Fence magazine #29 (spring-summer 2014)

SECOND LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE

When learning a third language, one often accidentally uses the second tongue, even if it’s barely rooted. In that moment of interference—there is a box in the mind that springs open. occupied. Two spiders per web. The dark matter of conflict. There is a shifting, making space for the stranger getting onto your subway car. You are a subway car. Or the language is in you like a mind. (Jennifer Kronovet)

By now, you’ve most likely figured out that one of my favourite American literary journals is Fence magazine, and their most recent issue recently arrived at my door: Fence magazine #29 (spring-summer 2014). I have to say I was charmed by Trey Sager’s editor’s note at the opening of the issue, titled only “EDITOR,” in which he discusses the process of a small handful of editors with varied tastes and biases, working together to produce various issues. The piece ends with:

Our conversations about what we want to publish have included shared enthusiasms and interests in work from different categories spanning (at minimum) race, age, sexuality, gender, class, level of artistic success, languages, and aesthetics, and how to find stories therein that are challenging and new and explosive and relevant. But I’ve also come to a temporary conclusion that a roster of diverse stories is what’s most important to me. Why? Because that means we’re reading stories on their own terms, that we’re not beholden to a reductive or singular idea of what “high quality” is. I also believe that a diverse group of stories necessarily results in a diverse group of authors. As a democracy, the give Fence fiction editors are each other’s fail-safes. We help check each other’s underlying motives. The subconscious is some deep shit.

Probably ours is not a perfect system, but the latest result is the fiction in this issue, a diamond of a gamut. More or less I’m still following the same Sherpa as before, only now he’s wearing an Iron Maiden tee and quotes Charles Olson, “Limits / are what any of us / are inside of.” Where’s he taking us? Up the mountain, of course.

Everybody carries some water.

Part of that broad scopes includes the caveat that, once published in an issue of the semi-annual Fence, that same author can’t submit again for two years, providing any reader the opportunity to discover at least a couple of very interesting authors previously unknown in every issue. I’m always happy to see new work by Brian Kim Stefans, Jenny Zhang, Evie Shockley, Cara Benson, Jacob Wren, John Pluecker, Sampson Starkweather, Barry Schwabsky, Katie L. Price and Laura Mullen, for example, but was also quite pleased to be able to discover the works of writers such as Dawn Marie Knopf, Jennifer Kronovet and Sandra Simonds; Simonds’ sequence, “The Lake Ella Variations” is worth the price of admission alone. A fragment of the thirteen part sequence reads: “The song of the lake and the song of the human / make / the electric chair. // The song of the hand and the syringe / make / the bread-maker. // The song of the wheat flour and sticker-book / make / the bed.” Sager makes the case for a strong array of fiction in each issue, but it is always the poetry that strikes me first (perhaps my own bias is simply coming through). It is through journals such as Fence that make me optimistic of the state of literary culture, and some of the possibilities of the poem, opening every issue to a series of striking short lyric poems and/or sequences, such as this, the opening of Dawn Marie Knopf’s sequence, “selections from THE ARIAL CRITIQUES”:

The boundary gathers all along the length of the same. If I recollect with any

accuracy I felt it just after we passed the Interstate Shield but you likely dumbed

down the controls for my sake, my simple mind. One side is on this side

and one side is on the other side. To cross Stateline is to re-establish

our conversation. Over our second course in the third town in the great land

Perpetua I continue with what I saw.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz on eohippus labs

eohippus labs is a literary micropress located in Los Angeles, California.


Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz are co-publishers and co-editors of the press eohippus labs. In addition to their individual works, they also write collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization). Their collaborative work has appeared in a variety of publications including Area Sneaks, String of Small Machines, A Sing Economy, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Texts, Abraham Lincoln, and as an Arrow as Arrow chapbook, Sin is to Celebration. In 2011, Harold and Amanda, as part of U.N.F.O., co-organized Explanation as Composition, a collaborative audio text project, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

1 – When did eohippus labs 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?

 eohippus labs started in 2006. The original goal was to give writers we knew a venue for work outside of their normal practice. Our goal has not shifted since then. We’ve learned that asking people to access or articulate another part of their thinking can be a difficult task.


2 – What first brought you to publishing?

 The desire to publish work that we love and felt would have no other home.


3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

 We can only speak for ourselves, but see the above answer. We also try to work with different economies to make our work more accessible.


4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

 We’ve been doing a a pamphlet series, a greeting card series, and most recently an innovative narrative series.


5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

 In our experience, chapbooks get out into the world in grassroots way: at readings, through word of mouth, the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
 We can be very involved as editors, depending on what the work calls for.


7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

 A usual print run is about 120 books. We also feel it’s important to keep books in print, so we do reprints.

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?
 The editing involves just the two of us. We’re lucky because we get along and work well together. We could imagine it being a very difficult process if we didn’t.


9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
 Being editors/publishers has made us more sensitive to understanding the need for communication throughout the publishing process. Nobody likes to have long periods of silence when waiting for work to be published.


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?
 This issue depends on the goals of each individual press. The idea for eohippus labs actually got started because Harold wanted to publish a piece of Amanda’s writing that he thought was great.

11– How do you see eohippus labs evolving?

 The bottom line is that eohippus labs will evolve along the lines of what we can afford to produce.


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 are proud of everything we have published and love that these pieces of writing exist in the world. Our biggest frustration has been learning how to design and make the books. Also, we’d love to devote more time to the press, but the day jobs do get in the way.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?


We were inspired by our friends’ presses in Los Angeles – Insert Press, Les Figues Press, and Make Now Press.


14– How does eohippus labs work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see eohippus labs in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
 Engagement with our immediate literary community and the community at large is integral to everything we do. We think those dialogues are crucial and ongoing. There would be no reason to engage in this project otherwise.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

 

Yes, we do. Readings are very important.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

 

We don’t what life is like without the internet.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

 Right now, we solicit work and do not take submissions. However, we are planning to change this process in the future. The one thing we are not looking for is pieces or excerpts from larger projects. We want the press to be part of a generative process for writers: either by publishing small, self-contained pieces that they would not have been written otherwise, or by seeding what might become bigger projects.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
 Recently we have published a pamphlet by Cara Benson titled The Secret of Milk, and an innovate narrative piece by Allison Carter titled Sum Total. They are both great writers and their work speaks for itself. We think you should read them.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Cara Benson, The Secret of Milk

I want to distract you from my primary purpose in penning this pamphlet. To do that I will create a space for an abject lyric, not in the sense that the lyric is abject, per se. Its core/content. Perhaps lyricism is the distraction.

The story goes like this: I made a poem. Which according to Robert Duncan was more than singing; but according to Johannes Goebel music is beyond and came after language. Either way, I made a piece of writing that slides along a continuum of music and language in its lyricism. Language here being signs attempting to indicate referents (which can be misunderstood), and music viewed as patterns of sound without intended referents.

There are a few versions of the poem of which I write. All of them include pre-text curated from an article on agri-business as well as lyric stanzas written in response to an advertising slogan. Here is the first, condensed, for space (think originally more floating or white):

“Does A Body Good”

As the product, myself, of generations of Eastern Ontario dairy farmers (and where I also worked and grew), I find I'm reacting even before opening poet Cara Benson's chapbook, The Secret of Milk (Tract Series #5, eohippus labs, 2011), referred to by the poet Kate Greenstreet, in her interview with Benson, as “a treatise on the possibilities of lyric advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness” in Bookslut. What does it mean to produce for one body, by putting another in danger? There is an element of Benson's writing that deals very much with the consequences of the things we make, as writers or as humans, whether in our literary production, or here, specifically, the dairy industry, asking the difficult questions that are usually, deliberately, overlooked. And in certain sections, is she talking about writing or milk production? Possibly, and beautifully, applying a single morphing strain of argument to both. I've always liked the approach, forwarded over the years by writers such as Erin Mouré and Lisa Robertson, of blending literary writing with the formal essay, genres bleeding and folding in and over each other, and, when done properly, each element adding significantly to the other.

We want the reader to enter to produce her poem from the poem so that we don't replicate anti-democratic syntactical strategizing. But what do you put on your cereal? How do you open the carton? At some point the door of the refrigerator is closed and one will hurt her hand thinking otherwise. Abstracting the physicality of shut.

Produced out of Los Angeles, California, eohippus labs is self-described as “a short form literary project and press, co-edited and co-published by Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz.” The author of the trade collections (made) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and the forthcoming Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, 2012), New York poet Cara Benson has also produced a number of chapbooks over the past few years, including Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Sources:

Milk: It Does A Body Good: Advertising slogan

[Lori Lipinski. Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2003, https://www.westonaprice.org/news/259.html]

That is the first version, sans picture. I submitted it for market consumption to a few literary journals, and though other work from that batch was published, this poem wasn't. Maybe it's not a good [sophisticated, ambiguous, artful, musical, image-filled, allegorical, metaphorical, speechy infused/refused] poem. Too sentimental. Littteral. Processually neoliberal? The picture was cheating. Or the whole composition was too difficult to format online. I tried a second version; actually, once I submitted two versions together so there could be a choice. I operated on the [pre-text] more. I'll give just the changes, for space:

[The majority of commercial dairy cows are kept …, forced to … months out of the year, in an overcrowded ….]

The Secret of Milk reads as a poem/essay/treatise on the mistreatment of animals-as-product, on forcible containment, even including information I didn't previously know, such as the fact that “It is illegal to expose animal manufacturing / practices through photographic images or reporting in thirteen / states in the US.” In their Bookslut interview, Greenstreet addresses the issue of art and advocacy directly, asking:

Where do art and advocacy meet? I hear this question in all of your work and you address it directly in The Secret Of Milk...

This is such a huge consideration in my life, and for so many poets/artists I know. I spiral around it. Some days I feel so strongly that poetry, with all its ineffability and particularity, is perfectly suited to effect something like a paradigm shift. Other days it seems like we’re spilling out of a thimble into a sea of disinterested scrawl and sprawl and commerce. Then of course I don’t want to demand of the writing or making that it has to tackle, well, anything.

What is the balance between individual and society? I want to consider larger concerns, and yet I am not in a position to speak for others. I can only speak to things/ideas/issues and for/from myself, such as I am -- even if I’m working with all source material and thinking the author is dead. That’s not the whole story even when the work I’m sporting says it is. Besides, I need to value myself. Should I not do any of that publicly? Should I not make the poem of the slender stem in my hand because it doesn’t tackle oppression? Just a silly example, but I think resisting an economic or systemic or political or post-structuralist -- an ideological -- read/requirement of the poem can be a radical, er, ideology. I’m definitely not after solipsism. Then -- and here is more of the spiraling in action -- I’m all too easily of a mind where playing with syntax or fabric seems like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Or, to switch vehicles, an ignorant neutrality on the moving train, which of course isn’t neutral at all, is it. If you’re “against theory” it’s really just because you haven’t looked at what’s underpinning your own work/status. More than that, though, doing nothing “beyond” the art to address the incredible inequities piling up on the planet also isn’t neutral. There are days when I get really mad at artists with their complicit and precious galleries and personas or theorists or writers who think because they’ve read Lacan or whoever that they are somehow avant or radical anything. What’s at stake? Even the installation artist. Or blog posts that say “but is it art?” -- they’re such bullshit.

And they’re not, right? Or at least not categorically. Critique is needed on all fronts, I know. Holding the space for conscious cultural/artistic creation is crucial, I know. Without theoretical considerations we’re sunk, I know. So this is some of what I’m tackling in The Secret of Milk. More specifically, can lyric language take on factory dairy farming? Should it?

Cara Benson, (made)

The mud dancers expatriate themselves. Shoveling and sticks. There is mold on the crafts in the sky. Satellite collision no bleach will rectify. If the long table can seat ten, why not thirteen? No feathers found. No cakey reminder. The unpleasant and uncomfortable fact of matter. Do not pause onscreen. Wander, but delete, too. Standby. Shed skins of inhabitants, some rustic relic. The eyes alone cannot see. Hold one in your hand as proof.

How can you aim a fire?

Whose stone is this? (“quo jure?”)

Lately I’ve been reminded of conversations around the American prose-poem and all its variations, intrigued by what American poet Cara Benson and others have been working with, and working from. What else to call what Benson is doing? Perhaps labelling is outside the point. But why does Canadian poetry not seem to be part of the same conversation of the prose poem as Eric Baus, Lydia Davis, Juliana Spahr, Sarah Manguso, sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Sheila E. Murphy and so many others? With Sina Queyras, Rob Budde, Nathalie Stephens and a few other exceptions, of course. What is it about the long line wrapped beyond line-break appeals to them that doesn’t to us? Part of what appeals in Cara Benson’s first trade collection, (made) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), is in the length, a sideways binding and design allowing the perfect form for her extensions, not blocked into little squares but like banners, letting them strafe across the page. There is such a lovely surreal shift and ebb and flow in Benson’s lines, turning in on themselves or stopping full on a dime, in a book with few answers and questions staggered across a breath between, but not limited, by parenthesis. Still, what is (made)? What is created and what simply exists?

To steal a hole one must first have desire. Night is how we picture this usually, though day will do. Brown in the ground, and loosely piled beside the fillings displaced. Take whatever was forgotten now found in all the coat pockets of the world into your cupped hands which act as conduits into the hole. Sticky coins, shredded tissues, lots of lint, keys, paperclips, frayed grocery lists, probably buttons. The hole of course will overflow with such obfuscation. An absconding to return to.

From whom do you? (“Hooligans”)

fwd; BookThug @ The Toronto New School of Writing

Many of you might have heard rumblings of this over the past few months, but whether you have or not this message is to let you know that various BookThugs will be offering creative writing workshops -- the kind that aren't available anywhere else in the GTA -- through the Toronto New School of Writing, starting in March.

The Toronto New School of Writing is a collecive entity that has teamed up with BookThug and a new book store and cultural space located at 283 College Street called of swallows, their deeds, and the winter below. TNSoW hopes to offer an ongoing series of inexpensive workshops, lectures, reading classes and other thought provoking reasons for living and literature.

The initial batch of courses include:

Mark Goldstein's Transtranslation Workshop (12 weeks)
Jay MillAr's Long Poem Workshop (12 weeks)
Angela Carr's Form & Figura: From Varro to Bergvall (1 week intensive)
Cara Benson's Fearless Poetry Workshop: Writing Poems the John Cage Way (1 day workshop)
Mark Truscott's The Joy (and Ethics) of Not Writing (1 day workshop)

Details on these workshops are available at www.tnsow.com

Space is limited, so if you are interested in participating, sign up soon!
If you know someone who might be interested in participating, let them know

Jay MillAr

BookThug
www.bookthug.ca

12 or 20 questions: with Cara Benson

Cara Benson edited the interdisciplinary book Predictions for Chain Links just out at SPD. She is the author of the forthcoming poem books (made) and Protean Parade with BookThug and Black Radish, respectively. Other work is included in: Belladonna Elders Series #7 with Anne Waldman and Jayne Cortez, NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards (Litmus Press/Belladonna Books), and Imaginary Syllabi (Palm Press). Spell/ing ( ) Bound, a tri-partite art objet with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Kathrin Schaeppi (ellectrique press), and Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (BookThug) will always be two of her favs. Benson edits the online Sous Rature and is a proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv.

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

This is a great question. It didn’t. At all. That is what I want to say. But the way that it changed my life was realizing that it didn’t change my life. I remember getting the email from Jay at BookThug, and I had this wahoo moment. Then I looked around and everything was exactly the same. That’s when I realized that publishing wouldn’t save me.

On the other hand, better or worse, I have experienced the difference between being a writer with work in print and a writer without work in print. Perhaps the difference is all internal. I don’t know, though, that that’s true.

Re: recent work vs. previous work: it’s tough to sum up. Mainly because I have a number of projects in the works currently, and they differ differently. I think what is similar is a playfulness. I will hopefully always be playful, even when I’m deadly serious.

Different. Well, there are a few things that are much more visual than I used to be. Somebody said Brathwaite-esque or something like that in my use of type. Use of the page/space. I think I trust myself better. To go wherever the piece wants to go. I use more source material, research in my work now. I feel freer to experiment. I don’t mean to say that I’m pushing experimentation as a codified approach to poems. But, for me, to truly as we say blow the spot up. Trust the connections to happen for the reader if they are there within me or for me as I make work.

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

I don’t know that I did come to it first. I’ve written some stories. Personal stuff, even. But I have a poetic sense-making that doesn’t seem to belong anywhere else. I read Berryman’s huffy Henry hid the day and thought yup. Me too. Bazillion others, too, of course. He just popped into my head.

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?

Depends on the project. I do hand written prompt responses every week with the poetry class I teach in a prison. Sometimes that writing comes out pretty close to what it’s supposed to be. There is something to the purity of the stream when I write with these guys after an hour and a half of conversation and reading poems and talking and parsing and then okay let’s write on this topic for seven point two minutes GO! I don’t know. It comes tumbling out.

Then there are the projects that maybe I add one or two lines a month. I might be doing research and thinking thinking lots for those one or two lines. Seems ridiculous, really.

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?

Not usually working on a book from the beginning, except when I am. That is to say I can have a sense or desire that a particular thought or topic or instigation will be a book, and it can dud out. With other projects I’m trying to shut it down, to end as quickly as possible. The current book I’m making only turned into a book when I was cramming as much as I could onto two pages trying to say okay the poem is done. The people looking at it at that time said, nice try Cara.

Keep going. That poem is now 86 pages.

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

I love doing readings. Until the day of, then I think “Why do I do this shit? Wouldn’t I be much happier under the covers or in the woods or under the covers in the woods?”

Then I’m over it and onstage and the work has a chance to take flight. There are some pieces that seem strictly suited to performance, others for the page or within a larger page work, and then there’s the overlap. I love making a crazy visual piece and trying to translate that into a performed piece. I don’t know if you can feature an image, but take this spot for example:

How do you perform that? But I so wanted to. And have!

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?

Issues of polyvocality, multiple languages, language interventions, commodification and branding through/of language, digitization and dissemination of text, are prevalent in the writing that is interesting to me. Many of these questions arise in the face of the globalized, ecologically havoc-ed late-capitalism era. I want a poetry that exposes/opposes how language is used to sell us a bunch of bullshit. How multi-national corporations, the ceos boards and branders of those corps, obfuscate their greed and criminality with a tag line. Image is huge in this, too, of course.

Not all globalization is malevolent, to be sure. Interchange of cultures, communication is tremendous. Web of life, if you will, can be seen in this context. So then there’s beauty and awe. I forget that. That maybe, just maybe, making the beautiful thing is what it’s all about. Not that the other concerns can’t be rendered in a beautiful fashion. Beauty so subjective, of course. Making the beautiful thing can be difficult-er with language as the material itself is inherently semantic, symbolic, etc. Or N=O=T!

Of course, many of my answers might manifest differently tomorrow, and I’ll endeavor to surrender everything I’ve said here to that moment when it was said. thismoment [Disclosure: I asked rob to let me add something after sending this to him. Woke up, wait I forgot to say ______.] I think that is one of my concerns with writing. To directly enter experience. To have an experience. Which can precipitate much, if not all, of what I’ve said I’m after. I do think it comes first, in fact, for the writing to be effective.

I often go back to Rosemarie Waldrop’s notion, or maybe she was referencing someone, that poetry is to burn excess energy, thermodynamically speaking. That we hum once our bellies are full. So maybe all my writing is about aiding digestion.

And then there’s Other. Interaction. Celan’s handshake.

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?

Juliana Spahr has this pie chart that shows 1/3 of being a writer is about writing. The other two thirds have to do with community, the community of writers and the community beyond writing. I might be getting that wrong. But something like that.

Absolutely, I think the writer has a cultural role. Maybe many. That’s much of what I’ve written above. There’s the old purify the language of the tribe Poundian notion. To influence the influential. To hold spaces, however marginalized, for attention to language that are/is not connected to selling a product beyond the language (issues of signification aside). Though some would say that all art can be seen as a form of selling, of propaganda.

But really, I’m not first and foremost a cultural theorist, or critic, or academic. I’m a poet. Ultimately, there is this thing that happens for me when I write. Jam. Riff. Think in tropes while typing. Find a word with my teeth or in my throat or gut that fights its way up. I don’t know if you would call it joy. But I don’t think I have the right not to do that. I get to model for others that the striving, the fumbling for freedom, is in reach. Is worth it. For lack of better terms, it’s an opportunity to share that has the potential to liberate. Gives others permission to inhabit themselves. Not egocentrically speaking. But who else am I? We can say all we want about the self as a societal construction or construction through language (luggage!), etc. and onward. Fine. At the end of the day I get in bed. Hug a cat to myself and my lover if I’m lucky.

Back to the permission. I think it’s a radical, political, and societal position to attempt and to demonstrate the attempt toward liberation of constraint. Isn’t that what constraint based writing is all about? Liberation?

I know there’s suffering. I know there are people on this planet right now in unspeakable circumstances. Eating dirt to stave off hunger. Literally. Plants and animals devastated. Do you know about the Pride of Baghdad? The zoo lions who escaped before the US invasion, who roamed starving avoiding explosions and when finally found by US soldiers were shot?! So documenting, opposing, remedying - these are intentions which drive many of us. Drive me. Where does the freedom (pleasure?) through poetry fit? It does. Can be difficult to justify in a culture that operates on the ascetic/excessive binary, but it does fit. Maybe all the more so.
Also, writing is an opportunity to test on paper alternate futures. Limitless construction of/experimentation with societal arrangements. Enact imagination that we might then follow off-page. I’m really curious about the recursiveness of thinking about future and future. How what we think/write/speak about the future affects what we do in the present which then affects, possibly effects, outcome. I think this is larger than the individual.

As a poem isn’t required to prove anything, unlike thesis or theory, it can go where it wants to go. It can enter the previously unimagined (Mónica de la Torre) or the impossible. It has the potential to rototill the way.

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

Depends on the editor. Some have challenged me in really productive ways. Some are just challenging.

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

Bhanu Kapil says comparison is fatal.

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

My preference is a fusion, moving between within a piece. At least when it comes to critical prose, though I have done the more straight ahead stuff. That feels so labor intensive to me, but worth it. When I’m forced to articulate something that I’m feeling or sensing or thinking about writing, another’s or my own, I’m sharper in my creative mess as a result.

However, and to me this is a big however, it is critical for me to throw off theory when in the generative phase of creative writing. Those are considerations for revision. I need to trust that the writing and the thinking about writing and the reading about and the reading writing are all in there already when I begin. Theoretical concerns will surface. If I’m in the right state, it’s all happening simultaneously, but not as a result of an agenda on my part. This is when Ginsberg’s first thought best thought is at play. We talk in the prison class about intention and inspiration. Being in a never-ending dance between the two. Of course, these are not mutually exclusive properties.

Regarding incorporating the mind into a writing practice, as it’s interesting to think of how Buddhists talk of emptying the mind, or not taking it seriously, letting thoughts drift through, in the context of *intellectualism/rationalism*. So, then, are theoretical concerns antithetical to a spiritual experience? Is all poetry superfluous? The move to speak an imperfect one? For this I go to Anne Waldman’s notion of wild mind.

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?

Urination. Coffee. Prayer. Not in that order.

I write every Tuesday with the guys at the prison. To feed that, as I wrote, we read poems aloud, bullshit, hear between class writing, more bullshit, read out loud more, riff ramble rant then I come up with some inspired prompt in response to the conversation and reading and concerns that have been floating and hovering and I’m thinking of what is that storm that swirls, tornado!, in the room and I say okay write your “walking around” poem (if we’re reading Neruda, NY School, etc.) or write your “narrate your environment poem” (reading Ratcliffe) or your “beat it” (Césaire) or whatever and then there’s this drop dead nothingness when everyone looks at me like wha? because it’s really hard to be Johnny-righteous-on-the-spot as I don’t always plan ahead what I think the moment will call for. That’s when I say let’s just put the fucking pen to the page and go without stopping for ten minutes. And we do. I think that’s common enough now to be called a routine.

Otherwise deadlines are really helpful. Then I will actually write in my calendar days to be working on a particular piece. Sometimes I’ll even put in my calendar “new work” so that I carve out space and ask of myself writing that isn’t accounted for ahead of time in some way. Part of any project, my own or others’. I do write on location. A pad and pen on the go to keep it real.

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

The mountains. I go hiking. Or read a few choice pieces by O’Hara or Edward Estlin. Eileen Myles makes me want to write.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Home is too variable and complicated a notion to be triggered by any one smell for me. I’ve never once had the experience where ah that smell reminds me of “home.” I’ve had smells trigger memories or emotions associated with places I’ve lived. They say that sense of smell is connected to the reptilian brain and so bypasses the rational mind. Which is why it is so evocative. I don’t know if I’ve ever drooled looking at lovely drapes. Well, maybe I have.

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?

All of the above.

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

Shit. Way too many to list here. In addition to the writers already mentioned, a partial incomplete and negligently haphazard list would have to include: Mallarmé, Rukeyser, Reznikoff, Tao Ch’ien, Aimé Césaire, Evan Connell’s Notes from a Bottle found on the Beach at Carmel, Alice Notley, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Hesse’s Siddhartha, Jayne Cortez, Lisa Robertson, John Cage, Clark Coolidge, Octavio Paz, Homer’s Odyssey, Marguerite Yourcenar, Renee Gladman.

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

Trek in the Himalaya if I could do it sustainably, with a sense of responsibility to the region. Nothing requiring bottled oxygen.

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 spose writing’s my occupation; it does occupy me. The writing itself doesn’t pay the bills. I do other things to support my writing habit. Like teach. Arts admin. Apply for grants. Oh I’ve certainly gone to dinner after a reading on the dosh in my pocket from a passed hat or books sold. I do get checks sometimes for publishing. Nothing that puts the ole roof over the head, tho. Not yet anyway. The teaching is absolutely part of my writing practice, I’ll say. Especially at the prison as I’m writing with them, and the continuing conversation is tremendously important in my process. Hopefully theirs, too. There’s that adage if you want to learn something sign up to teach it.

What would I do otherwise? I’d like to have been a lawyer. In some of the civilian actions I’ve been part of a lot of our success has depended upon legal support. Certainly bringing public pressure to bear on a situation is important, and I think poetry can absolutely be part of that process. But there’s nothing like a group of folks who can take the show on the road legally to convince Goliath of an alternate route.

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

I don’t know if that’s for me to answer. Nature? Nurture? Bio-chemistry? Neurosis? Divine intervention? Covenant of works? Grace.

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

I just picked up Bharat jiva by kari edwards, the posthumous publication. Soon as I’m done it will be. Oh! I really dug FOR THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF THE WALNUT. Sawako Nakayasu’s translation of Takashi Hiraide.

The film Sin Nombre wrecked me.

20 - What are you currently working on?

An essay on writing called On Writing for a book John Madera’s putting together.

A script from the PEN Prison Writing Program for some benefit performances. In fact, I’m up against that deadline. The writing on writing is due shortly after.

The book length poem that started as two pages. It’s due out end of 2010, so I’ve got some time.
12 or 20 questions (second series);