12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alison Stone

Alison Stone is the author of nine full-length collections, Informed (NYQ Books, 2024), To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), Masterplan, a book of collaborative poems with Eric Greinke (Presa Press, 2018), Ordinary Magic (NYQ Books, 2016), Dangerous Enough (Presa Press 2014), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize, New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award, and The Lyric’s Lyric Poetry Prize. She was Writer in Residence at LitSpace St. Pete. She is also a painter and the creator of The Stone Tarot. A licensed psychotherapist, she has private practices in NYC and Nyack. https://alisonstone.info/  Youtube and TikTok – Alison Stone Poetry.

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?

The first book taught me patience and how to change course. It was a finalist in many national contests, beginning when I was in my early 20’s. I thought I’d publish it and that would help me get a teaching position. But it didn’t end up winning until I was 38. By that point I’d gone  back to grad school and become a psychotherapist.

My new book is all formal poems, which is different from all my past collections. Most of them are mainly free verse, except for Dazzle (ghazals and anagram poems) and Zombies at the Disco (all ghazals.)

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

I came to fiction first. I wrote a love poem to my beagle when I was 6 (“Your nose is wet and you’re my pet. You’re brown and white, you never bite…”) but I was writing a “novel” (also about a dog) at the same time. I only finished the first two chapters. I was focused on fiction as an undergrad and only took a poetry workshop because I needed to for graduation requirements. But my teacher, Hugo Williams, converted me.

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 completely depends on the project. For Ordinary Magic (a book with one poem for each tarot card), I did a lot of research. The same with Caught in the Myth. I was asked by a photographer to write poems to go with photos  he’d taken of ancient sculptures. So I needed to learn about these historical figures in order to write. Some of the other poems are from Greek myths, so I’d research those as well.

The speed varies according to different projects as well. Some poems come out almost finished. Others need more substantial revisions.

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?

Again, it depends. Usually I start with poems and then they start to coalesce.

For individual poems, I usually start with a phrase or a line. For ghazals, I start either with a sound I want to explore or else a refrain.

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

I love doing readings! I’m an introvert, but somehow I find them really enjoyable.

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?

That’s a great question! I’m interested in stories – whose voices haven’t been heard? How would this tale be told from a different point of view? I’m also interested in how traditional forms can work with contemporary subject matter. I’m not sure if there are any “current questions” for all poets. This is such a diverse, exciting time in poetry – so many different voices and perspectives.

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?

Writers help people feel less alone. At least that’s what writing (including song lyrics) did and does for me. It’s a way of helping people open their hearts and minds.

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

I’ve never had one, but I’d love to. All my books have been published by small literary presses. Only once did I even get a copy editor. But no one to help me shape or improve the work, like at the big houses.

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

Have something else in your life you love as much as writing (Louis Simpson).

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

They are such different processes. Once I had children, I mostly stopped painting. I work in oil and couldn’t be covered in toxic paint if the baby needed me. Then I hurt my arm/shoulder so I gave over doing the art for my book covers to my kid. But I’m going to do the next one.

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 have no writing routine, except during POMO, when I write a poem a day.

I get up at 6, do yoga, walk the dog, eat breakfast. During the school year I sometimes do drop off. Then I start seeing clients.

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

Reading poetry makes me want to write it. But I also let myself take breaks. Olga Broumas told me when I was 24 to respect my silences, and I think that’s important. Capitalism is all about production, but art isn’t commerce.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

On rainy days, the smell of dog. Otherwise I’d say cooking smells. Lots of garlic.

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?

Music, nature, visual art. Politics, too, though that’s hardly an art form

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

Gluck, Plath, Rilke are my top three. Then Patricia Smith, Rita Dove, Diane Seuss.

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

Win a major poetry prize. See the Northern Lights. Be a grandmother (But no rush!).

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 have a full-time practice as a Gestalt therapist. It counters the self-involvement of being an artist because it’s all about the other person.

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

I can’t carry a tune. If I’d been able to, I would have wanted to front a band. But I’m too off-key, even for punk.

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

I just finished rereading Middlemarch, and I’m sad to be done. I don’t see a lot of films. This year we watched the Oscar finalists, and I enjoyed them all.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have 3 manuscripts in progress. I also invented a new poetic form.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Apt. 9 Press at fifteen: SOME SILENCE: Notes on Small Press and APT. 9 PRESS: 2009-2024: A Checklist,

 

It is 2024. I am 37 years old. I have been writing poetry seriously for some two decades, and for most of it I have also been engaged in some form in the world of the small press (whether as a reader, a poet, an editor, a publisher, a researcher, a bookseller). And yet, even after twenty years, it feel like I am just beginning in this world. (Cameron Anstee, SOME SILENCES: Noes on Small Press)

To mark the fifteenth anniversary of his Apt. 9 Press, Ottawa poet, editor, critic and publisher Cameron Anstee has produced the limited edition chapbooks SOME SILENCES: Notes on Small Press (2024) and APT. 9 PRESS: 2009-2024: A Checklist (2024), each of which are hand-sewn, and produced with French flaps; both in a numbered first edition of eighty copies. Anstee’s chapbook and broadside publications have always held a quiet grace, a sleek and understated design on high-quality paper and sewn binding in limited editions [see some of the reviews I’ve posted on Apt. 9 Press publications over the years here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, etcetera, as well as his 2010 “12 or 20 (small press)” interview]. If you aren’t aware of the work of Apt. 9 Press, the “Checklist” offers bibliographic information on some fifty chapbooks he’s produced through the press since 2009, as well as two full-length titles, two folios and a handful of ephemera, and a further selection of his own chapbooks under the side-imprint, “St. Andrew Books.” As he writes: “St. Andrew Books is an (unacknowledged) imprint of Apt. 9 Press. I started it in 2011 to make a chapbook of my own to coincide with a reading. At the time, I felt it was too soon in the life of Apt. 9 Press to self-publish under the name, so the imprint was conceived. I have used it for 13 years now to self-publish chapbooks and leaflets when the impulse hits.”

As part of his “NOTES / ON APT. 9 PRESS / AT FIFTEEN YEARS” to open his checklist, Anstee begins: “The origin of the name of the press is unsurprising—I lived at 328 Frank Street (Ottawa) in apartment 9 at the time. I considered Frank St. Press, I think I may even have registered an email address, before my partner suggested Apt. 9. I loved it; it rooted the press in the room in which I would be doing the work.” I am amused at the thought that he nearly took Frank Street as his press name, especially given he offered the same title to the first chapbook of his poems published through above/ground press, Frank St. (2010). The specificity of place follows a fine trajectory of other presses named for their locations, whether Mansfield Press named for the editor/publisher’s home address on Mansfield Avenue, Toronto, the myriad of Coach House affiliations (Coach House Press, Coach House Books and Coach House Printing) set in an old Coach House behind Huron Street, Toronto, Alberta’s Red Deer College Press, which emerged out of Red Deer College (renamed Red Deer Press once the university affiliation had ended), or even Montreal’s Vehicule Press, a publisher that first emerged in the 1970s out of the artist-run centre Vehicule Gallery. We named our Chaudiere Books, as well, with a nod to the historic falls. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples. Anstee’s imprint, “St. Andrew Books,” as well, is a project begun after Anstee and his partner relocated from Centretown into the Byward Market (on St. Andrew Street, itself named for the Patron Saint of Scotland).

Across fifteen years, Anstee’s Apt. 9 Press has produced work by a flurry of contemporary poets, from the emerging to the established, centred around the beginnings of his own public literary engagements through Carleton University’s in/words (titles by Justin Million, jesslyn delia smith, Dave Currie, Leah Mol, Ben Ladouceur, Jeremy Hanson-Finger, Rachael Simpson and Peter Gibbon) to encountering the wider Ottawa literary community (titles by Michael Dennis, Sandra Ridley, Monty Reid, William Hawkins, Phil Hall, Stephen Brockwell, Marilyn Irwin, Rhonda Douglas and Christine McNair) and further, into the wider Canadian literary community (titles by Leigh Nash, Nelson Ball, Stuart Ross, Beth Follett, Michael e. Casteels, Barbara Caruso and Jim Smith), and beyond, into the United States (a title by New York State-based Arkansas poet Lea Graham). His bibliographic checklist is thorough, and certain entries include short notes on each particular publication, offering history on both the publication specifically and the press generally, each of which provide, in Anstee’s way, short notes as teasers toward a potential heft of further information. I quite enjoyed this note he includes for Ottawa poet Dave Currie’s chapbook, Bird Facts (November 2014): “Dave somehow convinced CBC Radio to have him on the air one Saturday morning to discuss this book, which is comprised of made-up facts about birds. A handful of very confused customers came to the Ottawa Small Press Book Fair and purchased copies.”

The history of Apt. 9 follows a trajectory that coincides with Anstee’s personal interests in writing, including his own critical and creative explorations, from the short, dense forms of poets such as Nelson Ball and Michael e. Casteels, wider community engagements across the scope of his own ever-widening landscape, to bibliographic and editorial projects he worked on, including around the work of the legendary and since-passed Ottawa poet and musician William Hawkins (a bibliographic folio, a chapbook reprint and editing a volume of his collected poems). While Anstee’s work with the press can be separated and is impressive on its own, as with any poet-run press, his creative and critical work are essential to his work through Apt. 9 Press and vice versa; to attempt to fully understand one element requires an understanding of each element in turn (and how they relate to each other). Early on, as he writes in the essay-chapbook SOME SILENCES: Notes on Small Press:

In the earliest of those years, when I was 18, during a second-year CanLit survey, Professor Collett Tracey introduced me to Contact Press. I was immediately taken with the idea of Raymond Souster quietly working throughout his life writing poems, and then for a decade or two in middle of the twentieth century, from his basement, making mimeographed books and magazines that re-shaped how poetry was written and published in this country. Shortly thereafter I began learning how to make chapbooks during my time working with In/Words, the little magazine and press Collett ran. There were earlier moments too, such as when I was a teenager and gradually came to understand that my father’s collection of books was astonishing—books by Beat and San Francisco and New York School writers filled the corners of our house, books that were published by small presses run by editors who did it mostly because they felt these books should exist (though I couldn’t have identified them as small presses yet).

The lesson I took from these earliest encounters with books I found I cared about was that the act of writing can involve quite a bit more than simply writing. To write, in the sense of a lifelong practice embedded in a particular literary community, means so many other things. I couldn’t have defined those other things when I first encountered them, and honestly still struggle to articulate them today. In fact, through my first two decades doing this, in each overlapping role right up to today, I have never been entirely at ease with the term small press. It has always felt elusive because it can mean so many different things to so many different people, entirely dependent on the contexts of the conversation and its participants. That is something I confront anytime I try to speak about the small press or about what a writing practice is (about what my writing practice is), given how intertwined and unstable the two are.

Anstee’s prose recollections are sharp, detailed and thoughtful; they are quite moving, articulating an essay-sequence of prose sections around elements of engaging with small press, and his thoughts on small publishing generally, and his work through Apt. 9 Press specifically. “These silences are pressing for living writers and accompany the dead ones.” he writes, further along in the essay. “You can only let the work go I think, and hope that it finds the right hands in the future, that is, someone who will be sympathetic to it, who will open it and read it through and for whom it may spark a response, and who may come back and read it again.” Anstee’s prose through this piece, this chapbook, are comparable to his chapbook production—sleek, carefully-honed and deeply precise—offering meditations around and through publishing. I know he’s already sitting on an as-yet-unpublished critical manuscript around small press (it seems criminal that such a work hasn’t yet seen book publication), but one might hope that he sees enough orders for this particular title that it manages a reprint; it deserves to be read. Or, possibly, expanded upon. I could see this piece expanding into something full-length, an essential read on the specifics of literary engagement. Although, knowing the precision and density of Anstee’s poems, perhaps everything he needed to say is already here, set in a text that deserves even my own further engagement.

Books are great—of course they are!—but the idea of living a life in the small press or in poetry is something else. There is no moment when you will have made it, no finish; there is just the ongoing work of making poems, or books, or organizing events, or whatever part of it you’re putting your own energy and resources behind. Maybe that work occasionally gets some attention, but it will pass so, so quickly. Publish books, and chapbooks, and leaflets, and weird little magazines, yes, as often as you want and are able to, but my feeling is that it is best to try to do so with a hopeful eye on the much longer history you’re engaging with—the full scope of which is forever out of sight—and with an understanding that your moment in that history is both very small and totally essential, rather than on some immediate pay off in public recognition or success (critical, financial) or whatever other short-term validation is occasionally available.

So—and this is too easy to say—don’t be resentful that you didn’t get enough reviews, or didn’t win that award, or weren’t published by that magazine. It matters a great deal and it doesn’t matter at all.

Paul Celan, Thricelandium, trans. Mark Goldstein

 

On finishing my translation of Eingedunkelt, I was startled to discover the 11 poems comprising this work required a draft of over 100 pages. Rereading these materials, I came to understand that a response in English to Paul Celan’s poetry in German necessitates a material approach. The poem’s word-materiality in English first must parallel the word-materiality in Deutsch.

What do I mean by this? I propose considering this parallel materiality as a kind of alchemical Landschaft or Landscape. One wherein, amid its territory, we may inscribe Stein as Stone – and as a result of the difference between words, we may be granted a glimpse of their glyphic (and lithic) associations as anomalies: a chrysopoeia through which the under-poem may announce itself. (afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN”)

Further to Toronto poet, editor, publisher, translator and critic Mark Goldstein’s explorations through the work of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) is Thricelandium (Toronto ON: Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024), translated by and with a hefty introduction and even heftier afterword, “ON TRANSLATING PAUL CELAN,” by Goldstein. Thricelandium is but one step in a much larger trajectory through Goldstein’s thinking around Celan’s work, with other elements including: his poetry collection, Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) [see my review of such here]; his collection Part Thief, Part Carpenter (Beautiful Outlaw, 2021), a book subtitled “SELECTED POETRY, ESSAYS, AND INTERVIEWS ON APPROPRIATION AND TRANSLATION” [see my review of such here]; as publisher of American poet Robert Kelly’s Earish (Beautiful Outlaw, 2022), a German-English “translation” of “Thirty Poems of Paul Celan” [see my review of such here]; and as curator of the folio “Paul Celan/100” for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, posted November 23, 2020 to mark the centenary of Celan’s birth. It has been through the process of moving across such a sequence that I’ve begun to appreciate the strength of Goldstein as a critic, offering a thoroughness and detail-oriented precision to his thinking, working to articulate his approach to the material and his translations of such, that seems unique, especially one focused so heavily on the work of a single, particular author. Honestly, I’m having an enormously difficult time not reprinting whole swaths of his stunningly-thorough introduction, which deals with, among other considerations, Goldstein’s approach to the translation and how Celan’s work helped him develop his own writing. As Goldstein wrote as part of his “A Prefatory Note:” for the “Paul Celan/100” folio:

I came to the work of Paul Celan in my 20s through the common entryway of his poem Todesfuge [Death Fugue]. I suspect that I first encountered it in anthology — likely either in Jerome Rothenberg’s translation found in Poems for the Millennium or in John Felstiner’s translation as it appears in Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

In each case I was startled by Celan’s power of expression, and as a Jew, I obsessed over his early use of the imagery of the Shoah. In time, as I read through his books, I began to develop an ever-expanding sense of their territory. Moreover, as the writing neared its terminus, I came to recognize my estrangement with it too — one born from its profound and compelling angularity.

I’ve long been intrigued by Goldstein’s long engagement with the work of Celan, as deep and rich as his engagement with the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall, from Beautiful Outlaw having produced multiple chapbooks and books by Phil Hall, to the recent ANYWORD: A FESTSCHRIFT FOR PHIL HALL, eds. Mark Goldstein and Jaclyn Piudik (Beautiful Outlaw Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. On the surface, at least, there seems far more affinity between the work of Celan and Hall than the two life-long focuses of Ottawa poet, publisher and bibliographer jwcurry’s writing life, bpNichol and Frank Zappa, although either of these parings (or trios, really) would make absolutely fascinating theses by some brave academic at some point.

Across three poem-sequences—“ATEMKRISTALL · BREATHCRYSTAL,” “EINGEDUNKELT · ENDARKENED” and “SCHWARZMAUT · BLACKTOLL”—there is a lovely contrary and delicate quality to these poems, offered both in the original German alongside Goldstein’s translation. The language swirls, moving in and out, and through, blended and perpetual meanings that become clear as one moves through, holding a firm foundation of clarity by the very means of those swirlings, those gestural sweeps. As Goldstein’s translation offers, early on in the first sequence:

Etched in the undreamt,
a sleeplessly wandered-through breadland
casts up the life-mount.

From its crumb
you knead our names anew,
which I, an eye
in kind
on each finger,
feel for
a place, through which I
can awaken to you,
a bright
hungercandle in mouth.