Joyelle McSweeney, Death Styles

My review of South Bend, Indiana poet Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. See my 2009 "12 or 20 questions" interview with her here.

London (Ontario) Calling : report from Greg Curnoe's studio, Doctor Who + Antler River Poetry,

In case you hadn't heard, I took a VIA train nearly two weeks ago to London, Ontario for the sake of a reading I was doing through Antler River Poetry, which is pretty exciting. Given the length of the train (five hours to Toronto; an hour's wait; two-plus hours into London), the series was good enough to provide me with two nights of hotel, so I didn't have to worry about reading on a travel-day. I wandered leisurely across a Tuesday west along lakeshore, into, through, and beyond Toronto suburbs and into the wilds of Southwestern Ontario. The new Joyelle McSweeney title (which lands properly in April), I should have you know, is astounding.

I can't even remember the last time I did a reading in London, Ontario (and I seem not to have done notes about such, although I know I read there circa 1998 or so) [but you saw my report on my prior reading, when I ventured in Toronto for Art Bar, yes?]. I spent the train ride there sketching out edits on my book-length genealogical essay (you are following along with posted excerpts of this work-in-progress via my substack, yes?), and the train ride home sketching out edits on short stories, along with moving through a small handful of previously-unread books as I stared out the window. Oh, the cold. Oh, the minus fourteen of London, Ontario.

Once there, I slipped and slid the two blocks from train station to hotel (which was chilly, admittedly, once inside), and had considered venturing out for proper food and a drink or two until I caught that the hotel had a CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO CHANNEL. How was I expected to leave the hotel after discovering that? I'd already been moving the past few weeks through the Tom Baker period, and managed to move further through Baker and into the Peter Davidson run. Some stellar stuff there. Interesting to see earlier stories that are later referenced in the reboot era (my knowledge of Doctor Who began with the 2005 reboot; I was vaguely aware of it as a youth, but I never quite managed to get into it then).

Wednesday morning I sat for an hour or so with coffee, bags and a notebook at a small place on the corner (working on drafts of short stories), and saw a car run a red light, which seemed stunning. Again, minus fourteen. Downtown London has an enormous amount of smoke shops, and businesses you need to ring into, and reminded me of downtown Winnipeg, or Vanier, with nicer/older buildings. I managed a couple of used bookstores, and even found copies of books by myself and Christine (and a copy of Jean McKay's Gone to Grass, which I finished reading while in hospital awaiting Aoife's birth); should I have picked them up? Cheaper than perhaps I paid for my author copies, most of them. Instead, I floated through the historical titles and picked up a couple of guidebooks from Upper Canada Village, hoping there might be some information there I require for my genealogical researches. I ended up at Moxies for lunch, which felt like nonsense, but most of the more interesting places looked a bit dodgy (including a pizza place that hadn't any windows, which is always a bit of a red flag). Stupid Moxies. The food was tolerable, and the televisions were relentless (Moxies requires a safe space, naturally, to allow no distractions while your soul slowly leaves your body). And then, I saw another car run a red light. Um, what?

I had mentioned to Penn Kemp a week or so prior that I'd made a pilgrimage to the late Greg Curnoe's house at the end of July [see my note on such here], not wishing to bother his widow, Sheila, by what would have been a random stranger ringing her doorbell. I lingered on the street for a bit, which I was content enough with, at the time. Kemp (who had been Curnoe's assistant during a brief period in her teens: if you want to know more about that, I recommend James King's 2017 biography, THE WAY IT IS: The Life of Greg Curnoe, although the writing is a bit dry, which was surprising for such a lively subject and subject matter) was kind enough to respond by arranging a visit to the house, and Sheila and Penn picked me up at the hotel mid-afternoon (and we saw another car run a red light: that's three I saw on that day alone doing such). Sheila was such a delightful, generous host, and we sat and chatted the three of us in the Curnoe kitchen for a while before she took me into the studio, where Greg Curnoe (1936-1992) produced some twenty-plus years of artwork before his untimely death. I was there for a couple of hours, and it was completely glorious. We chatted, gossiped a bit (ahem), and Sheila was gracious enough to offer me copies of the original "big little" duo The Great Canadian Sonnet (Coach House Press, 1970) by David McFadden, that Curnoe did all the artwork for (a single reprint edition was produced through Coach House Books more recently; you should find a copy if you can).

And, oh, this absolutely beautiful dollhouse Curnoe made for their daughter when she was young. Completely the kind of dollhouse that could only be produced by Greg Curnoe. Oh, Sheila Curnoe and Penn Kemp, thank you again for this kindness, this gift, of being allowed into this space. Pilgrimage, indeed. So very very cool. (I was abuzz most of the rest of the day, as you might imagine).

After being dropped back at the hotel for a quick bite (and further Doctor Who), one of the organizers collected me from the hotel DURING WHICH WE LITERALLY SAW ANOTHER CAR RUN A RED LIGHT; THAT IS FOUR TIMES I SAW CARS RUN RED LIGHTS IN A SINGLE DAY IN DOWNTOWN LONDON, ONTARIO. THIS IS CLEARLY A LAWLESS PLACE. The reading itself opened with "local opener" poets Sunday Ajak reading a couple of poems, followed by Katie Jeresky and Penn Kemp, who each read from their contributions to the three-poet chapbook (the third being Jessica Lee McMillan) Intent on Flowering (Rose Garden Press, 2024). Poet Kit Roffey was scheduled to be there to read from their recent 845 Press poetry debut, Civilian of Dirt (2023) [see my review of such here], but was under the weather, so publisher Aaron Schneider read in their stead (it is a really good chapbook debut, I should say). It was very good, also, to hear Karen Schindler read from her chapbook debut (I was startled to realize it was only her debut!) from Gaspereau Press, THE SAD TRUTH (2023) [see my review of such here]. And Tom Cull was there! Very good to meet him. And Jason Dickson! And Sarah Marie! And Tom Prime! It was a solid crowd, honestly.

And then I read!

photo of myself reading, by Misha Bower / Antler River Poetry

There was even a bit of a conversation after, during which host and moderator David Barrick asked a couple of us publisher-sorts (being Karen and myself as features, the evening had been framed as a small press event) about submitting, publishing and other sorts of things: Karen, myself, Aaron and the two Michelles (whom I had not previously met) from Rose Garden Press (I had a chapbook with them a while back; remember?).

After the reading, I convinced Aaron that we should head out for drinks, which was an awful lot of fun; he says we originally met at a pub once in Kingston, but I couldn't think of a time I was in Kingston out for drinks without doing a reading (he says there wasn't a reading; if there had been, he would have been there), so I have no idea when that would have been. Otherwise, it was good to spend time with him and get a better sense of him, his writing, his press, etcetera. I'm curious to see where 845 Press, and, for that matter, The Temz Review, goes next. He's doing some solid work.

And then it was back to the hotel for some more Doctor Who, which began again with first light. Peter Davidson!

And the train again, around 10am. Making notes and reading an interesting collection of collected writings by American poet and critic Susan Gevirtz, among other items. Back to Toronto, briefly. Back to Ottawa. All in all a glorious trip. Have you thought of heading out towards London?

Yi Sang: Selected Works, ed. Don Mee Choi

 

MOVEMENT

I climb up above the first floor to the second floor to the third floor to the rooftop garden and look to the south and there is nothing there and look to the north and there is nothing there and so I go down from the rooftop garden to the third floor to the second floor to the first floor and the sun that rose in the east has set in the west rose from the east and set in the west and rose from the east and set in the west and rose from the east and it is in the middle of the sky and I take out my watch and look and see that it has stopped although it is the correct time but the watch is younger than I am or rather I am older than the watch is and it can’t be helped that that is what they will think of me because that is probably the case and so I threw away the watch. (translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu)

There is some absolutely fascinating reading in the new collection Yi Sang: Selected Works, edited by Don Mee Choi (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2020) and translated by Jack Jung, Sawako Nakayasu, Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney. Yi Sang: Selected Works is a collection of poems, essays and short fiction by Korean poet Yang Sang (1910-1937), a writer well-known in and around Korea, but most likely almost completely unknown to an English-language readership. It is interesting to see how this book is organized, both in terms of sections and translators, as the book opens with a collection’s worth of poems translated from the Korean by Jack Jung, before a further selection of poems translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu, a selection of essays translated from the Korean by Jack Jung, and a selection of stories translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney. In small ways, his shifts between language of composition speak to the cultural complications in Korea during the short span of Yi Sang’s life, as Nakayasu writes as part of the introduction to her section of translations: “Yang Sing is now an established figure in Korea’s modernist canon, but he was not as well known during his brief life, which took place entirely under Japanese rule.” Later on, she offers:

            Yi Sang’s poems are conversant with those of the Japanese modernists, but through them he also repurposes the tools of the avant-garde as instruments of rebellion. As Japanese poets sought to break from their own traditions, it is possible that Yi Sang was also seeking ways to push against the loss, erasure, and invisibility of colonial circumstances. While it is often said that translation stretches the target language by virtue of accommodating a new text, here Yi Sang was stretching Japanese to make it accommodate his position as a colonial subject. In that sense, avant-garde aesthetics may have provided the perfect cover for his subversive distortion of Japanese language conventions.

Through a short but remarkably vibrant artistic life, Yi Sang was able to subvert conventions of Japanese language and writing from the perspective of simultaneous insider and perpetual outsider, allowing him a unique vantage-point from which to write and respond. The individual offerings—whether afterword or introduction or timeline—included by these multiple translators is something I appreciated, as a new reader of Yi Sang’s work, to more fully understand the shifts in his thinking, his writing and his considerations. McSweeney’s “Afterword: Thirteen for Yi Sang, for Arachne,” writes: “So much that I know about translation I have learned from the working relationship of Don Mee Choi and Kim Hyesoon, of whom Kim Hyesoon has written, ‘It is like someone who is very much like me.’ To translate is to enter a web of likenesses and unlikeness, the uncertain, proliferating zone of the text. So it has been a thrilling adventure to join hands with Don Mee Choi and peer with her into the mirror of Yi Sang, sisterly and nonidentical, to become Spider&Spider&Spider&—such weird mimicry.” As part of “Yi Sang: A Timeline” that opens the collection, Jack Jung includes this as part of the entry for 1931: “Japanese invasion of Manchuria began in September. The war would continue into 1932 and end with Japanese victory. The annexation of Manchuria lasted until the end of World War II. Yi Sang’s poems such as ‘Poem No. 12’ of ‘Crow’s Eye View’ and ‘Street Outside Street’ can be read as elliptical responses to the military violence of his time.” Translated into English by Jung, the poem “Street Outside Street,” originally dated March 1936, ends with:

I go. A train car carrying Sun Tzu avoids my room. A note written in shorthand is laid out on my desk. There is also a cheap dish, and on the dish is a boiled egg—my fork bursts the egg’s yolk. A bird, a detal, flies out—a wind from the bird’s flapping wings tears up the grid. A flock of prophetic documents dances wildly on a field of ice. My blood wets a cigarette. The red-light district burns through the night. Fake angels begin to breed, flying every direction, covering up the entire sky. However, everything I have put here in my room is heating up, clamoring all at once. The vast room rots from within. The wallpaper gets itchy. The trash wildly sticks to my walls.

 

12 or 20 questions: Joyelle McSweeney

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of the poetry books The Red Bird (Fence 2001, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Prize) and The Commandrine and Other Poems (Fence 2004), as well as the novels Nylund, the Sarcographer, a baroque noir from Tarpaulin Sky Press, and Flet, a sci-fi from Fence (both novels 2007). With Johannes Göransson, she edits Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web journal for international writing and hybrid forms. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Notre Dame.

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 wrote The Red Bird in an uninsulated room during a winter so cold that snow compressed on the roof, driving brown fetid water down my walls which froze on the window glass. Aaliyah died that winter, and Al Gore conceded. Several belts of whiskey per night could alleviate these and other problems. On the other hand, I wrote that book in a condition of extreme luxury: I was a grad student, and I have never had so much time to write since then. As a result, the book reflects a process-oriented approach to writing. Each afternoon I would flee to the bookstore and read the New York Times from front to last page, including the business pages etc. I would write down any odd idiom, caption, typo or term of art in my notebook. Then I would go to class and the bar. In the morning, while still in bed, I would return to my notebook, reread it with my eyes half closed, circle any quote that caught my attention without editing myself, and trying to perceive the way in which this randomized selection of quotes dialogued with each other. That’s how I wrote every poem in that book. It was a kind of chance-based and automatic writing, though I didn’t realize it then, since what came out at the other end of the process were lyrics. It was as Tristan Tzara describes cutups: “The poem will resemble you.”

I wrote The Commandrine under a different kind of pressure. Rather than snow driving dirty ice water down my walls, I lived under a building (in a basement apartment, but since it had a door out the back it was called a ‘garden apartment’ in Chicago bird language). Roots had grown into the pipes driving air up through the toilets, causing large bursts like the soundtrack in Victory at Sea. Also I had almost no time to write, as I was adjuncting four comp classes at two schools and teaching poetry one day a week in a public school. When I sat down for my two hours of writing time per week on Saturday morning, very strange voices squeezed through my hands and onto the page. These were archaic voices I had collected over a lifetime of survey courses and anthology reading: Manfred, Faust, “I dreamed I saw the new moon/with the old moon in her arms/Well if the bard is weatherwise tonight” That kind of thing. All these voices crowded in and chatted with each other and that’s how I wrote the nautical verse play at the center of The Commandrine. It utilizes every convention of the form: sailors, the Devil, a damned genius/poet/head of state, etc. The other poems in the book are also filled with the kinds of strange locutions you find in anthologies: apostrophes, exclamations, epithets (especially), paens, etc.

Flet and Nylund I wrote in tandem out of a different kind of project. I essentially attempted to write a genre novel in each case. I made no attempt at originality in terms of the plot or characters. In fact, I treated these conventions as a kind of form, in the same way the conventions of a sonnet provide the material and rhetorical form. Then I went about fulfilling that form using something close to prose poetry. In each case the syntax had different requirements. In the case of Flet, the sci-fi dystopic, I wanted to create a heroine with no sense of a personal past, so it’s written in a kind of hallucinatory present tense. In the case of Nylund, a baroque noir, the past tense is so seductive that the hapless protagonist is so lost in his memory plot that he becomes unwittingly entangled in a present tense murder plot.

Right now I have at least three projects. I regularly write poems, with an emphasis on performance. I am working on a collection of stories. And I have a half finished novel, a historical romance (!) set in Occupied France (!!). It’s SMUTTY.

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

My parents gave me this anthology when I was a gradeschooler, I think it was called ‘Best Loved American Poems’ or something like this. It was incredibly patriotic and therefore carefully segregated into regular poems (including chestnuts by Thoreau, James Whitcomb Riley, Longfellow, etc), folk songs and ballads, and, of course, ‘Negro Spirituals’, rendered in dialect. Needless to say I found this an incredibly surreal read, particularly because I would flip around at random and find neoclassical references next to a supposed representation of ‘Negro’ speech so freighted with apostrophes and contractions that it sputtered like a machine rather than any human voice. The book was like the most incredible collapse. The Index of First Lines, as you can imagine, was like a diatribe spoken by a madman from New England. The experience was not so much ‘weird old america’ as ‘demented, dangerous old america’ , because at the same time the apparatus of the book was so didacticly cheerful. I think this book has been incredibly influential on my sense of writing. I would describe my writing as ecstatic, exuberant, dismayed, inflated, crushed down, and devious.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially 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?

When I ever get a chance to write, my writing comes very quickly and then I revise as I go. I no longer keep notes for my creative work. I’m just too strapped for time. I revise it as I go so that the shape is always adjusting itself. Then I email myself the drafts and then I lose the emails among my 4000 emails. This is a very bad and undisciplined way to work. It ensures that I have no literary history, which I like.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction 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 work begins at the beginning for the reasons stated above. Each book of mine seems to have a different idiolect and set of syntactical rules. Once I screw around with the sound enough to figure this out, there’s a fractal kind of process that happens. The micro- syntactic shape begets the macro-formal shape of the whole story, or novel, or what have you. The first few lines tell me what kind of piece I’m working myself up to and for. But not right away.

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

I adore readings. Readings are where it’s at. I love thinking about the material aspects of the text and how they relate to the sonic aspects, and how those two aspects are incompatible and open up a really exciting interval that’s full of risk and potential. People always tell me after my readings that they had no idea I would read this way, with this much energy and funny voices, that I should be an actress, etc. At first that troubled me, I thought I should do more to make the poems look on the page the way they sound in performance. Then I realized that not only is this impossible, but this gap is a kind of wonderful and awesome thing, a space of potential. And I really dive into that space when I perform and pull the whole room into that bombastic, tickish space with me. When I write poems now, as opposed to the textual practice of my first book, I try to nudge my toe into that bombastic space and imagine the poem as this flimsy medium that opens onto this vertiginousness like the city scene in Blade Runner. I’m basically writing for performance. That means the texts themselves are hopefully odd things that jump up and fly around in performance.

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 extremely theoretically concerned! All I do is protest, to quote Bob Dylan. Ok, what interests me are Bataille and the Notion of Expenditure; Antonin Artaud; Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literatures; translation theories; and disability theory. I’m interested in a kind of obscene text and obscene body, in rhetorics of failure, including the failure of one medium to fit into another, like, say, the bad fit of performance to into the printed page, and the unlimited potential energy unleashed by such failures. I’m interested in the possibility of loser auteurs, like Jack Smith and Ray Johnson. I’m interested in new theories of reading, digestive theories that deal with consumption and thus are both gross and political. I’m also interested in pedagogical theory, the way academics try to ‘control’ the text in the classroom as a kind of magic charm through which they control the students and control language itself. For example, the ban on teaching translations as primary texts in English departments reflects an anxiety over mastery. If the teacher can’t read the text in the original, he or she can’t be a ‘master’ of the text, a ‘master’ of language, or a ‘master’ of the students. Instead I think it’s fruitful to let uncertainty and discomfort into the classroom and recognize them as points of possibility. I’m pretty excited about Yoko Ono right now—not (only) for her Fluxus, but for the way she totally rewrote John Lennon as a Fluxus artist (‘Imagine’ is pure Fluxus) and for unintentionally (?)involving the entire world in piece of total theatre about race and gender with herself as the dark and hated villainess through whose heart the villagers would very much like to drive a stake. This piece of theatre has been running now for 40 years and puts Wagner to shame. I even saw recent installations on VH1 last night. What a woman.

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 continually destroy everything and pull everyone down deep into the mess of things and then to stand up. I’m thinking of another hero of mine, Aimé Césaire, and the imagery towards the end of Notebook of the Return to My Native Land, which uses fecal imagery to describe slaves exploding from a slave ship. In Eshleman’s translation :

I say right on! The old negritude
progressively cadavers itself
the horizon breaks, recoils and expand
and through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a sign
the slave ship cracks everywhere… Its belly convulses and
resounds… The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the
fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea!
And neither the joy of sails filled like a pocket stuffed with
doubloons, nor the tricks played on the dangerous stupidity of
the frigates of order prevent it from hearing the threat of its in-
testinal rumblings

[…]
And the nigger scum is on its feet

The seated nigger scum
unexpectedly standing
standing in the hold
standing in the cabins
standing on the deck
standing in the wind
standing under the sun
standing in the blood
standing
and
free

Or in the words of Amiri Baraka, “It’s nation time, get up santa claus”

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

If anyone’s interested in working with me on my writing, I’m happy. The editors that I’ve worked with at both journals and presses have been tremendous. Editing and publishing are/should be tremendous art projects and social acts.

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

“It’s nation time, get up santa claus”

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

Well, as I said above, I think there’s failure or non-equivalence when you move between different media and I’m very interested by that. My novels scrupulously fulfill conventions of the genres in which they participate and are thus failures; they are not interested in originality formally, plotwise, characterwise. They are only interested in their runaway prose. I also have a hunch that texts have nodes where they participate in genre and others where they write away from genre.

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?

A typical day for me begins with getting my toddler out of bed. I deal with her body for about two hours, take her to daycare, and go to work. I come home, feed her, bathe her, sing to her, and go to sleep. An atypical day for me includes about two hours when I can do some writing in the morning. I typically write when I’m half awake. I’m myopic and a hearing impaired ( I wear hearing aids) so I have a very mediated and partial, disintegrating relationship with the world which helps my writing. My hearing aids only like to hear noises produced by machinery, and they also make all sound synthetic through microchips, so it’s like ‘Revolt of the Things’ around here.

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

I turn to South Bend. Really, until you have lived in a rotting rust belt town you have not lived. People are hurting here, and they are dogged and ingenious. They drive their trucks through the walls of their living rooms on a nightly basis. They get in fights and throw pregnant dogs at each other. They find remarkable items to pawn (one winter morning two middle aged people were standing outside one of the many pawn shops at 7 AM trying to hold a window airconditioning unit up out of the snow. They were wearing sweatsuits and no coats.). There are residential motels here, one is called the Wooden Indian and it has almost no interior. So it’s a shelter without any shelter. We have a lot of yard sales around here where everyone tries to sell used goods to everyone else. The same used goods just pass back and forth. Capitalism is played out and distended here and very visibly broken. As a pregnant woman and a mother with a toddler, I fit right in to most expectations about women in this place, at least until I open my mouth and reveal myself not to be a Hoosier. But most of the time, at the supermarket, the BMV, the playground, the IRS office, daycare, I do not open my mouth. One is not invited to do so. As Denis Johnson writes at the end of Jesus’ Son, “I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

This question strikes me as obscene. What home are you referring to? Are you suggesting that my home has a ‘fragrance’? I love it.

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?

Oh my God. Well, books come from everything. I still believe, despite everything (yes Anne Frank reference) that’s there’s something special about writing, that it can hold every other art form and form in the world, and that the things that it holds badly (like performance) it is excellently deficient in and produces something interesting out of the deficiency. Then again, when I was watching those Ryan Trecartin videos on YouTube, where he has those great lines, like “My personal really concise pussy is creating a very inner monologue that I’m not going to share with you as I become dynamic.” And I think, that line is so dazzling, but at the same time, it’s as if the art is degrading into language, language is the shit of the art. And then I think of the artshow in Bolaño’s Distant Star, the photographs of the young women’s corpses disintegrating into the air, and also of “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” (Twin Peaks). So I love the degradation and decomposition and I’m not worried about it at all.

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

Well, I may have covered this by now but: *ALICE NOTLEY*, Ivan Blatný, Genet, Tzara, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith, *THE VELVET UNDERGROUND*, Yoko Ono, Daniel Defoe, Virgil, Jacobean drama, Hannah Weiner, Antonin Artaud, Voltaire, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Aimé Césaire, Harryette Mullen, Kim Hyesoon, Hiromi Itō, Aase Berg, Huidobro, WONG KAR-WAI, GODARD, Jack Smith, Langston Hughes, ALLEN GINSBERG, Bolaño, Deleuze, Žižek, JOHANNES GÖRANSSON, Dodie Bellamy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Jack Spicer, Lorca, Bataille, Joyce, Yeats, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

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

Hmm? Write 20 more books. Produce a play. I write a lot of ‘closet dramas’, dramas to be read in the closet, as it were. I’d like to split that open.

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 can’t imagine.

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

Lack of imagination.

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

The last great book was Candide; the last great film Puce Moment by Kenneth Anger.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Getting to school in time for office hours.

12 or 20 questions (second series);