12 or 20 (second series) questions with fahima ife

fahima ife is an American poet, essayist, and editor. She writes about radical intimacy, beauty, and sensuality as it pertains to nature and metaphysics. She is author of the poetry book, Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), the hybrid book, Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021), the chapbook, abalone (Albion Books, 2023), and other poems and essays appearing in The Kenyon Review, the Brooklyn Rail, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Indiana Review, Air/Light, ASAP/J, liquid blackness, Interim, Poetry Daily, and more. She has performed at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, the Poetry Foundation, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton, the Museum of the African Diaspora, and other places. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, the Poetry Foundation, Fugue Journal, the Poetry Society, Brooklyn Poets, Lateral, and other places. She is associate professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. She teaches creative classes on African diasporic music and performance, experimental poetry and poetics, Black Studies, Black Lesbian practices, and more. With poet Ian U Lockaby she co-directs, co-creates, co-curates, and co-edits a chapbook series for their poetry micropress, LUCIUS. She makes her home on the central California coast where she practices a yoga lifestyle grounded in daily rituals of love, joy, and peace. She is at work on two books which explore sacred feminine aging in tantric union with mature masculinity: a poetry book called, Cosmic Libido, and an essay on experimental poetics called, Love Scene, or dancehall on the radio. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Wow, great question. My first book, Maroon Choreography, changed my life in profound immediate ways. Stephanie Burt wrote a sweet review in the New York Times Book Review, which brought significant attention and light to my previously subterranean existence. I moved into community with so many other great souls, became known in a way. Financially, my entire life changed for the better. I got a new job and tenure at the University of California Santa Cruz, was able to move from New Orleans back to my home state of California, to live by the ocean which is something I always wanted. Maroon continues to create such powerful opportunities to think deeply with many people I would otherwise not have a chance to study with. I receive messages all the time from people who express gratitude for that book. It's an ongoing phenomenon. My second book, Septet for the Luminous Ones, has brought me into deeper community with contemporary poets, which is something I did not know how much I needed until I began to experience the unmatched joy of being able to pick up my phone and type or speak a message to some other brilliant living poet who lives hundreds of miles away from me, to momentarily feel less alone in the general vastness of being a poet in this world-simulation that still—on a mass scale—has no idea what we are, or what we are for.

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

I first came to poetry as a child. I began dancing when I was 3. I began reading and writing when I was 4. Growing up, my family was very mystical, musical, spiritual, so at home it was easy for me to "be" a poet, meaning I could explore and deepen my neurospicy sensibilities—I was a sleepwalker as a child, I had incredibly vivid dreams that I could recall with great detail, I began astral traveling, I was deeply connected with spirit realms, could commune with spirits, other entities, was incredibly sensitive (secretive), had a lot of imaginary friends, would spend hours preoccupied within the invisible realms in our backyard, on camping trips, or just drifting around aimlessly in my own imagination, I could easily imitate the sounds of other people's voices, could sing lyrics to songs even if I had never heard the song before and was singing it for the first time, had an episodic memory that felt almost epic, for the most part all of this was fine in the context of my family. I went to a public, creative arts school, I was in a magnet program, so I was involved with various creative practices as a child. In first grade, I guess around age 7, I started reciting poetry by Harlem Renaissance poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, other greats like Emily Dickinson, because my teacher, mom, and assistant teacher—three Black and Brown women who were all about Black history and Black poetry—co-created a daily practice that they collectively reinforced at home, in the classroom, at recess on the playground, and in the world. My mom would have me read poetry aloud to her most nights when I was young, she taught me how to type on her typewriter at the kitchen table, she also taught me how to sew, so poetry became something embedded within my daily practice of reading, studying, playing, moving, making, breathing, speaking, being. Just this very natural thing. I finally began writing poems around age 14, which makes sense to me now because that was around the time when I told my mom I wanted to begin practicing witchcraft and I was no longer interested in going to our Christian Science church. Fortunately for me, she listened and supported my decision.

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 takes me a very long time to start anything. Writing is no different. Sometimes I get a very clear flash of an entire project—generally a book—I see, feel, experience it as a finished product, understand exactly what it is, experience a heightened ecstasy that's unlike anything, then soon after I lose the thread and can't seem to figure out how to get from A to B. But if I feel that flash and commit to a project then I'm determined to see the thing through, no matter how long it takes or where it takes me. My first book was written in time constraints, it was my tenure project, so there was external pressure which I did not enjoy. Writing Maroon was such a painful process for my physical body, because I was so focused on the work itself I could not properly attend to all the signals coming from my body, or actually release years of the accumulated pain that I was working through in the process of shaping Maroon whose form changed dramatically from initial drafts to the published book. I was super anxious the whole time. I really had to learn how to get out of the way, to stop trying to control it, to let the book become itself and not what I wanted it to be. Septet came in a delicious flash. Suddenly, after Maroon, I was receiving invitations from poets to submit new work. I was shocked to learn I actually had more work, a lot of it! Rae Armantrout sent me a letter asking if she could put me in touch with her editor (now our editor) Suzanna Tamminen at Wesleyan. After talking with Suzanna, I ended up writing Septet in nine months, which was entirely unexpected, a beautiful surprise! A doula friend, Laurel Gourrier, told me it was a pregnancy and to treat it as such. I've never been pregnant with a human fetus, but I really loved working in a gestational way, some of those final poems look the same as they first arrived, many of them went through several revisions before the final shape. Now, because I no longer have any time constraints, I have this incredible freedom to truly listen to a project, to allow it to come in its own time, to readjust energetically to receive the work, receiving poems is a serious energetic commitment (it's not often easy on the body), I'm much better at listening to my body, pausing, properly caring for myself, releasing, moving stagnant energy, and understanding how certain things I'm working through in the poetry is connected to actual trauma I've experienced in my human life, and the deep ancestral work I'm healing at the cellular levels through my mother, grandmother, and all our mother's mitochondrial DNA. Working this way feels super natural, healing, sacred. I'm currently writing three books, different genres, all at once, have never done this before, it's ongoing. The first sensation of these three new books emerged while I was wrapping up Septet, and by post-production I was committed to bringing these new books into the world, began making notes on what I thought they might be. They change so much as time passes. Lovingly, I refer to them as my triplets. It's such a slow, intentional, co-creative process. Only a little comes, or sometimes these huge floods, followed by long periods of nothing. I spend a lot of time reading in the nothing.

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'm generally working on a book from the very beginning. The poem, or really the book, arrives with a line, a sound, a sentence, a fragrance, laughter, a texture, an image, something sensual. In late spring 2021, I was sitting in a little casita in a rural town in New Mexico outside of Santa Fe when the line "petrichor / a waft just now" floated in with the breeze, and the scent of coming rain. I heard the line in the wind, could feel it in the scent, wrote it down, it was the beginning of Septet long before I began writing it. The actual line appears in the poem "acid west" which emerges pretty far into the actual book, I was thinking partially with my friend Joshua Wheeler's Acid West, after spending a lot of time with his book on the beach, probably thinking about the constant interplay of beach and desert. Poems are such intimate spaces for me. They often begin on the precipice of great love, essentially for myself, and personal things I am exploring with friends and lovers.

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

I love reading poems. I want to read more public poems. I go through shadow and light periods. Sometimes I just need to be unperceived, in the dark, left alone. Other times I like to be very intensely in the light, just everywhere as much as possible. I'm coming into a bright moment. I live in a small coastal town in California, which is not at all like a city, it has a much sleepier, subdued, sensuality that I truly adore. Like no one is rushing, no one is really trying to impress anyone, people are just grateful to be in a shared creative spirit, it feels like a great place to start talking into some microphones. The pace is exactly my pace. I've been slowly making plans to do public readings here in Santa Cruz, where the poetry scene is microscopic but intimate. I want to get up to the Bay Area and start hanging with those poets too.

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?

These things have shifted dramatically for me post-tenure. Before my first book, I was basically trying to hone a language to discuss what I care about, what I think about, what I study. I seem to be very obsessed with intimacy, sensuality, and beauty, the way we (as a species) can experience these heightened existential states of being while still grappling with the horrors of systemic racial capitalism. That's the very broad thing. More specifically, at this point in my life, as a 42-year-old Black woman, I am preoccupied with graceful aging, with renewing my relationship with my uterus and hormones, with being a lunar creature, with deepening my Tantra, with spirituality, with love and loving. It's so rare to encounter mainstream positive literary portrayals of Black women who are truly inhabiting their power, who are loving fully and deeply, or the only spaces where I witness such delight is in the works and practices of Black Lesbians. Politically, in my writing and in my life, there is a very strong Black Lesbian ethos, that is my main concern now. And I mean "Black Lesbian ethos" in that Cathy Cohen ("Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens") sense where a Black Lesbian politic is less about sex and who is sleeping with whom, and more about intentional relating and caring for each other. I don't know exactly what other people's current questions are, but I am asking questions about how I can be more loving with myself and others in a time of continuous violence, precarity, scarcity, isolation, and fear.

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?

The writer is so essential. I think people forget this, or do not realize that the objective reality we inhabit is a narrative, something written, something reinforced. Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), everywhere I turn, so much anxiety around that, and whatever current trend in the media. Everything is written. People speak things that are written. For better or for worse. Each writer has a different role. My role as writer is to spread love, to try and play my part in shifting the vibrational frequency of this planet from fear-based to love-based frequencies. It's easier, I think, to do this with music. The next closest thing is poetry. As a Black woman, I've experienced some terribly painful shit in this life, so much core trauma, inherited legacy pain, but I work hard to transmute that pain into something beautiful. I'm so disciplined in my craft, practice, to raise the lyric to a more conscious level, even if it doesn't come off that way to a reader, I know what type of energy I channel into my work. It's all Love. I think the role of the writer, on some levels, is to become exquisitely devoted curators of our craft — whatever forms we're working through and contributing to — to make a point of contextualizing our work in the "traditions" and groupings (et cetera) that inform and shape our work. I read so much. Poetry. Philosophy. Fiction (both great and bullshit). Essays. I read much, much, more than I write. My practice as a writer mostly involves a lot of deep study and also communion and conversations with the friends who help keep my ideas in motion. I think our role is super communal. I learn so much more about my role by being in community with friends, both practicing and non-practicing artists, experiencing moments of life together, having conversations about what we do and don't do. There's sometimes a tendency for people to distinguish practice as some sort of rudimentary form that one must relinquish after a particular stage of development, at which point one presumably becomes adept, or proficient enough to no longer need to practice. Writing doesn't work like that for me. Even though lately much of what I think of as my "best" writing arrives quite rapidly, in order to receive these glimmers, I must practice to keep my instrument (my bodyaura) functioning at its optimal and ready to receive when it's time. The whole process is incredibly feminine. I sort of work like an improvisational experimental jazz artist, those harpists and horn players of the 1960s and 1970s, it only seemed as if they were jamming free, but they could only do so because they spent so much of their time in deep continuous study, practice, and play. I'm grateful I have the privilege to live how I live. That I get to immerse myself fully in the creative process to the point where I get to live inside my works-in-process. For folks who still have to deal with a 9-5 job, or who are struggling with securing basic needs, it seems the role is to remain true to their struggle, to express what needs to be expressed, to honor the tiny snatches of time when there is a moment to continue practicing, to continue shaping whatever poem, story, or missive that is their pleasure (and perhaps purpose) and to share it with the world.

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

I love the process of working with an editor. It's essential. I'm very independent, but receptive. I don't like being told what to do. That's a huge turn off. I love when an editor trusts me, when they step back, when they (perhaps) perceive some glitch or sticky part in the work, but they let me figure it out on my own. I like faith. A lot of space. And figuring shit out on my own.

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

June Jordan said "poems are house work" and I think that's the best advice I've ever heard because it explodes into meaning and is resonant with how I live in my physical home and physical body, what I do in these spaces, whom I invite in to these places, the work I do.

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

It appears seamless, but it's hard as hell. I use entirely different sensibilities when writing an essay versus receiving and shaping poetry. I'm doing this now in the three books I'm writing. One is poetry, the other essay, the other fiction. I think the appeal for poets to move between poetry and essays is about being known. It's essential for poets to place our work in the context of other poetry, throughout time and space, and to talk about the continuity, the expansions, whatever else is happening, through essays. We are the only ones who can do this. We cannot rely on (non-poet) literary critics or analysts, to define what is taking place within our poetry. Plus, the labor of writing essays helps keep the tradition of poetry alive for future generations of readers and I am so committed to this particular part of the practice. And for me, it's totally practice. I practice each day and night. Mastery is a myth peddled by racial capitalism. 

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'm incredibly domestic. Being intentional with how I make home is necessary to my practice. At home, I live a very simple, ritualistic life and poetry is deeply embedded within this. I don't like routine because it's too rigid for my lifestyle, but each day I tend to do the same things with slight variation. I move intentionally (either hike, yoga, dance, sometimes run), I breathe intentionally (in meditation), I prepare nearly all of my meals, I fast sometimes, I drink a lot of water, I have a journal I write in daily or many days a week, I eat in a seasonal Ayurvedic way to maintain balance, I spend time on the ground outside (in the sun, in the grey), I listen to the birds, I talk with people I know and strangers too, I work with plant medicines (cannabis and other herbs), sometimes I work with magic mushrooms, I feel things very deeply, I make love to myself, I pay attention to how my energy shifts throughout my menstrual cycle, I show up in the ways I can in my communities, I read something, read a lot of things actually, I share the house with visitors I love, I remain in flow. The university where I teach is on a quarter system, I do not teach every quarter. If I'm in a teaching quarter, my rituals expand to allow more space to deal with more humans than is typically the case for me, but I still dedicate time to my creative practice. Days of the week have spiritual significance. I follow the astrological movements of the planets, the phases of the moon, I am always moving in accordance with the great invisible threads that hold us all together. Every day I recommit to life. Every day I practice deep gratitude for the overall abundance in my life. When I am not in a teaching quarter, I am much more disciplined in my daily rituals, there's a precision, a tightness, a minimalism I cannot even articulate, but it's palpable. When I'm not teaching, because I live alone and do not have any children, I move into the delicious phase in my year where I feel as if I am living in a continuous artist residency only broken by going out dancing with local friends which is totally part of my writing practice.

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

I remember hearing the singer Erykah Badu say in an interview once that there's no such thing as a creative block, that when we arrive at an impasse it's actually just a moment of heightened receptivity, we enter an intensive downloading or uploading part of the process. This might be another exceptional piece of advice, it changed how I think about creating. Sometimes it feels frustrating when the writing stalls because I love creating, but I understand it's necessary to the process, to life. Everything goes through cycles. Nothing is in full bloom all year long. Whenever I experience these pauses, I don't even think about it anymore, I just surrender to the experience, feel things very deeply, pick it back up when it's time for me to re-enter the great stream. It might sound terrible, but when the creative process slows down, I often turn to my lovers and friends and family who I had been unconsciously ignoring while I was busy at work. I also return to nature, take longer, slower walks, immerse myself with the earth, go deeper into meditation, sleep longer, sometimes hop around in various books or sometimes binge watch a great television series. I'm not so much searching for inspiration in these moments, I feel as if I'm reacclimating to the material plane, the whole thing is super grounding. I also tend to write very long letters to friends, to poets, to other people during lulls.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My home often smells like jasmine, sandalwood, frankincense, ganja, cedar, copal, cumin, cinnamon, coffee, rose, olive oil, lavender. These scents remind me of home.

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?

Yes, nature. I live very close to the ocean, it's such a delight to exist in the continuous sensation of coastal life, and the lifeforms that are here, various birds, flora and fauna, everything is so fertile, lively, synergistic. The way the weather fluctuates on a coast is so different from where I grew up in a desert valley in Southern California and the landlocked experiences I had living outside the state in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. On the coast, there's a constant marine layer, at dawn at dusk, interspersed by bright sun, it changes rapidly, the movement is a rhythm I'm still learning and honing in my craft. For the past couple years, one of the greatest influences on my work is the soundscape created by my friend and local dancehall DJ Selecta 7 (aka Osha B) who hosts a weekly radio show on KZSC 88.1fm and streamed online called "Reggae Love Radio" on Saturday nights, and his monthly global bass music dance parties called "Outernational" here in Santa Cruz. Both surreal music spaces are great companions for all three of the books I'm currently preparing. Because Osha is super technical and precise, his shows/parties are so carefully curated they feel like poems, or a kind of poetics that is at the exact frequency in which I create, so his curatorial work within his scene is super influential.

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

Everything by Nathaniel Mackey, Renee Gladman, Ed Roberson, akilah oliver, Alice Notley, is important to my work. Various books on Tantra. Also, I can't stop reading Jasmine Gibson's A Beauty Has Come. Otherwise, lately I've been reading fiction series in English translation. Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth, and Suggested in the Stars (look forward to the final book in the series, Archipelago of the Sun) translated by Margaret Mitsutani. I also love Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume (books one and two of a seven book series, translated by Barbara J. Haveland), which is unlike anything I've ever read. I like stories that are mundane, minimalist, serial, composed through the simplicity of looping a certain sequence of events over and over with slight variation, which happens in both Tawada and Balle's work. I've also been reading a lot of Clarice Lispector's work alongside work by Hélène Cixous. I've been reading More Than Two (the original and the second edition) on healthy polyamory, because I've been polyamorous for 20 years but just barely reading these books because I'm writing about polyamory in a way that's still very fresh and exciting to me, so these books are helpful. I just got Debbie Urbanski's short stories, Portalmania.

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

Grow food. Go to Morocco, Spain, Thailand, Bahia, Patagonia. Make quilts. Grow roses.

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?

Hmm. I'd probably work with textiles, make quilts, work on looms to make natural fiber blankets and clothing. Actually, I'd live on a farm with my partner and other people we love, some bold new age commune where we all have our own yurts, we'd all make a point of loving ourselves and each other, plus we would live with sheep who we would carefully shear each season, lots of other animals. It would be a lot of work, a huge commitment, the whole thing would be rootsy, artsy, herbalist, based in trade, biodynamic, with plenty of time for shared walks, meals, intimate conversations. We'd host wellness retreats for people who live in cities and want to reconnect with the earth. This is the dream! Fuck, I'm so cottagecore. Maybe we could start some new great cult. Haha! Oh, or a filmmaker!

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

My frequency did this to me.

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

No idea.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A poetry book called, Cosmic Libido. An essay book called, Love Scene, or dancehall on the radio. A fiction book whose name cannot yet be revealed to the public. And, co-directing, co-creating, co-curating, and co-editing a juicy new poetry micropress, LUCIUS, with my friend Ian U Lockaby. We're preparing to publish our very first chapbook this summer—Nathaniel Mackey's very beautiful So Woke We Saw Thru Stone, which continues his double long song, ongoing still! 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late May, 2023: Emily Tristan Jones, Carolina Ebeid + Jordan Davis,

There’s so much going on! There’s even a reading on Thursday in Ottawa with three above/ground press poets—Stuart Ross, William Vallières and Jessi MacEachern—hosted by Bardia Sinaee. And you saw the big above/ground press 30^th anniversary fundraiser, happening right now? Or the fact that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair is coming up in a couple of weeks? And don't forget my enormously clever substack, where I'm working on one or two or three ongoing non-fiction projects. So many things!

Montreal QC: I was first directed to Montreal poet and editor/publisher (Columba) Emily Tristan Jones’ chapbook debut, HAND (Cactus Press, 2023) thanks to Hugh Thomas, who offered her as a poet worth paying attention to. I’m intrigued by the curious patterns of her lyric, and intrigued at the fact that she has a full-length debut, Buttercup, out next year with an unnamed press (at least according to her biography in this particular title) in Chicago. “A crow, inserting its hands into the air,” she writes, to open the poem “CROWNLAND,” “descends / by my human head / to low red shrubs [.]” The narratives of her scenes unfold across narratives of straight lines and deflections (the Blomidon and Bay of Fundy references I quite enjoyed, having experienced such myself), even through the fact of a chapbook titled HAND that bears the cover illustration of a foot: one thing is not necessarily another, aiming instead for the ways in which these thoughts connect. The poems are playful, specific and simultaneously tethered and untethered to the ground, akin to a kite. “My whole body, like a skeleton, music in the air,” she writes, early on in the collection. I am interested to see what her work is able to accomplish through this forthcoming debut, across a wider, broader canvas.

~

A large number of my thoughts were broadcast in the woods

I ran in every direction, leaving little to the imagination
I was like a racehorse. The wind whistled behind me
Animals whistled behind me

I was a free man
My soul fanned like the hair on the body of a wild thing

Philadelphia PA: Further to Brian Teare’s remarkable chapbook series through his Albion Books is Carolina Ebeid’s latest, DAUERWUNDER (2023), subtitled “a brief record of facts,” published as the fourth title in Albion’s series eight [see my reviews of 8.1 here, 8.2 here and 8.3 here]. The poems collected here are set, or tethered, between two words—“WINTERNET” and “TRANSGRACE”—and employ a sequence of an exploration around the accidents of language that technology spark. She writes of the glitch, of audio, text and meaning (something east coast poet Lance La Rocque explored as well from a different angle, across his chapbook glitch a few years back), from the literal glitch of audio to the recombinative. She explores the elements of what remains and what is rebuilt, reconstituted; she writes of telepathy, telephone calls and the “Hollow of a torso”; she writes of what is left behind, lost or added, from digital recordings to “something about our / neighborhood dust [.]” As she writes, mid-way through the collection: “how do you know you are remembering / an event or remembering the pictures of / an event, do your dream in the first or / third person?”

“Attention” as an imperative but without exclamations, the way one lowers her voice in the sensitive part of conversation making you lean in. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” (Simone Weil).

Brooklyn NY: I’m only slowly engaging with the work of New York poet Jordan Davis, having produced a chapbook of his through above/ground press (full disclosure, naturally), and now through the publication of his Hidden Poems (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2022), a small chapbook of sixteen short poems produced in an edition of one hundred copies. I’ve always been a bit envious of those poets working in miniature, from Nelson Ball to Mark Truscott to Cameron Anstee, for the possibilities that can exist in small spaces. Through Davis, the short form is less a compact form of held meaning, as in the works of those three examples, but as poems composed as pieces that exist beyond the boundaries of a single moment. Some poems here are akin to a wave of the hand, suggesting but part of an unseen and far larger space, or as accumulations of phrases that mangle and mix in the imagination, offering something far else. These are poems of possibility, including what might fall into contradiction, across what might otherwise be impossible. His directions are as evident as through the opening poem, that reads, in full:

BAD POEM

Put that rock down

Ongoing notes: early January 2023: Lillian Nećakov + Miranda Mellis

The first notes of the new year! There are so many notes. And did you see my report of our recent holiday gathering via The Peter F Yacht Club? Or the next event on our calendar, a Covid-era memorial of the poets we've lost? 

Hamilton/Toronto ON: Thanks to a package a while back from Gary Barwin, I’ve been going through Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s chapbook The Smallest Fence Between Us is Breath (serif of nottingham, 2022) [see my review of her most recent full-length collection here], a short assemblage of sixteen first-person prose poem observations and meditations on dailyness, with a shimmer of surrealism. “Remember when I wrote 1,000 times about those birds.” she writes, to begin the opening poem, “Myrna Loy,” “I thought I was building / you a lighthouse but you were mesmerized by the slow drag of darkening shoals / and inlets. And after an entire year of chirping I let go the voodoo, the inkwell, / your sulphur hair. I let the quicksand pull you into her muscly embrace as if it was / nothing more than a dream.” Nećakov’s sentence-stanzas appear to be constructed as singular breath-thoughts, each of which accumulate into something far larger, such as the seven standalone sentence-stanzas of “Magic Plants,” the first three of which read:

There is a ring of laughter around our street, day moves clockwise into evening, the empire settles like a déntente over drowsy dogs and magic plants.

Soon my daughter’s watermarked voice adorns the room with divine secrets and the golden filaments of threadbare languages.

Table abloom with cards of diligence and fortune, she leans down, presses her hand against the dog’s soft underbelly, there is a tiny village, here, filled with Slavic jazz operas and your mother, counting on you to remember.

In other poems, stanzas might include more than one sentence, yet she still employs the stanza itself as her breath-thought, something complete unto itself, a brick to set atop another to construct the larger narrative of each prose poem. Each break between stanzas, perhaps, a chance to catch breath. I’m really enjoying the shifts in her writing through these prose pieces, and am curious to see if and how a potential full-length collection of such pieces might emerge. And doesn’t she have a full-length collaboration with Gary Barwin out later this spring with Guernica Editions?

Charlottesville VA: The latest from Brian Teare’s Albion Books is The Revolutionary (2022) by American poet,writer and philosopher Miranda Mellis, produced as the third title in Albion Books’ series eight. The author of numerous titles [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], the only title of hers I’d seen prior is the extended sequence of numbered bursts of lyric philosophy, DEMYSTIFICATIONS (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2021) [see my review of such here]. The Revolutionary is built as an extended lyric memoir on and around grief that explores the effects and implications of being raised by revolutionaries, politics and childhood grief, and the Covid-era death of a father lost years before. There is such tenderness and care through Mellis’ lyric mode, one that sweeps with more openness than perhaps straighter prose might have allowed. “A school for the living by the dying: this is what it is; this is how it happens;” she writes, mid-way through the collection, “from the terminal diagnosis to the cessation of food and drink. From the wet rattling breath, to the liminality of the incommunicado, warm heart still beating, short fast breaths pulling the body up and down on the death bed.”

They were revolutionaries. How do revolutionaries raise children? We were raised not to expect or need too much, not to think of ourselves as special, to do our share of the work, to oppose exploitation and state violence. We were raised to understand police terror, to be angry, to be frustrated, to be shocked, to be outraged, to be militant, relentless, engaged, committed, to be freedom fighters.

What makes a person a revolutionary? What makes them, like Sophocles’ Antigone, volunteer for grief? What gives them the power to act, in the name of revolution, for revolution? What is it that calls a person to try to end not just their personal suffering, but all suffering?

We were not raised to be patient with sadness, sorrow, grief. Sadness, sorrow, and grief were to be gotten rid of in order to return to the fight. “Don’t mourn, organize.”

Ongoing notes: later June, 2022: Natalie Simpson + Hanae Jonas,

Given above/ground press turns twenty-nine years old in July, I’m toying with a BIG SUMMER SALE (although 2022 subscriptions are still available, which I would obviously back-date to January 1^st). What else is happening? Our young ladies close out another year of e-learning (less than a week left!), with the hopes that they will emerge into in-person this fall (for Aoife, her first time attending in-person school, after two e-learning years of junior and senior kindergarten). I am curious to see how they might manage. And what might our summer bring?

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: I am very pleased to see new work by Calgary poet Natalie Simpson, her post spell (Gap Riot Press, 2022) [she had a chapbook with above/ground press earlier this year, as well]. Composed as fourteen pages of short, self-contained fragments in sequence, “post,” along with a final, short end-poem, “spell,” Simpson’s work has always reminded slightly (and vice versa) of Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley [see my review of her most recent here]. Both poets, have long existed as curious echoes of each other, appearing as poetic outliers (ie: no one else writes like either of them, and it is hard to easily determine influence or lineage through their lines), and through the ways in which their language is reworked and rearranged from straight lines and long passages to short, staccato bursts, accumulating turns of unexpected and impossible phrase. “trim ducklings // and tit wings,” Simpson writes, in the second section of “post,” “temporary galaxies // collapse // into referents [.]” One word shifts into another word, as meaning and sound resonate the differences between. I’ve always appreciated the way Simpson gathers phrases and thoughts, seeking an assemblage far more than the sum of its parts, and this sequence set with a curious kind of coda nearly as closure, a stitching-together of closing statement, as “spell,” indeed, offers:

      turn eros into store, flaw into wolf, turn fallow to
laughing, lop to plod, lope into implode, feel into elf,
tether into wrath, cloud into dour, terse to rest, nothing
into other, final into lymph, turn simple into bliss, limp to
prim, turn tin to skint, bother to shod, caustic into tossed,
suture into rust

Charlottestown VA: The second title in Albion Books’ eighth series is Vermont poet Hanae Jonas’ chapbook debut, LOWLANDS (Charlottestown VA: Albion Books, 2022). Produced by Brian Teare in a numbered edition of one hundred and sixty-five copies, LOWLANDS writes an ecopoetics of spare, slow meditation, writing landscape, exile and intimate spaces, seeking space, ground and foundation. “When the Puritans came to New England,” she writes, as part of the sequence “Dusk,” “they left graves unadorned. // A loathing of icons, historians say. // But the sense is that the soul has flown away— // Here lies nowhere      snowed-over echo      the enduring / source of night.” There is something of the affirmation in her meditations, something spiritual that calls, rhetorically, out into the universe, seeking resolution to impossible questions. There are also echoes of the lyrics of American poet Rae Armantrout in the way Jones composes her length of meditative pinpoints, accumulating moment upon moment, albeit utilizing longer, stretched-out narrative moments into threads. Her poems pause, hold, pattern and patter, offering a casual stroll along the line in really striking ways. Oh, I would like very much to see more work from Hanae Jonas. As the second half of the poem “Imagining a Forest by the Sea” reads:

Have I reached the periphery of my survival

on romantic sweep?

The lush undergrowth of his care

proportional to the exit of urgent images

which once I spilled freely,

excess trash around town.

I am not special, not even

very psychic.

Just shutting my eyes

for long periods of time.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, REVOLUTE

 

She thought the status of refugee was a warranty
to return. Between her and beyond, a nation,
which also translates to a horizon. Never mind
that her village took a new name; the jar
of water from her childhood river, ten stones,
and five twigs: clues that home is transitive.
She had a version of her country under the bed.
We are permanently old and ever new
when we build a nation. (“Revolute”)

Known as “the first Tibetan female poet to be published in English,” San Francisco poet and writer Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s latest publication, her first poetry title in a decade, is the chapbook REVOLUTE (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2021), produced as the fourth title of Albion Books’ Series Seven [see here for my reviews of the first, second and third of the same series]. Dhompa is the author of the poetry collections Rules of the House (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2002), In the Absent Everyday (Apogee Press, 2005) and My rice tastes like the lake (Apogee Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], as well as the memoir/non-fiction book A Home in Tibet (Penguin India, 2013), a title published in the United States as Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging (Boulder CO: Shambhala Publications, 2016). Furthering a number of the concerns of her earlier works, Dhompa’s new chapbook speaks of exile and return, and the translation into further exile, with the discovery that what was once “home” has since changed, evolved, to a point beyond recognition. In a triptych of three poem-sequences—“Revolute,” “The history of sadness” and “Inner revolution”—Dhompa writes on memory and belonging, home and time, temporal and familiar spaces, and the collision that can’t help but emerge between two different cultures. “What grouping of texts, which images,” she writes, as part of the longer title sequence, “will speak to someone who is not me, / but like me, has no place to escape / from the place of belonging / that is no more.”

Dhompa’s published work-to-date has very much engaged with lyric explorations around emerging from one culture and continent to living fully within another, writing in and around exile and notions of belonging, as well as the concerns and complications around attempting to exist fully within the possibilities of both spaces. “Mothers remember / the bodies they buried. / Life after death,” she writes, as part of “The history of sadness,” “and death / in every breath. Belonging: a verb, / and belonging / a strip of hope fed with orchids / on sale and recipes / brought from a country I now hover / over in virtual maps.” What is curious about this current work is the way in which her poems extend across a larger canvas: not composed as suites of shorter meditations, but longer sequences that stretch beyond what she has previously attempted. The effect allows for a further level of depth and inquiry, and an admission in how her lyrics are so very much connected to each other. Further on in the same opening sequence, she writes: “The point that ink makes is storied, we’ve memorized / its conventions. The primary theme is land / and who stole it.” Through the triptych of poems, Dhompa slowly evolves her lyric from one of the disappearance of what it was they had left behind, to a poem that includes her mother, writing around mothers and mothering, and the potential loss of her mother, even beyond her mother’s own loss of homeland. “Is there a replacement / for the slow and stretched vowels in a mouth / accommodating something new?”

It is the branches closest to the ground
mothers warn about. If you stray too
far, you will fall. If you lean too much, you
will lose your center. In class, teachers prop gravity
as a lesson about equality. Outside, history is cruel,
our fall falling without ceasing. Even simple questions
trick us. What is your medical history? No branches
to fall back on, no headstone where they jumped
into the river, or shattered their hearts. To make
the doctor comfortable, I write, heart disease. (“The history of sadness”)