Ryan Skrabalak lives in “Kingston, NY,” where he is an instructor, printer, and radio DJ. He runs and edits
Spiral Editions, a small poetry press and occasional tape label.
Goes on now except), published by Beautiful Days Press this year, is his latest book.
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?Of my first three chapbooks, only one wasn't self published. I was (and I guess still am) mostly writing for friends. To get my writing into a wider circulation--past people I knew--was thrilling, but also a bit terrifying. I'd been writing for a while, so my first book was helpful in making me feel like I was a part of "something." I knew that the "something" was complicated and largely fraught, but it still felt good. speCt!, the folks who put my first book out, had like, really good taste. I was honored. This most recent work,
Goes on now except), is rather different in form and structure to lots of my work. I do think much of my work occupies a similar tone, though. This book and the last feel related in that way, despite the disparate looking pages.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?My mom bought me a copy of
Langston Hughes' The Dream Keeper--the edition illustrated by Brian Pinkney--shortly before my first day of school in 3rd grade. At one point I had most of those poems memorized. No longer. I was fascinated with the Beats in high school, mainly Burroughs, Welch, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Those last fellas are few tough heroes to have, I guess, but who doesn't have those? College was the big sort of aha moment: Lorca, Mayer, Whitman, Dickinson, Baraka, Notley, O'Hara, etc. etc. I did my undergrad at Brooklyn College, so I was reading New Yorkers alongside New Yorkers. It became my world for a long time. I wrote poems with friends in them for friends and with those same friends--we had a big, rollicking, cinematic writing collective. In a lot of ways, I wrote poems so that I could have friends, too.
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?This latest book took me about three and a half months to write. It's the shortest bit of complete writing that I've ever (and probably will ever) accomplish. I was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers after my dad had fallen very ill. I'd basically alternate between rehab room / waiting room / car / Stewart's (for those who don't know, a regional convenience store franchise that sells ice cream, usually with bright orange booths for the newspaper-and-coffee set). The writing quite literally fell out of me. I just had to make sure I was able to catch all of it as it fell out. That type of writing feels blessed. It doesn't happen too often.
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 write every day, usually in the morning. In college I was introduced to the poetry of
kari edwards, who I read fervently and obsessively, and who I think is one of our most massively underread late poets. I can't remember the exact sequence and durations, but
Rob Halpern notes, in his introduction to
edwards' succubus in my pocket, that she would wake, meditate for x hours, read philosophy for an hour, fiction for an hour, and poetry for an hour, constantly writing across these various texts, then finally eat breakfast, go back to reading, etc. I am not nearly as regimented or as robust in my mornings, but I drew a lot of inspiration from hir dedication to encounter and thought. Always reading. Always writing.
For the most part, I am writing into a question or a feeling, or around a question or a feeling. I do a lot of circling and sizing up. Collage work, mosaic work, lots of tinkering in the first half of my process. I do a lot of work up front. Once the book is together, it's mostly there. I will send it to a few friends to get a sense of sequencing and big picture work.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I love a reading. I do a lot of them because I need the constant reminder that poetry is social, writing is social. The reminder is in the act. I'd be willing to bet that many of us could use that reminder: poetry doesn't belong to anyone. It sure as hell doesn't belong to big presses, various awards of varying prestige, or poets in guarded and well-funded institutions. It doesn't belong to coastal metropolitan interiority, nor straight cisgendered poets using a crystal goblet as a hinge in their lyrical epiphany, nor wealthy white poets writing odes in celebrations of elected government officials. Everyday we are further immiserated and atomized, and this idea that poetry is for some, or that poetry is successful when it "communicates something," or that the final form of the poem is in a perfect bound book, is completely ludicrous. The final form of the poem is in the air. I think bad poetry--or, to be, er, democratic, poetry I am not fond of--does a compelling job of presenting to us and selling us a world of ineffectual bourgeois interiority. And we must refuse that world, that notion. I love a reading with less than five people in the audience--I love reading to that audience as much as I love being in the chair, receiving.
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 think my concerns echo with a lot of contemporary writers. Or, maybe, they echo amongst the writers I care about, or the ones that am intrigued by, or feel in convo with? The lyric "problem" comes to mind...or, the faults, failures, and road-tested merits of the lyric. Surely there are many, many folks who have more lucid, more cohesive, and more organized thoughts on this than I. The lyric imagination, say, and how it acts as a compliment and a foil to collective imagination, collective thought. I’m not that interested in the “lyric I” because I’m not really interested in the world that constructs it or that concretizes it. But I do think of how useful the lyric is in siphoning off, compartmentalizing, taxonomizing, etc. aspects of our lives, and how it is able to make our thinking and our criticism more acute, more refined. I think it was
Kunitz who said something regarding the lyric like "the voice of the solitary who makes others less alone." I don't put a lot of credence in that, but like most things I disagree with, I am still perhaps curiously troubled by it.
What else, hmm...I think, perhaps related to that--related to the "lyric I," is the concept of "gay literature." I don't know, it feels...maybe this feels silly to even comment on...it feels a bit frozen, or jammed, as a genre or category. There's this incessant need to identify, to label. And a lot of the end result of that constant impulse to identify in conjunction with the lyric first person is this sort of intrinsic, congenital victimhood of establishing yourself as "something" (as in, "this is who I am; I am this"). I'm interested in the non-static expressions of the first person, of first-person subjectivity. I'm not that interested in a narrative that boils down to "when you're me, it looks/feels/sounds/etc. like this"...how can the form, the language, the tone, etc. take on a more embodied sense of queerness or "being gay?" I think we could stand to be a bit more rigorous in our critiques of institutionalized categories...that includes "gay lit" and the narrative(s) that it's concerned with.
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?At the present moment in the United States, I think we're sort of obsessed with illiteracy. Love Island, generative AI, short-form video consumption...I don't know. At risk of sounding glib, since I know it's very complicated--my hope is that, maybe just anecdotally, I can help throw a few spike strips down to lessen the speed of our current obsession? I don't delude myself into thinking that folks are reading much poetry. Most certainly not poetry of my own hand! But I do think of poetry, like music or visual art, as an essential space for understanding and study.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?I have pals who read work of mine closely and critically, but I don't consider their critical eye necessarily essential. As in, I just like them reading my work, uncritically. I think that maybe I have a bit of an ego in this way? I feel grateful that I have friends that can read my work with that eye. I trust 'em. I've also been blessed to work with some extremely bright and kind folks these last two books. Present, honest, quick, and curious...one can't ask for much more than that in an editor.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?"If you're guilty of thinking, you're out."
Don Van Vliet.
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?Don't have too much of one. Wake, read, resist screen urge, take dog out, make caffeinated beverage, read, write. If the semester is in session, that setlist of sorts gets truncated quite a bit. I might listen to a book in my car on the way to campus. If I'm working the bar and have a later in-time, the above sample itinerary is usually how it goes. Plus or minus oatmeal, cigarette, additional walk, additional caffeinated beverage, etc.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Friends! I talk to my dog a lot. I always do those things while writing. If I am in the middle of a project and stalled, though, I try to spend a lot of time in public. If I am between projects, I am reading and listening to music. Widely cast nets. Bludgeoning myself with matter to see what shape my brain takes to fill the next vessel. Sounds more violent than it is.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?The smell of the river. Albany, NY: growing up, that river did not smell very good. It smells moderately better now. But that childhood stench comforted me. Kitchens filled with Marlboro Red smoke. Lilacs (my dad was masochistically allergic to them). Dead leaves. Also, fried fish and cabbage. That's a Slav diaspora thing.
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?Music, lots and lots of music. My latest book with Beautiful Days came with a special edition option of a limited CD-R which contained tracks of most of the albums that I listened to obsessively as I wrote. I think a lot about musicality, the poem as a score (in the
Creeley sense of the concept), improvisation, silence, and modulation as they relate to poetry. The poem as "ambient" "score." It's a huge part of my practice, however that is conceptualized...
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
You can probably--hopefully (?)--tell by reading my work.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Like so many other poets, I want to write a novel, ugh. Get in line, I suppose. I've always wanted to open a bar, too. And put a record out, with a rock band.
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?
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?An obsession with language, and an obsession with tinkering. I love taking things apart, but I am no good at putting them back together the way they were. Ask my motorcycle mechanic; I basically keep him employed by myself. Writing made sense in this way.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Hmm. For fiction, I have two:
Nate Lippens' Ripcord and
Sebald's Rings of Saturn. For poetry, also two:
Sara Gilmore's The Green Lives and
Paul Ebenkamp's Sunwatchers. Film...hmm.
Foxes (1980), on the recommendation of poet and pal
Ted Rees. A great coming-of-age film set in Los Angeles during the last days of disco, with an 18 year old Jodie Foster.
19 - What are you currently working on?The poet Will Fesperman and I just finished a book that we've been writing together for about two years...we're in the sort of final tinkering stages now. I've also just finished, I think, another manuscript of work. I'll put it away for a bit and see how it ferments. Other than that, lots of work with the press that I operate, Spiral Editions. There's literally always something to work on over there....
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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