12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carrie Etter

Originally from Normal, Illinois, Carrie Etter lived for thirteen years in southern California before moving to England in 2001. She has published three collections of poetry, The Tethers (Seren, 2009), winner of the London New Poetry Award, Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2011), and Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry by The Poetry Society. She also edited the anthology, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010) and Linda Lamus's posthumous collection, A Crater the Size of Calcutta (Mulfran, 2015). She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I suppose my first book made me feel credible as a poet. In my first two books, I fled the autobiographical; since then, I try to employ innovative techniques for handling such material.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I wrote my first poem outside of school at eleven. I was also writing stories--I'm not really sure which came first.

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?
My writing tends to come quickly, then I revise, revise, revise. In my books, I have lines crossed out, words changed--the process never ends.

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?
My first two books are collections of poems with threads of ideas running through them, while my third is much more cohesive as a project. The book I'm working on now (my fourth) is similarly driven by a main idea or rather a complex of them.

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. Poetry is a communicative act as well as a form of art, and I relish the sense that something that felt very specific to my own consciousness is being understood by others.

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'm interested in the ways texts always exceed the author's intentions. My ongoing manuscript's first section asks how our relationship to home as place and climate change can motivate us to care more for the environment.

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?
I feel a responsibility to address social issues in my writing, but I wouldn't prescribe for other writers. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I haven't had that much involvement from my editors, but I would like more--from the right editor. Is that statement inherently contradictory?

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I think writing critical prose about poetry helps me articulate my ideas about it more clearly in my teaching. I tend to take a long time over reviews, though, and am considering setting them aside indefinitely for the sake of focus on the (more) creative work.

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 don't have a routine, but I become antsy and frustrated if too much time passes without writing. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don't stall much, but find it's helpful to read as widely as possible across genres and styles.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Raw corn (I'm from Illinois)

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?
Film is an influence--its techniques for conveying ideas and emotions. I also think my viewing of film montages has been important for some of the montage-style long poems in my new manuscript.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The list is terribly long. I'll pick three at random: Iain M. Banks, Peter Reading, and Cole Swensen.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I enjoy reading speculative fiction, especially young adult (and so without the hard science), and would love to publish a YA speculative novel. I also have a manuscript of haiku and senryu I'd like to publish someday, The Broken Kite, either as a chapbook or a full-length book.

I'm also tempted to learn paragliding.

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 think because of the pleasure I take in both the arts and in working with others, arts administration might have been a good alternate career. When I was finishing my PhD and living in Walthamstow, I fantasized about getting a job at the William Morris Museum.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was never very good at team sports and had various stomach problems in childhood that led to lots of time away from school: perhaps that made me feel like an outsider. Many writers I know feel like outsiders. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I admired Margaret Atwood's short story collection, Stone Atlas, and can't remember the last great film I saw, so I'll recommend a few favourites: The Whale Rider, Spirited Away and The Wild Bunch. The first two share a theme of girls' empowerment.

20 - What are you currently working on?
The Weather in Normal is the manuscript in progress. In its current form, it has three sections: the first focuses on the effects of climate change in Illinois, my home state; the second brings together literal and figurative (in terms of family) weather in my experience growing up in Normal, Illinois; and the third is an imaginative revisiting of my family home.

I have another manuscript on the side, Grief's Alphabet, on the loss of my mother, who was my closest friend, and ideas for a book tentatively titled Transatlantica exploring the different effects of climate change on the environments of Britain and the US and the way the debates about climate change differ in my two countries.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Andrea Brady, Cut from the Rushes

HONESTY

Only one head, not without its problems.

Shuffled sleep, waking the shoulder

somewhat better, quill of bone lies more quietly

against its blade. Spotted chests of a pair

look in here, into the escape pod, refer

narrowed like catseye catching

scent of expirations. Still one

prepared head, in which una corda

pedal strikes home two rubberised wires.

Between extra-nice and distant a shag

pile on, no little intensity, thicken personality.

With one head takes this one rest. Jolt

of pain on the intake, like a pierced

kidney, pinkish scapula. Ichor drips

down her acrylic claw. She tucks,

her hair, in the neck-brace, bunted

lip-shaped marks of foundation, then lies

down to wait for the next expansion

of the plastic diaphragm. Only one

will be coming.

The anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2010), which includes a handful of poems from American/British poet (born in Philadelphia in 1974, she has lived in the UK since 1996) Andrea Brady’s fifth book of poems, Cut from the Rushes (Hastings UK: Reality Street, 2013), also includes this statement by the author:

The first poem I wrote, in 1982, was prayerful heroic couplets about the Lebanese hostage crisis. As a teenager the poems I most loved were oracles of transport; writing was a means of testifying charismatically to the perfectability of things. It was a tribute to the unachieved, its billowing references blowing around the outside of the feeling that was all beginning. Poetic language, like love, has always been a kind of bounty, correlating to something that wells up and is no speech: an infinity of opportunities to be exact.

            And that was the risk; all those opportunities might be spent at the fuzzy edges of exactitude. I might forget to mention the apparatus, the movements and characters of most days. Though I work the facts hard my radicalism does not feel very modern to me. I wish I could be funnier. I admire my contemporaries who polish off the superfluity of things, who inventory all the commercial vehicles for the average life; but the economy of my poetry can’t manage that, even if it lives off the same flow of cheap credit. Where I make use of the personal it is as a dialect of the present. My poems plot the contour lines of international argument as ripples and distortions of the local. And they have a weakness for ornament, which I try to keep in check. Though I have always lived in cities I grow tight without the beautiful air.

            But the anger, what is its relation to this bounty? As the impulse to begin in poems, to make an image of the perfectability which comes on like a trance, weakens, I shunt my desire for freedom into poems: and mourn there, and organize there, the lost worlds. But what comes first for any of us? Is critique grafted onto something more rootless, a turn in character? For a long time I wished that the world were better, as good as art. Now I am learning to write about happiness.

            My infant daughter has begun to sing. Her body is flooded with the desire to participate in the comedy of communication: from her curled tongue to her bucking feet she is electrified with the joy of sounding. Her better capacity reveals the really possible infinity of speech itself, which renews itself at any time, without effort or commiseration.

Whereas I’ve known of Andrea Brady for some time now, I haven’t been terribly familiar with her work. The short narrative lyrics in Cut from the Rushes contain a curious blend of cadences, from British and American poetry both, set in a series of rushes, accumulations and breaks of line, thought and breath. Set in two sections—“EMBRACE” and “PRESENTING”—Brady’s poems are observational and immediate, engaging the personal, domestic and political across a broad spectrum of deceptively-straightforward meditations, brief narratives, warnings and calls-to-action. As she writes in the poem “SIGHT UNSEEN”: “The future claws into sight. Gets the all clear.”

Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets, ed. Carrie Etter

This anthology gathers not readily found in the pages of Britain’s broadsheets or larger-circulation literary journals. More implicitly, Infinite Difference makes the case that Britain’s tendency to divide poetry into the categories of “Mainstream” and “Experimental” or “Avant Garde” undermines our sense of the rich array of poetries being written. While this range might place at one end of a linear narrative poem, and at the other end a fragmented, associative one, the land between us is rich and various. The expanse might be further evidenced by suggesting different extremes as points of reference, such as the degree of engagement with the natural environment. The poetries being written in Britain today might in fact be regarded as being on a spectrum holding infinite points of difference, and this anthology as bringing to a larger audience work on that spectrum that has had limited, if not quite ultraviolet, visibility.

As most anthologies must, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter England: Shearsman Books, 2010), edited by Carrie Etter, responds to a particular need, that of, as her rich introduction explains in some detail, the particular absence of more experimental writing in British journals, and even further absent, the work of the wide array of women writing in same. 

Publishing the works of twenty-five poets ranging from relatively new to established, Etter showcases a magnificent array of writing, from former Calgary poet Frances Kruk to Andrea Brady, Denise Riley, Redell Olsen, Anne Blonstein, Anna Reckin, Elisabeth Bletsoe and Caroline Bergvall.

I-Body 5

I can’t read

what I have somewhere

not written anywhere

but in this space of virtual

other

I can only find with click

shift

mind spewing. (Sascha Akhtar)

Admittedly, most of the names here are unknown to me, but a couple I am aware of, and Etter’s anthology can only provide a further jumping-off point, allowing each a small sampling of writing, and a poetics statement, something I’ve always appreciated. Kruk, known predominantly on this side of the ocean for her involvement in visual poetry as well as her association with Calgary’s small press community over the past decade, begins her statement, writing:

With coat hangers and live wires in hand, Frankenstein’s secret girl bastards run through these poems spitting blood and oozing their calculated poisons. While each poem stems from different serial projects undertaken between 2004-2007, the sciatic pathway connecting them is rooted in the uneasy pathology addressed in my work as a whole. By uneasy pathology I refer to my recurring engagement with themes that cause tension or disquiet for myself or for others, from the exposition of viscera to the committing, witnessing, or experiencing of psychic, physical, or political violence that shapes alienated human existence. Confronting cultural malaises requires the recognition of poetry as a locus of resistance, of soothsaying. It is a revelator of raw forms and textures and realities that mean. There must be a material to realize this: in my case it is the body, in one form or another.

Given the wealth of experimental writing I’ve become aware of over the past decade in the United Kingdom, the argument of a lack of opportunities seems surprising, in this day and age, but is difficult to argue for or against, given this distance. Who am I to say, or even know, otherwise? I am barely aware of what the print journals are in the UK, and what I am aware of, seem less interested in this kind of writing, certainly. On the other hand, much of this work has also been readily available through alternate venues, such as Australia’s Jacket magazine, Switzerland’s Dusie or even England’s own Shearsman, among other places, but the strength of the book remains the same, putting the work of some worthy writers into a single volume. This is a magnificent anthology. Will someone, perhaps, create a follow-up that allows boys inside as well?

a man wishes musical must know

tunes or how contingencies chose

in good steel or sharp towards no

proper control avoids too hollow

bodies cut off an inch above part

plant in wing remove feather I

I say marrow the cut should be

made away from the groove fork

formed thumb index then pare

down to beak of ploughshare

or sparrow symmetrical cut on

inner angle to point tiny piece

angles not on right bevels flow

freely divisible two more than

properly tempered whetted keen

thimble against colour to skin (“from A Newe Booke of Copies,” Redell Olsen)