Queen Mob's Teahouse : Kate Schapira + Valerie Witte co-interview,

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the thirteenth interview is now online: Co-Interview: Kate Schapira [pictured] + Valerie Witte. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimor, an interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollari, an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank, a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay Press, Five questions for Sara Uribe and John Pluecker about Antígona González by David Buuck (translated by John Pluecker), and kaie kellough in correspondence with Eric Schmaltz.
 
Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include: Stephanie Bolster on Three Bloody Words, Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, Meredith Quartermain, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way, check out my "about submissions" write-up at Queen Mob's; you can contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

Kate Schapira, Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out

NEW BEAUTY

I walked with my new beauty out from the circular houses.

Its seams ripped and frayed whenever I moved it.

New beauty is made of erectile tissue

made to bunch and wear out under the bridge

where pigeons live, loose-feathered and odorous.

Beyond the circular houses and the bridge, construction.

The new beauty was a knockoff, scarred together,

of a suit damp, flaking and acute.

Like a snake, I was glad to have it around me

making me more sensitive to everything.

I wore it inside out for extra tremors.

Dust drifted in heaps from the construction site.

It combined with moisture to engorge my new beauty.

The seams and uneven blood flow made a terrible outside

almost as if they were made from somebody else.

My new beauty was the construction site of all feeling.

Underneath it, I was becoming different.

There is an anxiety that runs through Providence, Rhode Island poet Kate Schapira’s fifth poetry collection, Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out (Denver CO: Horse Less Press, 2016), one that expresses itself through references to interpersonal relationships, climate change and cultural and community shifts. As she writes to open the prose poem “RED HOUR”: “When the red hour rings everyone falls for it. Everyone loses it. The red hour rips the wet giving-in bag of it, but what is it? What we want, loosened like a screw? The robots in us ring out, pivot thrust and circuit fart in public, tear pseudoskin and fuck wall sockets. We lose ourselves in it.” In a profile for the Brown University website, Nina Markov wrote: “Kate Schapira makes poetry that is both socially engaged and devoted to ‘the swing of a line or sentence.’” Later, in the same piece, Markov adds that “One of Schapira’s central preoccupations, she says, is the relationship between the individual and community.”

For Kate Schapira, poetic practice is a form of social engagement. While she seeks to write poetry that is “rigorously accountable” and “politically and ethically informed,” she aims for “illumination rather than transparency,” Schapira says. To that end, she pays close attention to the “rhythm and sound of language, to the swing of a line or sentence” and never loses sight of poetry’s potential to move, surprise, and inspire wonder.

The author of TOWN (Queens NY: Factory School, 2010) [see my review of such here], The Bounty: Four Addresses (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2011), How We Saved the City (Ithica, NY: Stockport Flats, 2012) and The Soft Place (Horse Less Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Schapira’s poetry is one of connectedness, such as her articulations on how the human world interacts with and intersects nature, aware very much how precarious human activity has made numerous natural systems. One could easily argue that Schapira’s connectedness extends structurally as well, from composing poems that speak to each other via suite or sequence to her ongoing engagements through the book as unit of composition, composing book-length suites of lyric poems, fragments and threads to construct a whole cloth, from the overt project-work of her first collection, TOWN, to the threads that hold sequences, sections and, really, the entire length and breadth of this new collection. She works on books, it would seem, and her connections between poems become stronger in their subtlety.

A head without limbs lives by description and emphasis. Hot melon dropping description. Wary, but not cautious. They decide everything together in the hollow theater where the hair is dug in, if you sliced them open you’d see it, tight on the inside, the mischief of it dispersed with a smell like when the straightening iron hits, all behind a bright ad with blue contacts. It would kill them. They mean you to take them literally: put your best head forward. (“WOMAN WITH EXTRA HEADS”)

In Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out, Schapira reminds us just how good she is at composing expansive lines that stretch across the page like runners, furthering and furthering a thought into a series of thoughts, such as the opening of the final poem in the collection, “FOOD POEM FOR THE NEW YEAR / (FUNGUS POEM)”: “White negatives of flour on the new baking sheet after the biscuits come / off, like ringworm //// fungus is the abandoned shirt of absence, foxed paper, cheese left out for / flavor furred almost invisibly urging a change of plans. Fresh mushrooms / firm and deliberate under their clingwrap shrug, fall to decomposers of / their own [.]”

Kate Schapira, TOWN

FROM THE DREAMWALL: I dreamed I smashed all the dishes, all the jars. I stood at the factory fire and threw handfuls of corn into it, from the blackness outside it. By the time it’s a story there will be no one to tell it. Mild eyes will make no distinction. Trees and the remnants of houses will grow up through the streets. It’s too late not to think about it. Once the trail roared through with its long golden mane in the dew-soaked morning. War never came here, but change came to thicken the water, to the spheres of flesh inside, tiny possibilities. Who dreams they give birth to the town’s tree-heavy future? Write your dream underneath mine.

FROM THE DREAMWALL: Sometimes I don’t think laws are so bad.

While in the United States recently, I was able to pick up a copy of Kate Schapira’s TOWN (Queens NY: Factory School, 2010). It’s only the second title of hers I’ve read so far (and I think the first I’ve seen from Factory School), after The Soft Place (Horse Less Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], not including her two chapbooks produced through above/ground press. As she writes at the back of the collection, the original materials for TOWN were solicited, compiled and re-worked, and she includes her original solicitation, which includes: “What I’d like you to do is tell me one thing about this town’s past or present. You don’t have to think about it too hard. Just type it in and send it to me. May I suggest that you do it sooner rather than later, for busyness and memory reasons.” Her “About Town” post-script continues:

            As information about the town came in from friends, relations and acquaintances (some of whom are working writers, others not), some of it started to contradict itself (some pieces contradicted others), and since I’d decided that everything people told me about the town was true, I had to revisit my ideas about consensus: how do contradictions mutually and simultaneously exist and what gravity do they exert on one another, without one erasing or swallowing the other?

Composed as a suite of fragments, prose-poems and lyric descriptions, Schapira explores the variety of ways a town can be described, allowing the directions provided to her through solicitation to provide an expansive town portrait, one that becomes richer and deeper through those contradictions she mentions (as every town, just as every person, contains at least one contradiction). From the other trade work I’ve seen of hers—The Soft Place—Schapira appears to be interested in the extended suite, whether the sequence of such for that later collection, or the book-length quilt of poems that accumulates into her TOWN. It makes me curious as to where else her work is capable of heading.

Another element of the book I can’t help but enjoy: the cover artwork by James McShane includes a collage of maps, and a fragment on the left of the front cover not only includes a section of a map of Ottawa, but a swath that runs along the 417/174 Highways, from Heron Road all the way north to the Ottawa River, which means I can see where my lovely wife works (the corner of Innes/St. Laurent), not an eight minute drive from here.

CUSTOM / LAW

FOOD

CHANGES

A family moved into a house on a quiet street. Once they were unpacked they evoked all their neighbor’s doors to invite them over for a watermelon margarita block party. The night of the house only two old women came. As the second entered and was greeted by the couple she shook hands with the other. Both women were widowed. Their houses sat next to each other and each had lived in her own since just after a young marriage. On this night they were introduced.

Hospitality holds its breath as the mixture delivers. Both have grown old and human. To say, “We’re both old,” that age happens not to the other but both, to be part of both in town, to remember the houses they moved from dwindling in memory, becoming matchstick, streets spreading and tiring easily, evening melting in cautious red sips. They were about the changes of which other neighbors were a part, sitting as they’d been taught, two women spreading and diffusing to reenter matter, like soaked gauze, quietly into the fiber of town as streetlights marked out the web of veins filled with isotopes moving weakly.

The couple whose house it was told everyone how sweet it was from the outside, quick coming to tongue, loosening flavor. The sunset looked like a lake of watermelon margaritas.

new from above/ground press: Schapira, Brockwell, Baker + Touch the Donkey #3

THE MOTIONS
Kate Schapira
$4
See link here for more information

Images from Declassified Nuclear Test Films
Stephen Brockwell
$4
See link here for more information

Abject Lessons
Jennifer Baker
$4
See link here for more information

Touch the Donkey #3
with new poems by Gil McElroy, j/j hastain, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, Susan Briante and D.G. Jones.
$6
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September/October 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

and don’t forget about the 2015 above/ground press subscriptions; still available!

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

forthcoming items by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Pearl Pirie, Gil McElroy, Gregory Betts, Kemeny Babineau, ryan fitzpatrick and Elizabeth Robinson!

above/ground press: 2015 subscriptions now available!

Twenty-one years and counting. Can you believe it? There's been a ton of activity over the past year around above/ground press, from the rebuilding of Chaudiere Books (the trade extension, one might say, of above/ground) to the founding of the poetry journal Touch the Donkey (included as part of the above/ground press subscription!). Just what else might happen? Current and forthcoming items include works by Kate Schapira, Gil McElroy, Jennifer Baker, Gregory Betts, Stephen Brockwell and Kemeny Babineau (2014) and Elizabeth Robinson (2015), as well as a whole slew of publications that haven't even been decided on yet.

2015 annual subscriptions are now available: $50 (in the United States, $50 US; $80 international) for everything above/ground press makes from now until the end of 2015, including chapbooks, broadsheets, The Peter F. Yacht Club and Touch the Donkey (have you been keeping track of the array of interviews posted to the site?).

Anyone who subscribes before November 1st will also receive the last above/ground press package (or two) of 2014, including those exciting new titles by derek beaulieu, Kate Schapira, Jennifer Baker, Kemeny Babineau, Gregory Betts and Gil McElroy (plus whatever else the press happens to produce before the turn of the new year).

Why wait? You can either send a cheque (payable to rob mclennan) to 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1H 7M9, or utilize whichever paypal button that applies to you:

Canadian subscriptions:

American subscriptions:

International subscriptions:

And keep checking notices for The Factory Reading Series. There’s so much more to come.

new from above/ground press: Schapira, Schmaltz, mclennan, Rosenthal + Tourbin,

OVERHEARD WHILE HIDING FROM THE SUN
Kate Schapira
$4
See link here for more information

MITSUMI ELEC. CO. LTD.: keyboard poems
Eric Schmaltz
$4
See link here for more information

from Hark: a journal
rob mclennan
$4
See link here for more information

Estelle Meaning Star
Sarah Rosenthal
$4
See link here for more information

THE STREAM and other poems
Dennis Tourbin
$4
See link here for more information






keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
February 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print).

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

and don’t forget about the 2014 above/ground press subscriptions; still available! Did you see what we made in January? Other forthcoming chapbooks by David Phillips, Susanne Dyckman and Pearl Pirie, and watch for new “poem” broadsheets by m erskine, Rachael Simpson and Elizabeth Robinson!

Notes, on the subject of marriage:

My sequence, "Notes, on the subject of marriage:," composed a bit more than a year ago now (we celebrated our first wedding anniversary this past Sunday), has appeared in the second issue of n/a journal, alongside some impressive work by Rae Armantrout, Kate Schapira and Megan Kaminski, among others. Thanks, much!

Andrea Rexilius, Half of What They Carried Flew Away

What they wanted most was to see things they had never seen before. When they were people they felt relief. They were on a new sexual continent willing to proclaim anything. They couldn’t sleep. It was impossible for them to choose whether or not to be savage. They felt something.

They indulge as a result of repeated colonization. They make armies. They decide they are as small as ants. It happens on the cellular level. It happens as a result of frustration. Like daffodils in the middle of the Pacific.

It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs helped them to arrive.

American poet Andrea Rexilius follows up her first trade poetry collection, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) with a second, Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Tuscon AZ/Denver CO: Letter Machine Editions, 2012). Predominantly a text of perpetual lyric movement and continued arrival, Halfof What They Carried Flew Away explores a series of prose-poems that accumulate into a semi-narrative around echoes of immigration. What makes lyric prose so much more prevalent in American poetry than in Canadian writing? Somehow we still seem entirely too attached to metaphor-driven verse, yet this currently generation of American poets are apparently lining up to produce books of lyric prose-poetry, including Lily Brown, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Eric Baus, Kate Schapira, Noah Eli Gordon, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Richard Froude and so many, many more.

There are two worlds inside them: the world and the sky. One living organism, a marriage of space and inner catastrophe. They are referring to negation, to the deepest blue. But it’s hard to get the blue of this sky, they say. Is it the same blue as that blue over there? It is true, they think, to question the language the blue has given them. Their eyes can only reach so far, even hooked together. They cannot bring that blue next to this blue. What is this blue called, they wonder. What is that blue.

Broken down into five sections—“First Residence: Desire,” “Second Residence: Water,” “Third Residence: Emanation,” “Fourth Residence: Weather” and “Fifth Residence: Territory”—the collection also uses a thread of sub-titles, including “This is the interview of their first crossing,” “This is the answer of their first crossing,” “What is the emanation of the image?” and “This is the song of their second crossing.” The lyric collage of Rexilius’ Half of What They Carried Flew Away both creates and deflects a narrative, composing and sliding around speculation, describing a voyage that is often less described than entirely conceptual. “Human space is a cohabitation with fog.” she writes, somewhere in the second section. Further into the collection, she writes: “They are from the early 1870s. / They move from house to house like windows.” Even the ideas themselves remain slippery. This is a staggering collection, and one that requires deep, repeated readings. One must possibly drown within.

I do not know the limits of my own distinctions.

Transition is not easy to define.

We are teeming with bees, boll-weevils, locusts. Brimming

    with maidservants and mistresses.

 This is what we have learned from imagery.

A cruel second nature, but what happened to the first, what

    will the next reveal?

Lower animals tell us more about ourselves.

Lost in a laboratory maze, the woodcock reasons, feels,

    communicates across the centuries.

He lives in the cultural field. On the plains.

To what extent can he trust his eyes? Who is his animal double?

I am an amoeba by sympathy. We could answer to each other.

We could trade pictures we’ve drawn on stones.

We are plants and people. Our rituals dance.

We respect the sky with ease.

Kate Schapira, The Soft Place

Give the kid my notebook to quiet her.

Give it to her every year.

Give her every year

her head-top smelling

like an experiment in communal living.

In 2016 we will begin paying more

in benefits than we collect in taxes

leaking through to the secure side of

a compact between generations

prepared especially for Kate Schapira. (“The Beginnings of Generosity”)

In her fourth trade poetry collection, The Soft Place (Denver CO: Horse Less Press, 2012), Providence, Rhode Island poet Kate Schapira composes four poem/sections out of notes and fragments that accumulate into a work that feels larger than the scope of the current trade work. 

There is something about her poetry that feels larger than the mere shape of itself, akin to works such as bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes, or more contemporary works, such as the poetry of Emily Carr, and yet, without having seen any of her previous works, it becomes difficult to do anything but throw out conjecture. Just what is it she is building? 

Composed in four poem-sections—“The Beginnings of Generosity,” “Suture Sutras,” “Open Storage” and “Border Portal”—there is a meditational quality to the writing in The Soft Place, a thoughtful movement that works equally slow and quick. As she writes in the first section:

            Bottles of breast milk even with their high

            fat content getting old waiting

            colostomy bags and seeps in the sides

            of transit

            Cupping the inarticulate flesh with inadequate hands

Schapira’s is a wide canvas, and this collection feels merely a part of something ongoing, gives the appearance of writing as a daily practice, akin to bpNichol’s “poem as long as a life.” Schapira stitches, in the finest sense, a quilt composed of fragments, a structure most obvious in the third section. The travel-section, “Open Storage,” unlike the other sections, is made up of individually-titled poems (as opposed to a poem/section of accumulated fragments), each of which repeat and wrap around each other in a compelling cadence of repetition. Poems in this section include “Train Notes (Expanded),” “Ocean, Air and Sickness: Day 1,” “Safety Fact 1,” “Ocean, Air and Sickness: Day 2,” “Safety Fact 2,” and multiple “Heirloom Notes (Expanded),” among others.

Train Notes (Expanded)

“look, listen and live” (Fall asleep

with hands guarding hills and old woods

inside your sweater, softer

wood eating into harder sand)

(For lovers’ protection labels attach

themselves to precautions) “Have occupants

move away from windows and cover eyes”

“Everything your weakened, damaged or failing

heart desires” (Mouth chasing

air in your dream, body bulwark wrapping

—a soft world means a thin barrier)

“We turn heart failure into heart success”

(We move as fast as the words move)

Schapira manages to connect her work back to itself without falling into mockery, equally managing to extend the scope of the individual poems, and the collection as a whole, most of which does feel as though sketched out during travel, with shades of the epistolary. When comparing this collection to another of the press’ titles, Richard Froude’s Fabric (Horse Less Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], it gives the impression that the editors of Horse Less Press might prefer quality poetry manuscripts constructed out of long, thoughtful, meditative fragments. How do such works get constructed? I am interested in pursuing her other works, to attempt to figure out.

Heirloom Notes (Concluded)

“I want us to be like that 95-year-old oven,” you say. Big cement

lions on both sides of an overpass bridge. Flat park and muddy

river below; fog and hillside, tangle and ivy, dark twilight, cold

damp air. I wrote this down carefully. I brought it to you.