12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stephanie Cawley

Stephanie Cawley is a poet in Philadelphia. They are the author of No More Flowers (Birds, LLC) and My Heart But Not My Heart (Slope Editions). Recent poems have been published in Protean, Prolit, and the tiny. More at stephaniecawley.com.

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 books have felt like an outward materialization of what I had been orienting my life around and towards for a long time in a sometimes more private or interior way. That’s a sideways answer. I guess I think life changes and books are part of life so they both do and don’t change a life. My second book is in many ways very different from my first, because the first is a kind of enclosed, contained sequence written out a specific period in the aftermath of my father’s death, while the new book is a collection of more individual poems and is a little bit more sprawling. But I think it is obvious that the same person wrote them, even though in some ways I’m not really the same person. 

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

I like thinking of myself as a poet first, as someone working in the field of poetry, because it feels so expansive, and so concerned with the material of language itself. I’m aware that the other fields are expansive and concerned with language, too, and that this is likely just my own baggage and assumptions. A lot of what I write is in prose. I have difficulty with the idea of writing fiction because I have trouble with the ideas of narrative and character and plot, but I suspect this is also a me problem. 

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 am not particularly project-oriented, usually, though there have been times I’ve set myself some constraints or committed to a particular experiment. I do tend to write poems kind of quickly, kind of all-in-one-go. I’m saying that but lately I’ve had some poems I’ve written in pieces over a period of a few weeks, so maybe it’s not true anymore, or right now. And often I have to let a poem sit around for a long time before I can decide if it’s worthwhile, or make the small changes needed for it to be finished. I also produce a lot of writing that isn’t very good or that I know will go nowhere. Or it points towards the next attempt, or helps me work something out that clears the way for the next attempt, perhaps. So in that way, it is also a slow process. 

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?

A poem is often preceded by a certain kind of itchy poem-feeling that arises. I often write poems while reading, putting a book down to write, or the poem-feeling emerges while I’m in transit. In terms of process, though, I feel like as soon as I have a grasp on a given process or method for myself, it changes. Historically, I have liked to give myself a lot of spaciousness around whatever it is I am writing, letting myself make things without necessarily knowing where they are heading. Then the process of shaping those things into a book is a more deliberate sitting down with whatever I’ve accumulated and figuring out if there’s a book to be made from the mess. 

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

I love doing readings, though I’m not an especially performative kind of reader. I like that readings can be a space to sort of test out new material, or incentive to finish something new in order to share it. And then you can learn a lot from how it feels to put a poem out into the air for others to hear.

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 once said, in a poem “I have no / theoretical positions to explore / in this poem. I have no ideas about / anything.” In a more recent poem, I wrote “I had no ideas / and my ideas got better / the fewer of them I seemed to have.” Of course, writing about having no ideas is itself articulating a sort of theoretical concern about the relationship between ideas and writing, or writing and life itself. That sounds very abstract. I guess I can tend towards being a kind of bootleg philosopher. I’m interested in writing, feelings, ideas, love, desire, despair, the future, and film. And my questions about those things are like, what even are those things? How do we stay alive in a culture committed to the destruction of human life? How can we find anything like freedom? 

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 don’t think writers are that special in terms of their role in the culture. By culture I guess I am thinking of and generally preoccupied by the realm of the “political.” I think there is much more risk in writers thinking their writing “achieves” something in and of itself as an exertion of a desire for change rather than thinking about how to use their human time, energy, and resources towards that end more directly. I have just finished reading Ben Davis’ 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, which I found really interesting and useful in articulating this entangled relation between the artist and the “world.” All these terms feel kind of insufficient. And I do also believe in the kind of mysterious potency of art to transform the world, or the culture. I just don’t think that’s so literal, or straightforward, or obvious. And I think a lot of writers, particularly those in academia or with money, seem frankly divorced from the material reality of life for most people in this country and world, but see themselves and their lives as contributing meaningfully to some abstracted “cultural” realm that transcends that world, which I find really troubling. Recently I found myself being kind of hard on myself for struggling to write, and I was like well I live in impossibly horrific conditions and times for human life: maybe struggling to make art in such conditions is really not an indicator of my personal failing. But I do believe in struggle, and failure, and persistence. I don’t know.

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

I loved working with Sampson Starkweather, one of the editors for Birds, LLC, who worked with me on No More Flowers. Other than with friends, I have never had such a fruitful and open editorial relationship, where I felt like I could show him some of my messy half-starts and see what he thought should go or not go into the book. It made the book better, and more interesting, to have an editor who I knew could see what I hoped the book could be, and figure out how to help it become richer and wilder. 

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

I don’t know why but I cannot come up with an answer to this question. Maybe I’m opposed to blanket advice. 

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

I think a lot of my writing is animated by rhythm, and sometimes that rhythm is operating on an engine driven by the sentence, and thus emerges as prose, and sometimes driven more by lineation or fragment. So it’s just a matter of tuning in to the frequency a certain expression seems to be asking for. 

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 currently still getting adjusted to a new rhythm and routine with a new job. Previously, I have not been particularly routine oriented, except I have had long stretches of time (years) where I have written poems at 11am on Sunday mornings in writing groups with friends. I’m glad for that standing commitment to time for writing. Otherwise, my daily habits are pretty erratic so I try to carve out larger blocks of time when I can. With my new job, I’d like to be able to read and write a little before work sometimes, but that’s an endeavor for a little later on. 

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

Usually I just need to take the pressure off. Read, watch movies, see friends, take walks, let the writing sort itself out. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine trees, the ocean. 

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?

I watch a lot of movies, which appear in my writing quite a lot in direct ways, but I also think of them as useful for thinking about structure, texture, and tone. 

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

My standard answer to this question is usually Alice Notley, because I admire her lifelong commitment to poetry, and the wide-ranging and shifting nature of her aesthetic and intellectual development. I find similar inspiration in David Cronenberg, whose films are often reduced to tropes but who, I think, has been using his films to approach a set of questions about human life and the body in a much more wide-ranging and interesting way than he is often given credit for. I find that kind of sustained investigation really inspiring when thinking about how to have a long life in writing. There are many others. The list is long, but I don’t like to make one for fear of who I might accidentally leave out. 

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

I really would like to write a novel, to find out what my version of that would look like. 

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 guess I don’t necessarily think of writing as my “occupation.” It feels like I was sort of bound to be some kind of writer, no matter what. There was an alternate trajectory for my life when I was young where I could have become more serious about music. I think I wanted to write film scores, but I might have actually liked being a piano teacher. Instead, I have spent a lot of my working life teaching, but even that has been inconsistent. I recently started in a new line of work as a paralegal, which so far I quite like. I like being various in many parts of my life, but my writing life is really kind of the constant. I try to think of it always as the larger project, even though material reality at times makes that difficult to do. 

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

I loved books from the time I was very young. I wrote a lot, often just privately, from a very young age as well. I think I like that writing is a quiet, private creative practice, and that you can take it with you anywhere. 

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

The most recent true greats are Margery Kempe by Robert Glück, and a rewatch of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, but I also watched Robert Altman’s 3 Women for the first time a few weeks ago, so I’ll slide that in. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve been more seriously trying to get to a place where I feel finished with a manuscript mainly of fragments that I’ve been working on off and on for 4-5 years now, which may never go anywhere but I need to finish so I can stop thinking about it. Other than that, trying to find my footing writing new poems again in what feels like a new season of my life. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Michael Boughn, THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2

 

Tropos remains a matter of immaterial
condensation turns the poem against the current
tattered grimace peers between cracks
in the Mall’s magisterial façade mutters
glory and grace can be yours as well
as that three-dollar Armani shirt Progress
delivers from tiny foreign hands to your
doorstep
              Away borders on leaves
seasoned with pulsion’s direction
as restless negativity, not to haggle
over minor inflections
but to indicate bent philosophical
familiarity and Hegelian digressions
through back-and-forth interruptions
sometimes mistaken for tropological
ontologies’ second cousin
twice removed (here incest reveals
blurred edges lead intrepid
into mansions of the Night

and surprise’s incubation
lost in words’ headstrong connections
this way, that cave the River Alph
pours from, where uncertain still leads it in
spike of Porlockian Interference|
Patterns universal downer) (“Tropological Ontology / of Uncertain Emotions”)

I’ll admit I’ve seen but a scattering of titles by Toronto poet and critic Michael Boughn over the years, from his incredible collection of essays, Measure’s Measures: Poetry & Knowledge (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], to poetry collection Great Canadian Poems for the Aged, Vol. 1 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) [see my review of such here], as well as the chapbook The Battle of Milvian Bridge (shuffaloff, 2021) [see my review of such here], not to mention his chapbook In the shadows (2022) that I produced through above/ground press. Whenever I do encounter his work, I’m always curious why it hasn’t received more attention than it has, Boughn somehow sitting as one of our unheralded senior Canadian poets and thinkers. Wrapped together as eleven chapbook-sections and pamphlet coda is THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 2 (2024), the first edition of which is produced in a hand-numbered edition of twenty-five copies (mine is number twenty-five). Subtitled “A Hyperbiographical Users Manual,” this book-length assemblage follows THE BOOK OF UNCERTAIN BOOK 1 (Brooklyn NY: Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), and extends across eleven sections, each of which are set in their own numbered chapbook-binding—“Tropological Ontology of Uncertain Emotions,” “Uncertain Micro-Politics in Pirate Utopias,” “Uncertain Wave Functions in Local Populations,” “The Box of Uncertain,” “The Box of Uncertain: Subsequent cats/eats,” “New Loves and Other Tales of Lurid Uncertain,” “Etiquette Lesson #3—Politely Escaping Knowledge in the Application of Uncertain,” “Treating Uncertain Symptoms,” “Uncertain Times & Nomadic Conclusions—A Mythic Phantasmagoria in Love’s Dark Heart,” “Leaving 3” and unnumbered “&: Numinosum—An Alchemical Reverie in a Blakean Mood,” as well as the coda, the pamphlet/poem “Numinosum Aftermath.” The “&” section holds echoes of bpNichol’s posthumous Gifts: The Martyrology Book(s) 7& (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1990), offering itself as a kind of furthering, of incompleteness akin to hinting what might come next, whatever that might be (I think for the editors of the bpNichol title it sat as simultaneous grief, hopeless optimism and archival possibility). There’s also something of the physical structure of this collection reminiscent of how Warren Dean Fulton reissued the ten poem-sections of George Bowering’s classic Kerrisdale Elegies through his chapbook press, Pooka Press, produced in a limited edition run of eighty-two copies in 2008 for a class at Carleton University, after the initial run had long gone out of print (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1986), just prior to the reissue (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008).

Boughn’s is an extended and packed lyric sentence of collaged language, reference, sound and influx, a poetics reminiscent of Toronto poet Stephen Cain’s recent Walking & Stealing (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but with a far denser language and heft of materials. “Midden heap / of nothing’s discarded remains,” he writes, in the first section of the fourth poem-chapbook, “layer // after layer after layer has already / signified more than decency would have / circulate in polite company , a normative / exclusionary sig-fix designed to keep power / well-contained and ordered according / to bleach requirements […].” There is just so much happening, so many simultaneous directions, to his ongoingnesses through these lines. As he spoke of the project, then still very much in-progress, as part of an interview for Touch the Donkey in 2019:

Well, this is really the crucial question facing us at this moment of intensifying crisis. Modernity destroyed a mode of being-together that was an intimate proximity, both to other people, to other animals, and to the divine. It wasn’t idyllic by a long shot. It was by all accounts brutish, violent, and horribly intrusive. But it was a different mode of being-together than what awaited us in the cities. Living cheek by jowl, we insulate ourselves from the people who live closest to us for privacy, where the only animals we ever encounter are domesticated pets, where our meat is purchased in cellophane wrapped packages, and where the divine, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, no longer flutters except exsanguinate and grimacing.

What’s missing is belonging in a human sense of being-together. We struggle to live among the wold vagaries of vast markets, including labour markets that force people into motion all the time. Witness what just went down in Oshawa. Society is a place of probabilities and statistically verifiable behaviours among alienated individuals determined by a set of social imaginary significations and governed by imposed norms. We are seeing the result of that process that has been going on now for some 500 years in the rise of reactionary populists like Trump and Bolsonaro who are able to exploit that deep alienation by creating a “movement” in which people experience a sense of belonging to something with others who also belong – a being-together, but one that is finally based on exclusion and violence against those who don’t belong.

I’m intrigued by the potentially-endless ongoingness of such a project as this, even before the consideration of this as a second volume, and makes me curious as to see what that larger arc of his published work actually looks like. Should someone be working on a selected poems of Michael Boughn? And how far might this current work extend, whether to a BOOK 3 or beyond? As part of the same interview, he speaks of his larger, ongoing work, saying: “Well, it’s really all the same work, ever since Iterations of the Diagonal back in 1995. It’s the work of finding ways to weave the complexity and mystery of beinghere in language.” Of language itself, one might say. Of being in that exact, single moment, however many languages and gods may have been or have ever been. Or, as the final poem in the collection, the coda-pamphlet “Numinosum Aftermath” reads:

                                                    but in the difference
lies soul’s challenge to embrace
what’s beyond yet within it, what we bring
to it as it is brought to us, light and dark,
seen and unseen, known and unknown
twists us around being’s poles, flings us
willy nilly into the roil of common day
where we catch a glimpse of a new world
in confusion’s pain and grief
and are surprised by the greeting
of a stranger
                     who is us

Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton, with an introduction by Lisa Fishman

 

When a book or a poem or essay or performance has already been made, are there ways for it to keep changing, so to speak, in part by means of being thought about, spoken about, written about, overhead by others? We know that the answer is yes, and that criticism is one word for that process, even if cultural space for meaningful criticism seems to be shrinking. A practice discussed at length by the panel is curation; each writer approaches curation in ways likely to expand and refresh one’s sense of what critical engagement is. When Andrew Steeves sets type as a printer and publisher, when Jim Johnstone reviews a book, when Chris Patton exhibits fragments of a text written by a person who was once alive, when Klara du Plessis creates the conditions for a new text or experience to be made by way of bringing writers together to share their work in unforeseen ways (her name for this is Deep Curation) – when any such endeavours are undertaken, work by someone is brought forward to be encountered by someone else. Curation lays the ground for conversation, critical inquiry, collaboration, and – as the panelists light upon with palpable hope – community. (Lisa Fishman, “INTRODUCTION”)

I recently caught a copy of Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), originally curated as one of the Wayzgoose Talks via Gaspereau Press, the full list of which is included at the back of this collection. “At the annual Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose,” the collection cites, “authors Jim Johnstone, Christopher Patton, and Klara du Plessis were invited to discuss the topic of Literary Criticism and Curation by their publisher, Andrew Steeves.” Have publications been produced of every talk-do-date? It would seem a very Gaspereau thing to do, certainly. Either way, I would hope that transcripts of such might be available, somewhere, as a kind of checking-in on how various writers, curators, thinkers etcetera are considering their craft. As Steeves began these particular proceedings: “I think the best place to start would be for all of us to just locate ourselves. Briefly, in what way do each of you write about writing?”

For those unaware, Klara du Plessis has been engaged for some time with what she terms Deep Curation, an absolutely fascinating curatorial structure she discusses as part of this conversation. As part of the panel, she offers that her sense of the term “literary curator” “[…] includes my more recent and ongoing project, Deep Curation, that experiments with collaborative poetry performance and centers the poetry reading as more than a vehicle for disseminating published texts, as an artform in its own right. In my academic work, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of labour that goes into organizing poetry readings (like the ones we saw here today). It’s very under-valued and under-theorized work. Both in the practical and theoretical sense, for me, this literary curatorial work is a form of thinking about and enlivening writing. This work becomes an analysis, whether I engage with more traditional scholarly forms or not.”

The ensuing conversation floats easily through and across literary curation as each participant sees such, specifically around each of their individual practices, much of which begins to overlap, in quite interesting ways, one I dearly wish I could have attended in person. So much of this work, this community effort, is being attended by multiple across the country, so any kind of deep dive into the conversation around such is essential, especially given the rarity of such conversation. It is one thing to say there aren’t enough reviews, for example, but then even fewer are discussing the arguments and ethos of reviewing, let alone any consideration of literary curation, from editing books and chapbooks to writing reviews or essays and organizing and curating literary readings. “When we’re talking about curation,” Johnstone says, near the end, “we’re talking about filtering noise. There are a lot of people who write, and there’s a lot of writing waiting to be published – a good curator can get a community excited about what’s happening. They can bring voices into perspective in a way that makes you want to hear them.”