12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julian Carter

Julian Carter writes about touch, complicity, recognition, and temporal change. His new choreotext, Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024) is a transpoetic story cycle linking  art, death, and kinky sex, through which he partners readers in intimate encounters with trans/queer histories from Neolithic burials to coffee in present-day San Francisco.

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

My new book, Dances of Time and Tenderness, began in queer art and political community and grew and shifted in conversations with both dead and living people. It's been a relational project all the way along. In contrast, my first book was lonely lonely work. It was my dissertation. I wrote it without an advisor and then revised it from the ground up 5 times over my 9 years on the academic job market before finally using it as a tenure book. I don't recall the editor who picked it up for Duke University Press talking with me about it beyond asking who should blurb. That book, The Heart of Whiteness, is not bad at all, and it's found some audience over the years, but the process felt contaminated. I didn't even consider writing another book for almost 20 years. Which was ok.

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

I started with poetry & switched to critical prose as a grad student (sadly, Ph.D. in history, not an MFA). My elegantly WASPy undergrad poetry professor liked me because I was interested in formal mastery; I was too innocent to realize that meant he might not be the best reader for a long, unmetered, explicit piece situated on the edge of sexual consent--I was contemplating the erotic and community repercussions of anti-dyke violence. When he told me this wasn't a poem at all, but a manifesto, I assumed he knew what he was talking about and turned my attention to writing critical theory and historiography. I've never stopped writing poetry, I just dropped out of the craft conversation.

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?

Words spill out of me. I have to do a lot of pruning to find the moment of silence inside, or alongside, the swirl of language. That's the point when I understand what I'm doing. Sometimes it takes years.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Usually I latch on to a word or an idea, or one latches on to me, and then follow it until I and my friends can't take any more. I've just written my third long critical essay structured like a miniature book, with three tiny "chapters" developing a core image from different angles. I didn't start develop this form on purpose. It happened because I think most non-fiction books should be about 20% of their published length, and I hate the idea of someone reading my work and thinking "oh, he should have cut that out, he's just quacking away." I dislike filler.

Recently my poems have mostly been stories that began from something I overheard. I would like to make enough of these to assemble these into a cycle--something with an arc that lets you feel like you've been someplace. That sounds like it might be heading in a book sort of direction.

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

I adore doing readings! As a kid I learned how to read aloud in church, and also my mother read stories to us with different voices for different characters. I put care into the music of voice--modulating tone, playing with tempo--things like that have everything to do with how we receive meaning. I also read aloud to myself while I write. It tells me when I don't know what I'm saying yet.

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?

My big questions have always been historical, or even mythic: how did we get here, and how has our road been laid out for us? My current questions are about how we survive. I want to know whether there will be anyone to care about the past.

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?

We open windows.

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

10% essential. Sometimes difficult also. Like any intimacy.

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

Take the advice you'd give to a student.

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

I am feral as a poet and professional in prose. I have mostly kept the feral under wraps; allowing it to lead is both exhilarating and scary. That risk is the appeal.

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 use birdsong as an alarm and prefer not to speak or be spoken to until I've had two cups of decaf, a bowl of plain oatmeal, and 45 minutes of writing by hand. The cat has opinions about all of the above. So do my children, partner, students, co-parent, department chair, writing partner, colleagues, therapists, garden, sourdough starter and a series of friends--though to be sure these have fewer feelings about the birds. My life is a constant series of relational interruptions. This means that ideas wander out for a long time in loose spirals and then the real conceptual and compositional work has to happen in highly disciplined spasms.

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

Open sky, other writers doing craft talks and interviews, and the Oxford English Dictionary.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My own body.

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?

Dance has shaped more of my life than anything else except maybe growing up in the country. Ballet, tango, contra, country-western two-step and line dance, country waltz. The attendant somatic practices (Feldenkrais and Pilates), physical therapy and cross-training, and bodywork are all techniques for increasing bodily awareness and self-presence, so that you know what you are feeling and what you are doing: a dancer is a way of being, like a writer is a way of being, only dancing for me cultivates enormous curiosity and joy that happen almost entirely outside of language. Like dancing, writing comes from deep attention, curiosity about what is, and joyous moments of not-thinking. For me, times of not-writing and not-talking sponsor being-in-words on pages.

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

Subject to change in a flash; yet a few things stick around. I learned to read from Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. T.H. White's The Once and Future King and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish both inform a great deal of my thinking and voice. Both books dig into the relational nature of power; White's sentence structures and tonal variation resonate in my own, and I love and emulate the style with which Foucault loops back and forth from broad strokes to fine lines, vast epistemes to single images from a single moment.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Study literary form (as opposed to following my inner metronome). Maybe even write a villanelle.

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?

I am already so many other things--if I could choose anything it would be *only* to write. And read. Preferably under trees.

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

I couldn't help it?

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

I think more in terms of great reading experiences rather than great books. The most recent book that pulled me entirely into its world was Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind; the most recent to make me read sections aloud to friends was Selby Wynn Schwartz's After Sappho. Not much into film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I've just finished a short scholarly/creative hybrid-genre art-historical essay called "Kissing the Cavalier." It looks at van Dyck paintings, the history of lace, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy to tell a story about how aesthetic response can loop us into systems of power we wouldn't have chosen to touch if we'd known what we were doing. I'm edging inexorably into a Southern Gothic book based on stories from my father's incredibly pathological Virginia family.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Small Press Market (part one, : Devon Rae + Norma Cole,

Once more, Kate Siklosi and Gap Riot Press helped curate and organize the annual Small Press Market as part of the Toronto International Festival of Authors! And I was totally there for that, with a swath of recent above/ground press titles and my new short story collection with University of Alberta Press and Christine’s new hybrid memoir with Book*hug Press. Naturally, there were plenty of amazing publishers and items there as well [see my two notes from last year here and the four posts I made around the first year here], including Anstruther Press, Gap Riot Press, knife|fork|book, Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupines’ Quill, Inc., room 302 books, Proper Tales Press, Book*hug Press, Nietzsche’s Brolly, serif of nottingham, etcetera (with Simulacrum Press and Puddles of Sky Press unable to attend this time around). Don’t you wish you could have made it? At least there’s another small press fair coming up in Toronto (Mississauga, actually)that I’m participating in soon, for those folk who wanted to catch some further small press excitement (where Christine is on a panel with her new book as part of the same event/festival that day). And you know about the 30^th anniversary edition of the ottawa small press book fair happening on Saturday, November 16, yes? OH, AND IF YOU ARE IN OTTAWA COME OUT TO THE LAUNCH OF MY SHORT STORIES TONIGHT!

Here are a couple of items I picked up at this year’s event:

Vancouver BC/Toronto ON: I’ve been an admirer of the work of Vancouver poet Devon Rae for a while now [see my interview with her via Touch the Donkey], so was very pleased to see a copy of her chapbook debut, THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS WITH MY BODY (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2024). Rae’s work, at least what I’ve seen, is leaning into what I presume will be an eventual full-length collection of very sharp prose poems around the body, with titles such as “My Lips,” “My Left Leg,” “My Left Shoulder” and “My Breasts,” offering narrative threads and conversation almost as a kind of update on what the late Toronto poet bpNichol (1944-1988) was playing with across his Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1987) and eventual, posthumous, organ music: parts of an autobiography (Black Moss Press, 2012). Rae’s poems offer a conversation with and around bodies very different than Nichol’s serious play, one instead that works through and with the differences and culturally-loaded complications of women’s bodies; she writes bodies as both physical and emotional space, one impacted far too often from the outside. “That elsewhere so close we can almost / touch it.” she writes, as part of “Conversation with My Night Body.” These prose poems are damned sharp, and you should be paying attention to them. Rae packs enormous amounts in very small spaces, yet her poems are composed with a deceptive ease of lyric and propulsive flow. As the poem “Conversations with My Uterus” reads:

You are shaped like the child I may not have. I think of myself curled up inside my mother years ago – the fullness of her uterus and the emptiness of mine. Sometimes, I want to return to that dream place. I know she loved being pregnant, I’ve seen the photographs, belly swelling in an Armani dress. And I wonder if I too will become a kiln or remain a vacant room.

Dani Spinosa, Gap Riot Press

San Francisco CA/Toronto ON: Oh, the delight of a new title by Toronto-born American poet, translator and visual artist Norma Cole [see my review of her 2010 To Be At Music: Essays & Talks here], her chapbook RAINY DAY (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2024). Another of Toronto poet and publisher Kirby’s gracefully-produced items, RAINY DAY is a collection of twenty-one short, sharp lyrics offering a myriad of narrative directions across few words and very short spaces. As the poem “Critical Miss” begins: “permanently / beyond chagrin // intrinsic—what is / trinsic?” Alternating between prose poems and slightly longer sequences against short bursts, Cole composes the long line of each poem across a kind of condensed point-form, offering a rhythmic sequence of bursts held in breath, almost as hesitations, or a lyric caught in the lungs. “the darker / room // he talks / blocks,” the unpunctuated four-page poem “NO ACCOUNT SYLLABLES” writes, “of space / and // books of / time // I think / your // hand on / paper // least exercise / leaves [.]” Her lyric compactness clusters, stretches, holds breath. All of which, of course, makes me eager to think that we might be closer to a further full-length by Cole at some point soon, hopefully.

Mum’s the Word

saturation not able inside the magnitudes
scorpion suppression oppression falling failing
oblivious silent objects

Liz Countryman, Green Island: Poems

 

Now, to be 40 is to be a comb someone else’s hair moves through.

I sense but can’t describe some other, newer kind of openness
contorting me—

Now when I set the cereal boxes on the counter
when I make a shape of them

what prior arrangement—what impulse disguised as practicality—
do I refute? And what of it?
do I refute, and what of it do I carry forward?

What of that stubborn shape around me back then
Do I know replicate, even as I refute it?
Or has one simply grown up from beneath the other
But stayed one thing

Like the skin of a hand? (“NARRATIVE POEM”)

The latest from South Carolina poet and OVERSOUND co-editor/co-publisher Liz Countryman is Green Island: Poems (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2024), following on the heels of her full-length debut, A Forest Almost (Boulder CO: Subito Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]. Winner of the Berkshire Prize through Tupelo Press, as judged by Julie Carr (Countryman’s debut was also a prize-winner, published as part of the 2016 Subito Press Poetry Prize), Green Island is a collection made up of seventeen poems set in two clusters on either side of a longer sequence. Throughout the collection, I’m intrigued at how each of her poems stretch to articulate the length and breadth of a landscape, both internal and external. “The saddest thing,” she writes, as part of the sequence “A CLEARING,” set in the centre, the emotional eye, of the collection, “when someone’s gone, is land. // No amount of accuracy will bring what I see closer. // Its arms seem open but it keeps receding as I move.”

There is a patter that connects her domestic to her physical landscape, holding the two as not separate, but intricately connected. “I felt the authority of the arrangement: // how flowers with light behind them,” she writes, to open the six-page poem “NARRATIVE POEM,” “hanging plants / near the phone in our house / framed that phone, the window, // our family dog chained in the shade of pines / and soft needles beyond the glass. // The phone like a faucet. / A little grime in its grooves.” Countryman writes in meditative stretches, lines collected into clusters around a thought or a series of thoughts that cohere into something larger, offering meditations of walking, of moments, across great distances, and narratives-as-accumulation. One step follows another across these poems, offering moments stretched out, the big canvas of constellation that makes up this collection. “I sweep a lot of gripes around the floor,” she writes, as part of the poem “HOMEOWNER,” “thanking each Cheerio with trepidation.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katie Naughton

Katie Naughton is the author of the poetry collection The Real Ethereal (Delete Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Study (above/ground press, 2021) and A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2023), and Debt Ritual (Bunny / Fonograf, forthcoming 2025. Her poetry has been published in Fence, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poetics (www.etceterapoetry.com) and a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo.

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?
I really liked having a chapbook (my first, Study, from above/ground press) because it gave me something to give to other poets when I met them. Incidentally, a lot of the work in my new book, my first full-length collection The Real Ethereal, predates the work in Study, which was both composed and published relatively quickly. The Real Ethereal is poetry, whereas Study is a kind of essay form.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I read a lot more fiction as a young person, and hardly any poetry before college, so it was a bit of an accident to become a poet. I found, though, that my attention was inherently attuned to detail, the momentary, and the sound of language, more than narrative or character.
 
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 tend to draft a poem fairly quickly and in a form close to its final version, but it takes me a long time (a few years) to figure out how to frame a collection. So far. I don't know how my next big project will start and am interested in exploring other methods. I've been inspired recently by reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's drafts for Empathy at the Beinecke Library and seeing how the poem emerges from notes, sustained and direct inquiry into them, and iterative drafts.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm not necessarily working on a "book" from the very beginning, but I am thinking about the questions or possibilities a collection of short poems operate in and what else I need to write to fill out that line of inquiry.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am moved by the hushed quiet of a room of people listening. I haven't done too many readings yet, but they feel like a good way to gather with other poets and bring the poems into the mouth.
 
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'm interested in perception, the relationship between thought and feeling, the relationship between language and experience, and how any of this can become relevant and present to others.

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?
I think writing can help expand the possibilities of perception and change, even if often only slightly, the way we experience the world and our lives. Writing can also be a friend, sometimes a funny one, to keep us company.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it's such a generous use of an intelligence to work as an editor. I appreciate that someone is thinking with me about what I've made and that I can use their attention and vision as a tool to refine or strengthen the work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read more than you write; risk sentimentality. Both Susan Howe via Sasha Steensen, at least as far as I remember it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
 My thought in poetry is never more strongly animated than when I am reading and writing critically, and my work as a critic is deeply informed by the experience of writing poetry. I do tend to have seasons for different projects, though, only because I like to place priority on one thing at a time to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

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 not very good at routines, but I prefer the house to be put in order before I sit down to work. I have to clear a space, for better or for worse.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Reading, bodies of water, but also, I just wait.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Unfortunately at the moment, stale cigarette smoke that comes through our apartment walls from some untraceable source. I would prefer my answer to be warm pine wood, lake water, or traditionally milled French lavender soap.

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?
Other human structures, like money and cities. I like how visual artists often think iteratively about material or process and would like to emulate this but don't know if I do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Bernadette Mayer, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Robertson, Cass Eddington, Allyson Paty

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Surf (regularly/well)

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?
Maybe a historian. Which is still a kind of writer. All the other occupations I would have other than writer I do have (teacher, editor, arts administrator, grant writer, publicist . . .).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was what I was best at making, and it was thrilling to make something that I liked and that sometimes other people liked too.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm currently reading Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, though it has moved away from Hardy-the-poet writing about sheep farming and deeper into the romance plot and I'm becoming less interested. Have been neglecting film recently, accidentally, though there are so many good theaters now that I am here in NYC. Enjoyed some Ernie Gehr shorts at the Met earlier this year, with the filmmaker in attendance, and seeing the parallel world of avant garde film and its audiences, glad to know they've been there all along, too, while I've had my nose buried in poems.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My dissertation -- on opacity as a component of experience, and how this is used in poetry.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Nat Raha, apparitions (nines)

 

[ i/5 ]

 

grrrl // if we are citizens
of nowhere, a threat to the tone &
image;; composed / lace cute
we divine femmes no here to disse
-ct your impositions >>
so late in the day, bark organs
in casual violence: your pleasure
excruciate living / &
the beauty about our eyelines

The latest from Edinburgh, Scotland-based “poet and activist-scholar” Nat Raha is the poetry title apparitions (nines) (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024), a fragmented, fractalled, book-length sequence. This collection was composed, as she writes in her four-page “Afterword,” “during a period experienced as temporal reversal, rupture and compression, 2017-2021. On June 14^th, 2017, seventy-two people—the majority of who were Black and brown—were killed in the fire at Grenfell Tower, a twenty-four-story apartment block in West London. For many of us engaged in housing struggles, and in the radical history of London and the UK from anti-racist and anti-colonial perspectives, Grenfell was the amalgam of everything we knew regarding the ‘organized abandonment’ and neglect that comes with private property oriented towards maximizing profits and a state that considers poor Black and brown people, especially Muslims, to be disposable.”

Set in nine sections of nine, each poem-fragment comprised of nine lines, offering staccato and stagger of word fragments, twisted syntax, and flagrant punctuation and hesitations, she writes small moments, accumulated and electrified, punctuated and piercing. “detached / formulaic / our / saturate eyes / chroma,” she writes, as part of “[ iii/7 ],” “-tic , brittle  , split, flaked w/out [.]” Her poems are expressive, and gestural, blending lines and references from other sources when required, whether a poem “after Anne Boyer,” or “with lines from Frank O’Hara’s ‘Homosexuality’,” as Raha’s accumulations provide a layering effect across her narratives around social upheavals, human requirements and demanding, despite capitalism, that humans treat each other with at least a modicum of respect and dignity. “schema di/vesting black & brown / breath burnt ab/andoned / nest synthetic pale on pray / screech bitter salvation prized,” she writes, through the poem “[ vi/6 ],” “light disdain calls benevolent / neoliberal tears cellular / carbon based/carbon torn / stones & plaster time contained to fail // continues its ordinary [.]” Her narratives, as apparitions, shift with the difference of light, of shadow, as she closes her “Afterword”:

            The poetics of the last one hundred plus years have demonstrated poetry’s power as a direct mode of communication that can cut through times of diatribes and violence. The niner is a form attuned to speed and constraint. They are brief containers to feel through, polemicize, and remember—to communicate the stakes of the everyday harassment and structural violence that are the lives of ourselves, our friends and our loves. For possibility, contra disposability. They shed light on the glitter and heat of our creopolitian, queer, and trans lives, in and through their collective formations.

The poems are staccato, and highly structured, as visual as they are performative, and I’d be curious to hear how any reading of these pieces would hold to the visual notations sparked across these pages. As she writes at the opening, in “A NOTE ON THE FORM”:

The niner is a contemporary form of the nine-line poem, typically in sequences of nine poems. More recently, the niner consists of lines of nine syllables and/or other numerical orderings in the number of sounds or words related to the number nine.
            Coined by the poet Mendoza and adopted by various innovative writers, the niner is seemingly a “sonnot,” resembling a sonnet while radically departing from its conventions; a perverse sounding that adopts a masochistic containment. In this book, the nine-syllable line reads as a brash, punk, or post-punk response to the metrics of Anglophone verse. The form has allowed for experiment and study in dialect and accent, and their effect upon the language, contained in a line of nine syllables or beats.