12 or 20 (small press) questions with Joshua Edwards on Canarium Books

Established in 2008 and sponsored in part by the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, Canarium Books is an independent press dedicated to publishing poetry by established and emerging authors from the United States and abroad.

Joshua Edwards directs and co-edits Canarium Books. He's the author of several books of poetry and photography, and he translated Mexican poet Maria Baranda's book-length poem, Ficticia. He lives West Texas and works at Marfa Book Company.

1 – When did Canarium Books first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
The press began in 2008, with our first single-author collections in 2009. It emerged out of a magazine, The Canary, and I don't think our goals have changed much ever since it's formation in 2002. Basically, we want to participate in the conversation and publish great poetry. One thing I've learned to appreciate more through editing is time.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?
My mom is a librarian, so I guess you could say that promoting literature is a hereditary addiction. Also, books have long seemed to me to be a better use of printing technology than money. I clearly remember feeling, in my early 20s, immense power in certain books-as-objects. One that comes to mind is the New Directions edition of The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca with the title in a burst of light surrounded by branches. Great poems and great books like that made me want to get in the publishing racket.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
I can only speak to our sense of responsibility, which is to publish writing that pays attention to language and the world in ways that are not of interest to the market and larger presses.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
I don't think of Canarium as doing anything that no one else is doing, we're just contributing what we can. Details and specifics distinguish every press.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
That's a tough one, and I definitely haven't figured out the answer. I only have more questions: What is the life of a book and how does it find that life? What sort of audience does an author seek? What is one's relationship to readings? To time? To travel? To translation? How to get a book beyond a border?

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
It depends on the book, the poet, and the editor. Each book we publish is assigned an editor who works with the poet. Sometimes the book is ready as-is, other times we push back on lines, structure, titles, and every other little thing.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
Our books are distributed through Small Press Distribution. We typically print 1000 copies.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
There are four co-editors: Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, Lynn Xu, and myself, and Russell Brakefield has been our essential managing editor for many years. We also have great assistant editors and interns at University of Michigan who help us select books and proof them. We get a ton of submissions each year, so fresh eyes and a variety of minds are essential. The toughest thing is figuring out a schedule that works for everyone.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
I tend to think about my own poems as pages in a book way more than I'd like; that is, it's increasingly difficult for me to write a poem without thinking of the architecture where it will live (or rest in peace). I do this with photography too.

10 – How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
We'd never publish our own books through Canarium, but I don't think there are any essential reasons for an editor to not publish their own collection. In the States, however, the poetry community's connection to academia complicates this. My next book, Castles and Islands, is being published by Liang Editions, a press that my wife, Lynn, has started for projects that are unconventional in one way or another. That book is photography and poetry and will serve as the catalog for a couple of upcoming photography exhibitions, and the photography world has very different ideas about publishing. Many of the best photobooks are self-published because the book object is so important (see the publications of Motoyuki Shitamichi). I look forward to more small, beautiful editions of poetry books (see Cuneiform Press).

11 – How do you see Canarium Books evolving?
In the context of this question, I think of evolution as staying alive.

12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
We've published many first books, and I'm most proud of introducing these poets to a wider audience. Readers have been very good to us; there are a couple of books I think are mind-bogglingly brilliant that haven't gotten as much attention as I feel they deserve, but I can't complain. My biggest frustration is there isn't time or other resources to do everything we want.

13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
Our aesthetic concerns are a carryover from editing the magazine, but for inspiration and energy we definitely looked to legendary presses like Burning Deck, New Directions, The Jargon Society, North Point, etc., as well as newer publishers, such as Flood, Fence, Verse/Wave, Ugly Duckling, etc..

14 – How does Canarium Books work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Canarium Books in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
I don't want to put up any velvet ropes or categorize our authors since they're all doing their own work. Books and authors do the real conversing, we just help them out as best we can.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
The years that Lynn and I have been in the States, we've (usually) organized road trips with some of our authors. These have been terrific fun and were especially important early on for introducing the press to the people. Now that we're in Marfa we're a bit less mobile, but we've had a couple of authors out for book launches and we plan more. We go to AWP each year and host readings, and although can be weird/nightmarish, it's been great for getting books to readers.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
We do the standard social media stuff.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
We do take submissions. In fact, we're accepting manuscripts until the end of December and we don't charge a reading fee (although we appreciate when submitters order a book from us).

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
Ish Klein's Consolation and Mirth includes a remarkable section of enigmatic riddles writ in red ink. Emily Wilson's The Great Medieval Yellows shows, better than any other book I can think of, the world up close, through a macro lens. Michael Morse's Void and Compensation is a heart-breaker that also cracks your brain wide open.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, translated by Sawako Nakayasu

PLEASE COVER ME WITH DIRT EVERY YEAR

Listlessly walking silently,

Clinging to the honeysuckle on the hedge

Crouched beside the road

O, decrepit old winter –

The hair on your head has dried

And those who walked upon it

Have died too, along with their memories

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, translated by Sawako Nakayasu (Canarium Books, 2015) is the first comprehensive collection by Japanese poet Chika Sagawa (1911-1936) available in English translation. In a recent review of the book over at Heavy Feather Review, AK Afferez writes: “[T]his first comprehensive collection of Sagawa’s poems and prose—diary excerpts, notes and reviews, vignettes that read like prose poems—reveals a complex and assured voice, one in constant expansion, always seeking new poetics.” As Nakayasu opens her introduction:

Sagawa Chika was Japan’s first female Modernist poet, whose work resonated deeply with, and helped shape, the most dynamic shifts and developments in the poetry of the era. She was a singular and remarkably inventive poet who had developed a poetics influenced by French literary movements as they were imported to Japan, English and American Modernist writers whose work she translated, and contrasts between her nature-filled upbringing and cosmopolitan Tokyo. Despite her death in 1936 at the young age of 24, it is impossible to overstate the importance of her remarkable oeuvre, which was created in less than six years of poetic production during one of the greatest social and cultural shifts of her nation’s history.

In her lengthy introduction, Nakayasu, a remarkable poet in her own right [see my review of her most recent collection, The Ants, here], goes on to describe Sagawa’s career cut short through a number of factors, including her early death, being female in a male-dominated field, and the advent of the Second World War:

Chika’s early death, along with the effects of World War II, did not help her work find a strong foothold in literary history. For the writers who lived through the war, however, it created a special set of difficulties. In addition to the general strain that the war placed on everyone, an FBI-like organization called the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu, also known as the Shisō Keisatsu or “Thought Police,” had taken to arresting writers and intellectuals whose work was deemed unpatriotic. Poets were pressured by the government to prove their loyalty by writing patriotic verse.

Her introduction is essential reading, and provides a fascinating overview of Sagawa’s life and work, and the factors that led to her work being forgotten, and later rediscovered. At nearly one hundred and forty pages, the range of the collection is remarkable, even moreso when one considers it was created in the space of some six years, until the author’s death at twenty-four. This is a work of poems, journals, short prose pieces and diary entries by someone remarkably mature and curious, stretching out the possibilities and energies of youth into something contemplative and knowing. Her poems, stretching between the lyric and the prose poem, are meditative and incredibly immediate, and read as remarkably contemporary, articulating a relationship between nature and the body, the smallest and simplest examples of beauty, the possibility of failure and a shadow of death that runs across and through the entire collection:

FALLING OCEAN

A red riot takes place.

In the early evening the sun dies alongside the ocean. The waves are unable to catch the clothes that float away after them.

The ocean builds a blue road from the vicinity of my eyes. Countless gorgeous corpses are buried below it. Annihilation of a band of tired women. There is a boat that hurriedly covers its tracks.

There is nothing that lives there.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynn Xu

Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai.  She is the author of Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) and June (a chapbook from Corollary Press, 2006).  Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Critical Quarterly, Octopus, Poor Claudia and others.  She co-edits Canarium Books.

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

It both does and does not, of course, on a very basic level, it must be both.  It does, because for a lot of people ‘writing poems’ does not become ‘poetry’ until it is published, so based on this logic, having a book gives my poems permission to be: poetry.  But this engine of ‘affirmation’ is almost entirely outside of me and my relationship to writing.  I say ‘almost’ because it has, without a doubt, been a positive reinforcement for my self-esteem, especially when I find myself struggling elsewhere.  However, life remains a self-reckoning, and ‘having a book’ (unfortunately) is not a magical handkerchief I can wave in front of it and make the various pains of psychic life go away.  Put another way, it does not make writing itself any easier.   

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

I am a terrible storyteller.

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

I’m not sure I can distribute writing into “projects,” although I use the word to give thinking a sense of time.  I am a very slow thinker and slow writer.  I need to live with something for a long time (in reading and in writing) before I can sift, crab-like, through the sediment.  In this way, re-writing is my primary mode of writing. 

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?

Writing begins where understanding is weak and desire is strong.  By “understanding” I mean: constitutive knowledge.  And by “desire” I mean: a proleptic sentience. 

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

Public readings are a part of my practice.  Subsequently, I find it strange that it is an unquestioned part of the poet’s work, as if it is an easy (or worse: natural) extension of the work itself, which it is not.  For reasons which threaten self-possession, public readings remain a sphere foreclosed from criticism.  But clearly the “reading” aims to offer a different experience from reading in private, to oneself and in silence.  Poets should not be expected to be performers as well.  But if one does take on the task, I think more should be made to offer different ways of listening and attention. 

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 like formal problems, because they are problems of history. 

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?

Today, maybe, the writer fights against the becoming-obsolescence of her craft—against the giant wave of multi-media displays and screens—so seeks to change it, to meet the demands of changed-experience.  The temporality of consumption is so fast and just getting-faster—and the appetite for ‘the next best thing’ is always on the tip of our tongues.  We are dissolute, completely useless, mediating mediated media.  I think of poets (and makers of creative work in general) as an “active culture” (the things advertised in yogurt or in Kombucha)—which tries to metabolize existing culture, because it cannot but completely internalize the gathering debris of its own unsuccess.   

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

I loved working with Rusty Morrison.  She was essential. 

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

There is no reason to be mean.

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

For me this is very difficult.  I need several weeks (even months) to transition from critical prose back into poetry.  It is easier the other way around. 

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 do not have one.  Sometimes I do not write for months.  I have not written for months.

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

I sleep.  I shower.  I wash my hands.  If I really want to get something done and cannot, I get erratic and buzz around like a self-distorting rock. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Funnily, the smell of plastic rain jackets in the rain.  This is not a Proustian madeleine, because it is not associated with nostalgia, but rather dissonance and a kind of nausea. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I suspect that the most powerful “influences” are ones that remain unconscious—or, cannot be delineated as a material presence as such. 

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

Nietzsche. 

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

I would like to learn how to swim.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?  Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Filmmaker, no question.

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

I don’t know.  I came to poetry through visual art, so I am quite attached to the image-making faculties of language—these can be metaphor or the simple accretion of affect over time, hardening into a material presence you can and cannot touch. 

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

The opening sections of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or blew me away.  I feel the same way about the first five chapters in Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone.  As for the film, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev lives with me like a strange crater.     

20 - What are you currently working on?

Friendships, and catching up on sleep.  

12or 20 (second series) questions;

The Invention of Glass, Emmanuel Hocquard (trans. Cole Swensen and Rod Smith

How to see this pink

cloth? It’s right. Prisoner

of his perspective

the commander missed

everything. Ancient walls

become paths.

Affirming and negating

can be equally energizing.

Why these forms?

Direction north. “Every day

he climbed the difficult trail.”

(Anna Brener.) The parentheses

create a blind spot in the

sentence. The blue line

of a bridge and the blue line

of a kingfisher: the distance

between the blues. Close

the quotation marks. (“Poem”)

It was only a couple of years ago that I originally encountered the work of French writer Emmanuel Hocquard, the first name that struck in an anthology of French writing in translation, edited by Norma Cole, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (Burning Deck, 2000). Since then, it seems, I’ve been seeing his name everywhere, including in the new single-author volume, The Invention of Glass (Canarium Books, 2012), translated from the French by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith. Said to be one of France’s leading poets, the back cover of Hocquard’s The Invention of Glass (originally published in 2003 as L’Invention du verre) reads: “This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory’s particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.” The book is structured into two sections, the long poem “Poem” and the prose-section “Novel” (as well as “Notes” and the end), with both sections not entirely limited to those artificial labels, and, as the back cover suggests, working through the binaries of “narrative” and “poem,” twisting and turning both.

Murmur

P. 32. Time Pocket was made in 1968 by Dennis Oppenheim. The line cut by the snowmobile into the surface of the frozen lake traced the time zone that runs between the United States and Canada. “This ‘time pocket’ also evokes the ‘fold’ of time which runs into the pocket, which is itself no more than an interstitial void between two hours (3:30 in the United States; 4:30 in Canada)—exactly the interval of the Aristotelian instant. This representation of the instant as time’s internal limit across a fiction manifests one of the possible accounts of time, articulated around a system of international conventions. Time in this case truly is the number of motion. (“Story”)

Throughout the first section, the twenty-part stretch of “Poem,” the linearity and smoky quality of his lines manage to cohere into a solid, while still shifting. I’m struck by the evocative abstract of his writing, the way his texts articulate both language and process, writing the details into universals. For Hocquard, it seems, it’s the flux that matters, the process of shifting, of never remaining the fixed point. For a number of writers, book-length works are just as much explorations of form as anything else, whether George Bowering, bpNichol, Lisa Robertson or nathanaël, and Hocquard very much adheres to the same qualities of searching through writing, although I find it is in his short prose bursts (the “prose-poem”) where he shines best. From what I’ve seen, this might be his finest thinking form. I am fascinated by his sentences, and in the structures and resonances that his prose-pieces evoke.

The subject reconstructs itself

P. 75. “Even a proposition such as: ‘I currently live in England’ has two aspects: it is not erroneous, but on the other hand: what do I know about England? Might my judgement not be completely confused?

Might it not be possible that these people, entering this room, tell me exactly the opposite, even showing me ‘proof’ so that suddenly I find myself there, a madman alone in the middle of normal people, or a normal person in the middle of the mad? Couldn’t doubts come to assail me precisely about that which, for me at that moment, is the most incontestable? (“Story”)

Still, I have yet to read enough of his larger oeuvre to comprehend a larger sense of it, something I hope to correct over the coming months. Given his publication history in translation is vast and scattered, there is much to learn.