Saturday, February 28, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Joanne Page (d. February 20, 2015)
In 2012, while writer-in-residence at Queen's University, poet Phil Hall founded a lecture series in her name.
A short interview exists here at Open Book: Toronto. A larger author bio exists here, at the Kingston Writers Festival website.
Her obituary, from The Globe and Mail:
PAGE, Joanne
(nee Bowles)
On February 20, 2015, at age 71, Joanne died in the home she loved in Barriefield. Beloved wife of Steve, cherished by Geoff, Ian and Vero, doting 'Grandma Joanie' to Zoe and Elliot and 'Bean' to Anna, loving sister to Patsy (Jim). She will be deeply missed by her extended family and her many good friends. She had a natural talent for friendship, and cemented it with voluminous correspondence both written and verbal. She touched many lives.
A talented painter in her early years, Joanne spread her wings when she and Steve moved to Kingston. For five years she wrote the 'In Other Words' column in the Whig-Standard, dispensing wisdom and common sense on feminist issues of the day. From there she turned to poetry, with 3 published books (the last of which - Watermarks - was nominated for a Trillium Prize). Sadly, the onset of metastatic breast cancer cut short her writing life. Joanne was an active participant in Kingston's literary community, and in 2014 Stan Dragland, delivering the annual Page lecture at Queen's University (a series named in Joanne's honour) celebrated her work and its ongoing contribution to Canadian literature.
We were able to keep Joanne at home until the end thanks to the devoted caregiving of Jean and Ana, and the palliative care-at-home program (Dr. Connidis) Thanks also to Drs. V. Mohr and G. Linn for being anchors for the past 5 years. In lieu of flowers, donations in her name to the Cancer Centre of Southeastern Ontario (through the University Hospitals Kingston Foundation, 55 Rideau Street, Suite 4, Kingston ON K7K 2Z8) would be appreciated.
As per her wishes cremation has taken place, and no funeral service will be held. Her life will be celebrated at an event in the spring.
In care of SIMPLER TIMES CREMATION SERVICE 613-389-7223 /613-382-3683 On-line condolences www.simplertimes.org
Thursday, February 26, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Sims
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 first book made me feel like I’d been rubber-stamped “poet” at last. Now I can look back and laugh a bit at that imagined sense of legitimacy, but…it’s how I felt. It also made me start thinking in terms of “books” vs. “poems.” I became more likely to write a few poems in a similar vein and think “this is a new book” instead of “this is a new poem”…even though there’s never any guarantee, of course, that there will be a next book.
My recent work is truly a departure from my earlier work. In the last two years, I’ve begun to feel like I’ve exhausted my particular voice and style and a new voice and style have been bubbling up from the depths. My new work is still dark, but there’s room in it for levity and playfulness. The poems are still short, but they’re more congested—with words, images and ideas—so there’s less space on the page, and less mental space inside the poems, too. I think of them as my “mid-life crisis” poems since they’re grounded in an age-specific frustration, bitterness, and impatience, but they also have a certain swagger that I don’t think I could have pulled off as a younger writer.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to all of them at once, actually—I wrote a book at age 5 that included poems, stories (deeply indebted to my favorite books), drawings of ballerinas, and one essay on the relationship between Native Americans and the deer they hunt. But I got “serious” about poetry in high school, when my 9th grade English teacher encouraged my poems, and from then on that became my chosen métier. I have occasionally written essays and reviews, though, and I’ve recently started to get serious about returning to fiction.
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?
Usually a new direction for my work starts suddenly—I write a poem, and it’s somehow different, and then if I write a few more like it, I recognize that it’s building into something larger. Right now I’m writing poems in a voice that takes me over—so the voice is dictating this new direction, this new series. Whenever that voice quiets, I’ll be done.
I usually write a first draft pretty quickly. My first drafts are awful, overlong and bloated with excess. After I write that draft, I put it away—I don’t tinker with it immediately. Then after some time has passed I look at it again, and cringe at most of it, but hopefully find a line or two worth saving; I start over with those. And then I write another draft, and winnow down from draft to draft until the poem starts to emerge.
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?
See answers to questions 1 and 3! Though I will add: usually a poem starts with a line I’ve heard or read, or one that pops into my head.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy doing readings, once I’m there and in the moment, but I find that when I have several readings scheduled in a relatively short period of time, I feel scattered and too unfocused or rattled to write. So I guess I’d say readings are counter to my creative process, though they are also creative events in themselves. What’s “created” at a reading when your work meets a live audience is more fleeting, of course, than the daily work of writing, but it’s also more socially satisfying. And if part of the work of writing is about connecting with other human beings, then readings must be an important part of the writing life, the writing process.
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?
Why are we here, how did we get here, why do we die, how will we die, what happens after we die, who am I, who are you, who are we, why are we like this, what made us like this, why do I love you, why do you love me, how long does this not knowing go on?
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?
Our role is to be marginal to the culture at large, and in our marginality lies our ability to look at the culture at large and reflect it, destroy it (in words), rebuild it (in other words), embody it, critique it, embrace it. I think this is exactly what the role of the writer should be, so even though I would love to see, say, Susan Howe on a billboard instead of Taylor Swift, if we were ever co-opted by the culture at large it would probably destroy our capacity for art.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I think it’s always difficult to have others look at and evaluate your work, and sometimes it’s painful, but it can be fruitful, too. Can give you insights into your work that you couldn’t have had yourself, because you’re too close to it. Working with an editor (whether that’s a professional editor or a trusted friend) can change your work and develop it in deep, meaningful ways. Or not. In which case, you can simply ignore the edits.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Do your own fucking work.” –David Markson, given to me directly
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I formerly moved between poetry and critical prose much more often than I do now. I always found it very challenging but mentally rewarding to move between the two – from one genre (poetry) that allowed me to speak from someplace deep and inexplicable, to another (critical prose) that forced me to iterate and explain my response to a work of art, and make that response intelligible and valuable to others who might read it. Writing critical prose is always good brain work, I find—it forces me to use my brain in a way that poetry simply does not (and vice-versa). It makes me feel like I’m back in school, grinding my brain against words in a really satisfying way, a way that almost feels like hands-on labor. But, of course, isn’t. Now I move between poetry and fiction—most days I write a little fiction and tinker with a poem, too. Fiction requires so many things of me that poetry does not – like character and plot development, for instance – but poetry remains for me the genre that takes me to the deepest and most wholly satisfying place.
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?
My day begins early, when my son wakes up. But after he goes to school, I sit down and write for several hours. Before having kids, I never had a routine, and I would write in unscheduled bursts. Now I’m extremely scheduled and even efficient. I can’t afford not to be—I no longer have any time to waste.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
It depends. I always, always turn to reading fiction for sustenance and rejuvenation. If I’m not reading a good novel, I feel out of whack – creatively and existentially. It’s not exactly inspiration (though it can be), but somehow the narrative flow keeps me…in line, in tune, and generally sane. I turn to other poets, too, of course – to my friends’ work, or to work that I’ve always loved, like Dickinson and Stein. But sometimes I turn to TV or film—lately The Walking Dead has been (entertaining and) inspiring me.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Old wood warmed by the sun.
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?
Film is the most influential other medium for me; other forms of visual art—like paintings, photography, sculpture, installation art, etc.—have also been influential. Indie rock & pop music, too.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, David Markson, Rae Armantrout, Diane Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Denis Johnson, John Berryman, Gertrude Stein…those are a few longstanding loves for me.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Publish fiction.
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?
Is writing an occupation? I’ve had to do all sorts of things, occupation-wise, while also being a writer. I’ve taught and done administrative work; I’ve copy-edited other people’s manuscripts and tutored students privately. I expect this will go on and on as I continue to be occupied with writing.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is something I’ve always done.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Poetry: Bough Down by Karen Green
Novel: The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara or My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Prose: The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison or MOTHERs by Rachel Zucker
Film: Boyhood or Zero Dark Thirty or Her
20 - What are you currently working on?
The manuscript for my next poetry book, Staying Alive; a series of poems tentatively called “The Olga Poems”; a young adult murder-mystery novel; and another as-yet-unmentionable prose project.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
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Monday, February 23, 2015
announcing: VERSeFest 2015, March 24 – 29, 2015
Readers to this year's festival include Alessandra Naccarato, Amanda Earl, Anne Compton, Anthony Bansfield, Arleen Paré, Armand Ruffo, Artemysia Fragiskapof, bill bissett, Claire Caldwell, dalton derkson, Daphne Marlatt, Deanna Young, Dennis Cooley, Eric Charlebois, El Jones, Emily McRae, Emma Blue, Forrest Gander, Frances Itani, Frederic Lanouette, Gail Scott, Gary Geddes, Geneviève Bouchard, Gilles Latour, Gillian Wigmore, Herménégilde Chiasson, Ikenna Onyegbula a.k.a OpenSecret, JC Bouchard, Rational Rebel, Jeramy Dodds, John Akpata, Kande Mbeu, Kathleen Goulet, King Kimbit, Komi Olaf, Lillian Allen, Lisa Jarnot, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Lorna Crozier, Margaret Michèle Cook, Marilyn Dumont, Marshall Hryciuk, Mehdi Hamda, Michel Therien, Nick Laird, Nicole Brossard, Patrick Friesen, Patrick Lane, Paul Vermeersch, Pearl Pirie, Raúl Zurita Canessa, Roland Prevost, Sacha Vachon, Sandra Ridley, Sheri-D Wilson, Stan Dragland, Stephen Brockwell, Steven Artelle, Stevie Howell and Titilope Sonuga. See the entire schedule, including author bios, information on tickets (as well as a number of free events) (and even how to volunteer) here.
The Factory Reading Series is once again participating, with lectures by Armand Ruffo and Lisa Jarnot.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katie L. Price
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I haven’t published my first book yet, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity. For quite some time now I’ve been working on two related projects—BRCA and Sik. While I, at times, have viewed them as macro and micro versions of the same kind of poetic work, I’m currently trying to see if I can successfully combine the macro and micro elements into a single volume that combines the best of both. BRCA was always meant as a grand gesture, and Sik a minute surgical procedure. But the landscape of contemporary poetry has changed since I began work on BRCA, and now it feels more appropriate to produce a series of surgical procedures that, together, amount to a grand gesture.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
For as long as I can remember I’ve been drawn to difficult and experimental literature. In high school and college, I realized that what I found most exciting and invigorating in literature was marketing itself as poetry. And I say “marketing” because I find the best poetry often looks nothing like Poetry. Yet, that term seems to give writers a license to be more bold and courageous in their writing practices.
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 only like to write when I have an idea. If I have an idea, I try it out. It happens rather quickly. If it works, I keep it. If it doesn’t, I move it to the scrap pile.
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 always begins with a punctum, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes. It starts from some small, piercing detail that seems to demand exploration. For me, writing has always been about a larger project; I’m less concerned with individual poems. I’m interested in language that makes interventions into specific discourses, and I this kind of work requires sustained engagement. Writing is always tied to inquiry, experiment, and discovery. I like to explore big questions from multiple angles, which is a project best suited to the book.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
It’s always a delight to share my work with others. The process absolutely impacts my work, and readings give me the creative energy to continue writing. It prompts revisions, deletions, and expansions that enhance the work.
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?
Absolutely. I don’t try to give answers, so much as query topics along particular lines. My current work, for example, queries the relationship between language and the body. I’m particularly interested in how bodies are described in clinical settings, and how these descriptions impact clinical practices. In other words, I’m not just interested in how the clinic writes the body, but also how the body writes the clinic. In the clinic, language has very particular uses (to diagnose, to document, to protect against lawsuit, etc.). What happens when we put that language itself under the microscope?
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’s only role is to produce writing that is fresh to its reader. A contemporary writer should intervene, disrupt, subvert, challenge, push, swerve, parody, and divert. A relevant writer should never insist, demand, reinforce, proselytize, or preach. I had a conversation with a good friend a few weeks ago in which we concluded that to be contemporaneous now is to recognize that insincerity is the only way to sincerity; humor is our only avenue to any kind of seriousness that might matter. I hope that readers can find insight—through surprise, humor, and the unexpected—in my writing.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The process of working with an outside editor is essential, rewarding, and pleasurable. Good editors bring out the best in your work, push you in new directions, and challenge you to exceed your own expectations. What writer wouldn’t want to cultivate such relationships?
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Art is what you can get away with. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically. You don’t have a brother and he likes cheese.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Writing has never come easily to me. It’s something that I’m always glad I did, but is inevitably difficult to do.
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 like to write in the mornings, read in the afternoons, and write emails in the evenings. My days almost always end with television. As a friend of mine once claimed, “the only thing Katie likes more than weird poetry is twisted television.”
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I listen. I watch. I talk with friends. Nothing invigorates me as much as good writing, a gripping show, or a compelling conversation. More and more, I find myself gravitating toward writing that comes from disciplines outside of literature. What can literature teach other disciplines, and what can other disciplines teach literature? This, to me, is our most pressing current question.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Mountain air.
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?
The obvious influence on my current projects is medicine and the medical field. I find inspiration in writing outside the purview of literature. I’m interested in how writing is used by other fields, disciplines, people, and places. What happens to writing when we strip it of its utility? What are the poetics of uselessness?
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I feel lucky to have had extraordinary teachers that introduced me to great writing and difficult ideas: Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin, and Brian Kubarycz. Other writers that are important to my work include Beth Blum, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Dowling, Susan Howe, Rosalind Krauss, Mina Loy, Sianne Ngai, Vanessa Place, Lisa Robertson, Gertrude Stein, Michelle Taransky, Orchid Tierney.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Publish my first book.
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 not sure I would consider myself to be “a writer.” I’m a reader, thinker, teacher, editor, organizer, and facilitator. I’m deeply committed to creative thought, the arts, and life-long intellectual exploration. Writing always comes from these other activities.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing always seemed accessible to me. There’s something democratic about writing. It’s something I can do over lunch, on the weekends, with a glass of wine, at a park, or—as was frequent in my youth—as a form of protest while sitting in the back row at church.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Sarah Dowling’s DOWN, which was just published with Coach House Press. It’s smart, sexy, engaging, and rewards close engagement—all the things you want in a good book of poetry. For the last five years or so, television has captivated my interest much more than film. I’m currently watching—and forcing all my friends to watch—Showtime’s The Affair.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Sik and BRCA, which are beginning to merge into one project. My current work uses medical records as its source text to query how medical professionals describe the body, sickness, and health. I’m also interested in the connection between textual error, genetic error, and clinical error. In the clinic, a typo can have very real consequences. Conversely, genetic code, itself prone to errors, is the language that dictates our bodies. The clinic becomes a kind of border zone between text and bodies, and this aspect of the clinic fascinates me. My work on these projects began at a very specific moment. I was reading through a huge stack of medical records when I came across the phrase “umor present.” I couldn’t help but laugh at the juxtaposition of the gravity of that phrase (indicating that a tumor was present), coupled with its sonic corollary “humor present.” I suppose I have a dark sense of humor, but this was the punctum that prompted me to begin the poetic work.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Friday, February 20, 2015
essay : goldfish: studies in fine thread
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) reviewed in The Bull Calf
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer K. Sweeney
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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 first book felt like I had received a certain legitimacy as a poet. I know it should not be this way, but holding the immortal object in my hands, I understood that all this quiet effort had come to something whole that would live beyond me. People can be somewhat belittling about one’s effort as a poet, as if it’s a hobby or journal flourish which is frustrating as a young poet who is trying to take the art seriously and for whom the work is life-saving. Having an actual book with a Library of Congress # in it did help to transcend some of these attitudes. That’s the outer realm. The inner world of my art had a wonderful momentum after the first book came out. I could approach poetry in larger sweeps, think forward in long-poems and bodies of work. The shape and scope of the art opened up for me. My most recent work is more diverse in range of style and approach, more music and sound-conscious, less determined in arc and theme.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t think this was a conscious choice. My poetic voice was simply the most compelling. When I sat down to write, I heard poetry, I wrote poetry. Poetry is the room with all the doors and windows. It propels me forward. It is a way of thinking and integrating and deepening and drawing myself closer to “the family of things.” I do love to write both fiction and non-fiction, but poetry is my home base, how I feel my way through the world.
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?
All of the above. When it comes to process, I stay pretty open about how writing projects develop. Sometimes they are mined from the deep and sometimes they are the result of notes, journaling, and laboriously culling a tangle of thoughts into shape. Every so often a poem comes out gloriously whole, but usually it’s more 90% there at first, then that last 10% to call something “finished” can take a very long time and involve some dramatic revision. I have one long poem I worked on and off for seven years. So this is a happy paradox for me. I am always simultaneously writing both quickly and slowly depending on the work. I’m writing from an “if-not-now-then-when” place and yet also resigned to let the whole process be glacial if need be.
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 begins with a couple of words. I benefit from some sort of focal point on a white page, plant a few odd and compelling words at the top and begin. I don’t necessarily use them or write anything to do with them, but they act like little keys. Listening to the sounds of the words themselves or contemplating the relationship between them seems to order my mind just enough while still staying receptive and loose, and I start thinking into language and listening my way forward. A poem about this way of entrance: http://constructionlitmag.com/the-arts/poetry/jennifer-sweeney/ As for building a body of work into a “book,” it’s also a very organic process. I write poems for a long time not thinking too much about the shape of a book until I have maybe 25 solid poems, then I start listening to what they are saying to each other, and the shape of a book begins to clarify.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings. They often feel like the completion gesture of the creative process and are gratifying and generous occasions, but to be honest, I have become a bit more reclusive as a writer in recent years, and don’t do as many readings as I used to. They have become more and more emotional and vulnerable experiences for me. Preserving the kind of inner listening required for the writing life is my first and most important focus.
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 poems often derive from direct experience, the aesthetic dimensions of music, image, meaning and spirituality—my angle is to stay close to rendering language that is true to the layers of consciousness that manifest during an experience, that is to trace the full dimensions of questions rather that answer them, to follow the questions rather than arrive at a conclusion. That said, I also love the work of the lyric poem that transcends meaning and experience and dwells at the edge of the known and the unknowable. As far as what questions are most pressing to me, this is always changing, but my third book, Little Spells (forthcoming in spring 2015), explores the scope of what slim margins all life leans on, fertility and the lack of, what rough spark we depend on every day to keep going. Much has been written on the ‘gates of death’ but perhaps less on what guards the ‘gates of life,’ and this collection seeks to perpetually meditate on threshold, potential, conjuring, from many different entry points to speak more universally about how we become, and how we endure a stalled narrative. It is the poetry of waiting, being suspended at the crossing, the work of everyday magic, loss, and bounty.
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?
This is a big question, and I think every writer would have a slightly different answer at any certain stage of her/his process. In direct and indirect ways, each writer is making an individual effort toward the collective expansion of the knowledge of ourselves by witnessing our lives and the time that we live. We chart a history of consciousness, and how we approach that is each writer’s contribution. No writer has to fulfill some duty call, but if the effort is honest, then the work will be useful and have value. Range of style, form, and topic is crucial in creating our full conversation about language and meaning, as is work that challenges and changes our perceptions.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have had editorial dialogues with two of my book publishers, and they were both very positive and clarifying conversations, not extensive or generative of new work, but more the tightening and completion of the ready-to-be-immortal. Seeing a body of work clearly at the end is a delicate thing; there is sometimes this impulse to make a lot of changes. Both editors helped tremendously in respecting my vision and talking about the poems intimately with me. Susan Kan, publisher of my second book, was open to adding in a long poem that had not previously been in the collection, but felt vital for me. This inclusion really made the book complete, and it was a big change; I was so grateful. Overall though, working with editors has not been an essential part of my work-in-process.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Art undoes the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t. –Theodore Roethke
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?
Right now, I spend most of my time with my nine month old and four year old sons. I tend to write fast in unexpected corners of the day. Everything feels a bit stolen. Poetry steeps for a long time, then comes quickly. It’s not the ideal way to sustain a writing practice, but it is equal parts thrilling and frustrating, and the end result is much the same as when I languished for hours in a quiet room. Part of that steeping is writing fragments, headlines, math equations, travel phrases, whatever mess of things is tossing around in my head in a notebook. I take this ongoing collection of notes anywhere I might find a corner of space, and as a result, I have written the majority of recent poems in parking lots and waiting rooms. Whatever rules I previously had about what conditions were necessary for writing to happen have been tossed out. This is a good thing, I think. I wrote the last poem for my next book in a crowded basement room waiting for a blood draw. I just try to keep showing up at any hour or place; something is usually there. If not, that instance is clearcutting for the next time. There are so many terrible ways to kill an hour. Trying to write but not succeeding is one of the best.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t panic if I’m not writing, but it usually means that something is out of balance. Maybe I’m on the computer too much or not reading enough or I’m not in my body and the circle has grown too tight. When writers feel this way, the mistake might be in pushing the need to write to satisfy fear. Returning to a more present and embodied life is what’s essential for me. I wander the orange groves, drive up to the San Bernardino Mountains, read generously and without much thought of writing. I get excited about my life again in an authentic and curious way. When writing is stalled, it is time to listen more.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke.
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?
All of these are meaningful influences for me. Nature and science have been sources of inspiration for all of my books. The ocean was spirit guide in my first book, but for all my writing, communion with the natural world is a place to keep returning to for nourishment, understanding, mystery, awe, terror. Music, both intrinsically and thematically, led me through the second book, notably in a long poem called “The Listeners,” where I explored my relationship with my father via our love for music, weaving in lyrics, memory, the obsolescence of the record album, meditations on time, and circular patterns.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Essayists are really important in helping me stay in my writer’s mind amidst an otherwise very full life. Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson, Eula Biss, Lia Purpura, Joan Didion, Rachel Carson are all writers whose poetic prose continues to slow and sustain me. As for poetry, I read very widely. I love range in poetry and read and enjoy all styles of poetry. I don’t understand why people are so divisive about poetry styles.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Swim with dolphins. Doesn’t everyone want to do that? I would like to swim with some dolphins and spend a lot of time writing some lyric essays. I would also like to try my hand at writing a children’s book. Hike a significant part of the Appalachian Trail with my husband and boys when they are older. Learn to play the mandolin. There is no end to this question.
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?
Choreographer. Botanist. Park Ranger.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I had previously been a dancer, and though I met my limits with this art, I see now how being in the body and expressing that through a temporal art was co-creating my writing life. I try to bring what sound and body-wisdom I know from dance into poetry. As the other temporal art, poetry asks me to be ever sensitive to music, rhythm, and the sensory realm, and these very much guide my writing process. Breath, wind, pace, texture, form, compression all deliver an intensity of experience that feels true for me. Writing is the best way I know to live.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Lila by Marilynne Robinson right now. I’m not done yet, but it’s brilliant. As for film, I am really behind on watching great films. We moved three years ago to a house with a lot of windows, and there was only one logical place to put a t.v., but we’d already hung a beloved painting there and decided we’d rather look at that so we left the t.v. in the box. Sometimes I watch something on the laptop, but not often. Got any recommendations?
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am writing a fourth manuscript of poems, especially working with a long poem that weaves losing and finding myself in Prague, memories of my Polish grandmother, and the internment camps at Terezin among other things. I’m reading some interesting pieces on the colors of noises, and the “timbre of the universe,” preliminary reading for an essay I would like to write on white noise, development of the ear, Tuvan throat singing and our perception of sound in the womb.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Monday, February 16, 2015
Ewa Chrusciel, Contraband of Hoopoe
The hedgehog collects
the apples of my mother tongue. He is a dormant god. I take him as my wealth.
The hedgehog hunts serpents and hidden thoughts. He protects against evil.
Parcels eternity into spiny planets. Each mystery rolls into itself, a thorny
crown rolled into a lotus. Leaving, I do not go with empty hands. I carry
needles. Violins, stigmas, mulberry seeds. Each thorn a voice of an ancestor. I
wear him as a brooch on my shawl. Thorny sun, a fire. For he is the god of
suffering under spines. God blessed him with autism. For he is a Kipod, a beast of tricks. Defender
against serpents and Isidore of Seville. He carries packed eternities into the
dusk. As I pass through Customs, it is the hedgehog that smuggles me. My brooch
bristles.
I’m
absolutely fascinated by Polish American poet and translator Ewa Chrusciel’s
fourth poetry collection, Contraband of Hoopoe (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2014). The author of two poetry collections
in Polish—Furkot (Studium Press,
2003) and Sopitki (Fraza Press,
2009)—and one previous book in English—Strata
(Emergency Press, 2011)—her Contraband of Hoopoe writes out a collage of poems as lyric segments of a single,
extended poem sketched out as lyric journal entries. The poems in Contraband of Hoopoe are composed around
growing up in Poland during the Communist Regime and emigrating to the United
States, and her variety of experiences and widsoms that came from watching the
collision of languages and cultures, both from within and beyond European
borders, and of what was required to be hidden while travelling across numerous
boundaries. Throughout the collection, she utilizes the term “contraband” to
reference far beyond the expected, from gummi bears to candles and to language
itself, to “the Jewish people […] during the Holocaust,” and to the abstract
possibilities of ideas, culture and what is bred in the bone. As she writes:
Smuggling is
translation. Between a subject and an object. Between an idea and reality.
Between reality and a shadow. Between a pronoun and an imperative. It is—for
those who are unable to let go—nesting in two places at once. It is a yearning
for bilocation. Some Christians were adept at it. St. Anthony of Padua, St.
Ambrose of Milan, St. Severus of Ravenna, and Padre Pio of Italy. Both
translation and smuggling come from longing for presence. From a loss. They
speak of insufficiency of one life, one language. Yet insufficiency to express
what is ineffable saves us from idolatry.
Contraband of Hoopoe utilizes,
as “one of its guiding totems,” the hoopoe, described in the press release as “that
bird of exile and return, which King Solomon sent to the Queen of Sheba to
convert her to his faith. Under the aegis of this mythical bird, Chrusciel
tracks a series of historical objects, undeclared beliefs and secret messages
that immigrants throughout history have been sneaking through customs, past
border checkpoints, and across the seas.” Constructed as equal parts poetry
collection, historical essay, thesis and travel journal, this is a complex and
thoughtful collection, and one I am very much impressed with.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
12 or 20 (second series) questions for Joshua Corey
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Selah came out in 2003, emerging from the volatile mixture of my addiction to sheer language with acute grief and nostalgia. Twelve years later, I’m still throwing words into the black hole of irretrievable losses. But I’m conscious now of a more organized and experienced approach to fundamental questions about how to resist inhumanity, how to live with others and myself, and the temptations of the vertical in a thoroughly horizontal world.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My mother wrote poems, and made poetry seem like a natural thing to have as part of one’s life. I showed my earliest poems to her, and she praised them—simple as that! I was hooked on her love and her love for language became mine. I wrote and continue to write other kinds of things—criticism, essays, and lately fiction. But poetry remains home base.
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 work like a crab: while my eyes are fixed on what looks on some unreachable horizon, I sidle up to accomplishment. I’m always working on multiple projects and get my best work done when I’m procrastinating one of them. Poems especially tend to come when I’m focused on other things like a novel or a critical essay or teaching or the round of domestic life. So there will be a great deal of circling, mentally, and the accretion of urgent and illegible notes in my notebook, and when the writing actually happens it happens suddenly. It comes in a gush or it doesn’t come at all. I do much less revision than I once did—or rather, the revision process is happening before the poem is actually written, if that makes sense.
4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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 most recent book, The Barons, is more of a “collection” than any of my other books—it doesn’t have a single theme or through-line, or if it does (disaster capitalism?) it’s something that emerges from how I arranged the poems instead of any plan. My first novel, Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy, also accreted from independent sections that grew together. I love the idea of a book that’s just one continuous rush—the “flight forward” technique of the Argentine writer César Aira, who claims not to revise his works, fascinates me. But that doesn’t seem to be how I operate; like Joyce, I’m a scissors and paste man.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Like many poets I’m used to hearing people who don’t normally read poetry exclaim that they “got it” only after hearing me read poems aloud. I’m not entirely sure what that’s about but sometimes I myself “get” my work differently after presenting it to an audience. There’s something about the act of offering a poem or story to an audience, live, that changes my sense of what that writing is about, or has the potential to be about. It can bring something that felt dead to life, or it can confirm for me that something that felt particularly strange and out there when I wrote it feels that way because it’s touching something real, something in the unconscious. Audiences will respond to that if you give it to them.
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?
Political theory, ecopoetics, vital materialism, speculative ontology—broadly speaking, my writing engages with and is engaged by thinkers and writers in these areas. Some names: Lucretius, Spinoza, Emerson, Thoreau, Darwin, Whitman, Nietzsche, William and Henry James, Proust, Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Ponge (I’m working on a new translation of Le parti pris des choses), Merleau-Ponty, Perec, Deleuze, Olson, Duncan, Arendt, Burroughs, Beckett, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett. I’m interested in the liveliness of materialist approaches to writing and thought—materialist in the dialectical-historical sense and also the “new” (really very old) “vitalist” materialism. And I’m interested in overcoming what I see as the dead-end of received postmodernist practice and into contact with a poetics that revives the power of the voice and of myth.
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?
I think the role of writers—that is, the artists whose medium is language and not the “storytellers” who represent capital—is to operate from the margins, working both to conserve culture (that is, quite simply, to remember—since memory, both cultural and personal, has been all but obliterated by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and universal access to Google) and to oppose it (in the forms in which it is given to us and reproduced by us and for us by all of these machines with human bodies and minds for moving parts). Disrupt the machine, throw pop bottles from the bleachers, stand up for Apollo (light, beauty, harmony) AND Dionysus (energy, feeling, ecstasy), and do it all with words words words. So many forms of connection have, paradoxically, been lost in our connected age. I think there’s something potentially radical in reading: one mind to another, from solitude to solitude. As writers, we need to fight for that radical possibility, which could very easily vanish without our vigilance.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Most of the editors I’ve worked with, for better or worse, have brought a very light hand to the task. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have an old-fashioned Maxwell Perkins-style editor to work with, who could help me shape a mess of pages into something deathless. Or a Gordon Lish-type who might radically and painfully transform my writing into something unrecognizably great. I’d probably hate it, but it would be worth maybe sacrificing one book to such a process, just for the experience.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Friendly advice is rarely useful, and vice-versa.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
For years I felt a kind of disgust for fiction, an almost physical nausea at the subservience of every other pleasure writing can offer—sonic pleasure, image pleasure, the dynamic tension between generals and particulars that we might name “the virtual”—to the demands of either plot (in genre fiction) or psychology (in “literary” fiction). It wasn’t until I discovered Roberto Bolaño’s work that fiction began to seem possible for me: there a kind of derangement of genre (in Bolaño most frequently this takes the form of the detective story or noir) becomes a kind of grid upon which those other, poetic pleasures can be arranged. There’s also not a lot of psychology in Bolaño’s work: his characters’ motivations are a kind of void or pressure point that make significant social and natural forces manifest. If a Bolaño character commits an act of violence, for example, it’s never explained away by his individual psychology: some complex of exterior and interior forces has operated upon that character and forced him to act in that way—call it fate if you like. That seems to me like a poetic way of understanding the world. Bolaño also practices a kind of transformed winking autobiography—he’s a character or observer in many of his fictions—and I’m fascinated with the blurred line between fiction and nonfiction in many of the most compelling and vital writers of the past thirty years or so—W.G. Sebald, Ali Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Enrique Vila-Matas, Rachel Cusk, and Karl Ove Knausgaard are just the first names that come to mind. Their work straddles fiction and nonfiction and the infrathin border between them is poetry.
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?
At the moment I’m on sabbatical, so I am fortunate indeed to be able to maintain a writing routine! After seeing my daughter off to school, I typically head to my neighborhood coffee shop with my laptop and a few carefully or randomly selected books in my bag. I work all morning, sometimes on whatever I conceive to be the big project of the moment (at the moment it’s a new novel), sometimes on a side project which can at any moment mutate into the big project. After lunch I mostly read, and then it’s family time, and in the evening I’ll probably read some more and maybe work on something that’s even farther to the side of my main projects. Like this interview.
When I’m teaching, it’s entirely a different affair: writing becomes a catch-as-catch can affair. I write poems when they come to me, on the train to or from work, or during office hours when I’m supposed to be grading papers. More sustained work has to happen in the evenings, or in the summer. But somehow the writing gets done. It’s like they say: if you want something done, ask a busy person.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I am overcome by staleness and horror at my own lack of talent on a regular basis, and when that happens, and I’m conscious enough to recognize that it’s happening, I try to give myself permission to stop writing altogether and to go do something else. Watch movies or old detective shows, ride the El to a random Chicago neighborhood and walk around, visit an art museum, browse bookstores, study French, read biographies or letters or Proust.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Onions frying in olive oil.
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 am a deeply literary creature so I couldn’t agree with McFadden more. But I do get a lot out of visual art—I’m not especially knowledgeable about it but the freedom that painters and sculptors and some filmmakers seem to enjoy from the constraints of narrative and language can be enormously inspiring. Or galling, it’s the same thing—“Goddamn it! Why can’t I do that??” I read a fair amount of philosophy and that can similarly feel liberating, though the language concepts can seduce me away from the earthly particulars that my work needs to thrive. Nature and science are increasingly important to how I approach writing as well, though again it can be hard to overcome a certain tendency toward Platonism.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I seem to be especially fascinated by writers with a rage for order, who say with Blake, “I must Create a System. or be enslav’d by another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” Writers walking the knife-edge of the Apollo-Dionysus dyad: analytic shamans, Cartesian drug-addicts, Lutheran lushes, Marxian mystics. Living the life by perfecting the work. George Oppen, Charles Olson. Woolf, Joyce. Beckett, Burroughs. Stevens.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make a film, write an opera, travel in Asia, live in France, create a TV series, become fully bilingual, learn to sail.
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?
Filmmaker. DJ. Curator.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I never felt like there was any choice in the matter. My mother opened the door and I walked through it. I’m a pretty cerebral person, and if it wasn’t for writing, I’d be in danger of disappearing entirely into my mind.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m going to veer closer to the last than to the great. I had a hell of a lot of fun with Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice—in his sheer inventiveness, paranoid displacements, and sly humanism he’s the closest fiction comes to John Ashbery. In a funny way he’s the flip side of Henry James—another deeply elusive writer—whose The Ambassadors I finished recently and which uses utterly sui generis sentences to explore psychosocial phenomena that resist interpretation even as they invite it. The P.T. Anderson film version of Inherent Vice isn’t maybe “great,” but it does do a good job of capturing that effort of interpretation, mostly in close-ups on the incomparably puzzled face of Joaquin Phoenix. (The Master is great. Punch-Drunk Love is great. If we’re talking greatness.)
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got three manuscripts in progress. One is poetry, an attempt to fulfill the promise of what I once called “visionary materialism” (http://joshcorey.blogspot.com/2011/02/theses-on-visionary-materialism.html); the next is a kind of SF riff on the love affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, reimagined as replicants in the age of global climate disruption. It’s a hybrid of poetry and prose. The third is a novel, a mélange of personal history, travel writing, essays, and anything else I can plausibly or implausibly cram into it. Translating Ponge. A scholarly article or two. What time is it, anyway? I’d better get back to work.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;