “productivity” as a measure of (writing) success and I protect the not-writing as an important part of my process, so I can’t say my writing ever feels stalled. There are times, when I’m on the verge of starting a project but can’t quite locate it, when I’m making false starts and word-barfing, that can feel frustrating. But I don’t suffer much frustration because I like writing to be fun. There are plenty of other things to feel terrible about! Reading books, taking walks, taking photos, and talking with friends are some of the things I find that mitigate the general terribleness.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Murphy’s oil soap.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think all of these forms find their way into the things I write, but film and photography are especially fascinating to me as representations of time/timing and memory. The work of Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman have been influential to my thinking about the moment as an artistic unit, the performance of self, and representations of decay. Silent film collections on YouTube, especially the work of Mabel Normand, Lois Weber, Bebe Daniels, and Anita Berber, have provided historical accounts and (sometimes notably bad) counterpoints or complications to the questions I consider about motherhood, humor, and bathos.

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

My poet-friends, especially the beloved friends of my MFA cohort, are the heartbeat of my writing life. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is the poem I’m forever chasing in my own work. I’m currently reading or rereading Harryette Mullen, Jean Follain, Rick Barot, Fanny Howe, Laura Ellen Joyce, and Arthur Sze. Without the present as a constraint, the list overwhelms me.

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

I’d like to translate a poetry collection, live in a commune, and visit my grandfather’s grave, for three.

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?

One thing I’d like to try is being a backup singer. Harmonizing, getting dressed up, maybe dancing a little, sometimes going on the road: that seems like a good life.

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

I wrote because I loved to read. I had my own library card and time to be bored and time to myself. And the reality is, I’ve done and I do lots of other things. The “something else” is a real presence, but for me it’s never in opposition to the writing.

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

Work Is Hard Vore by Philip Sorenson

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night dir. by Ana Lily Amirpour

Both are darkly hilarious, slant but sincere, bleak and beautiful. Both are lyric fantasies of the very real. Both are underpinned by overwhelming desires of literal consumption.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Things about f/actuality, stories and anti-stories, the retro-pastoral, and maybe something like post-domesticity are coming up in my recent work, and at least some of the pieces are shaping up to be discrete poems with individual titles, something I haven’t written for quite awhile. There’s a book in here somewhere, maybe two. I’m not quite to the part where I know what’s happening. Also, every so often I’ve been attempting little translations from a book of Sicilian proverbs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, SIR

 

Granny mama said that you wanted to name him Master.

Master never came outta my mouth. I always knew his name would be Sir. I named him Sir to honor my lineage, so that it would not be disrespected. The carrier of the name didn’t matter anybody could have been named Sir. You could have been Sir if you were first.

I’m fascinated by Berkeley, California performer, writer and artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s book-length poem SIR (Litmus Press, 2019; now available only through the author’s website). SIR is structured as a collage of image, text and archive to explore family, power relationships, segregation, racism and inter-generational trauma. Through a scrapbook of lyric prose, archival material, including family photographs, Hinkle writes on the histories and implications of being black in America, specifically her eldest brother, named “Sir” by their mother at birth (full name: Sir Antany Marquis Lavonne Hinkle), so anyone speaking to him would have to begin with respect. Hinkle explores the history of Louisville, Kentucky and her own brother’s name, including his own discomfort with it, referring to himself, instead, as “Anthony.” She writes: “His pants sag low as if he has a sack of shit in them. He wears a huge watch. His eyes squint when he is amused. He walks through life like anyone else. One step at a time. You would never know that his name is Sir and sometimes neither does he.” SIR exists as an expansive, loving and critical portrait of a name and a family, a time and a place; citing family photographs and a family shaped through and by an ongoing history. She writes archive and theory, trauma and naming, and how the name their mother gave her first born child both revolves and responds to elements of power and disparity:

They have been calling him by a name that is not his name and furthest from his name as his name can be. He hated Sir and still does. Even as I write this sentence he navigates the world with it under his skin. Tucked away in the cotton fibers of his birth certificate. Scared to make it emerge. Is it really fear I wonder? Is its use no longer needed? Fear comes through power. Power is the result of fear. What if he were named Power? Would he tell people his name was Strength, or even better same ole same ole same ole Anthony?

Opening as a map of his name, she evolves into an exploration of self and her larger family, including the lineage of her own given name. She explores her family’s history and genealogy. She writes of Louisville slave owner Captain Aaron Fontaine (1753-1823), from the park that bears his name across his former landscape, through her attempts at researching the names and details of the slaves he owned, and any potential descendants. She writes of the difficulty of a history she can’t fully research, and fully articulate. “I romanticize about a place that I cannot name. It is always on the top of my tongue but gets lost in the slippery saliva,” she writes, “and drifts back down my throat. Forming a knot, walking a fine line between choking, loving western shoes that hurt my feet and running around barefoot on the hot Kentucky cement.” Hinkle’s SIR is multi-faceted and expansive, with a lyric heft created through the deep dive she takes across her research, from the framing of her brother and her brother’s name into numerous acts and individuals that brought their mother to that point, and continue to affect their entire family. Hinkle’s SIR is framed very differently than, say, Charlottesville, Virginia poet and editor Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], a book that covers a similar geography and history. SIR is far more intimate, more personal; writing her brother and his discomfort, and their mother’s discomfort. If White Blood is a book about how history impacts the present, SIR is a book about family, and how history impacted them and still does, directly and in an ongoing way; how their mother chose to respond, as an exploration of how that response ripped outward.

If we had a grandfather and a great grandfather would they have named him Sir? Would he have been a Jr.? Would Sir have been needed? If we all had arms and muscles to swing from, to laugh and cry with us, to have their two cents put in and have it be the final word would Sir need to be named Sir? If in our neighborhood the S.W.A.T. team was not kicking down doors left and right because young men had taken over whole apartment buildings for drug houses would Sir need to be named Sir? If we didn’t care about black men at all in the world and wanted hate to eat them up, with he need to be named Sir?

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh, Piece of Cake

 

The thing about family life that’s amazing is you can’t keep anything, is that it’s chaotic and you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because you can’t keep anything in order so you begin to go crazy because you can’t keep your own separate life in order. It’s probably the reason why more than one child is about ten times as chaotic as two children, I mean, as one child, you see what I mean? No children seems very orderly to me at the moment, as if you could place something somewhere inside your house and one month later it would still be there. I remember while I was pregnant still being able to know where my things were and to know what I was doing and even to be able to keep the kitchen in some kind of order when I wanted to—now there’s no chance of that and you must get used to a certain amount of chaos (I remember when I lived alone what a pleasure my little meager dishes piling up in the sink for days without getting in the faucet’s way gave me, as if I were being modest); I’ve always believed that one should be able to bear a lot of chaos but chaos has to have its rewards and this kind of chaos often seems gratuitous and with no beginning and no end. It’s interesting to have lived a life where you always knew your life could suddenly change; overnight you could be in another country, either rich or poor. And though this sensation could still persist, theoretically, the presence of Marie and our desire to be a little bit rooted makes life seem quite timeless and change of that sort a matter of indifference. So we must use the kitchen almost continuously. It would be good to have a mother’s helper, or a mother to help us. When Marie begins to talk everything will seem less chaotic, I know it, and even now, everything changes approximately every two weeks. But when she doesn’t talk she seems to me more of an object (keys banging) and certainly then an object of care. (Bernadette Mayer, “August 10”)

Working my way through a chapbook by Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter recently [see my review of such here], part of my response included making my way to the internet and ordering an edition of American poet Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day (Turtle Island Foundation, 1982; New Directions Publishing, 1999), as well as a copy of Piece of Cake (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2020), a book composed in August, 1976 by Mayer and her then-husband, the poet and editor Lewis Warsh (November 9, 1944-November 15, 2020). For whatever reason, it was Piece of Cake that first caught my attention when the two books arrived: a book composed in first-person prose on alternate days, said to be “arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th-century American poetry.” Mayer and Warsh each write alternate sections throughout the entirety of a single month from the relative isolation of a rental house in Lenox, Massachusetts, as they attempt to write and read, taking alternate days with their infant daughter, Marie, so the other could focus on writing. For whatever reason, this is a manuscript that was composed and completed, but lay fallow for some forty years, until prompted by the “determined efforts” of their now-grown eldest daughter.

The writing and the interplay between the two writers, including family moments, literary gossip and recollected stories are entirely compelling (the further one reads, the further one gets hooked), but I find it more interesting, in certain ways, the absolute pleasure knowing that Marie Warsh would have such access to an intimate, open and detailed paired document by both of her parents during her own infancy. I can’t imagine too many people who would deny that for any one of us, such a document, from either of their parents, let alone both, would be an incredible and uniquely rare gift. Originally moving in together in the spring of 1975, the couple would spend ten years together and have two children after Marie before they went their separate ways, and onto new relationships (the children, as what I can tell from online sources, remained with Mayer). As Mayer writes as part of her introduction:

            I had been reading the Swedish mystery novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in which they wrote alternating chapters without knowing what the other had said. In our book we also decided that when we mentioned a name, like Clark, we would describe a bit who that person is, a little about her or him.
            It was in this neighborhood that Hawthorne said that the weather was always too hot or too cold. It was in the local Lilac Park that we had endless discussions about communes with Bob and Eileen Callahan. We were planning to buy an old resort in the Catskills to relive The Blithedale Romance, yet we didn’t, but books were written, this one and maybe others of which we can only find mouse-bitten remains.

In his introduction (dated December 24, 2018), Warsh offers:

            I don’t know who had the idea to write the month-long journal that became this book, but my guess is it was Bernadette, who had already written a month-long book on her own called Memory. I’d been a journal writer all my life, so the idea made complete sense. Most days we were content to simply walk around the block, carrying Marie in a backpack. There was much to write about, all the tiny details of daily life, plus all the flashbacks to the past, and everything that had led up to this moment.

Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) began to keep diaries at an early age, and throughout the whole of her life, most of which exist as straight journal entries, but also include scraps of writing-in-progress, including the beginnings of her infamous novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; and her journals have been published in various volumes over the years (I keep hoping someone might take on working to get more into print). There have certainly been other examples of compelling personal journals or diaries of writers and artists that have been worked into print—off the top of my head, I can think of Canadian writer Frank Davey’s devastating How Linda Died (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2002), as well as the two volumes by painter Barbara Caruso [see my review of the second volume here]—all of which exist as entirely worthy reads, but this is very much writing produced as literary writing, and not as (despite the four decades of distance between composition and publication) a writer’s private exercise. From what I am aware of Mayer’s work, at least, hers does work through gestures of private and the domestic as equally-important subject matter for literary work. Her Midwinter Day, for example, is a book-length composition around a single day on the calendar, and working through the material that was so often dismissed as “women’s writing,” and not worthy of actual literary merit. They take turns, and the back and forth is part of what provides this volume its heft; initially I found Mayer’s writing to be more striking: writing on more intimate details of the day with Marie, and more abstract considerations, including family history and contemplations around her reading of literature and theory (there is a lengthy stretch writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example, who also composed a book in the area), with Warsh’s prose a bit more external: stories around publishing, and of other writers, friends and hitchhiking memories:

Another hitchhiking story, really a story about other things, takes me back to Christmas Eve, 1969, when I was stranded in San Francisco after a party at Margot and John Doss’s house with no way of getting back to Bolinas, the small town an hour north where I was living. Bill Berkson was visiting me then, I’d driven down to the city with him in his car, he’d met someone at the party and had taken off with her and the only available ride was with Joanne Kyger and her husband Jack Boyce, but that didn’t seem like a good idea, Joanne and I had fallen in love, and I told them to leave without me. I’d taken LSD earlier that evening and wandered down Lombard Street trying to locate the motel where I stayed with my parents on our first West Coast visit in 1958. The string of beads I was wearing around my neck, which Joanne had made for me, was a charm, or at least I hoped, protecting me from whatever the rest of the night had to offer. No one would hurt me as long as I wore the beads. Don’t hide who you are, the voice said. Be open. That’s the only protection. If you act suspicious or afraid a wild dog will bite you. (Lewis Warsh, “August 9”)

Both sides, really, focus on the immediate, with lengthy asides depending on where the mind might go, and include visits to the store, interacting with friends and what the other might be doing that day, all of which culminates in a visit by a group of friends near the end of the month (with his excitement building, and her excitement mixed with a bit of anxiety). For those interested in literary biography and connection, there are interesting interactions and stories around Tom Clark, Susan and Clark Coolidge and multiple others, and it is interesting to note the connections and overlaps, the ways in which circles interact with circles. This is a charming and compelling volume, especially when one considers just how young these since-literary heavyweights were at the time (she was thirty-three to his thirty-one), and attempting to live a combined literary life while raising a family.

I’ve written before in how I’ve long been interested in how couples, both of whom are writers, might interact on or around the page, especially since Christine and I began our own collaborative and as-yet-untitled project of back-and-forth poems (produced so far through two chapbooks), a half-completed manuscript temporarily put aside around the time our Rose was born in 2013. There are plenty of other examples of (Canadian, at least) poets who have interacted, whether in direct collaboration or as separate texts existing in conversation, whether Victoria, British Columbia poets Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier’s No Longer Two People (Turnstone Press, 1978) or Roo Borson and Kim Maltman’s The Transparence of November / Snow (Quarry Press, 1985). Apparently Toronto poets Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris did a small collaboration that might have appeared as a chapbook, but I haven’t yet seen it. There was Smaro Kamboureli’s poetic travelogue about being away, in the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), and Robert Kroetsch’s poetic work-from-home about Kamboureli being away, his Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), and even break-up responses made between Roy K. Kiyooka via his Pear Tree Pomes (Coach House Press, 1987) and Daphne Marlatt’s Our Lives (Truck Press, 1975; Oolichan Press, 1980). There is the direct collaboration and the texts that exist, separately, in conversation; somehow Mayer and Warsh, despite not reading each other’s entries during their process, manage, somehow, to simultaneously exist as both.

It took a while for me to realize where I’d heard or seen Warsh’s name previously, and it was through The Angel Hair Anthology (New York NY: Granary Books, 2001), an anthology edited by Warsh and his first wife, Anne Waldman, selected from materials from Angel Hair magazine and Angel Hair Books edited and published by the two from 1966 to 1978. The anthology had sparked an array of further reading after it first landed at my doorstep, but not as much as perhaps it could, or should, so this is really the first of Warsh’s work I’ve spent any time with. Really, prior to this, I knew little of her work, but at least something, aware of her name for some time, and having gone through her more recent collections Works and Days (New Directions, 2017) and Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), some of which I suspect I’ll revisit, soon.