12 or 20 (second series) questions with Graeme Bezanson

Graeme Bezanson lives in Nova Scotia. Ultra Blue is his first book.

 

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

My first chapbook was a weird little e-book called Eclogues from H_NGM_N Books in Buffalo (free to download here). At the time I was thinking a lot about what astronauts mean. I’m not sure it changed my life a ton! But it was great to feel like I was participating in something bigger than just me. Poetry is pretty solitary work so it’s nice to do something a little more public every now and then.

Ultra Blue is my first full-length book. I’m still trying to figure things out by writing. Although it’s as fragmented and collage-y as my previous work, this book is probably my most straightforward stuff so far. It feels intensely earnest to me, to a kind of uncomfortable degree.

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

I grew up in Halifax listening to CKDU, Dalhousie University’s campus radio station. They played all kinds of eclectic stuff—I remember making tapes of Jim Carroll reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and listening to them over and over on my walkman at night. I still can’t fall asleep without some kind of talking in my ear. Around the same time, my older sister won a junior high English prize and was awarded a squat little paperback anthology called Immortal Poems of the English Language. I remember reading the line “After the first death there is no other” from a Dylan Thomas poem in there and not knowing what it meant but just being super impressed that in poems you could just say cool-sounding stuff like that.

 

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 usually takes me a long time to get going! I tend to have a long phase of accumulating bits and pieces, fragments and phrases. Then I have to spend time figuring out how the different parts might fit together. The last part, actually making a poem, comes quicker.

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?

Both! Sometimes from the ground up, sometimes from the top down. From the very beginning, the stuff in Ultra Blue was always going to make up one big project, or maybe two medium-sized projects that ended up coming together into one book.

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

Readings feel like a separate thing. It’s nice to connect with friends, meet people, hang out together. But it’s not really part of the creative process for me, other than how the prospect of a reading causes you to kind of take stock of what you have, what’s finished, what goes together etc.

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?

Well I’m interested in fragmentation and openness, in intertextuality, in how poetry emerges from other texts and discourses, how meanings build upon themselves. I like gathering bits and pieces of things and seeing how they might fit together. I like working with language as a kind of technology for thinking and for carrying meaning across contexts. I believe language is slippery and full of connotation and cultural baggage. Am I trying to answer questions? I feel more like I’m trying to describe questions, or restate them in new ways. I’m not sure what the big questions should be right now, probably something about how there’s this vast repository of all of human knowledge that is accessible at all times by people, corporations, governments, zombie algorithms. For instance I feel like poems should not pretend that the internet doesn’t exist.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Different roles for different writers! I think it’s important for someone to be paying close attention to language, to how it’s doing what it’s doing and saying what it’s saying. This is one thing writers can do.

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

It’s ok! I have to really believe in the editor. Luckily, for Ultra Blue I worked with Kevin Connolly, who is great, and the poems are better for it.

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

Sister Corita Kent said that the only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. (All her rules are excellent advice for artists of all kinds.) In terms of direct counsel, my Grade 7 sewing teacher taught me that the first rule of stain removal is to do something right away. This is valuable advice that I have carried always. (Thanks, Mrs. Weber.)

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Last summer, I moved with my young family from France to Nova Scotia, so it’s been a year of upheaval and disrupted routines. Reading is probably the most important part of writing for me, and I’m usually able to keep that part going. I’m driving a lot at the moment to get to and from work, so I’m getting through a lot of audiobooks. I’m still working on a good system for safely taking notes while driving—speech-to-text is a little rough, it’s hard to highlight good parts of books to go back to, and so on. But generally the poem-writing routine is to go through the week accumulating fragments, little ideas or phrases here and there, and then whenever I have time, sitting down to try to shape those notes into poems.

When I’m writing fiction, it’s more momentum-based. I write a little bit every day, trying to turn off the critical part of my brain that wants very badly to tell me that the writing I’m doing is no good. Instead I try to focus on just moving forward. I find it helpful to call the files I’m working on things like “Dumb ideas for the part when A does B” or “Bad version of conversation between X and Y” which is silly but does in fact relieve some pressure and lets me write a little more freely. I try not to worry about the quality of writing until I get to the end of whatever fiction thing I’m writing, then I go back and try to make it good.

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

Books! New books or old books. Sometimes in my writing I get to a place where I convince myself that the secret to the only way forward is contained in some specific book that I have not yet read, which is a bit of a trap because a lot of the time the book turns out to be not quite what you imagined. Sometimes the book does give you a great idea and everything is cleared up right away, the path forward is revealed. And sometimes you have to go looking through more books. But always there’s someone who has thought about the same ideas you’re thinking about, or has struggled through similar struggles, or has managed to phrase things in a specific way that causes something to click. This is the great magic of books.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I lived in NYC for a long time and remember the smell of wild mint on the Highline. Then when I moved to France I mowed over a patch of wild mint and it was the same smell all over again. It’s nice to think that we can plant wild mint wherever we end up. 

13 - 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?

Films, music, art. Science as well, I guess: I wrote a novel about relativity but it turned out not great (you can read some of the better parts here). Actually maybe the main thing I take from science is the idea of work building on work. My dad was a microbiologist and sometimes I look up his old papers and the citations to his work from scientists who followed. I try to build on what writers have done before me, though I’m not sure that poetry advances in the same way as our understanding of stomach bacteria. But it’s nice to feel part of a long chain.

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

So many! Recently there’s been Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, CAConrad, Mark Bibbins, Tomaž Šalamun, César Aira, John Thompson, Elizabeth Bishop, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian.

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

Uhh I guess homeownership?

16 - 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?

In another life I think I’d have liked to be a saltmaker, like the sauniers of Île de Ré. Once I tried to make salt in New York, lugging a bucket of Coney Island seawater home on the subway. Then I boiled it off on the stove. It made the whole building smell bad and the salt tasted metallic and awful. 

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

Fame, fortune, etc.

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

Probably the last really great book I read was Debths by Susan Howe, which for me was one those books that make you go “Oh right, this is why I love poetry.” CAConrad’s Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return  is another great one I read recently. In the car, I just finished listening to Accordion Crimes, and Annie Proulx is becoming one of my favourite novelists. I also just finished the Margaret Atwood memoir, which was pretty good if you’re interested in Margaret Atwood lore. Her family had a cottage a couple cottages down from my grandparents, perched on a cliff over the Bay of Fundy. Also there’s a lot of House of Anansi tea in there!

For movies, most of what I’ve seen in recent years has been at the Cannes film festival—I worked there the past couple of years and would just go to anything that happened to fall in gaps in my schedule. A good one from last year is the documentary about Shia LaBeouf’s disastrous community theater experiment called Slauson Rec. It’s a tough, compelling watch! He comes off as such a simultaneously charismatic and charming but manipulative and violent figure. Like I can’t believe he let the documentary happen. I’m not sure if it has found North American distribution yet, but I hope it does.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Ultra Blue is a very fathers/sons-coded book, and my daughter has negotiated that the next long project will be more up her alley. She has requested a novel involving caverns and peril, so that’s the main thing happening now.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Melissa Eleftherion, Field guide to autobiography

cockle

my heart-shaped secretion

my exposed symmetry

a specimen

in the sediment buried alive

bilateral suction

a siphon

i am edible in shapes

The author of numerous poetry chapbooks, Northern California poet Melissa Eleftherion’s first full-length poetry collection is Field guide to autobiography (H_NGM_N Books, 2017), a collection made up of short sketch-poems in three sections: “auto/,” “/bio” and “field graph [no guide].” The short poems of Field guide to autobiography are rife with a sense of play and the visual field of the page, sketching a quickness of phrase, deft turns and halting language. Utilizing details and influence from published field guides to trigger poems blending other elements of information, including biographical, the poems in Field guide to autobiography do have a sense of rushed movement, nearly breathlessly so, streaking across each page like a meteor shower; or, as she writes in the poem “sea cucumber”:

            spines buried deep

      tentacles grown over and again

            a skeleton mouth

            to grab the crumbs

            to be inside a body

            there is a fur

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Steven Karl

Steven Karl is the author of Dork Swagger (Coconut Books) and Sister (Noemi Press). His chapbooks and collaborative chapbooks have been published by Flying Guillotine Press, Peptic Robot Press, Lame House Press, and H_NGM_N. Recent poetry and non-fiction have appeared in The Volta, Real Pants, Coldfront Magazine, Jellyfish, Pinwheel, Entropy, and The First Time I Heard My Bloody Valentine. He is a poetry editor for Sink Review and currently lives in Miami, FL, but will relocate to Tokyo with his wife and daughter in August.

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

My life did not change dramatically, but there were subtle and gradual changes. I was able to let myself enjoy a feeling of accomplishment, since from a very young age I wanted to write books. As someone who often feels unaccomplished, I suppose it was nice to allow joy into my life and simply accept it. Gradually, as the book existed it afforded me the opportunity to meet and interact with a lot of writers I admired.

Both books are a bit dark, but the first one is also humorous so it was a lot easier to read from whereas, the second one leaves me feeling raw and sometimes overexposed. I’m still figuring out how to live with it now that it’s in the world.

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

I actually came to fiction first, both as a reader and writer. In 6^TH grade I wrote a short story (incorporating the week’s vocabulary lesson) called “Ravenous Rick” and it was entered into some school contest where it placed 2^nd. In high school my friend & I decided we wanted to be “literary” so we started reading novels and then one of us decided we should read poetry too (although we were still reading two novels to one book of poetry). As a college freshman/ sophomore English major the trend continued of reading significantly more novels than poetry.

I also took undergraduate workshops in both fiction and poetry and wrote horrible fiction imitating some “blend” of Calvino/Borges. My fiction profs were primarily male, egotistical, and only taught dead white men. The workshop atmosphere was pretty competitive and very macho. Maybe I’ll always be a bit too “twee” but it just wasn’t for me. Also, as a multi-ethnic person, I found the all white reading lists to be problematic, especially since I was just becoming aware of Frantz Fanon and reading Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston outside of class curriculum. In contrast, my poetry workshops had wonderful, encouraging, and inspiring female profs that required us to read broadly and critically. Poetry felt alive and necessary and politically charged in a way that fiction (as I was receiving it) did not. I was also slightly better at writing poetry so my interests became more and more focused specifically on poetry.

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?

Each book, each poem is different. My first book, Dork Swagger, came quickly. Some poems remained close to the original, but most were revised. I actually wrote a lot of what is my second book before writing Dork Swagger, and it made a few finalist or semi-finalist lists, etc. but never really clicked as a book. While revising Dork Swagger I also started revising Sister and more importantly thinking of how to make Sister work as a book. So that one changed a lot more from conception to revision than Dork Swagger and ultimately took a lot longer. I think Dork Swagger took about 2 years (although I had written many failed variations of what became the opening poem over the last 10 years- ha!), whereas Sister probably took closer to five years. For most of my life I’ve been a volume writer, but in the past two years the writing has become slower and slower and no where near a final version.

I  also have a 1-year old daughter ( I know we’ve talked about our babies/children before), so currently everything is based on taking notes or just jotting down a line here or there and hoping to sculpt it into something later down the line.

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?

This too changes all the time. After writing three poems in succession very quickly, I knew Dork Swagger was going to be a book. Sister started out as individual poems, some of which appeared in two different chapbooks. However, post-Sister I find that I prefer to think in terms of a “book,” but don’t always have the time or vision to manifest my ambition.

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

I had the unfortunate luck to be raised a Jehovah Witness, so from an early age I had to give bible readings in front of the congregation and didn’t suck at it, so I’ve never dreaded public speaking.

For both books I did a mini-tour and will continue to tour (as much as that is possible since I’m moving to Tokyo in August). I enjoy meeting new people and reading with other poets. I’m Aquarius so perhaps you can blame it on the stars that I’m relatively social. I also like coffee and beer and touring is a good excuse to check out local breweries and coffee shops and of course, see friends scattered across the U.S.

With that being said, I don’t always give good readings and sometimes readings are poorly attended, or the energy of the place is off, so I have a lot of complicated emotions surrounding my own inadequate performance or putting too much value on readings and then getting bummed out and have to work through feelings of futility, etc. So I like giving readings, but don’t always feel good about them.

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?

While my two books are quite different they both contain political poems. Sometimes the poems are interrogations into the heteronormative ideas of manliness, or they are actively pushing against and questioning a patriarchal society. I’m also interested in violence— how it’s used in oppression, as well as how we consume it as entertainment.

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 think all writers should aspire to have a role, but I’m cautious about assuming that authority and defining it for anyone other than myself. The idea of a current role is a complicated one as well, because genre influences most of our role expectations, and I think a lot of writers are intentionally pushing against and attempting to destabilize those expectations.

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

I like working with an outside editor and I find feedback instructive. I chatted on the phone with J. Michael Martinez (my editor for the Noemi book) about using “a” versus “the.” Editors have the ability to pick up and question extremely subtle nuances. As writer we make decisions throughout the process of writing and revising, but it doesn’t always guarantee that we are engaged in metacognition for every word in each line we write. Editors, if the experience is positive, can allow us an opportunity to re-enter our work from a perspective that is not unique only to ourselves.

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

Chris Salerno told me that when his first book came out, he sent it to writers he admired. I’ve often returned to this idea, because most of us work very hard at writing books, deal with huge amounts of rejections, and then FINALLY get a book published, only to become timid about letting the world know about it, especially the writers we admire the most. And who doesn’t like getting free surprise books in the mail?

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry, whether solo or collaborative, to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I really enjoy writing collaboratively and have done so with both poets and artists. I think once I’m in Tokyo I’ll really miss my friends and living in the U.S. so I imagine I’ll do more collaborative writing as a means of keeping up a creative dialogue. Although I haven’t gotten a ton of writing done recently, what writing I have done has been in the form of lyric essays and non-fiction vignettes. The appeal of these forms is that it’s another way of writing a sentence or completely breaking apart the sentence.

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 much of a routine. I’ve often fantasized about it, but my work schedule fluctuates a lot, so every semester the routine would have to change. This is a roundabout way of saying I often implement routines only to abandon them. A lot of my friends write and publish significantly more than I do and I think a lot of this is because they have routines. I go back and forth with being envious of them and their routines, and being okay with my smaller output and not having a routine.  And honestly, now that I have a daughter every day begins with her— writing either happens or it doesn’t. I have to be okay with that.

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

Oh, I like inspiration. I understand it is often over-used and can feel superficial, but for me it remains important and meaningful. When I’m stalled, I’ll often seek out conversations (face-to-face, phone, email, etc.) with friends to kick-start the brain and shake me out of my malaise. I’m mostly upbeat, but I can be plagued with pessimism and anxiety and my friends know it, so they have been and continue to be extremely generous with their love and encouragement. I also find a lot of inspiration in film and music.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of a freshly mown lawn. It doesn't remind me of Philly (where I was born) but it does remind me of living in South Jersey, Eugene, and Portland, Oregon.

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?

Both of my books are heavily influenced by film and music. Visual art is also an influence, but the writing that comes out of it has been less successful for me.

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

Oh, there are so many of them. But I frequently return to Myung Mi Kim, Inger Christensen, James Schuyler, and Joseph Ceravolo.

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

Perhaps a residency. Even in grad school I worked a lot, so the idea of having entire days to write is still something I fantasize about.

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’m rather hopeless in this regard. When I was really young I thought I’d be a lawyer or an astronaut. However, I found studying for the LSAT to be completely dreadful and could never actually visualize myself as a lawyer. As far as being an astronaut, it was the pure daydreams of youth since I actually never bothered to put an ounce of effort into it becoming something I could do.

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

I like playing basketball, but my handle is non-existent and I am acutely aware at how below par I am at it, so enjoyment is often diminished. I suppose writing doesn’t have to feel good and yet, it feels good knowing that I don’t have to feel good and can still be productive and contribute something to society.

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

I’m unreliable when it comes to greatness, but some recent books I’ve read and enjoyed are: Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved, Taylor Jacob Pate’s Becoming the Virgin, Sade Murphy’s Dream Machine, and Sarah Bartlett’s Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Out.

I recently saw the film The Lobster, which I did not think was great, but did thoroughly enjoy Joe (Hall) and Cheryl’s (Quimba) discussion of it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m somewhat poorly alternating between three different books. The first is a poetry manuscript that needs a bit more research and editing, the second is a hybrid book on cults, and the third is a non-fiction book of mostly vignettes.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;