12 or 20 (second series) questions with Yahia Lababidi

Yahia Lababidi, Egyptian-American thinker/poet, is the author of 6 critically-acclaimed books and has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, Best American Poetry, World Literature Today, On Being with Krista Tippett, The Guardian and Al Jazeera, among several other places.

His forthcoming book, WHERE EPICS FAIL, is to be published by UK publisher, Unbound, in partnership with Penguin Random House, and has been endorsed by Richard Blanco, Obama’s inaugural poet.  “Epics” is now available for pre-order.

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 could hold in my hand and share with others, what I previously carried in my head and heart.  After 5 books of different genres (essays, poetry, conversations), over  nearly two decades, I am returning to writing another book of aphorisms.  It is different in that I no longer worship at the altar of the mind, and don’t mind professing ignorance and bowing before the Spirit.

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

Growing up with a Lebanese father, Gibran’s Prophet was an early introduction to poetry (in my teens) followed by Wilde’s De Profundis and TS Eliot Four Quartets.  As Eliot says: ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.’  It stirred me to the depths, without my fully knowing how or why.

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?

Prose (essays, etc…) requires structure, mapping out all I know, creating outlines and fleshing them out.  Poetry appears from thin air.  It lets me know when it’s ready.  The harder it is to write, the more I suspect that I am stealing from myself, and picking unripe fruit.

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 proceed in fits and starts, I get bits and pieces, an image, a line, here, a limb or a tail there… I do not fully understand what I am working on until it’s complete.  My books, too, are not so much composed, as they are cobbled together.

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

Shy show-off that I am, on paper, I still struggle with readings.  It seems unfair not only to lay one’s heart bare, and reveal all your secrets in books, but also to have to stand completely naked under strong lights, in a room of clothed strangers, and confess one’s strange sins.

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?

The poem teaches the poet.  I write to learn what I know.  Liberation and transformation are giant themes that occupy me on the page and off.  Each time one sits to write, it’s a wrestle to set the ego aside, the limitations of specificity, and an attempt to practice the art of dying, anew.

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?

Witness, Conscience, Voice for the voiceless.   

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

It depends.  Ultimately, if they are sensitive to the work, and able to set their ego aside and serve the writing, it’s a gift.  Here is Nietzsche weighing in:   I think artists often do not know what they can do best, because they are too conceited… their love and their insight are not of the same quality.”

So, it’s a matter of pruning.  Or to mix metaphors, and I can’t remember who said this, but a good editor rescues the fire from the ashes.

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

Write what you know.  Up to a point.  And, then, vacate yourself, and let what you don’t know be written through you.

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

Different genres represent different stages of our life, intensities, or facets of our personality, perhaps, even our being.  Not a wholesome practice to divide one’s self thus, but I used to think my essays were my  mind, my poetry my heart, and my aphorisms my soul. 

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?

None.  I have no routine or typical day.  Reading helps, sometimes; other times, silence.

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

Reading, and silence.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Home is Egypt, which I’ve not returned to in over 11 years.  I suppose, complex spices and exhaust fumes.

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?

Silence is a great master, and of course, Everything Else!  But one must pay attention, and listen closely, so that they might overhear the Conversation of All Things that is always taking place.  This is what good art does. It takes a pebble in the road, or a human being, and it concentrates on them until they begin to glow. I think the concept and the notion of blushing is very important in art, and in my kind of art. You know, the artist concentrates on the detail of the object until it blushes in the way the love object blushes when a lover gazes at it with that particular intense gaze. That is what art should do. It should make the world blush and give up its secrets. - John Banville.

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

Increasingly, mystical utterance, specifically, the Sufi saints (mystical branch of Islam).

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

I don’t know if I’m capable of a children’s story, or a play, but I’d like to try my hand at them one day.  Perhaps, if I find the right collaborator, co-conspirator.

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 wanted to be a lawyer, a singer, a monk.  I suppose the writer that I am is a mix of all three.

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

I write myself sane. Anne Sexton.

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

Book: The Revelation of the Veiled, an early Persian treatise on Sufism.

Film:  Perfume, already 11 years old, from a purely aesthetic POV, I found to be heady and hallucinatory and intensely lyrical 

20 - What are you currently working on?

Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Spirit, over 800 aphorisms composed over the last decade or so, that are in the process of rewriting my soul.  It is now, available for pre-order; and, as a thank you, those who pledge on the book’s webpage will have their names included in the back of the limited hardcover edition.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

three new poems : Vending Machine Press,

I have three new poems up at Australian site Vending Machine Press, from my work-in-progress "the book of smaller." Thanks much! Further poems of mine online can be found at my author site.

Jennifer Nelson, CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY

NORMAL SONNET

There’s a book people write by pretending

to be another author. It’s called life.

Conceptual art’s about goaltending

more boring arcs of self toward meaning. Life,

how far north am I of New York City?

A brief snow held by buzzed grass means pity.

The wall of want and should grows soft and fat.

I’m tired of lacunae. When my cat

licks itself in front of old jewelry

it performs confessional poetry,

which, like one’s historical cruelty,

no one escapes. I say potpourri

for two thousand and bury my parents.

I repeat the parable of the talents.

Winner of the 2016 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, as judged by Anne Boyer, is Chicago poet and art historian Jennifer Nelson’s second collection of poetry, CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017), following her Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015). Even from her book titles alone, one can see the overlap in her interests between art history and poetry, and CIVILIZATION MAKES ME LONELY is thick with influence from and engagement with history, art and everything in-between, something she discussed in an interview with Jessica Tolbert, following the publication of her first collection:

I saw you are a professor of art history. Which came first, your interest in art or your interest in poetry?

This is a really great question, which I think (because of the verb tense of “came”) ends up being about class. Like many people, I’ve participated in a lot of different classes in my life. But when I was little, the sort of “culture” things in my house were the piano, watercolors of golf courses, Egyptian hieroglyphs on papyrus, and those leatherbound books with the gold letters on them and the gold page-edges. The piano, a Chickering upright, was probably the most “authentic” of the objects. It was kept in tune and I took it pretty seriously, as a small kid.

My parents were in full-blown aspiration mode. Our class, as a unit, was shifting, and our culture things reflected that. I’m not ashamed of that, but it’s a real factor.

But the hieroglyphs were in my parents’ bedroom, so in any contest between poetry and art, the leatherbound books were going to beat the golf course watercolors every time. Keats, HUGE in my early life, then weirdly secularized for me when I took Helen Vendler’s Keats seminar as a first-year in college. (Was so saddened by her race-blindness in recent years, and I mean that term in both sad senses.) Who else. I never read Tristram Shandy but I opened it a lot. Anyway, that’s not poetry. Donne was there, too, I think? Definitely Shakespeare, Pope, a rhymed version of some Homer. In any case, poetry, definitely, was first.

Thank you for not asking which comes first now!

By taking on “civilization,” Nelson’s poems, in their own way, take on fragments and elements from throughout the whole of human history, and the poems in this collection engage with references ad threads including Roman protests, the City of God, Coleridge, Icelandic names, ekphrasis and Renaissance paintings. In certain ways, her poems can be seen as sketches or research notes from her day-job, but just as easily playfully expand and further explore ideas in ways that being an ‘art historian’ might simply not have space for. Her poems are sharp and witty, and exploratory in a way that seeks out knowledge from unlikely connections. The title of the collection, incidentally, comes from the first couplet of her poem “LET ME BE LONELY,” that reads: “The first noble savages were German / Civilization makes me lonely [.]”

ARS ACADEMICA

Leonardo’s studies of fluid motion are an exception. Mostly it’s people bad at math taking calculators to whirlwinds. Sometimes murder is beautiful. We have to drink blood. I admire the people who never get caught. But I keep trying not to kill

Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian

Why New Narrative and why now? Writers Who Love Too Much arrives in the wake of renewed critical and scholarly attention to the movement; enough, at any rate, to convince us to revisit, reprint and revive some of the original documents of the 70s/80s/90s avant-garde. Founded in the San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1970s, New Narrative responded to post-structuralist quarrels with traditional storytelling practice for reinscribing “master narrative,” and attempted to open up the field to a wider range of subjects and subject positions. It would be a writing prompted not by fiat nor consensus, nor by the totalizing suggestions of the MFA “program era,” but by community; it would be unafraid of experiment, unafraid of kitsch, unafraid of sex and gossip and political debate. Novice writers have been lectured since forever to “show, don’t tell,” but one thing New Narrative did was tell and tell and tell without the cheap obscurantism of “showing.” In the years since 1977 the roots of New Narrative have become obscured, partly because it was an ill-defined movement from the beginning, partly because its point(s) of origin are in debate, and partly because a welcome host of second and third generation writers later altered its character in significant ways. Our anthology will go back to a putative beginning and proceed warily through the decades since Gerald Ford was president, and it will stop twenty years later, right at the beginning of what might be called New Narrative’s second wave. An important anthology from 2004, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (edited by Robert Glück, Mary Burger, Camille Roy, and Gail Scott), shows that new wave in full flight, with a galaxy of brilliant young writers disparate as Rob Halpern, Renee Gladman, Douglas Martin, Heriberto Yepez; but Writers Who Love Too Much presents work made during the first wave of New Narrative and stops itself only by immense self-control, at a place that fairy demands a sequel. (“New Narrative Beginnings 1977-1997,” Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy)

Constructed, as the back cover informs, as a “new map of late 20^th century creative rebellion,” a “movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle” is the massive anthology Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, eds. Dodie Bellamy and KevinKillian (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017).  At over five hundred pages, the bulk of the anthology includes prose (whether self-contained pieces or excerpts of longer works), but also includes other writing, interviews, essays and talks by Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Bruce Boone, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D’Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecilia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Robert Glück, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson and Laurie Weeks. Centred around San Francisco, the loose movement of “New Narrative” is provided thorough context and history through a lengthy introduction, co-written by Bellamy and Killian, and swirls around conversations and “concurrent writing developments” “across the Americas, Asia, and Europe” that include Language Poetry, “French, German and Russian philosophy,” revolution, difference, Canadian writers Scott, Marlatt and Brossard, and the queer community, among other elements absorbed, lifted and borrowed to attempt to write something entirely new. Even for their self-described “definitive sampling of a wide range of original New Narrative texts,” this is such a massive and rich undertaking, one that is deeply personal for both Bellamy and Killian. As they write: “Because we were there, we feel we need this range to display the writings most important to us.”

Bo is called both Bo and Butch. Bo likes to be called Butch but he writes his name Bo. I think it’s a spelling problem. I call Bo “Bo” just because he likes Butch better than Bo. Also I can’t say “Butch” too well, I always end up saying “bush.”

Me though, I’m named Squeaky, after Squeaky Fromme. Squeaky Fromme was an anarchist and killed a movie star. I’m supposed to turn out to be a butcher of stars (butcher than Butch). I’m called Squeaky, Pip-squeak and weasling, which is weasel + weakling.

I’m making my brother into a big porno movie stud so he can be in the Hollywood Wax Museum. Real brothers are big in Hollywood porno movies. (“BO-HUNK,” Richard Hawkins)

Beyond all of that (as if that weren’t enough material to spend the rest of the year sifting through), the anthology also includes pages upon pages of notes at the end, expanding upon editorial choices as well as providing a great deal of context for certain of the pieces. As they write in the notes for “Judy Grahn, Interviewed by Steve Abbott and Dodie Bellamie”: “We wanted our anthology to show more than a series of texts now canonically arranged; for we wanted to present a vivid picture of a particular avant-garde, and we knew that to do so we must include the ephemera. Maybe you’d want that in every anthology, to show the social construction of the writing, but ephemera itself seemed especially apropos to New Narrative writing, which began as a body of work torn, like the Living Newspaper of the WPA project of the 1930s, from the headlines, reacting to social and political actions as they occurred, or as we worked for them to occur.”

GOOCH: Yeah, genre writing. In the classical period poets would do an elegy and then do an ode, then a lyrical poem and everyone knew what they were doing. Now poetry’s gone into this kind of mess in a way—which is good, I don’t mind that—but in writing life there are these very definite kinds of writing: magazine articles, stories, novels.

SA: The 80’s as the pastiche of all these things being thrown together.

GOOCH: That connects with what’s going on in painting. In fact there are these connections between certain kinds of painters and writers I’m starting to see, which I hadn’t thought about much before, and one of them is that, being free to throw in everything, and the other is being free to tell a story again, without having always to be reminding everyone that one knows one’s writing a novel, drawing attention to “this is language”—all that kind of stuff which was popular, which was need, which now we really know. Novels are old-fashioned; and we can just go on and do it anyway.

            I guess I’m interested in the popular thing, not popular like being the most popular person in the class (although that’s all right). I wrote an article for GQ about Dennis and the L.A. poets, about Ed Smith and Jack Skelley, about California and the excerpts from their poems were completely accessible. They were about high school life, that kind of stuff, and anyone in the world could get that stuff. I kind of like that. A lot of writing being done actually is accessible. (“BRAD GOOCH: interviewed by Steve Abbott”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Andrew Seguin

Andrew Seguin is a poet and photographer. He is the author of the poetry collection The Room In Which I Work (Omnidawn 2017), which was inspired by the life of photographic pioneer Nicéphore Niépce, and of two chapbooks, NN, and Black Anecdote. A former Fulbright Scholar in France, Andrew lives in New York City.

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?

Mostly not much, though it was a real affirmation of work and persistence, and risk-taking, because my first book was actually the third full manuscript I’d written. I had sent the other two around a lot, sometimes with solid leads, and I think that The Room in Which I Work follows naturally from those manuscripts, in that it synthesizes lyric poems with prose and documentary material. What’s different about it is I decided to force or allow all those things to cohabitate—with imagery too—and that the book is really devoted to someone else’s (Nicéphore Niépce’s) life.

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

At the level of word and sound, I think. A natural love of language and a sense that it was an enormous forum for play—silly songs with my siblings, lots of nonsense language with friends. Then, in high school, being assigned to read Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and wanting to make a phrase like that, which could take on a subject as large as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

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?

It depends. The Room In Which I Work really happened in a year and a half, and that had to do, in part, with the duration of the grant I was on while writing it. But I do tend to generate a lot of material, and throw away a lot, and often that is with no project in mind. It’s only after a period of a year or two where I can say, “oh, I’ve been generating a lot of poems about X.” First drafts, for me, do often come close to their final shape, but I think that is also because I abandon a lot of drafts, and they are the rehearsals for the later, better draft, even if they are completely different poems.

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 for me begins with a line or phrase that occurs to me after having seen or felt something, and in sound and meaning it somehow has accuracy or mystery that needs to be investigated. I think of myself as more of a short-piece writer whose pieces accrete into a book, but the evidence points to the contrary: The Room in Which I Work was definitively a book project from its outset.

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

They are neither part of nor counter, I would say. I don’t give a lot of readings, but I really enjoy them when I do, so maybe I should do more. There is something about being able to deliver the poems directly that is really important—the pacing, how I hear the poem in my head. And I have had moments of embarrassment in reading aloud a poem that maybe was not finished, and so knowing, really knowing, I had work to do on it. Embarrassment is a great revision tool, I think.

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?

No theoretical concerns, but lots of questions, both concrete and otherwise: How far can language be pushed to show me or make me (and by default others) feel something truthful and new? How do we make sense of our lives? Has anyone heard this before? What has value? Where are we going as a species? Where can the English sentence go? How much time does the earth have left? What’s the responsibility of consciousness? If it’s absurd to be here, what else is it?

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 it’s the same as it always been: to expand and preserve the province of the imagination.

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

Essential. I have two very close readers that I’ve known and worked with for years now, and I find their feedback to be crucial in revising poems, and in testing out new modes and silly ideas. The value to me is clear: someone with more distance from the work can see things you can’t see.

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

My grandfather: “Let the knife do the work.”

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

It’s been easy and very natural, though I admit that is changing. I seem to be gravitating more towards writing these days, and am having a harder time making photographic work that I feel has any consequence, but I also know from past experience that that can change, depending on what ideas seize me. The appeal, I think, is in letting go of language when I’m working photographically, and having a purely visual vocabulary to employ. And my photographic work, because I work in a way that requires preparing paper and brushing on sensitizer, has an element of the hand in it, which carries an immensely pleasurable and meaningful feel that does not exist when writing. I think each genre affords me space from the other, and also lessons about the other.  

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 try to write something new every Friday morning, and then revise and tinker a bit over the weekend and throughout the following week. On a typical day, I get up at 6:10, make coffee, and read for an hour or so before I have to start my life.

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

Art, the cinema, and walking around. Visual representation is always provocative for me and helps generate poems. And then I sometimes have to reread a poem such as Wallace Steven’s “The Man on the Dump” to remind myself what it’s all about, or just stroll through the city and let things wash over me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Baseball diamond dust.

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?

Visual art and movies, as I mentioned, and then travel. As of 2015 I have traveled regularly to Senegal for work, and my experiences there have inspired a lot of new poems: making sense—or acknowledging that trying to make sense is my default reaction, and perhaps not an appropriate one—of all the things that comprise a different culture.

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

An incomplete list includes Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, WG Sebald, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Emily Wilson, Joseph Roth, Herman Melville, Susan Sontag, Gustaf Sobin, Bruce Chatwin, Pierre Michon, Basho, Buson, Issa, public signage, menus, the news …

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

Live in a Spanish-speaking country so I can finally become fluent in the language.

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 would like to be a woodworker.

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

I never felt it was a choice. It was always what I wanted to do.

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

I’m giving two of each because their intake occurred almost simultaneously: the books were Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey and The North Water by Ian Mcguire. The films were Aquarius and Toni Erdmann.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A new manuscript of poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;