12 or 20 (second series) questions with Genève Chao

Genève/Geneva Chao has a B.A. In French, an M.A. in English, and an M.F.A. in poetry. Her poems and translations have been published in Boxkite, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, (Satellite) Telephone, n/a literary journal, New American Writing, DIAGRAM, the L.A. Telephone Book, and others. Her translations of Gérard Cartier's Tristran and Nicolas Tardy's (with François Luong) Encrusted on the Living have appeared from [lx] press, where she is an editor. She has twice been a Tamaas resident for work on the intersectionality of language/poetry and dance/the body. 

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

Well, one of us is wave one of us is shore is my first book published (as opposed to the dozen or so books that are currently lost on various stolen hard drives or moldering boxes of paper). It has been wonderful so far. Otis has been very kind and conscientious with me, a pleasure to work with. In the past, I’ve had periods where I did not succeed in making the time to finish whole books; I've had things pulled because I failed to please the person in charge socially or sexually; I’ve turned down offers from friends to take a manuscript — I understand that poetry is a small world and that we necessarily work with and for our friends, but for me it was important to have some sense that the work was being considered on its own merits and that my relationship with the publishers as a human did not have a defining role, so I did not want to do it that way. So I just sent this manuscript into Otis’s open reading period and they took it. And yes, that was validating, certainly. But — and for me this is a very important but — the real work of life-changing happened before I even submitted it, when I emerged from a period of indentured domestic servitude the like of which often befalls otherwise fortunate women, and which was debasing and exhausting. This debasement and exhaustion made me understand that no external recognition about myself as a poet was at all relevant to me. I think often we crave recognition because we think it will Velveteen Rabbit us into being flesh and blood and a heartbeat, and of course that never happens, or you just become an enormous whore for more and more of it. And I was always both jealous of and repulsed by the public-like-a-frogness of it all. So my life was changed when I wrote this book and I committed to publicly admitting that I was writing, and the publishing of it is entirely secondary. That said, because Otis is a teaching MFA program, when they invited me to read there it was a fantastic audience of mostly students — the public was allowed too — all of whom had read the work and had interesting questions about it. So that was life-changing because it allowed me to engage in a dialogue about the work that did not feel like poseur b.s., which is the instinctive reaction I have at readings or parties when people start conceptually droning about their work, but which actually seemed to move the work forward.

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

I read Emily Dickinson as a child, and Shakespeare, and of course I walked around my house reciting them, and then in my early teens Creeley and Bunting and Stevens and Pound and Laura Riding and so on. I was and am always interested in spareness, as an aesthetic, more than ampleness, and in the plasticity of poetry in terms of verse/narrative/theme/music. I of course always loved reading novels, but now I find a lot of them — the Oprah book club ones, the upper middle class white lady bedside ones, horribly dull. I think a lot of these big contemporary American and British novels are class markers. I have friends who read them constantly and pass them to me and... I really want to like Claire Messud, for example, but I couldn’t finish her last thing. I still love all the novels I read as a child, of course, which I think is because I find novels that explore morality — and all the great children’s novels are about this, how you decide who you are, what principles or crimes you’re going to plant your flag on — very satisfying. So I am now writing children’s novels.

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

It depends. I do a lot of gestating work. The actual writing is usually pretty quick, and fully formed — minor edits but not a lot of major overhaul. If I feel something needs major overhaul I’m more apt to chuck it and start the next thing, imbued will all the beautiful knowledge of that failure. 

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 late friend Stacy Doris once told me that she only wrote books and never individual poems. I think this is a useful way of thinking about it. I like the exploration of a theme through the length of a book — though I write very short books so I can get back to bumping Nicki Minaj or making smoothies or whatever. I have a hard time with the standalone poem; I’m not interested in it. I’ve never liked the poems in the New Yorker or those “intelligent” magazines that interrupt their socially pertinent reportage to bring you a poem so you can feel cultured on your way to the tennis club. Not that they are uniformly bad (just most of them), but I dislike this presentation. I suppose I am greedy for more. I want each poem to be the ice cream in the ice cream sandwich in a whole box of ice cream sandwiches, not one stingy truffle all dolled up on a plate.

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

I do enjoy doing readings, during which I make many inappropriate jokes and will probably at some point segue into karaoke or parkour. I have trouble taking readings too straight, but I love connecting to the reader. I am my reader too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I have ONLY theoretical concerns behind my writing. one of us is wave one of us is shore is of course a lover’s discourse, and it’s one that specifically gnaws on what Guy Bennett in my reading at Otis wonderfully called “the inadequacy of language.” In this case it’s the inadequacy of French and of English to each other, to translation, to the experience they attempt to describe; the book is in many a bad translation of itself. I have a finished manuscript called i, poor monster that is about motherhood and how it irrevocably alters (not always constructively) one’s mental and physical architecture, sometimes with disastrous results. This started when two very good friends of mine and I all became mothers and our lives instantly fell apart. Motherhood can be catastrophic. It is a seismic shift. Sometimes Lois Lane disappears into the fissure.

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?

The role of the writer is to make things that people want to read. Beyond that, it’s nice if sometimes they change the world, not necessarily in sweeping gestures but through intelligence and increment. Ursula le Guin was talking in a recent interview about how she was always secretly making her protagonists people of color and readers would never notice; I remember this very clearly, reading The Wizard of Earthsea as a child and not noticing Ged, the protagonist’s, coppery-red skin and then in the second book it’s contrasted to Tenar’s white skin and you’re like Ohhhh miscegenation! My parents were miscegenators, so this was very reassuring to me. 

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

No.

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

Well, the great Canadian poet Alanis Morissette says “the moment I let go of it/is the moment I got more than I could handle” and, though perhaps wildly optimistic, this is an attitude I wish more people would adopt. We have too much poverty mentality and status-grubbing, particularly in the arts. And Creeley says “bite it but take care not to hurt,” which I think is also good advice. 

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

Translation for me is very much a lending of my voice and skill to try to render into one language what I see as the character of a work. It is a work of service. Poetry for me is a work of attacking problems, of analysis. This is the place where I live. And novels are a work of the pleasure of imagining.

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?

For poetry, I write one poem every morning first thing, while drinking coffee. For novels, I write one thousand words every morning first thing, while drinking coffee. I am extremely rigid about this and I like total silence when I do it, although of course the silence is often punctuated by the screams of battling children. But I am always fighting my way back into that silence where the work can emerge. Because I also have a full-time job plus many other responsibilities, I sometimes miss a day, but it is rare for me not to average over five days a week. If I had fewer other things to do, I would write for longer in the morning. If I have something else to do, like an essay, I crank it out after lunch. I do not write in the evening at all; that is time for food and noise.

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

I am not a big believer in writing getting stalled — I more sidle up to it if it’s skittish — but I need to take a lot of breaks to do physical things, like walk or eat. Then I find everything falls into place. But of course my routine is a way of keeping things well oiled.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lavender. Lilacs. The dusty smell of California dirt. Salt water. Eucalyptus, particularly in mist or rain.

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

Yes, but not directly; more as an overlay. The sections of one of us is wave one of us is shore are named from a song by the great French rapper M.C. Solaar, “Matière grasse contre matière grise” (“Fat matter versus grey matter,” literally translated). I love to appropriate structures from science: I wrote a poem called “Five Specifics,” published by DIAGRAM a hundred years ago, that is of course all based on physics: specific gravity, heat, impulse, performance — such great metaphor words.

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

I really enjoy critical theory, structuralism/poststructuralism, and semiotics, Barthes and Saussure and Deleuze/Guattari and Baudrillard (especially Baudrillard, who cracks me up) and Guy Debord and etc., but I don’t take it very seriously. These things seem to me like fine amusements. It may be naive to think they provide us with any kind of actual wisdom. But I think that particular twentieth century way of dismantling cities or systems into intentions and attitudes, of trying to understand what everything means, or what it represents or dissembles about, is very much a habit of mine. Other than that…I read a lot of different things, but I wouldn’t say they’re part of my process. The fiction I read is a way of stepping out of that place of constructing and into a space of just rapaciously consuming, with juice running down my chin.

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

Well, hang glide, obviously. Stacy used to always threaten that we would show up at Fort Funston and seduce a bunch of hang gliders into taking us up for free. Using our feminine wiles. I never actually saw her use her feminine wiles in anything like such a deliberate or targeted way, and I’m not all sure I’d know how, but I would go along for the ride. This now has to happen in an alternate universe. Otherwise, I am not a big believer in bucket lists. Many parts of my life give me intense pleasure and engagement. I do an enormous amount of work of many different types. That is already pretty good, I think.

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 I could have been a great Hero. I don’t mean like Supergirl. I mean like a priestess in a tower setting out torches for her hot affair with some world-class swimmer.

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

I was too shy to sing in public. Legions of people in karaoke bars worldwide will tell you that’s no longer the case.

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

Great is a very heavy word. I don’t see a lot of movies because it’s expensive. The last movie I saw that was really great was called Enemies of the People. It’s a documentary by a journalist, Thet Sabbath, who lost his parents in the Cambodian genocide and who gets to know Nuon Chea, who is featured in the film. I think I’ll recuse myself from the book question.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a series called Hillary Is Dreaming, which follows the election and is an observation/analysis of the many fucked-up chimeras Hillary Clinton has been transformed into, either by the gaze and words of others or by herself or her intimates. I find this fascinating and grotesque. I get up and read various newspapers and magazines and everybody’s Twitter accounts and do keyword searches and I try to imagine what it would be like to inhabit that body, to be its puppeteer. Of course I realize that talking about feminism and media is a thing white women do, but I thought I might give white woman a break: these are the economies of all our lives.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

dANDelion 37.3: POETS GALORE!

Words for the House

(After Kate Hall)

The house has gone missing. It’s called a warbler.

Warbler takes paint chips from her beak, makes a dinner.

Warbler points north for the winter, the windows closed.

Warbler tight in the sheets, picking nails.

Warbler with eyes wide and hiccupping asks for spaghetti.

Warbler can’t keep the windows closed.

Warbler pantomimes a throat wound up.

Warbler sees wood paneling in the bed and makes a boat.

Warbler swallows the pillow and spits out the lint.

Warbler rips a hole through the screen and points the ship.

Warbler makes a bath of dishwater.

Warbler sheds bones from the neck down.

Warbler puts the boat in the water and screams.

Warbler finds a man’s tie a formal ending. (Jenny Sampirisi)

When British Columbia poet kevin mcpherson eckhoff was in Ottawa to read for the AB Series a few weeks ago, he did an afternoon talk that focused on some of his interest in art produced by people who don’t necessarily self-describe as artists, ranging from amateur art to folk art to the unintentionally bad. Part of what he used to discuss that interest, and the incredible possibilities that come from such, was the recent issue of dANDelion magazine that he edited with frequent co-conspirator, Jake Kennedy, the “POETS GALORE!” issue. According to eckhoff, part of the call for the issue included self-described professional artists providing work, as well as work by someone they knew, whether a family member, random friend, or the man who ran the grocery store down at the corner. As they write in their “Editor’s Note”:

The issue contains works by some writers. [When we write “writers” we mean folks.] It also contains works by some folks who are either shy writers or who don’t identify as the writer at all. [When we write “folks” we mean writers.] Please, for a moment, forget that superficial differences exist! [I suppose our hunch is that community exists prior to and just after the fact of its naming; mostly we could be acknowledging that as folks and writers and writers and folks we are sharing all the time.] Now, in this same moment, please tear through the writing throughout, forgetting that you’re a reader, but remembering that you, too, are a poet! [We are grateful to all the magical producer-contributor spirits herein; songs poems wanted / songs poems found… (big old fart sound); we bow to the realaccidents, we bow the accidentalreads!]

Some of the results are quite compelling, with contributions by Claire Donato, Elizabeth Donato, Jeff T. Johnson, Kate Mercier, Peter McDonald, Michael Vorhies, Emily Fedoruk, Debbie Bouska, Jenny Sampirisi, William Ashman, Chantal Neveu, Angela Carr, Pierrette Valois Neveu, françois luong, Alicia Escott and Dave Dyment. The mix is interesting, and the idea behind the guest-edited issue is equally interesting, both of which were covered during eckhoff’s Ottawa talk, something I hope he might eventually expand upon in print at some point. Unfortunately for the journal itself, this issue holds as the final issue of the long run and shifting history of dANDelion magazine which, since its re-boot a few years back, has emerged as one of the most compelling and engaging (if occasionally uneven, what with the slate of guest-edited theme issues these past couple of years) literary journals in the country. I don’t know if they have managed to release a long-rumoured “official statement” at all, but I mourn the passing of dANDelion. What the hell happened?

MIAMI

August 23^rd, 2011

Is there area code in heaven?

How do I

Erase you from my head

Let alone your number

In my Blackberry

Its not like its of use

Anymore

Is than a new number up there?

How can I send you

Lover texts

I will never again see you

When I need to

Be reminded that

No one prances

Better than me

On the dance floor

Until I met you. (William Ashman)

There is something really quite magical about Alicia Escott’s work in the issue, her “Love Letters Sent Sometime Before the Continents Split.” As she writes in her short introduction:

This project began in January of 2011. The letters are written for people I care about, to animals that are now extinct, and are sent through the post office without the recipient knowing. The letters approach romance in geologic time scales, collapsing the lineage of evolution.

If you feel that you may need a love letter, you may contact me direct at aliciaescott.com. Briefly tell me something about yourself and provide your mailing address.

Included as scanned, printed letters, the letters are interspersed with archival photographs, and the letters open up something marvelous and unusual. There is something hopelessly sad, haunting and lyric to these letters to the already-lost. I can only hope to see more of this series, and perhaps at some point in trade book form.

January, 20, 2011

Letter to a Thick Billed Ground Dove. Extinct 1927.

My love,

Last week I set the clock on my iphone to December, 18^th 1914.

I was hoping I would be able to find you there.

But it did no good. Everything was just the same as it is now. And you were gone. So I am sending you this letter via post because I see no other way, it is too long to send in text, if that were even an option these days.

So much has happened since you left. Where do I begin? Not long after, the stock market crashed. Then they fixed it, but it would happen again. Then after that we discovered a relationship between mass and energy, but man alive, this has some drawbacks.

Then came rock n roll. More than anything I wish I could show you rock n roll, you would love it, I’m sure.

And there was the telephone, and then answering machines and call waiting and then caller id, and now you can have that with you always. Honestly.

There would never need to be these distances anymore.

But really, that’s not what I want to say.

How do I explain; you weren’t the only one to leave…. It’s been quite a time.

We’ve tried to stem the tide now, but… well…. I read they have little hope.

I was foolish. The last time we saw you, no one thought it was goodbye forever. Did you know then? I think sometimes that you did.

We looked everywhere for you in 2004-2005. Of course that was much, much too late… I’m sorry.

The little lines under my eyes don’t seem to go away when I stop smiling anymore. What I mean is, it happens so slowly that you don’t even realize how quickly it has passed by.

There are rock doves everywhere, as those places we used to know are mostly concrete now. They remind me of you…. these pigeons.

I can never forget,

Yours always,

Alicia Bainbridge Escott

eleven eleven #13

There was no hope

that a reading

customer could

leave this thick and

cold silence. She

shivered and rose

again looking

to go for coal.

She put water

once in the hot

water bottle

which could not sing

any more while

the new she-cat

slept in its fur

behind the stove.

Egoistic

particulars

raised their eyes to

look across the

old window prints

of falling snow –

the street had turned

completely white.

Alone, she crossed

her happy arms

desiccated

upon her chest,

and put her nose

outside to re-

cord the world of

whole spectacle. (Victor Coleman, “ivH 58 [coda]”)

The most startling thing about the thirteenth volume of the bi-annual eleven eleven: A Journal of Literature and Art (San Francisco CA: 2012) might be in the inclusion of new poems by Toronto poet Victor Coleman, a writer who rarely (it seems) appears in trade journals (although, as I learn through Coleman’s bio, a chapbook of this work appears or has appeared this year with Toronto’s BookThug). I suspect the inclusion of work by Michael Boughn, a writer who co-edits and co-conspires with Coleman (including co-editing the recent University of California Press edition of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book), might have something to do with that. Possibly. But either poet’s work is worth more than the price of admission, and I wonder what the late John Newlove might have thought about Boughn’s poem in this issue, the odd, hilarious and marvelous “Doukhobor Butts”? The piece begins:

The truth is often saggy, naked, dimpled

in ways unsuspecting youths from the desert

intersect with a kind of stunned but vague

recognition that north is more direction

than most needles can tell. Is it

the condition that wreaks or the havoc

that conditions? The flames bear confusion

into the thick of alien’s sudden

illumination. […]

For the two hundred and fifty-plus pages of the journal, I’m a bit surprised at the sheer amount of writers I’ve not previously heard of, a wide range of magnificent work by such as John Pluecker, Floyd Salas, Lee-Ann Roripaugh, Judy Roitman, Eugene Rico and Clay Matthews, all new discoveries, thanks to this issue. This is the benefit, I suppose, of a journal that doesn’t consider the writers they publish for another issue or three. And the bee images by Rebecca Szeto, “from the ongoing series Traces: Daily Meditations on Just Beeing,” are quite stunning. Otherwise, it’s good to see new work by familiar names such as Sarah Rosenthal, françois luong, and Rebecca Loudon (a recent discovery).

from Lizard

Mostly eats the living.

On account of her

eyes. They see what

moves. She stalks

the world nude, I

want to say reveals

the world’s nudity.

Want to say, we’re

all that emperor.

That lonely thing

with mirrors (Sarah Rosenthal)

Another particular highlight was the interview Peta Rake conducted with Newfoundland-based photographer/performance artist Kay Burns, and her work The Other, a series of staged photographs of the artist as female historical figures who lived their lives as men. Might this be a touring work, perhaps? As Rake introduces the interview:

Dress is an exploration of not only self, but of the other. Enacting these alternate identities has become a process of discovery for performance based artist Kay Burns. The women Burns researched and portrayed in her project, The Other, made a “pragmatic decision to dress as men in order to move forward in a career path that would have been unacceptable for women at that time.” And the women have such varieties of career; Margaret Ann Bulkley as the military doctor and surgeon Dr. James Barry; Mary Charlene Parkhurst as the stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo Charley Parkhurst; Charlotte O’Leary as the zoo keeper and bear trainer Charlie O’Leary. What becomes integral to Burns’ project is that the women she seeks to re-inhabit do not implement male dress as one-off masquerade, but that they had lived their entire adult lives as men, with their female genders only revealed posthumously.