Sunday, March 01, 2026
introducing: Goose and Frankie,
Saturday, February 28, 2026
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Fournier
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Punishment Bag changed my life in that it gave me something to do—or to aspire to do—for a long time. Having it growing somewhere in the background allowed me to describe myself as a poet. There’s a persona poem in the book about a first responder who recovers a suicide from a cesspool. I wrote it when I was an academic and had spent almost the whole of my professional life teaching language and literature. Now I’m a structural firefighter. Did the poem change my life?
My most recent work
is green, stolonic—kudzu-like—and my previous work is sectile and cool to the
touch.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Poems are usually shorter,
so if you waste a lot of time wrestling with yourself and questioning what
writing is or whether it’s even advisable, I think it tends to just kind of win
out over time. I’m not a huge fan of the genre divisions. I think what I write
next will be some big combination of all these things.
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?
Yes!
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?
They almost always begin with the first line, but I can think of at least one exception. This makes me think I ought to start more in the middle. Starting at the end seems like a bad idea, though I know John Irving writes that way. When it comes to writing, I don’t like to do anything too exclusively, even if it works.
I guess the scare quotes around
“book” in the question are supposed to distance the idea of a project that an
author might have starting out from the object that ends up being produced and
distributed in the world, but I kind of prefer to imagine that some ancient
sophist poses the question while doubting the very existence of books. These
so-called “books” your purport to believe in. That’s kind of how it feels to
me, having rarified them so much with my obsession.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to
your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
A few poems I’ve
written came from imagining I had an audience. One called “Edible Arrangement”
in my book and another called “What makes it a poem?” that I wrote after the
book was done. As a reading attendee I’m always waiting for the reading to be
over so I can get to the fun part of talking and making jokes and having a few
drinks. Readings are best as a pretext for hanging out. I enjoy giving them
very much though. If I could chain people to the seats and make them listen to
me all night I would.
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?
Not to be coy, but
these seem like current questions. I think a lot of my poetry is asking what a
poem is, trying to catch some fleeting glimpse of one of poetry’s contours. I
guess there’s some organicism or naturalism behind my writing. I’m very
interested in the question of what word comes next. Or, you know, should that
be the last one.
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 writers
should write things, maybe even just in their heads. Ideally they’ll have some good
intuitions about how it will ramify in “the world that is the world of all of
us,” but that’s not necessary. Writers have to take on a lot that isn’t
writing—teaching, child-rearing. They exercise a lot of judgement. That’s not
really their social role as I see it. Even if a writer were just sitting in
their own private version of a temple typing onto a ream of paper that fed
immediately into a shredder, I think that would be good. I saw a very funny
bogus and potentially even slightly offensive reel recently that features a
Chinese sage with an English AI voiceover. The sage is saying “Is there a woman
in your house who likes to sleep a lot? Don’t call her lazy! She is bringing
good luck and fortune to the house. This is very hard work, so naturally she is
tired and needs her rest.” That’s kind of how I see writers working globally.
8 - Do you find the process of working with
an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Very few editors have seen anything profitable enough in my work to bother with
it. Friends and my wife have done a lot pro bono. I listen very
attentively, and I often change things, but really I just want them to tell me
it’s perfect. I sort of wish I remembered everything I changed so I could get
in there and change it back one day.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My therapist told me about a really
great deep tissue guy who lives on top the Sandia Mountains, and she advised me
to get in touch with him. I was very skeptical that it could help, and the work
he was doing was and is very painful, some kind of jujitsu-grip technique. I
don’t really understand it, but it works. Find somebody like that.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move
between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
For me, critical
prose has mostly been a way to secure funds and benefits. The University of
Chicago gave me an amazing fellowship that stipulated, you know, “finish your
dissertation within the space of the year or you’ll be immediately ejected from
the program.” That’s not verbatim, but that made it very easy to focus on
criticism for a while! I like having the big degree too, that’s very appealing.
I put the letters after my name on LinkedIn, and I have all the magazines
address themselves to “Dr. Fournier.” And people at work still call me “doctor”
or “doc” as a kind of joke every now and then. It can be very confusing for the
patients.
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?
If I’m not at work I usually wake up and spend the first few hours of the day staring into my cell phone screen. I had a lot of debt and financial insecurity through my teens, 20s, and early 30s, so I’m basically obsessed with money. Now that I have some retirement savings, sometimes I’ll just go into my E-Trade account and refresh the page over and over watching the market values go up and down however many hundredths of a percentage point. If I’m at work, I make coffee for everyone at the station and then I go out into the bay and wash the trucks. I really like language learning, though I’m miserable at it, so I’ll usually put a Spanish audio lesson on a single Airpod, and I’ll scrub up the engine and the rescue repeating things like, En Argentina, hay una región vinícola muy conocida. Ayer, hice un recorrido por los viñedos.
I read this book
recently called Living on Earth—it jumped out at me from the nonfiction
table at the Strand on the Upper West Side, I think because it was what I was
presently doing. Anyway, the author, Godfrey-Smith, talks a lot about the corpus
callosum—the connection point between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Apparently reading really enlarges this thing. He also talks about some subtle
measurable differences in the brain activity and anatomy of people who read and
write from right to left, and my routine, since I was even a very young child,
has involved writing left to right. I’m thinking it could be good to start
writing right to left. It’s just a matter of choosing the right language.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do
you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My window and the birds
outside, or sometimes I’ll write about the coffee on my desk. If the birds
outside seem a little too boring, I have an Audubon Society Field Guide with
all the really great birds in it. The boobies and stuff. If that doesn’t get
you out of a funk, I don’t know what will.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Vanilla. My mother
had a very acute sense of smell, and she loved vanilla. If I ever smell Vel
soap again (they stopped making it) I’d be instantly transported to my mother’s
bathroom. Also, Murphy’s Oil 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?
Leslie Marmon Silko has this great
thing about how the plot of Ceremony is like a spider web, and Paula Gunn Allen has all this awesome stuff about the Lakota sacred hoop and what she
calls a matrifocal worldview. Spiders scare me a little, and there’s black
widows here in New Mexico, and brown recluses. Their bites cause a lot of
damage, but the thing is they hardly ever bite people. I’m a bit embarrassed to
admit this, but I even put out some chemical that’s supposed to kill them. We
had a lot of spiders in our yard, and I like to lift weights out there,
so I was worried I’d accidentally bother one when I was grabbing my BowFlex
adjustable dumbbells, and it would bite me. I’m not going to do that anymore
though. I hope they come back so I can learn more about how to write poems from
them.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This is the opposite
of how this question probably means to be answered. It seems like it’s after some
deep foundational influence, but, before my new Zen Soto practice—just sitting—I’m
reading a few poems a day by Laura Kolbe from her book Little Pharma. I
met Kolbe just before midnight on December 31st, and then she was
the first person I talked to in the new year. She’s a doctor—a medical doctor—
an internist, and her poems are deeply inflected by her being a doctor without
being reducible to that. Since I started firefighting, I’ve become a little
worried that my poems are going to go, like, “Get the Narcan!—.4 migs for IM.”
Her writing feels important to me now because it shows how much deeper and
weirder it can be than that. Justin Cox is another very important writer to my life
and work. He wrote a book, Stock Pond, that might be even better than looking out a
window. I’m also one fourth of a poetry coterie called the Merry Company, also
sometimes called the Gay Science. The other members—important to me in every
way—are Chris Schlegel, Jess Laser, and Dan Poppick. I don’t know how I got in.
They’re sort of like the SEAL Team Six of poetry.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't
yet done?
I’d like to get my
paramedic license. I’m a basic, which just feels pretty lame when it comes to
practicing medicine. I’d also like to run a 50-mile ultra.
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’m thinking about
maybe trying for a masters in linguistics or linguistic anthropology. A lot of
my favorite critical writers are anthropologists by training—people like David Scott and David Graeber. All the Davids. And Ofelia Zepeda, who wrote one of my
favorite poems of all time, is a linguist.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
I don’t really see writing as being
opposed to doing something else. Sometimes I wonder if writing is opposed to
writing! I was just thinking how Siddhartha Gautama and Socrates never wrote
anything at all. They were such great writers they didn’t have to.
19 - What was the last great book you read?
What was the last great film?
I really liked Marty Supreme,
but the last really great film I saw was On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,
which was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni. It’s so good my wife was mad
at me afterward just for being a man. I had a shelf with all the books I read
in 2025 on it, but I dismantled it when I moved into my new office. It would
have made answering this question a lot easier. I’ve read other great books
since I read it, but I’m going to give Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of
Empires as my answer here. A few years ago my old friend Rowland Yang sent
me a book by Benjamin Labatut called When We Cease to Understand the World. That was a banger. I have an idea for a book I’d like to write that is right in
between the two of them, and all about poetry!
20 - What are you currently working on?
Yesterday I repainted the room that was my office, and I’m busy working on getting it ready for the baby. My wife is due on March 30th. I’ve also been putting a lot of research into what VR headset I want to get and what games I can bring to play while she’s laboring. She’s an ob/gyn and she tells me about all the awful things the FOBs do when their wives are delivering. FOB is “father of the baby.” She tells me all this stuff—people delivering with the TV on, families eating crab claws in the delivery room—and I’m like, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Friday, February 27, 2026
Joshua Beckman, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries
Early 1984
Dad got a new sled for me
and Randi. It’s great.
My Aunt Arlene came, and
she got me an art set. I like it a lot.
Sean came over and we
played Monopoly. He won.
We had Chinese food. I had
a great time.
I got my new handlebars. I
like them a lot.
Today I went to the YMCA.
Jeff and Colin came too. It was fun.
We went to my Grandpa and
Grandma’s house. It is in Florida.
We went to Clear Water
beach. The water was cold.
I got to play Trivial
Pursuit with my family. We had teams.
My team won.
I went bike riding and
saw an alligator.
We came home from Florida.
Today I was drawing and I
had a lot of fun.
I rode my bike all day
long. It was a lot of fun.
I saw my Aunt Libby and
we had a picnic.
I went to art and I had a
lot of fun.
I went to Hebrew School.
I hurt my ankle.
I met kids near my
street. We rode bikes all day.
A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries continues a process articulated through Animal Days, composing poems out of an array of rough notes, journal and diary entries, leaning fully into the acknowledgement of that process, carving poems from what might be an array of first-draft looseness, narrative and immediate. “I love how in dreams you can climb a tree and recline in the / branches.” he writes, to open the sequence “The Great Good Fortune of the Dreamer.” “I love how in dreams you can fold up a giant picture without creas- / ing it. // I love how in dreams you can order spray cane flowers for dinner.” There’s a smallness, an intimacy and an interiority, to these notes, these fragments, with titles such as “A Chapter Summary in the Style of Boccaccio,” “A List of the Creatures Who Entered My Home This Year,” “van ride to jfk,” “Body Questions,” “David Shapiro” or “brief note back.” As the prior collection held poems from notes composed across extended and ongoing illness, the poems continue that particular level of sustained and sketched interiority. “J– of Barrytown crosses the river to buy lemons,” begins the untitled opening poem, a piece titled only through the table of contents as “a chapter summary in the style of Boccaccio,” “and one there, / in a single hour has three slight misunderstandings, each of / which he weathers, returning with a salad.”
Beckman holds such a quiet intimacy to these poems, an unselfconscious note-taking through a variety of explorations and experiments with form, a deeply-purposeful assemblage of poems that manage such incredible attention to silence, moments and how both are best held. “What broke the tooth?” asks the poem “Body Questions,” “What cracked the tooth? / What filled the mouth with dirt and metal? / What got / into the heart?” Or, as the “Chap. 1” of the short sequence “Aegina, May (Chapters 1-8)” reads:
Full of quiet concern, a dear friend suggests a new path – The gathering crowd – A punishing scene – Sun Clouds – A history of the land over which the sun clouds first appeared
Beckman’s A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries closes with the title piece, a sequence of prompts on how to do exactly what the title says, offering this brief introduction: “The following is a list of instructions for making fragments from your diaries. Each instruction can be tried multiple times in the same or different notebooks. While my expectation is that you will naturally find the notebook and pages you are interested in and will move on when needed, on occasion I have given directions to flip pages or stay on the same page in the hope this might be helpful.” Across the book’s final seven pages, the notes include:
Any page, last two lines.
Any page, first verb to second verb.
Transcribe the next parenthetical encountered.
Write out the next three questions encountered.
Next three punctuation marks, each with the word after them.
The
process Beckman describes is one I find curious, given it so foreign from my own
compositional structures; Beckman’s processes seem closer to Ottawa poet Roland Prevost’s decades-long daily stretches of composing “log book” entries,
returning back to his notes to shape poems, some of which landed, for example,
in his full-length poetry debut, Singular Plurals (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere
Books, 2014). Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell, as well, works from endless notebooks,
as I think does Canadian poet Lisa Robertson (there are most likely others, but
those the most overt that come to mind). A sleek thing, at less than seventy
pages, A Guide for Making Fragments from Diaries is a charming and
intelligent book, one that offers so much through such delicate movement, and there
are elements of his gestures I might even compare to the works of certain
Canadian minimalists—Cameron Anstee [see my review of his latest], Jack Davis
[see my review of his debut], Guy Birchard [see my review of his latest] or the late Nelson Ball [see my review of his posthumous selected]—all of whom manage
a carved, careful and fiercely intelligent density across the short lyric, but
Beckman presents as a moving target, holding those as elements of his work but
not exclusively so. The form, one might say, is as much the thing, and the
variety throughout the collection provides. Consider the poem “A. Said,” for
example, a lyric of one word per line, with empty lines between, scrolling down
across fifteen full pages. For brevity, there’s an awful lot of it, composed as
a string of words that precisely roll and accumulate. “I // don’t // know,” the
poem offers, mid-way, “R. // said // you // know // you // know // I // love //
you // you // know [.]”
Thursday, February 26, 2026
Leila Chatti, Wildness Before Something Sublime
POSTCARD
Sky of new snow open
like eternity. Numinous,
benign. All
day wind moves the day
along. January still
blank as if unbegun. I’ve
come to face it—
I have to live and go on
living. With the
knowledge
oblivion excludes me,
apart from
brief, fathomless sleep. This
unshakable quiet
I am told is peace. For you,
I count the blessings
which stitch me to this
earth. Lacework
of time. Pines feathered
and faithful as swans.
This morning, I woke
and pain, a while, stayed
dreaming.
Children unknowable to me
left before my seeing
angels in the yard.
I think of myself as having discovered these poems rather than having wrought them—I am the one who held the rod, entered the field, but I did not conjure the water already there. I feel they are cowritten: some in conversation with another (unaware) writer, others a dictation of a voice beyond my understanding—my unconscious or an external force—call it God, the Muse, I can’t say, but I know better than to claim it as mine alone. Call it divine.
The poems in “Oracle” are written as echoes or shadow sides—responses, negative images—to poems by women whose voices first led me to discover my own. Each poem in “Divine” was written while flipping very quickly, at random, through beloved books and recording words and fragments that evoked a bodily response or otherwise snared my attention, as well as my misreadings, reactions, and associative leaps. The “Night Poems” were written on the brink of sleep, on my cell phone. Often, I would doze off midway through. The final sections, “After Thought” and “Shadow/Self,” are the poems that arrived once I learned again, at last, how to move out of my mind’s way.
Might someone else be able or willing to track the distances and differences between this collection and her prior? I would hope so, given how deliberate such an opening declaration. Chatti writes of being open to receiving the words, as well as returning to the foundations of what prompted her to write in the first place; finding her ground, again. And Chatti offers an array of responses, after works by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Jean Valentine, Louise Glück, Linda Gregg, Alejandra Pizarnik, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich and C.D. Wright, citing a few of these poets more than once. Through returning to this array of poets, as she says, “women whose voices first led me to discover my own,” it seems to reinforce this consideration of the author attempting to find ground after feeling untethered. Go back to the basics, as it were, returning to those poems and those writers that provided those original reasons to begin. In the first poem “after Sylvia Plath,” the four-poem sequence “ONE WOMAN: A Poem Unvoiced,” Chatti writes:
I am wild. I am wild. It is
the wildness before something sublime.
The violet hour after the
earth stills, when the roots
Bury their tails, their
suffusion. It is so raucous, elsewhere.
The shades, the bodies,
are black and moving, like infinity.
Silence approaches and
swells. Its invisible clarity
Swells, ink opening to
let stillness in.
It erases knowledge,
languageless.
Across five sections—“ORACLE,” “DIVINE,” “NIGHT POEMS,” “AFTER THOUGHT” and “SHADOW/SELF”—these poems do seek a return to balance through and after loss and grief, the sensation of such spelled out through poems such as “GRIEF,” that opens: “Like a hawk, gyring / out of reach. / In sweet of shadow / larger than its origin.” Across deeply intimate heartbreak, Chatti writes around infertility and dreams, desire and the impossibility of hope. “Will you ever / speak to me again, beyond / my nightly resurrections? My desire / displaces, is displaced.” she writes, as part of the poem “MY SENTIMENTAL AFTERNOON,” a poem that offers this devastating closure: “It’s true: I am learning to believe / there are beautiful things / never meant for me.” Still, there are ways through which one can see this a book of optimism, working through as Chatti composes poems clawing through the dark and attempting what might lay beyond, although the collection as a whole is far more detailed, more complex, than simply that. Through connecting her grief and hope through the language of other women, other poets, Chatti works to reconnect to her very roots, reminding her of that sense of community especially required through such feelings of untethered loss. “I run under water / a fistful of blueberries,” she writes, in the poem “FOR THE BABY THAT IS NOT, IS NO LONGER, COULD ONE DAY BE,” “a kettle / I watch until it shrieks. My face, / so I can face it.” And here, the crux of the collection, perhaps: however dark this moment of grief, to be able to face it, however screaming and wild and silent; for grief to land, to process, it has to fully be, and it is, here. Or, as the poem “A WOMAN HAS TO LIVE HER LIFE” ends:
You took you from us
and two decades later I’m
on a mountain
startling at butterflies,
shivery
phantoms in the yellow
clover.
And the clouds quietly
knit over.
And I take a different
path back down.
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