12 or 20 (second series) questions with Marcella Durand

Marcella Durand’s [photo credit: Corinne Botz] latest book, A Winter Triangle, received the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize and was published in 2025 by Fordham University Press. She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry, published by MIT Press in Fall 2024, and the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Other books include To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2022), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), The Garden of M./Le Jardin de M., translated by Olivier Brossard and published in a bilingual edition by joca seria, 2016, and a book-length translation of Michele Metail’s constraint-based work, Earth’s Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, (Black Square Editions, 2020). 

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

My first book was a chapbook, Lapsus Linguae, the first in a series of chapbooks published in the 1990s by Situations Press, edited by Kimberly Lyons and Joe Elliot. It was such a thrill to see my poems in chapbook form, and I’m still very fond of how a chapbook can hold longer poems or a series of related poems that are not "book" length. Lapsus Linguae also has a heavy letterpressed cover of textured paper—another aspect of the chapbook, that you can bring a visual or sculptural heft to it. Happily, Lapsus Linguae is available again online, thanks to the wonderful Blue Bag Press.

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

I tried writing a short story once and quickly realized that creating characters or working out a plot line were not for me. My parents are both visual artists, and so I appreciate how poetry is more related to other arts, like painting and music, that can sit free of linearity, and how I can experiment in so many ways with poetry. I love its potency too, and the concentration of it. I love the poetic line and how a line may unfurl along the page toward either an enjambment, or a stop, or fragment, or divert into another unexpected direction. That said, I made my living for a long time as a writer, editor, and copy editor—I worked for various publications, weekly neighborhood newspapers, niche enthusiast and lifestyle magazines, art journals, medical writing… It was a totally different writing process, extremely hardheaded and linear with of course lots of external constraints, but I enjoyed putting articles together, deciding which quotes to use from an interview, when to insert a data point, what the lede should be, etc., and I sort of miss that tactile sense of organizing information in the most direct and coherent way possible to connect with various audiences (especially in medical writing) and provide them very immediately with resources.

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? 

Most of my projects take years, from initial idea onward. I’m a heavy reviser (or self-cannibalizer) and will revise right up to when someone else takes the work away from me. I keep journals with a lot of notes—notes while reading, or seeing art, or just interesting words or word combinations—so I’ll return to those journals often. They are sort of my seedbed. Every once in a great while, due to an inexplicable confluence of unknowable factors, I’ll be struck by lightning and a poem will emerge immediately from the sizzle. But otherwise, I've got a zillion drafts.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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? 

I mostly have a concept, or even a title—usually several going simultaneously. The concept will slowly let itself be known to me—in that I keep thinking about it and turning it over in my mind, until a potential structure of poems start to emerge. I really love titles, and have lists of them, and they are sort of concepts too, like The Light Factory, A Winter Triangle, No Trees, Circles for Wheelmakers. I'll often write toward and from those title/concepts. Or I'll group discrete poems that seem to belong to that greater concept.

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

Edwin Torres once advised me to read as though I loved my own work, and I think I am finally arriving to that, feeling love for my poems and the words in them, or at least savoring and allowing space to the words in their order. And feeling love for the audience, whose live presence I value in these days of electric isolation. I practice a lot before a reading and that is part of the revision process, as I'll hear (or hopefully hear) what's clunky, etc. But I'm not a "performer"--I have issues with engaging in spectacle, increasing the noise, entertainment--I don't want to be an actor or producer. 

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 associated with ecopoetics, and a continual concern in my writing is exploring the relations between internal human and "external"--even in finding new language or subverting old language or modifying present language to better hold the complexities of where our selves intersect that which is around us, and also change--how to change the destruction that our systematic existences is causing to our greater environment and fellow species. I find the language around "nature" so deficient and unwieldy--even the word "nature" itself is a loaded term, to the point it is repellent. Stepping outside English (this is where translation is helpful) helps me understand that there can be different ways of wording how we be within what we be in so that we're not so extractive and exploitative of us/all around/our continuum of self to world. I also want to protect words from misuse or cliché--for instance, the words "resiliency" or "sustainability" have been deliberately twisted away from their original meanings into really sneaky linguistic "cover" for various commercial/industrial extractions. ("Eco-friendly" is another one to beware of.) I'm dismayed to see very recently a few literary journals joking forbid poetry about "trees" or "ecopoetics"--it's like somehow the overwhelmingly topdown corporate/political disdain of and active disrespect for our environment is affecting even our little poetry circles. I still believe in the power of really intense odes to trees in their symbiotic relationships with a vast network of underground fungi and how their roots tangle with each other in what a few very alert and clear-eyed scientists are discovering is a mindblowing structure of communication and community that supports both very old and very young trees in a fierce network (even as they are regularly cut down and replanted in sterile formations that don't allow for root tangles, and they have absolutely no legal standing or human-codified worth/value in development projects, urban planning or land use) and one we might do well to emulate as a necessary alternative to capitalism! So there! To the trees! I am not tired of nature or poetry to/of/around it/us, especially as we are nature (which we say often, but apparently not often enough) and there are so many poems to be written "under that poem," as Lucille Clifton says in her poem, "surely i am able to write poems," pointing to all the horrors behind the false American pretty picture of "wilderness."

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? 

I’m not sure I can generalize what the societal role of a writer really is, but I do see my own role as a questioner and maybe, like Thoreau implies, a drag on the wheel of progress (which is actually not a quote of his, but seems like it should be one). Writing poetry runs opposite to the producer/consumer cycle. Poetry is free and generous, and very portable. I also believe in writing lightly upon the earth—I don’t want to “tell” or direct or be didactic, I want to subvert, undermine, question, poke, point out, notice. I really want to notice. Poetry is silence’s musician, to paraphrase Mallarmé. I truly believe in poetry (art and music and dance too) as essential spaces of thinking, understanding, adjusting, being, imagining. As the societal circle of what's "acceptable" tightens, I see the poet coming into focus--right now, I feel even writing these words right now to you is a form of resistance.

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

What’s an outside editor? (Kidding, but.) I give my work to a couple of trusted poet friends to eyeball, but otherwise, my poetry has been pretty much published as is. As a proofreader, I do try to present my work as cleanly as possible--and each comma should be in the space I meant it to be in. Hopefully.

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

Speaking of commas, I studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and our class read through Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" together. He directed us to take a breath at every single mark of punctuation in the poem--light for commas, deeper for periods and colons, and deep draughts for exclamation points! He said it would be “intoxicating,” and we might feel dizzy. So I learned that punctuation in a poem is to mark breath (and I did feel dizzy). I had been pausing, awkwardly, at the ends of lines when giving readings, and it helped me tune into the importance of punctuation, pauses, breaths and the potential of caesuras. Ginsberg also pointed out a natural 13-syllable length to my lines, which alerted me to syllabics, and inspired me to start experimenting with them, including writing alexandrines in English (a selection was published by Tent Editions as Rays of the Shadow). But I have so many "bests," and one of them was taking a workshop with John Yau in the 1990s. He would assign us the most impossible challenges--like sestinas with predetermined end words. So many people dropped out; there were five of us left by the end. He helped me learn that poetry is a wild challenge! And fun. We laughed so much, and I even met my husband thanks to the workshop. But I love experiments and constraints, and learned not to be afraid of them--to pay attention to form always. Form is the poet's secret expertise.

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

Translation is the most adjacent to poetry—I learn new words, new ways to look at old words, to understand how grammar works in a line, step back and into sound, how to carry experimentation and fragmentation from one language to another, how a constraint in one language can help shape a poem in another. I enjoy writing essays, but it’s a different part of my brain—more an observer or interpreter who steps back to look at or refine (or invent) what I’m thinking about in terms of poetry. Writing essays on poets or poetics helps me think through what I'm doing and why I'm doing it--to be an ornithologist for a minute. Essays are also a great way to engage really deeply with another poet's work.

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

I don’t have a "typical" day so much—I work three days a week, and the other two are often filled up with life logistics stuff, but often in the late afternoon before I start dinner I’ll take a break, read some poetry, write some ideas down, get inspired, go back to the computer. Or if I wake up early, I’ll write. I try to write in life's spaces--on trips, breaks, alone times. At this point, I'm always writing one way or another, even if it's just thinking about a project while washing dishes or whatever.

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

Reading other poets’ work or nonfiction science/art books or looking at art helps give me new ideas. I’ve also learned to be patient—so often a new structure will start to come together when it’s ready, but maybe not when I'm ready. It’s a lovely moment to write when we're both ready.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

Oil paint, wood, apples, lavender are all grounding scents for me.

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? 

All of them--all very important. I see art, read science books, listen to music, hike and bird. I'm currently very interested in Ellsworth Kelly and how he worked with abstraction directly from natural forms. Mondrian's early landscapes are also incredible--again that movement from nature to abstraction. I just visited the reopened Studio Museum of Harlem and loved seeing so many previously neglected artists set in context and continuum, like William T. Williams, who brought abstraction into urban settings in the 1970s with the Smokehouse Collective. Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney are two more artists I'll drop everything to see. Nature in the city is a big influence: how humans interact with nature is so surprising, bizarre, frustrating, horrific, but it's the truth too. I’m a devoted urban birder, and my happy place is an hour or two staring at some neglected patch of weeds with a bunch of sparrows in it while people play music and walk their dogs and talk around me. Also staring at water, being near water, absorbing all that infinite complexity of waves. I live next to the East River and need to visit it every day.

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

I feel connected to an enormous national and global web of poets with whom I correspond, even if I’ve never met them in person. It's amazing, during terrible times, this intense poetry community. In many ways, I feel I always have a place to stay, a meal to share and ideas (or books) to exchange. Specific writers to whom I offer my work and/or who give so much to me include Brenda Coultas, Tonya Foster, Will Alexander, Anselm Berrigan, John Yau, Anne Waldman, Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Jennifer Firestone, Rachel Levitsky, Edwin Torres, E.J. McAdams, Kostas Anagnopoulos, Lee Ann Brown, Peter Gizzi, Hoa Nguyen, Daniel Bouchard, Kay Prevallet, many others. People I've never or rarely met, but whose work I love: Norma Cole, Michael Palmer, Ed Roberson. Writers who have passed, but I think of them as community: Bernadette Mayer, Tina Darragh, Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, James Schuyler, Lucille Clifton, John Clare, the writers of the Wen Xuan, Tu Fu. French writers: Michèle Métail, Olivier Brossard, Mallarmé, Apollinaire. John Ashbery is perhaps my perennial and primal maître de poesie. (This is an incomplete list!)

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

I would love to swim around Manhattan, or at least swim the stretch of the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge.

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 was early an ecological activist—I canvassed for NYPIRG at 16 (my first real job) and interned with them for my senior year at high school, so I learned a lot about activism and ecology, but I didn't quite realize how "new" ecology was as an actual career field. I applied to colleges intending to somehow study ecology, but hardly any college had majors in it (yet). So I went to college as a geology major, which, as soon as I found out I had to take math, I ditched. And then, I discovered poetry.

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

The fact that I became a poet is still somewhat of a mystery to my family, my friends and myself. My best friend from high school still laughs about what a terrible writer I was--I'd literally finish writing my grammar- and punctuation-free term papers as the teacher called on me to hand them in. However, I had a poetry teacher in college who was a poet himself and made it possible to think of being one too. Our aesthetics were very different, but he gave us newly published books by living poets to read and took us to readings, which made poetry feel immediate. And he helped me work on my grammar, to be serious about language. I don't remember ever making a conscious choice to "be" a poet. All of a sudden I was one, and I've continued to be one since.

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

I just finished Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Undrowning, which is a lesson in acknowledging the full bitter horrors of the past (and present) while offering incredible, generous love outward to the reader and to the natural world. As for movies, I loved "Sinners." Still unpacking so much of it in my mind.

20 - What are you currently working on? 

I am thinking lately that I have way too many projects and ideas that maybe need to come together at some point. So. I'm working on poems called "Circles for Wheelmakers," that I think of somewhat as offerings outwards to the poets. The title comes from Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's utopian design for a saltworks, La Saline Royale, in which each building reflects the labor of the occupants (the sex workers' building is as you might guess). I visited the saltworks in France a few years ago, and it's remote, but as Orkney Island residents say, "Remote from what?" Half of it was built, with the other half devoted to various ecological experiments, and I got so much poetic material from the experience, part of which was recently published by Insurance Editions as The Light Factory, a collaboration with my mother, the painter Suzan Frecon.

I also have a series on the various iterations of the color blue, and grief, and loss--I don't want to say too much about it yet because to paraphrase it makes it sound trite, and I want to get deeper into it first and figure out what structure is going to hold it (them) eventually. A major challenge of poetry is to enter something thought of as "done," and to find a new approach. Like Stein with the rose. 

During Covid, I started a series of what I'm calling spiral sonnets. I'd begin a sonnet, and then introduce a violent volta--a hand-drawn spiral into the 7th line--to see where that intervention would push the sonnet. I liked detaching the beginning from the end physically, and with such a direct push of the hand. Now that we're back in what feels a tightening spiral, in which our beginnings are being forced around to look at our end, I'd like to return to those sonnets.

I'm working on a translation from French of Oliver Brossard's first book, Let, part of which is in a complicated constraint based on Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath. It's a great way to get deeply into Brossard's work and also Ashbery's. 

I also have a project on simmer--it's a big project, written during the destruction of my local park for a "resiliency" flood control project. I wrote so much of it in total anger and disillusionment that it's just sort of sitting there. I'm not ready to revise it, but I think about it all the time. It hasn't found its title yet--it started as East River Park, then changed to No Trees, and now I'm thinking Intentional Beauty (a term used in park design and urban planning).

During a residency this summer--my first in 20 years--I started a long, thin poem coming out of an achy body (there's something wrong with my foot, and now my hip...) walking and lying on hard glacial boulders by the ocean, and what voice is used to convey that--again, the self existing within a space, and how the self conveys--or exits itself to bring itself to others, maybe. Right now it's titled Without Charisma, which doesn't quite fit, but it might as it evolves. Anyway, that's the newest baby, and it's kind of different, so we'll see where it goes, other than into yet another drawer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Jackson Mac Low, The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003, ed. Michael O’Driscoll

 

            Indeed, as Mac Low was at pains to emphasize time and again in the last decades of his life, procedural operations are anything but a matter of chance:

In the 1960s, when I first devised and utilized deterministic methods, I thought that the methods that I know realize are deterministic were kinds of chance operations. It was only in the early 90s that I realized that such methods are basically different from chance operations. The principal difference is that if one employs a deterministic text-selection method correctly, using the same source text and seed text and making no mistakes, the method’s output will always be exactly the same. Chance operations produce a different output each time they are utilized. Deterministic methods do not involve what could rightly be called “chance,” or as many artists have termed it, “objective hazard.”

The Tucson lecture, which I’ve cited here and throughout my introduction, and which follows as a further introduction to this volume, is an important example of Mac Low’s extended attempts to nuance the historical record of his role as the champion of chance operations. As I’ve documented elsewhere, from about 1980 onward Mac Low repeatedly sought to correct the overemphasis on chance and what he no longer regarded as the “egoless” composition of purportedly nonintentional works. This effort extended, importantly, to his own central statements on the allied work of John Cage, including the essay “Cage’s Writing up to the Late 1980s,” which Mac Low revised no fewer than five times over a period of fifteen years with an increasing emphasis that accentuates his own investments in this piece. The central point of Mac Low’s 2001 version of the essay is that while Cage’s mesostic methods are nonintentional and deterministic, the textual selections and aesthetic judgments that precede and follow the mesostic procedure are matters of choice. But this reluctance to subordinate fully his own creative impulses to procedural or chance determinants was also very much in keeping with his regular refusal of the label “experimental poet.” For Mac Low, the use of deterministic procedural methods was not, as is so often supposed, a matter of experimentation. (Michael O’Driscoll, ““This shining makes revision of a string more strange”: An Introduction to Jackson Mac Low’s The Complete Stein Poems”)

I’m impressed by the heft, at nearly six hundred pages, of the newly-published collection The Complete Stein Poems 1998-2003 by Jackson Mac Low, edited by Michael O’Driscoll, with a foreword by Anne Tardos (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2025). The Complete Stein Poems assembles Mac Low’s final, great procedural work together for the first time, meticulously compiled and critically articulated by critic Michael O’Driscoll, a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In case you aren’t aware, American poet, performer, composer and visual artist Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004), as the back cover of this particular volume offers, “was a leading member of the Fluxus group, an innovator of procedural poetics and liminal compositional forms, and a progenitor of the Language Poets and other conceptual artists.”

The poems that make up The Complete Stein Poems was composed, as editor O’Driscoll writes in his introduction, across more than half a decade through a precise formal procedure “[…] that Mac Low himself had invented in 1963 in order to generate poetic material determined by algorithmic rules. This latest version of the program, crated in 1994 at Mac Low’s request, was a fifth generation of the original 1989 DIASTEXT code, now revised to handle larger inputs. The algorithm, following Mac Low’s procedure, sequentially drew words from the source text that correspond to the placement of letters in the seed text. The placement of letters in the first word of the seed, ‘l-i-t-t-l-e’ in this case, resulted in the first line of the output: ‘Little lIngering faTher titTle reguLar simplE.’ Having completed a full cycle of testing the source text against the seed text, the program terminated its output at thirty-five lines. Saving the results to his hard drive, now in the wee hours of the morning of April 28, Mac Low would go on to massage the raw output the following day, excising and altering redundant words, introducing capitals, periods, and line spaces to give the poem its desired form, titling the result from the initial and concluding words of the poem, and recording the whole process and the interventions he’d made into a summary ‘makingways’ note along with the location and date that concludes the poem.” The source text that O’Driscoll refers to Mac Low working from for this project were A Stein Reader, edited with an introduction by Ulla E. Dydo (Northwestern University Press, 1993) and “a corrected version” of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914), and the collision of unexpected words against each other are exactly the point of this project, pushing language into and against itself, twisting the possibilities of sound and meaning through a highly formal and precise procedure. As the piece “One Completely,’ cited as “(Stein 16),” a  poem “derived from a source passage in Stein’s “Orta or One Dancing” begins: “one / one / one who. // This who them son / not came something / was her / her come / come her that.” The Complete Stein Poems is certainly a precursor to multiple, possibly hundreds, of other procedural works, whether Christian Bök’s infamous and award-winning Eunoia (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2001) or Derek Beaulieu’s “The Newspaper,” as well as more recent work by Ottawa poet Grant Wilkins.

Given contemporary conversations and concerns around creativity and AI, one certainly wouldn’t confuse this as a work done by machine, as the human hand still remains central to Mac Low’s creation, from the final edits and touches to the development of the initial process. One can read through the poems without notation, or move deeply through the precise detail of how Mac Low moved from source material to where each piece landed, through Mac Low’s hand. Or the first poem, “Little Beginning,” a piece cited “New York: 27-28 April 1998; 23 March, 29 April 2002” that offers the note: “Derived from a page (and preceding line) of Gertrude Stein’s ‘A Long Gay Book’ (A Stein Reader, edited by Ulla E. Dydo, last line of 240 through 241—determined by a logarithm table) via Charles O Hartman’s program DIASTEX5, his latest automation of one of my diastic procedures developed in 1963, using the 1^st paragraph of the source as seed, and subsequent editing: some excisions of words, changes of word order within lines; and changes and additions of capitals, periods, and spaces.” As the first half of that piece reads:

Little lingering father little regular simple.

 

Little long length there louder happening deepening.

Beginning and little way singing neat cooked.

Difference certain length time light much lighting. 

Description certain choosing is the piece.

Pleasant the deranged rhubarb pudding permitted stay.

Sit sing laugh soiling not lingering sing.

Singing difference conclude long so to mention.

Length is stay sit sing laugh soiling beginning.

Singing and any and which the way singing has higher.

Is material long very fried the pears when abuse. 

And say filled makes afternoon with children there.

It is.

Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, eds. Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone,

 

It was also at Naropa in 1994 where I was introduced to Harryette Mullen and was lucky enough to take a workshop with her. A brilliant teacher, Mullen shaped the workshop around her use of Oulipo-based techniques, folkloric influences, and attention to the demotic and conversational word play. That workshop forever influenced my pedagogy and writing. Likewise, that summer I was first introduced to the work of Bob Kaufman, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer, and I took a workshop with Dennis and Barbara Tedlock, who gave a panel on their translation of the Popol Vuk and who said that whenever they speak of their experiences around this work, it involved rain: it did. I took a sonnet workshop with the brilliant Anselm Hollo that initiated my lifelong interest in this form and after which I wrote my first mature poems, a sonnet sequence. It was at Naropa that I heard Nathaniel Mackey give his soul-searing lecture “Cante Moro” on Lorca’s concept of duende. That lecture opened a cross-cultural understanding of bent strings, broken eloquence, and the role of dialogue singing, allowing me to make perceptual links between U.S. Delta blues and the Cham-influenced musical scale of south Vietnamese music, which is also composed of a pentatonic scale with flattened and in-between notes. Delta to delta. (Hoa Nguyen, “WHEN YOU WRITE POETRY YOU FIND THE ARCHITECTURE OF YOUR LINEAGE”)

I’m deeply impressed with the collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, edited by Marcella Durand and Jennifer Firestone (London UK/Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2024), a collection of original essays “by a range of leading contemporary feminist avant-garde poets asked to consider their lineages, inspirations, and influences.” The list of contributors include Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Nicole Brossard, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Brenda Coultas, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Tonya M. Foster, Renee Gladman, Carla Harryman, Erica Hunt, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky, Bernadette Mayer, Tracie Morris, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Sawako Nakayasu, Hoa Nguyen, Julie Patton, KPrevallet, Evelyn Reilly, Trish Salah, Prageeta Sharma, Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Tardos, Monica de la Torre, Cecilia Vicuña, Anne Waldman and Rosmarie Waldrop. “First I had this impression of Leslie Scalapino bouncing outside of language poetry,” Eileen Myles writes, to open “ACCIDENTAL SCALAPINO,” “like she was kind of there but couldn’t quite stay still in the project of it, or the project of hers. I always noticed who one pals around with in the poetry world and she was I think beloved by Alice (Notley) and Ted (Berrigan) though they’d be the first to describe Leslie as ‘a weirdo,’ a phrase they reserved for the best people and they meant it with the utmost affection.” There is such a richness to this collection, one that explodes across a constellation of names, threads, writing communities and commentaries, both a heft of information for the experienced reader and emerging writer, allowing the best of what be possible across an anthology of poets and poetics. Every essay within this collection is exceptional, each articulation on how one begins, how the poems begin, how one establishes relationships to writing, writers and thinking across writing. “What can it mean for a woman,” Rachel Levitsky offers as part of “PUSSY FORWARD POETICS, OR THE SEX IN THE MIDDLE: READING AKILAH OLIVER AND GAIL SCOTT,” “for radical marginalized women, for a Black woman, for mothers, for a poet, for an experimental prose writer, for a poor woman, an aging woman, a queer woman, a woman who holds no fixed idea or surety over the meaning of the category ‘woman,’ therefore a theoretical and theory-making woman, a nonbinary woman, a trans woman, a trans man or masculine who was once called upon to be a female or a woman, a no-longer-cis woman, a poet and artist, solitary woman, a gazed-upon and scrutinized woman, a dreaming woman, a desiring woman, a traveling woman, a reading woman, a homebody, a woman of autonomous intellect, a friend, to perform freedom or more free-ness amid such conditions?” And then there is Stacy Szymaszek, writing in “VIVA PASOLINI!” a sense of the poem and poet connected to civic responsibility: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini is the first poet who teaches me to turn existing poetry spaces into spaces for poets to be possessed by civic poetry, a poetry that is imbued with reciprocity between the individual poet and society.” Further on, writing:

            Civic poetry is gnostic in its intelligence and shows an uncomprosmising fealty to language. It gives me an ability to intervene, to refuse, to create a more just reality, to rewire the brain into making better sense. These are not new concepts, although they are new in the way that old poetry can be eternally new and new poets can be possessed by old poets.

One of the strengths of this collection emerges from the variety of responses; however much overlap might occur, each poet leaning into their own unique direction or approach, with the assemblage allowing for an opening of conversation or collaboration over any sense of contradiction. There’s an openness to these pieces, one that can’t help spark an enthusiasm for the possibility of further work. “To unmask our history,” Anne Waldman writes, “we also need to go to poetry.” Or, as Nicole Brossard begins her essay “LA DÉFERLANTE”: “What informs my poetry is not necessarily meaning first. It is mostly how sentences of lines disrupt my reading-writing to create a tension in meaning and prepare new paths toward it. Those paths are what I will call the basis of influence, of resonance, of what becomes the appeal in the intimate space of a text, of an author.” Asking contemporary poets to speak to or about lineages and influence suggest that this collection an extension of an idea from a prior collection, another anthology co-edited by Firestone, the anthology Letters to Poets:Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Philadelphia PA: Saturnalia Books, 2008) [see my review of such here], a book she co-edited with Dana Teen Lomax. I recall finding this collection utterly fascinating and a bit envious at the time, equally so for this current work: a book crafted to speak to the best of how community can work, as well as a deeper understanding of each of the works of the contributors, through seeing how their poetics and sense of literary kinship were developed. As the editors offer as part of their introduction:

            The poets in this collection found their ways to their own poetics, identifying their contexts and lineages unbounded by the strictures of their schools, work, and established literary institutions. As Audre Lore states, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” This community of writers resists labels: they invite nuance, error, slippage, and even messiness. They take the terms feminist and avant-garde, claim them, and make them uniquely their own. They know deeply that canons change, that inspiration is subtle, that the path is not so easy or clear. This collection is only the beginning of an evolving dialogue, an opening to a new generation of feminist avant-garde writers to connect to, collaborate with, and support each other. ultimately, it is our vision to gather feminist avant-garde poets who engage with language as a point of contention and potentiality.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tung-Hui Hu

Tung-Hui Hu is the author of three books of poetry, The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a chapbook, On the Kepel Fruit (Albion Press, 2017), and a study of digital culture, A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015). He has received awards from Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, the NEA, and the San Francisco Foundation, and his poems have appeared in places such as Boston Review, Ploughshares, the Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, and the anthology Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Hybrid Literary Genres. Hu teaches poetry and digital studies at the University of Michigan, where he is an assistant professor of English.

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

The year my first book came out I moved back to California and entered a graduate program in architecture. At the time, and for a few years afterwards, that book felt more like the end of something, rather than the beginning of, say, a literary career. Now that empty feeling has lessened a bit, but it wasn’t until the difficult birth of my second book that I began to feel my life had changed. My most recent work is more prosaic and less dressed up in finer language; I’m happier to say what I really mean to say.

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

Besides the appeal of its brevity, I was working a summer job down the street from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, and decided to try a course. I didn’t fit in at all. The poets translated from other languages; were older; had pain, etc. – nothing I had experienced yet, being still a teenager. I was fascinated by my fellow students and instructors, flattered that I could possibly be considered one of ‘them,’ and wanted to do it, too.

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?

Usually I have an object I want to write about, but not the angle. And I always imagine everyone else has thought of the object and been struck by how poetic it is. That full eclipse that just happened in the US, for example; so many terrible poems, and probably a few good ones, will be written about it. So it takes a long time for my writing to mutate into something strange enough that I won’t be embarrassed by my starting point.

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?

There are big, abstract questions that keep floating about my head – about how we write about empire, about the invisible, about capital. And there are also stories that I come across from reading other books, the news, etc. – for instance, about the rarest pasta on earth, or a 17^th-century beached whale. The poem often comes out of trying to figure out how to combine those two extremes. As for your question about scale, I often begin by imagining everything as part of a “book”, even if that book is entirely fictitious. It takes the pressure off making each line perfect.

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 the reward for writing – the part where we can all just be witty rather than dour, which is my on-page personality. People who come up to me and tell me what lines they remember or enjoy, or other books to read, are helpful to my process, too. I won’t always remember what I was thinking when I wrote a poem, but I’ll always remember the times I’ve been heckled by the audience or, occasionally, the organizer.

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 currently working on an academic book about lethargy, so the questions on my mind are about passivity and how we negotiate political (in)action within the constraints of capitalism. Because I was asked to give a few talks on the environment, I’m also thinking about nonhuman agency, and as a result, I have some new poems written from the time and perspective of mushrooms and mayflies.

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?

Most of my colleagues and friends are (correctly and necessarily) outspoken about the political role of writing and about writing’s ability to intervene in culture. For me, though, I’m a reticent writer; that’s my personality. Writing shouldn’t need to do anything; it shouldn’t have to justify itself. The doesn’t-do-anything part of writing is, for me, an antidote to a neoliberal world that’s hellbent on making everything productive.

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

I’ve worked most closely with an outside editor on my nonfiction book A Prehistory of the Cloud, and found it absolutely essential. Ben called bullshit on a lot of my rhetorical flourishes—those tricks to disguise the moments I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was saying. And he helped me think about the architecture of my story, rather than jump from idea to idea.

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

Never ever bad mouth your colleagues.

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

It’s gone a bit better than I expected; it was made easier by discovering how many other poets have made that transition, such as Lewis Hyde. The appeal of critical prose for me has been that it’s a chance to provoke, to change how people think about a subject by wrenching the steering wheel away from the previous ways of doing things. The tough part has been keeping a consistent tone, since, as a poet, I obviously like experimenting with the craft of writing. Nobody will ever notice, but there’s a really deft jump-cut between two ideas in A Prehistory of the Cloud. That’s the stuff I’m secretly proudest of.

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 only get to write poetry for about a month, maybe a month and a half, each year. So most of that time is spent trying to figure out what I was trying to do the previous year—what I was doing with line; what experiments or ideas had stalled. A typical day begins with a bagel and cream cheese, reading over my drafts from the previous day and whatever book is on my desk, and writing down what ideas I want to try working on for the day.

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

I guess I go for a walk? That, and returning to an Asian American sense of shame that I’m wasting someone’s time/money by not writing?

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Salt water and laundry exhaust, and if I’m really being honest, a bit of urine, too.

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?

Mostly visual art. I’m currently obsessed with Candice Breitz’s “Love Story”, a multi-channel installation with Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore performing a script based on interviews Breitz did with six refugees from Syria, Angola, India, Venezuela, Somalia, and the DR Congo. It uses Hollywood stars to expertly dismantle the Hollywood star system and the white savior myth.

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

C.D. Wright, Cornelius Eady, Kimiko Hahn, off the top of my head, to name some of my “elders” that continue to influence me.

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

I’d like to live on a canal boat (narrowboat).

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 had a very brief taste of working as a political consultant, and I might like to pursue that career at some point – I like the strategizing and the details (some might say minutiae) of the game, and of course the stakes feel very high right now. I also just learned about the foreign service exam; I did reasonably well on a practice test, and that seems like it would have been a better way of spending my 20s/30s.

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

Perhaps that I’m a slow thinker, and appreciate the length of time that one can take between books – no editor or publisher will ever be pounding the table, demanding my next book of poetry.  Not producing on deadline seems very rare to me, and precious. (I realize this contradicts the career choices I listed above.)

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

This isn’t exactly right, but the two films that spring to mind from last summer, when I had some time to watch films for leisure, were Jane Gillooly’s Suitcase of Love and Shame and Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not To Be Here. As for the last book, Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A paper about how we feel infrastructure for a few upcoming conferences and workshops. Also, learning to be less impatient.

12or 20 (second series) questions;