Pattie McCarthy, Nulls

THE FOLLOWING IS PLAINTEXT. the poem uses no metaphors. the poem uses no irony. the poem uses no figurative language whatsoever. the poem uses no humor. the poem uses no appropriate eye contact. the poem has a monotonous voice. the poem has difficulty repairing communication breakdown & restarting conversation. the poem uses language in an eloquent but inarticulate way. the poem knows the emperor has no clothes. the poem knows squares don’t have cousins. the poem chews on things that are not edible. the poem is unusually loud. the poem creates jokes that make no sense. the poem creates its own words & uses them with great pleasure in social situations. the poem interprets known words literally. the poem interrupts others. the poem tells no lies. the poem not single spies. the poem has impairments in prosody. THE PRECEDING IS CIPHERTEXT. (“Domestic Cryptography Survey I”)

Philadelphia poet Pattie McCarthy’s fourth trade poetry collection is Nulls (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2014), which is, as the back cover suggests, a four-section “collage of possible meetings which ultimately lead to birth [.]” I’ve only seen a couple of titles from Horse Less Press over the past couple of years, but this is easily the most attractive, and showcases the fact that this is a press worth paying attention to. The first section, “scenes from the lives of my parents,” appeared as a chapbook earlier this year with Bloof Books, and the short poems that make up the section each begin with a small asterisk and opening line. In many ways, the entire suite of short pieces in the first section is constructed as a sequence of footnotes, broadening the scope of information presented within an unseen source. Perhaps the footnotes exist as the real story, the important moments, between the mundane pieces of living. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

*scenes from the lives of my parents:

my father shaved his head in order to write

a letter upon his scalp & waited

(for his hair to regrow)—whereupon

he set off for my mother & there shaved

his head again to reveal the message.

this was a period of history that tolerated

a certain lack of urgency.

Many of McCarthy’s poems over the years have been composed in part from her apparent love of research into medieval subjects, topics and sources, blended with contemporary, personal and familial references, including her children, all of which come through with an incredible, staccato ease (something she recently discussed in an interview posted at Touch the Donkey). Her poems bounce and leap and have such a wonderful sense of sound and play that I don’t see in most other writers (Sylvia Legris, perhaps, or Emily Carr), as well as playing off a repetition and accumulation that build up to something quite magnificent. As she writes to open one of the pieces in the second section: “WHEN I SAY go TAKE THESE SENTENCES ONE AT A TIME—the / poem may laugh inappropriately. the poem may engage in / sustained and unusual repetition. the poem may prefer to be alone.” And yet, as much as McCarthy’s poems can exist as individual units,they are very much built to live with and even against each other, as Michael Ondaatje wrote in the introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1970): “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can […].” It is as though McCarthy’s work is slowly evolving as a larger, ongoing, singular work of interconnected works, each composed as book-length units.

FOR yes—PLEASE

PRINT FIVE OF YOUR CHILD’S LONGEST & BEST SENTENCES

I can’t do this orally, only headily.

my sleep today was long but thin.

I don’t like the blinding sun, nor the dark, but best I like the mottled

            shadow.

but the butterfly is snowed, snowed with snow.

the long green grass with be yours & yours & yours . (“Domestic Cryptography Survey I”)

The four sections of the collection—“scenes from the lives of my parents,” “Domestic Cryptography Survey I,” “a poem including a brief history of autism” and “Domestic Cryptography Survey II,” as well as a section of “Sources”—extend many of the threads of McCarthy’s prior concerns, structures and subjects, blended together in such a way that expand on what she’s previously accomplished. Her interplay between medieval and contemporary ideas of women, children, birth, courtship and marriage work their ways through four sections, each of which focuses on a different point in a narrative from courtship through to marriage, childbirth and child-rearing, with the additional thread of autism. As she writes as part of the third section:

John Langdon Down, in his 1887 Mental Affections of Childhood & Youth described a type of child ho, when first dentition proceeding, lost its wonted brightness; it took less notice of those around it; many of its movements became rhythmical & automatic; […] anxiety was felt on account of the deferred speech, still more from the lessened responsiveness to all the endearments of its friends. Down notes other children who at second dentition suffer crises of intelligence having night terrors & not unfrequently loss of speech.

after my third child was born, I worried about post-partum depression. my ‘irrational fear’ was that someone was going to come & take the baby away. but if I confessed my irrational fear to the doctor, would that mean that someone would come & take the baby away? would the fear of someone coming to take the baby away be a reason to come & take the baby away? when I read the history of autism, I can taste that fear again.

it is as tough all of my skin can taste it.

Part of what has long appealed about McCarthy’s work is the way in which she manages to combine research and confessional in such a visceral, personal way, pushing inventive language poetry to very personal spaces (something Ottawa poet Brecken Hancock has been doing lately as well, such as in her recent series of pieces at Open Book: Toronto or in her Broom Broom [see my review of such here]). McCarthy is adept at writing about parental fear and anxiety, subjects that still somehow have the sheen of taboo, despite the growing list of poets managing to write such with incredible power, including McCarthy, Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg. The poems in Nulls are composed with such a primal force over an extremely large and complex canvas, and delve both historically and personally deep. “[A]ll words in fact have private meanings,” she writes. As one of the poems in the second section begins:

to give her something to be anxious about, she was taken to the shock room, where the floor is laced with metallic strips. to give her something to be anxious about, two electrodes were put on her bare back, & her shoes were removed. to give her something to be anxious about, z-process. to give her something to be anxious about, re-birthing. to give her something to be anxious about, he was shot to death in the arms of his aide. to give her something to be anxious about, some children will need more than ninety hours of listening. to give her something to be anxious about, a bit like a radio station going in & out of frequency & will change from left to right ear. to give her something to be anxious about, the process of removing heavy metals.

Arielle Greenberg, Shake Her

Arielle Greenberg was raised in Niskayuna, New York, home of the first Shaker community in America and eight and a half miles from where Mother Ann Lee is currently buried. She was pregnant with her second child when she conducted the research for this book in the summer of 2007 at the Shaker Heritage Society in Colonie, New York and at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine, home to the only living Shakers left in the world (four at the time of Arielle’s visit, including a recently arrived young novitiate). She tried to keep this pregnancy a secret from her mother, from whom she was estranged, but her mother found out about the pregnancy in early November 2007, when Arielle had just entered her third trimester. Arielle began having nightmares and visions of the pregnancy being cursed, and about two weeks later, the baby died in utero at thirty-one weeks. He was named Day, and was born and buried in Maine in December of 2007. (More of the story of his birth and death can be found in Arielle’s book with Rachel Zucker, Home/Birth: A Polemic.) (“ABOUT THE AUTHOR”)

I don’t often begin with such biographical detail, but the new edition of American poet Arielle Greenberg’s chapbook Shake Her (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) appears to require it. Originally produced as part of the 2008 dusie kollektiv, Shake Her is a startling, heartbreaking and complex collection of poems. Constructed as a scrapbook of poem-sketches and footnotes as part of ongoing studies into the American Shakers, Greenberg’s Shake Her feels very much part of a much larger frame than the boundaries of the immediate publication. At roughly thirty pages, this is a book that ties the narrator as mother to her own mother to the historical figure of Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), founder of the American Shakers. Through the narrative of the poems, the connection is one that binds the three throughout, eventually moving into the loss of Greenberg’s second child. In one of the first poems, she writes: “I’d be stupid to pretend there wasn’t all that sky-writing / when I was a child and you were my mother.” (“SKY-WRITING”), and the loss of her mother (“to California, and to illness physical, and to illness mental, and to general anger,” as she writes in the poem “THIS IS WHERE I CAME TO KISS (ALBANY, NY)” ) is deeply felt .

FORGOTTEN

My mother has a lovely face of fur, I once wrote,

and has to go to a meeting.

As in a fairytale, there’s a hole in my book where a mother should be,

a hole in my head, caught in my throat,

a hole in my fine felt heart worn on a fob.

There’s a hole big enough to push my finger through

and flex to feel the flood of air I am damming.

This hole die-cut in my life and peered out

to an illuminated page with a castle and a rook,

this round, voided space, my mother.

The hole that hills yell through.

If I followed the familiar paths—was orphaned,

taken to the wolves or the witches or left in spindled knots—

well, as in I am living the good life without,

The author of two trade poetry collections, My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) [see my review of such here] and Given (Verse, 2002) [see my review of such here] and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003), as well as the co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of the hybrid genre nonfiction book Home/Birth: A Poemic (1913 Press, 2011), Greenberg has written numerous poems on mothering and motherhood, and her work compares with some of the rare best of a genre that far too often falls into sentiment and cliché. This short chapbook is stunning, and works, in part, to highlight how long it has been since a trade collection of her poetry appeared. Shake Her feels like something much larger that we haven’t yet been able to see, whether still in-progress or left waiting, unfinished. I want to see what the rest of this looks like.

THIS IS WHERE I CAME TO KISS (ALBANY, NY)

Some Hints of a Religious Scheme, Taught and propagated by a Number of Europeans, living in a Place called Nisqueunia, in the State of New-York, Valentine Rathburn (Salem, 1783): “They begin by sitting down and shaking their heads in a violent manner; turning their heads half round…their eyes being shut.”

I walk the ground for once a childless mother. The thistle, clover, wind and bug-sticky heat are all what I communed from when I was young. The roosters look like perfect folk paintings of roosters, almost kitsch, almost sacred. It is as if the present tense were itself trembling.

Around the corner, the small airport where I used to come to kiss, when I was a virgin and my boyfriend had a hatchback and we both lived at home with our families. It is as if the tide of my next child is already breaking, did break, will break, because waves are just a thing the water does again and again.

I think of myself as a person who, if no path is clearly marked, simply will not start walking. But here I walk, because I am a mother with no child with me. A mother enveloping a secret next child. A child with no mother, with a mother who will not walk beside me. Simple is a fallacy.

A big bee bumbled by from the pages of a children’s book I read to my daughter last night at bedtime. I could sleep or die or birth here, out in the open, in this forsaken and holy farm, its medicinal herb garden still tended, made to look new by volunteers. I could be, finally, that orphan, a free spirit, and bound only to this plot of star flower, Indian cup, and ghosts.

Except, of course, that I was raised up here, daughter to a mother now departed (to California, and to illness physical, and to illness mental, and to general anger). Except, of course, that this is where I came to kiss.

______

I want to go to my Mother; I am sick to see my Mother; I had no God till I had a mother; how could I be born without a Mother? What reason I have to bless God for my mother.

Pattie McCarthy, L & O

honest work—that makes me feel verbatim.

the widow says : sorrow is my own yard. I don’t

have to look it up. it is one of the poems

I’ve accidentally memorized & when

he was in the hospital I could recite it to him.

honest work—the same

bones, only

compressed. apologies

for the delay, someone left

a package on the train. the army

experience center at Franklin

Mills Mall includes three mission

simulators, a café & lounge. all your

recyclables in one bin! ring in

the frost upon them freedom

from fire. in fact, people are not

particularly kind to pregnant women. I have never

In a review of Patti McCarthy’s [see her 12 or 20 questions here] first trade collection, bk of (h)rs (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2002), in Rain Taxi, American poet andcritic Catherine Daly writes:

McCarthyjoins a post-confessional focus on information of various sorts ascontent in poetry with the still-increasing awareness thatnon-canonical texts from the middle ages, renaissance, and “earlymodern” baroque period were written, spoken, or used by women. Shecalls attention to survivals in the language which indicate survivalsin the way we perceive our days and read old texts. She firstimmerses us in language, and a particular language of time andspecial case, creating a sense of intimacy and identification ratherthan identity. “[T]he clerestory as choice & not-choice” in“matins” is also a window in a cloister. A woman becomes “anyonewho grew up behind / the wreckage of a pastoral screen door” in thefollowing poem, “lauds.” The word “door” changes the screenof a harem window, a Japanese Imperial Court, or a monastery into acontemporary screen for keeping the outside out and the inside in,the screen on the doorway of the sublime. Then she matches andmismatches her present situations, what she knows from experience,with images from the past, what she knows from reading and studyinglanguage. She is both writer and reader: her subject matter is bothpublic and private. Finally, McCarthy establishes what she thinksabout the women she reads and writes about, “glances and hair down,their bodies produce no sound.” Their images, languages, andwritings speak through McCarthy’s prophecy of survival.

After three trade poetry collections—bkof (h)rs (2002), Verso (2004) and Table Alphabetical of Hard Words (2010)—allfrom Berkeley, California publisher Apogee Press, comes Pennsylvania poet Pattie McCarthy’s chapbook L& O (little red leaves e-editions, 2011). Constructed out of the sequences “liminal :” and “oyer :,” she explains the impetus for the first piece in her “notes & acknowledgments”:

This poem was brought to you by the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania. Written for the event “William Carlos Williams andthe Women: the Legacy of WCW at 125,” on 11 November 2008 [you can catch streaming of such here]. With many thanks to Jessica Lowenthal, organizer & host, & to my fellow participants : Sarah Dowling, Jena Osman, & Michelle Taransky. Includes much quotation & thievery from many poems by WCW (e/g/ everything after the second masses of flowers is quotation).

October – November 2008.

Possibly written during or perhaps after the composition of her third trade collection, L & O forgoes McCarthy’s explorations of Old English for another type of language, and, as the first sequence lifts and resequences lines and phrases from William Carlos Williams, the second, “oyer,” hosts a list of that stretches more than two pages, from Eleni Sikelianos, Anselm Berrigan, Jen Hofer and Cathy Wagner to Lorine Niedecker, Fanny Howe, William Blake and Samuel Beckett. In her published work to date, McCarthy has managed to collage filtered and found language into acrobatic and emotional shapes, working though a passionate embrace of language writing, reminiscent of the work of Toronto poetMargaret Christakos, or even New York City poets Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg. The poem-sequence “liminal :” catches a number of references, skipping stones across heady surfaces, wrapping one narrative sequence through the immediate of the author/narrator, from “it was so much empty / air to fill with ocean.” to:

& toddlers arrive & I

should have stayed

home with my own

kid & had free

coffee & graded

nothing.

all the usual margins.

honest work—a busy kind of diction

limning out a greenglass

insulator make these calculations

more complicated. ring in the new

baby […] open well its eyes

love & wrestling

were brothers on the Mayflower

& (one assumes) thereafter.

katie & timothy

mccarthy were not

(presumably) siblings on the Titanic.

The second sequence opens: “everything begins with A,” focusing deeper on pregnancy, and the immediately domestic, even as both sequences wrap themselves around pregnancy, the body, mothering, birth and children.

make it hard for me & I’ll make it

impenetrable for you. crafting

a code & its key simultaneously,

though a cipher is preferable

(the former is cumbersome & unflexible).

swags of pine, the day’s familiar. you need

language where you sit. the room where

our house is slowly (& with much old-world

gentility) falling apart. he coats

his fingers in antebellum plaster

dust—the damp creeps (as they say) & his fingers

plug the faucet. isn’t there anything

beautiful in decay anymore? you squirm.

I felt [your] bare foot from the inside.

There is something of the fragmented journal to both of these sequences, a form that McCarthy revels in, writing individual entries made in the spaces between the chaos of writing, teaching and children. As any writer with small children knows, there is the constant difficulty in finding time, in balancing writing and parenting (there is a reference to being on maternity leave in the second sequence, for example), yet its an effect that still seems to be felt more (and written about more) by women writers than their male counterparts. Where, I wonder, are the maternity/paternity leave poems by male writers?

at the boy’s birth in whom the iron shall cease—

apologies, I ignored you to write

a poem about you.

Both sides of the border: Rogue Stimulus and Starting Today

“Poets,” Shelley declared, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How can this be? In his Defense of Poetry (written in response to Thomas Peacock’s assertion that poetry bears little relevance in an age of science and technology – sound familiar?), Shelley asserted that poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought,” because it is “a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.” No wonder one of the first objectives in a military coup is to gain control of the media. No wonder writers – and poets, especially poets – are jailed by dictators all over the world. No wonder the surge of unprecedented hope in this country, sprung from the unwelcoming gray scarp of nearly a decade of palaver, makes us feel tentative, yet exuberantly alive.
Rita Dove, “Foreword,” Starting Today

Poets in Canada and the United States have been responding to politics happening in their respective countries over the past number of months, resulting in two very different poetry anthologies: Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament, edited by Stuart Ross and Stephen Brockwell (Toronto ON: The Mansfield Press, 2010) and Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, edited by Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2010). There has been a concern over the past decade or two that ordinary citizens in both Canada and the United States have lost their engagement with politics. Madonna once pleaded with her fellow citizens to “rock the vote” given the state of their poor voter turnout, working an appeal (as well) to the not-fully-engaged, potential first-time voter. The recent Iraq election, fraught with turmoil, bombings, fraud and other violence, had a higher rate of their population voting than we had in Canada during our last federal election. Where does this apathy come from? Even when Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to turn artists against “ordinary Canadians” (suggesting, therefore, that one had nothing to do with the other) and slash cultural funds, it was really only the francophone artists in Quebec that managed to organize themselves, rally together, and talk directly to the media to explain the importance and richness of culture on a society. Or, the same who forced an election to deliberately pre-date the last American Presidential race, in case a Republican loss south of the border might trigger a Liberal win here.

The blurb on the back of Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament says it best, providing the driving force behind this instant anthology, giving five days between first call and final deadline:

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament (for the second time in a year!) on December 30, 2009, he punted many vital bills into oblivion. But he also inspired hundreds of poems after Mansfield Press announced this government-toppling anthology. This book gathers a range of responders—from outrage to slapstick—by acclaimed poets (including Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate and several winners of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry), previously unpublished poets and, to paraphrase Stephen Harper, ordinary working Canadians.

The “people’s poetry” aspect of the collection is interesting, but makes for somewhat of an uneven collection, yet the deliberately seventy-two poem collection seems almost reminiscent of Vancouver poet George Bowering’s own “people’s poetry” collection, his Seventy-One Poems for People (Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College Press, 1985), which riffed off Dorothy Livesay’s own Poems for People (1947), building a book that, hopefully, might engage more than those just interested in poetry. Why is this such an uphill battle, inviting engagement with politics or poetry?

One writer who seems to engage with the nuances of politics on Parliament Hill with regularly is George Elliott Clarke, himself a Governor General’s Award winner for his poetry collection, Execution Songs (2001). His aesthetic often switches gaze from the Nova Scotia communities of his roots to the workings of federal politics (he was employed on the Hill for a period in the 1990s, working for a Nova Scotia Member of Parliament), including numerous works on the late Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Stephen Harper as Himself

A pasty-faced, milquetoast, humpy doughboy,
As icky as egg white and just as dull,
This professor of snow jobs oozes, slides,
From incline to decline to hole, shedding
Blizzards of dried shit and confetti’d lies,
Or slithers in grey areas, shady,
Like a right abominable snowman
Who’s leery of sunlight. His Canada
Is cold as a morgue: a deep-freeze Parliament,
With policies the Ice Age fossilized.
Our Howdy Doody in a flak jacket,
Pres. Harper strives to ape Richard Nixon,
To play his dreary replica, to slouch
Unpardoned, unloved, into infamy.

There is an entire group of west coast writers writing out of social politics through language who would have been fascinating to see responding to the prorogue, but somehow, are noticeably absent. One can only presume that they chose not to responds to the quick-call, dealing, perhaps, with the social and cultural implications (and disruptions) of their Olympics, including Peter Culley, Stephen Collis, Wayde Compton and Marie Annharte Baker (a recent issue of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review [see my review of such here] reflected some of their responses). In a country made out of regions, are the concerns of a government engaged in two annual prorogues, poorly-conceived debates on Arctic sovereignty, deflecting questions on Afghan detainees, and silent on those missles off the coast of Newfoundland simply an issue of so-called “central” Canada? Part of what the book works as its main thrust, its main point, seems to have been to publish a wide range of responses, from the “literary elite” (another thorn, supposedly, in our Prime Minister’s side) to poems by “ordinary working Canadians.” Because of this, the anthology presents seventy-two poems that range from earnest to lyric to jokey, threading an unsettling frustration to simmering anger at shutting down Parliament for what has been seen by many as an action against democracy, such as Jason Heroux’s “Old Year’s Day,” that begins: “There was no New Year / this time around because / parliament shut down /so we had to begin / the old year again.” Another is the magnificent “The Chair” by Toronto writer Daniel Scott Tysdal, that includes:

Plato would lose it: a chair—already so far removed
in ink from its ideal form—degraded by the addition
of the features of a ruler satirized for ruling. “Look
at the poets,” he’d state, “validating your right
to prorogue. For them? What’s the good? They find
your face in a chair without realizing they can’t even
see you. You’re a true leader, Harper, your true
features at all cost remain hidden.”

The anthology Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days, edited by poets Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg, was originally conceived of as a daily blog (one that is still up, with fresh entries, at 100dayspoems.blogspot.com), asking one hundred poets to write a poem for the first hundred days, usually composed within hours or a day of appearing online. As editors Zucker and Greenberg write in their introduction:

In those jittery, preinaugural hours, it became clear to us that our exhilaration stemmed, in part, from the knowledge that we were not alone in our enthusiasm. We knew others felt called to action just as we did. That same afternoon we compiled an e-mail list of poets – friends, acquaintances, and folk we admire – from across the country and across generations. Could we get ninety-nine poets to commit to writing a new poem during the first one hundred carefully watched days of the new presidency? And could we get them to respond overnight, so that our project would coincide with Barack Obama beginning his job? Yes, we could! Poets wrote back immediately, and with gusto.

Organized in the order in which they appeared online, from day one to day one hundred (starting with the only pre-written poem in the collection, Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day,” which she read at Obama’s inauguration), these pieces exude all the hope and fears and uncertainty that came about in those first heady weeks and days. There are the uncertain poems, the poems clear in their vision of change, and those who were only able, still, to hope, marking an interesting record, in itself, of that beginning period of a new president.

In the little painting of love
Is a man repairing a fence.
Catherine Wagner, “Oh” (Day 52)

What makes the anthology, in part, much like the previous, is the range of writing styles that exist in the collection, and the fact that it is one of the strongest anthologies of new writing I’ve seen in some time. There is something about the vibrancy of the poems in this collection; and is it just me, or do these pieces of the immediate, of the occasion, move from celebratory to quietly tentative to more certain, optimistic (and, often, more realistic) and more giving as the days continue?

Imagine being unable to imagine
another side.

What would you be?

A hill so steep you’d throw your thoughts against it?
Fanny Howe, “Imagine All the People” (Day 5)

One of my favourite (or, should I say, “favorite”) pieces in the collection has to be Brenda Hillman’s “Guilt Armada (draft of a haibun),” produced for Day 98, which is quite lovely, and begins:

About a hundred days into the dream, I saw a ship. I feel free to hide it here. A poet can hide anything in her poem. Some think this exceptional freedom is why we are at war. How can presidents sleep? Do they take pills? I feel free to ask. They give orders to kill people they don’t know. This president is an intelligent man, he’s like a son. The top of my left hip—where the femur meets the pelvis—feels turquoise. Arthritis or something. The president has compromised his ideals. How does he sleep after sending soldiers for endless violent occupations since Ghandi is on his list of top ten. Give him time, say my friends. Even now he looks tired. He does not say “endless violent occupations” but I am free to say it. I can choose Grande or Tall, Blackwater, oil & opium. The handsome general sits in the Appropriations Hearing. Nice haircut. His medals look like the little colored bands they put on pigeons. He has talked two presidents into endless violent occupations. Do presidents get stoned on power or what. Give him time, say my friends. Even the people crouching in the Shadow Banks & changing their shadows in shadowy corners say Give him time. Tossing their used-up shadows in the sea.

12 or 20 questions: with Arielle Greenberg

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005), Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is co-editor of two anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, personal essays by young women poets on their living female mentors (Iowa, 2008); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque, a theory-driven collection (Saturnalia, 2010). She is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv and is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago, though she is currently on leave in Maine, working on non-fiction projects, one about midwifery and one about the new back-to-the-land movement.

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

My first book was accepted just as I was graduating from my MFA program, and I was (and am) enormously grateful and lucky for that. I felt like I'd achieved what I set out to achieve, which is to be a poet with a book that I was proud of and might get read by others, and I was really thrilled with the press (Verse) that took it, and felt at home amongst its authors. When I got the news, I danced around my house to Joni Mitchell's song "Carey," which has Joni acknowledging her own success: it was my rock star moment! And the next year I went on the job market, since I had a book, and ended up getting a job in Chicago, and all of THAT changed my life, but honestly in most ways publishing a book of poetry does not change one's life in the way one might imagine: financially, or in terms of guaranteeing any kinds of future success or ease. Some things certainly are helped along by having a book, but not all.

My first book was the product of my casting around, aesthetically, in grad school, exploring and experimenting. It's therefore a playful, somewhat diffuse book--I wouldn't say it has one tone or voice, and it feels young and wild to me, in good ways. My second book is much more purposeful, focused: I went into that project with the aim of writing about my Jewish identity, and by that time I think I'd figured out some things about what worked and did not work for me about my own writing, so even though the poems are often dense and difficult and in some cases quite weird, the book feels settled to me, more adult, in that sense.

Since then I've written two more poetry manuscripts--plus a hybrid, collaborative manuscript about homebirth with my friend Rachel Zucker--and each of these feel like continuations of that same trajectory: I think in some ways my work is settling down, getting more focused, even as it decides to be even weirder and more personally investigative as I get older and my life gets more complicated. I try to make myself always write about whatever feels hardest and scariest, in some ways, and that changes as my life changes. Certainly since becoming a mother, mothering has become a central theme of my work, though gender and womanhood were always central themes.

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

I have to say that I just don't think I have much of a narrative urge. I'm not good at plot. I can write essays (and enjoy writing non-fiction, and always have written non-fiction) but I can't sort of move characters around in a scene or have them scoot linearly toward a goal. When I was younger I wrote more narrative poems that I thought were clear and readers would struggle with them and how non-linear they were: I finally made the conscious choice to not try to be so linear in my work! So I think I am just better cut out for poems...although when I write non-fiction, that is a totally different process for me, much less about inspiration and more about revision. I think fiction would require equal parts muse and hard work and that is very intimidating to me!

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I am usually speedy once I start something, but it can take me a long time to come up with an idea, and once I have an idea I mull it over for awhile in my head before writing anything down. And I can go months, sometimes even years, without ideas for poems, and during those periods I have no disciplined practice--I just wait. But I kind of think of those times as letting the fields lie fallow to recuperate, and trust that when I get an idea I'll write again. I don't call it "block" or flog myself about it. It's a long life. I trust that another idea, another poem, will eventually come.
In terms of individual poems, the first draft better look pretty close to the final draft, or it's just not happening. Meaning that my best work comes pretty spontaneously--I am not one to tinker with a poem forever once it's down. It has to come in a burst or not at all. Which is not to say I don't do some revision: I always write longhand, and I revise as I go, and then I usually let the poem sit a bit, then type it into the computer, at which point I revise again, and sometimes ask others to look at it, and revise again, etc. Often the form of the poem will change dramatically during this process, and sometimes I go back in and try to work on sound, meter, etc. But the basic germ and energy has to be there from the get-go, and that part happens in a sort of trance-state.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Some of both, usually. I often have a conceptual project in my head, a "book" or series or chapbook or overall arc or idea, and then also "random" poems will come to me at the same time and get jotted down and collected.

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

I love giving readings, though I wouldn't say they are part of my writing process--I am not someone who generally uses readings to think about revision, etc. Readings are like the cherry on top, the prize for having written anything at all. I try to mostly read new work at readings, and don't pursue readings if I don't have new work. They are a reward in that way. I love hearing from people, being with people, with my work. Connecting. Such a rare treat.

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?

I do have theoretical concerns behind my writing, but I try to keep them pretty far behind, because if they sneak up to the forefront, they usually impede more than improve the poetry. I would say the things I am often thinking about include: gender; taboo and "risk"; honesty and authenticity; class; privilege; "making it new;" and slang and dialect and regionalism.

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?

Right now I am living in a small town where poetry seems to actually have a big impact, and it's so encouraging. In Chicago, where I normally live, poetry has a pretty big presence as well, in a lovely way, but it sort of gets muted in the bigness of the city. Here it's so tangible: the local paper's arts section this week featured a whole page worth of poetry-related news and events! So I think writers have a similar role to other artists, which is to reflect the culture back to its citizens, provoke thought and emotion, challenge, make strange, make beautiful--all of that. And it's happening! It happens!

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

A good editor is a godsend. If an editor seems to really hear my work the way I want it to be heard, I love nothing more than to get some suggestions. I will say that Joyelle and Johannes at Action Books were this way for me with my second book, and Rob Caspar at jubilat, a magazine I adore, has done this for me. It's enormously satisfying to be well-edited. But it's rare to find editors like this, or those who take the time to perform this function, and so I don't count on it happening. I'm just thrilled when it does.

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

In graduate school, I was worrying over poetry contests or recognition or some such thing, and the poet Malena Morling, a professor there at the time, basically said that she tries to just keep her head down and write a good poem. In response to any flare-up of insecurity, ego, po-biz nonsense, etc.: just go home and try to write a good poem. I have thought of this so many times, and it keeps me grounded. Malena was too humble to have offered it as advice per se, but I am a less pure soul than she is, and I have passed it on as advice to many students.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to critical/creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I do a fair amount of genre-shifting between poetry and criticism and non-fiction, and I find that helpful. The processes are so different for me, and each taps into a different kind of work ethic and vein. It's also nice that in the lulls where I have no poems coming to me, I can try to work on essays, because, again, I don't rely on inpiration to strike in the same way for those. Though I think the times when I am flush with poems coming to me right and left are the most exciting to me.

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?

See above. No routine for poetry. Relatively workwoman-like for non-fiction, so those pieces are shoved into little blocks of work time when I can catch them, in between teaching and mothering and activism and domestic duties and friendships and the other things I do.

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

Again, I am somewhat relaxed about stalled phases and try to just let them be, but if I want a kick-start, I read. New poetry, poets I adore and who are my touchstones (C.D. Wright, Michael Burkard, Jean Valentine, Frank O'Hara, Dickinson), novels. The truth is, though, that since I've had kids it is rarely the situation that I have the time but not the impetus to write. I rarely have the time at all. If I do, it's probably because an idea feels so urgent that it has to break through my schedule and get written down. Which happens far too seldomly right now. But again, I feel like it's a long life, children are only young once, and at some point in my life I will have the luxury of time again.

13 - Betty or Veronica or Archie or Reggie? Drive or fly (or sail)? Laptop or desktop?

Jughead. Walk (or run, slowly, when not pregnant). Desktop--Mac, all the way.

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?

Oh yes! One of my chapbooks is from bluegrass music and a court trial. Another is from Shaker artifacts and religion. One of my books is from Judaic lore and culture and dogma. Another is from fashion and consumerism. And I have many poems that come from watching movies or listening to "Science Friday" on NPR or looking at visual art or thinking about the earth, all of it. I desperately need and love all the other mediums, museums, history, all of that.

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

Important to my work, in addition to the ones I've mentioned above: James Joyce. Nabakov. Lydia Davis. Anne Carson. Whitman. Kathy Acker. Lorrie Moore. Any writer who reminds me that one can be playful and innovative and profound and subversive and entertaining and difficult all at once.

Important to my life (of which my work is a part, not outside): Ina May Gaskin, Marsden Wagner and others who write about birth and maternity care in America.

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

So much! I would like to learn various crafts, like rug-hooking. I'd like to learn how to bake bread, how to raise chickens. I would like to work with my hands more in general. I would like to see all of the United States, and more of the world. I'd like to improve my French, go back to Latin, learn American sign 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 wish I could be a graphic designer, since that's something I'm really interested in, but I honestly don't know if I'd be very good at it. Same with other kinds of design: clothing, product. I think I'd be a good real estate agent. My dream profession right now is to be a homebirth midwife, but I'm not sure I'm cut out for it, because the life-and-death responsibility of it is intimidating to me and because I value being able to unplug from any job, which you can't really do as a homebirth midwife. But in any of these situations, I'd also write poems. I don't think of writing poems as my occupation: I don't make a living at it. I teach for my occupation, and I feel well-suited to that as a job.

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

It was what I was told I was good at early on, and I tend to stick with things about which I feel confident...perhaps to my own detriment. And I love language probably as much or more than anything else. I started reading at four, voraciously. So I think it just follows that I became a writer.

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

I am almost done with a novel my husband loves and recommended: Mrs. Bridge by Evan Connell. It's pretty great, though it hasn't shattered my world. The last book that shattered my world is probably Michael Burkard's collected.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A number of things: a nonfiction book that's a guide for women thinking of working with a midwife for their pregnancies and births; an oral history of the new back-to-the-land movement in Maine; trying to publish the three unpublished poetry manuscripts I have so that I can start writing something new. I've also got three anthology projects going: a book version of the poems from Obama's first 100 days blog that I've done with Rachel Zucker (it will be called Starting Today and is almost surely forthcoming from Iowa); a collection of Gurlesque work with Lara Glenum (forthcoming from Saturnalia); and a book of contemporary women's poetry aimed at teenage girls with Becca Klaver. And I'm supervising some graduate theses, writing some blurbs. Mostly I am working on gestating my third kid and bringing it into our family and the world happy, healthy and at home. That's a lot of creative work in and of itself!

12 or 20 questions archive (second series);