12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jordan Stempleman

Jordan Stempleman is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Spilt, awarded the 2025 Wishing Jewel Prize from Green Linden Press. He has also published nine previous poetry collections, including Cover Songs (The Blue Turn), Wallop, and No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press). Stempleman is the editor of Windfall Room and faculty advisor for the Kansas City Art Institute's literary arts journal Sprung Formal. From 2011 to 2025, he curated the A Common Sense Reading Series in Kansas City, Missouri, and from 2007 to 2025, he served as co-editor of The Continental Review, one of the longest-running online literary magazines devoted to video poetics.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It meant a kind of seriousness, I think. A devotion beyond the statement, the feeling, perhaps, of “I’m telling you, I’m a poet.” My first book, Their Fields, was a book-length poem, the first time I’d ever written anything past a couple of pages or so. The doing of something this long felt vastly different than anything I thought I could endure. Writing has never been something that I find settling or enjoyable while I’m actively doing it. This struggle, an almost anti-flow state, continues until I’m near the end of the drafting process, and then it’s the reading and re-reading that reveal the poem, which then compels me to write the next one. My work now is very much doing what my work from 30 years ago was doing: feeling it all out. Putting it all together, or nearly together, or with the potential of togetherness, and then applying a different mode of attention that stares into what’s now there. 

The fact that I write poetry has changed my life. It’s a means of being with language as much as outside of the poem as within it. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
The first poems I wrote, outside of any classroom assignment in school, were about being dumped, total heartbreak. I was seeing, I think, what was beyond the ache of excess feeling. I also think I turned to poetry initially because it felt like the bookish response to music, especially the kind I was drawn to in my teens: CRASS, The Cure, Dead Kennedys, Descendants, Bauhaus, Fugazi, etc. I loved how poetry could channel these excess states of feeling, political repulsion, without even knowing three chords, just the voice and the page. This felt attainable to me and aligned with my immersion in music.  

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?
Rarely does it come quickly. As I mentioned, it’s typically a slog. To mitigate this, I am always trying to accumulate notes and fragments in my phone or give myself constraint-based exercises to generate at least a base layer that has the potential to develop into something down the road. In my poetry workshops, I always show this short video where I started recording my laptop screen after I was finally done drafting a shorter poem, like 18 lines, a poem that I never hit “save” on so I could then hit “undo,” taking the poem all the way back to the blank Word document. The recording states there, so the students can see what line came from my journal to the page, how I left so many awful lines in there for ages because I thought they were incredible or necessary, or just the fact that I spent half a day drafting them. I go bit by bit, trying to add narration to my decision process, noting how the parts become the poem through thousands of decisions. 

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?
Often, I can sense when a poem will evolve into its own thing: a longer sequence, a series, or a stand-alone piece. I’ve never written a “project.” I write and let the poem do what it wants to do. This is probably why I never had a deep interest in being a fiction writer. What does DeLillo write in White Noise? “To plot is to live.” Or is it, “To plot is to die”? I am awful at engineering plots. I would much rather play and struggle on the page, and see what comes of it after the fact. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings. I love hearing other poets read their work. I often get a better editorial ear when reading my newer work aloud. However, even the published work becomes more accessible, less unknown, when I read it alone in my house a thousand times, and even more so when I read it a few times in public. 

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 know I’m always drawn to the epistemological and phenomenological, but expressed or released in everyday environments. I am all about the local. It’s the closeness of where I’m at that seems most estranged for me, and I think being here makes me less preposterous in my political sensibilities. I think having an openness to the messes we’re most in are the messes that we make or that are five feet from us. The same with the overlooked beauty and goodness. 

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?
Just try to leave where you’ve been in a little better state than when you arrived. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh, I love it. The experiences of working with editors who are invested in the work are incredible. It’s the best way to not only catch what old tired eyes missed (and I always miss plenty even after a gazillion reads/proofs), but often where I am gifted my final cold editorial eye to remove a poem from the collection, finally rework a line or a stanza to where it needs to be, or to find the language to describe my intentions for doling this or that. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t stop doing. 

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I make coffee, I drink coffee, and I read news. I head to campus. I prep for class, answer emails, and read. I may write. I eat. I may write. I teach. I may write with my students. I go home. I make dinner and eat dinner with my wife. We do whatever we feel compelled to do or not do, and I try the whole thing over again. Never the same. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I always open up five or six books, and I wait for the charge of language to set in. Primarily poetry, but quite often nonfiction and philosophical works. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I love this question. 

An ever-so-slight smell of nicotine. We live in my wife’s childhood home, and her pop was a pack-a-day-plus smoker. It gently leaks from the walls. 

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Music, big time. I love cover songs, even named a collection after them. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There is an endless supply, which is glorious. So many of the dead ones, the ones now doing, and, hopefully, the ones who aren’t even born yet, who I’ll discover at my very end. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Become 200% more patient. 

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Something to do with end-of-life care. Being there for those who are alone in the final stages of life. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It found me, I think. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Aflame by Pico Iyer. Film: Conclave (There’s an evident pattern developing there, I know)

19 - What are you currently working on?
A poem to fit this line into:

“The dialogue is an endless stream of commas, floor-to-ceiling curtains opened and closed repeatedly to allow one snowflake inside at a time.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Rob Manery, As They Say

 

who nowhere
or near
and indeed unwritten
or aware
will aim
at least
clutching
upon each
each end
ends each
further
on (“Sometimes Welcome”)

Vancouver poet and SOME magazine [see my review of the seventh issue here] editor and publisher Rob Manery is one of a handful of west coast poets that seem to publish intermittently enough (comparable to Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Lissa Wolsak [see my review of Wolsak’s collected poems here], Kathryn MacLeod [her above/ground press title is still available] and Aaron Vidaver [see my review of Vidaver’s most recent here]; former Vancouver poet Colin Smith [see my review of his latest here], now in Winnipeg, is also worth mentioning), that one might understandably lose track, one of many reasons why it is good to see his second full-length collection As They Say (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2023). There are those that might recall Manery as an Ottawa poet during the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, collaborating with Louis Cabri as the Experimental Writers Group and curating readings at Gallery 101, later publishing hole magazine and eventual chapbooks under hole books while curating the N400 Reading Series at The Manx Pub until he left town for Vancouver in 1996 (Cabri, on his part, left Ottawa for Philadelphia in 1994). At least twice if not three times the size of his first collection, As They Say follows It’s Not As If It Hasn’t Been Said Before (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 2001), and chapbooks Richter-Rauzer Variations (above/ground press, 2012), Many, Not Any (Vancouver BC: Some Books, 2023) and Elegies (above/ground press, 2022).

There is such a wonderful heft to this collection, as though everything Manery had worked on prior has been a kind of lead-up into this (the Elegies poems appear near the end of the collection, as well). With poems that stretch and sequence, Manery’s is a language-fueled lyric of small movement across great distances, constructed as a kind of compressed expansiveness. “I at least / yield,” he writes, as the penultimate poem in the seven-fragment sequence “These Constant Moments,” “to inarticulate / distances // if you depend / on these // unwelcome convictions / these constant // moments / some borrow [.]” Manery’s poems hold such exact language and thinking, crafted and crisp stretches, providing such a delightful array of sound collision and jumble of meaning, providing the poems far greater than the mere sums of their parts. “Please tell me a story,” he writes, as part of the poem “If All My Woulds,” “just a little story, // hemmed-in between the Would / and the Should, or the Must. It wasn’t / always like this? I count my / self the same man whether / I want or have.” There’s a staccato to his short lines, enough that he writes less across the page than straight down, providing a language of craft and baffle, drawing vocabulary from multiple sources (depending on the piece), from Sophocles, John Donne, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Louis Cabri, Catriona Strang, Bob Hogg, Ted Byrne and Dr. Robin Barrow, among others. He utilizes collision and collage in such way to provide an effect of the pointed sketch, quick lines that simultaneously offer meditative pause and propulsive force. As he writes as part of the book’s acknowledgements: “The Elegy poems draw almost all of their vocabulary from John Donne’s Elegies (Signet Classic, edited by Marius Bewley). Each elegy in the series corresponds to the same numbered elegy penned by Donne.” Built as a highly deliberate work of meditative collage, As They Say is an assemblage of Kootenay School of Writing-infused language poetry as thoughtful and purposeful as anything I’ve seen. Rob Manery’s work has clearly been flying underneath the radar for far too long.

do not excuse
a lie too

severe
and scrupulous

allow some
reservation

or illation
which they call

desirous of
some secret words

or was at that time
irresolute

both opinions
are possible

by their gravity
maturity, judgement

indifferency, incorruption
the impugners

carping at
just equivocations (“Equivocation”)

 

Nate Logan, Wrong Horse

 

At the end of a tough week, I treat myself to some curbside steak, broccoli, and brick of bread. I wait for the bill and see right into the restaurant. A hostess rolls her eyes so far in her head, I feel a little sick. Some child uses a red crayon with disturbing flourish. A slice of cheesecake is put in front of an elderly couple. I’m the only person in the designated to-go parking area. The wind nudges the car with a sock foot. (“Parking Lot”)

The second full-length collection by Wisconsin prose poet and editor Nate Logan, following Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019), as well as a small array of chapbooks (including one by above/ground press), is Wrong Horse (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2024). I’ve been following for a while the curious trajectory of the American prose poem, one that appears to have been furthered quite prominently by the late Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected poems here], a form that leans rather hard into what others might suggest as a very short or postcard story. There seem a handful of poets following that particular influence: Sarah Manguso’s early work, for example, or that of Evan Williams, Elisa Gabbert or Benjamin Niespodziany. Logan’s narrative prose poems, through Wrong Horse, might share certain elements of all of the above, but not necessarily the surrealist and cinematic elements of Niespodziany, or the theatrical gestures and impulse of Gabbert, yet the same elements of scene-composition remain. Logan’s approach, instead, offers a curious and even kinetic push against endings, refusing to provide those easy or expected landings. Logan’s poems offer a calm, almost unsettling sense of quiet, writing something slightly off in the narrative, unsettling the very foundation of the narrative; not in a surrealistic way, but something else, other. There is such a fantastic subtlety to the way Logan approaches each prose-block, each poem, a quietude that might allow inattentive readers to not fully appreciate just what it is his work provides. His poems put all those narrative parts into play, into motion, but stops just short of the implications, allowing the reader to fill in the rest. “To spend the equinox in a hammock,” he writes, to close the poem “The Home Stretch,” “wasting my life. Or not breaking the backs of mothers walking a Weimaraner. And there’s the mannequin again with an egg in its mouth.” As Logan wrote as part of a statement on prose poems last fall, for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

There are frequent stops when traveling by prose poem; for me, this is one of its unique charms, maybe thee charm that keeps me coming back. Unlike another poem that can move between a line that spans across the page and a zig-zag all within the same piece, I know, and the reader knows, the prose poem will start and stop, then start and stop again. Being invited to sit with sentences, poetic sentences in no particular hurry, is a pleasure. Furthermore, the tendency for the prose poem to wind around surrealism (neosurrealism?) is a nudge to the reader to stay with sentences longer—the associative leaps lend themselves to contemplation (this is a whole other essay). The “radicalness” of the prose poem still lies in its form, but the beat has changed. And when the poem does end, either at one paragraph or a few pages, if it goes especially well, the accumulation of sentences stirs a reader, which is what all good poetry should do (even still, Charlie, I didn’t mean to make your mom cry).

 

12 or 20 questions (second series) with j/j hastain;

j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with hir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous full-length, cross-genre works such as: asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents (BlazeVox Books), our bodies as beauty inducers (Rebel Satori Press), we in my Trans (JMS Books LLC), autobiography of my gender (Moria), ulterior eden (Otoliths), prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil) as well as many chapbooks and artist’s books. A new chapbook collaboration with poet-artist Marthe Reed, is forthcoming from Dusie. j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including: Trickhouse, Vlak, Unlikely Stories, The Offending Adam, Eccolinguistics, and Kelsey. j/j is an elective affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv and a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j’s manuscript Let was a finalist in the 2010 Kelsey Street and Ahsahta book competitions. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award. j/j’s work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In the near future j/j has full-length, cross-genre collections coming out with various exciting presses.

_____

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 want to begin by thanking you for these questions. I think that they are rooted in effort to reveal the layers of the complex experiences of composition and living (how those things do or do not overlap) and I am grateful to you for asking!

Okay now, to get to your question—my first book asymptotic lover // thermodynamic vents came out with BlazeX a few years ago. I am not sure that it really changed my life (or that it will really change anyone else’s “life” for that matter) but the book does have an intent: it only has to touch once in order to have mattered… so, for me, and others, as long as that touching occurs, I think that that first book is/was successful. Please do not get me wrong, it is a very affirming feeling to have a composition move from its ephemeral states inside of the body, into physical states (via publishing). I feel that this process is a collaborative alchemy and I am always grateful when publishers want to share space with me in that way.

A recent work is coming out with SAY IT WITH STONES PRESS (edited by Micah Robbins) in the next few months. This book is called long past the presence of common...the book is the creation of a commons, intent to activate future states of feeling.

I am working (through my books) toward a state-able poetics. The following is a bit of what I have come up with so far: mine is a poetics of the felts. the felts is path, and the felts as path is evolution being made visible/ visual via pages. The continual making of a body that must eat itself to preserve itself. So, recitative, yes. And interconnections (in tone, voice and vision) between books is a major necessity. What I am saying is that the felts are confessional staying. They are not trying to be smart, or Joyce or Stein. They are trying to be my future offspring, occurring now. Future offspring which are composites of the essential accruals. the felts are fractions of a visceral new world being pressed again and again into fact, for the sake of continuing the divergent body and all of its buoyant desires.

In the felts, the fact that the word felt is multi, is integral. felt: a past marking of interior experience, felt: an external contact, felt: a fabric (non-woven) compacted together through heat, moisture and great pressure.

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

I am not sure that what I write is “poetry” and I am not sure that I identify as a “poet”—therefore I do not know, really, how to answer this question. I do think it is relevant to others though, depending on how they identify.

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?

Regarding the writing projects…there are many different ways that they occur for me, but the whole work of feeling coming into from (which is my primary compositional impetus) is located in a transcendental/ trance experience that I had a few years ago. I was out in the snow, after some major life changes that hurt—that made me unsure of whether or not I wanted to stay on the planet-- and I was sitting naked on a boulder and weeping. My head in my hands. My tears turning to ice before they hit the ground. I groaned and growled to any awaiting intercessors in whatever forms they might exist, outside of the planes of my vision…I was calling on them for assistance. I needed to be given funnels in order to translate, morphose and make passage for all of the sensation that exists in my body. G Stein and P Celan appeared to me as plain as humans. I mean that I think that they were ghosts that materialized for the sake of assisting me with bridging. They spoke with me. They gave me some funnels (forms) for translation—for assistance in kneading the data outward into procedures or systems that could affirm and sustain. At that time I vowed to them (the gods) that if given access to forms, I would live to fill those forms beyond the state of brimming. That I would give the forms literal stretch marks. I guess what I am saying is that for me the impetus to make visceral continuities in and amidst so much subsumed, is always where the writing comes from. The books do have varying qualities, but those are often made vivid in each book, by way of its particulate theories that are driven by sound. I am saying that one of my primary methodologies is the music of language. Rather than a slow or rapid process, I think that what I want to say is that for me, the work is a constant process. Relentless configuring.

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?

I would say that I work on books (which are places, which are identities) as moving and motile wholes. The other day an editor for an upcoming book asked me if the “poems” had appeared in other places on-line. As the books are composed as wholes, it is often awkward for me to attempt to extract pieces of that whole, to try and publish them in journals and such. I would prefer to compose something new when I know what the journal is looking for, as I have many meta-stories and shapes within _the felts_ that need to be elucidated—that need transduction.

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

I am glad that you have asked this question, because I think that too often it is assumed, that readings are an inherent part of writer’s processes. That readings feel good to writers, and that assumption feels dangerous to me. Feels like robbing us of the complexity of our personal feeling about spaces. Let me say more…if I was asked by an editor to do readings, I could do them. I would do them to support the editor of the small press. That is where the gesture would be located for me. It is also true, that I am much more inclined (when with a group who has come to be a part of my composition space) to enact some sort of initiation toward collaborative activism. Or to sing…I am saying that I would rather put on a body performance, than to read at “you” (said audience) for an hour. That is, unless you (audience) feel that the reading would add dimension to your experience of the books’ capacities to touch. Does this make sense?

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

I have many theoretical concerns/ intents in my writing. As a genderqueer writer/ maker of things my books deal directly with the transgressive body, deviant gender, eros and identity construction as necessary compositional methods to living with empowerment in what can be a diminutive and polarizing world.

I am interested in expanding traditional notions of what activism is/ has been/ can be. I am interested in doing this via the reimagining of spaces. I believe in creating texts/ spaces that are inherently non-linear and a-historical. Texts as spaces that have never been patriarchally controlled and cannot be patriarchally controlled. It is my hope that in these spaces there will be room to experience post-contemporary moments of truth, eros, convergence, conjunction and profoundly new types and sensations of equity.

So, GLBTQI concerns (questions of gender, genitalia, sexuality, identities, equity, collaboration, variance, inclusion) and of course, phonic theories of many types. My work is also greatly concerned with physical and ephemeral states and how both of these are body—are makeable corpuscle making itself. There are needed alchemies that once invented and applied, open potential—I am also very interested in these.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think more important than generating any more narrative regarding “roles” (should and should-nots) is emphasis of what can occur when we (as writers and as creative beings) remove chasms between ourselves and ourselves. I mean that to alert or alter our relationship to our socializations so that we can move with more emancipation in world, is I think of more importance, than is upholding dogma or roles.Let me be clear here—I am not proposing that alterity is the only way. I am however, saying that I believe that each of our gestures toward provocations of emancipation, is of extreme value in that it continues to loosen up the congestions or stasis that are caused by exteriorly imposed chasms between ourselves and ourselves.

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

I love working with editors. I find it to be a very rewarding collaborative experience.

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

Hmmm—one of my favourite stories ever, involves a young student walking into the small kitchen in the monastery where they are studying with their lama (teacher) and while the lama is eating cereal and reading the newspaper, the student says: “with all due respect lama, didn’t you just tell us “when you are eating your cereal, be eating your cereal, be nowhere else, but right there”” and the lama says “yes, that is what I said” unsure of the problem that the student is implying. Unsure of the confusion. The student points to the lama eating cereal AND reading the newspaper at the same time and says “but you are eating your cereal and reading the newspaper”…the lama looks down at cereal, and looks at newspaper. Then gets a huge smile on face. “Ahh—when you are eating cereal, be nowhere else but eating cereal…and when you are eating cereal and reading the paper, be nowhere else but eating cereal and reading the paper”…

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

Regarding a writing routine. I write every day. I make sure that I keep a voice recorder with me (as well as a notebook that is an ulterior bible) so that when the sound coils come, I can record them. I can trace them and trance with them, until I know where they belong in compositions.

Regarding how the day begins…my beloved covers me in rose oil and we sing to each other. This is a constancy more imperative to me, than the sun is. It is ritual which is portal. It is non-linear fascia being moulded into more and more ways to contact and feel (which is to identify with) world. I am talking about how my beloved and I work together to be deep participants in planet, as planet. I am saying that we begin the human days in rose oil, and touch and sound.

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

My writing does not get stalled, because there is no pressure that I put on the writing regarding an expected “pace”—there is also no place (that is pre-determined) that the writing must end up. Instead it is like the writing—the pages, are path in the present tense. Like wafting. My pages are path happening. No pretense and no pedagogy. The phrases and pages are the act of laying cobblestone, one sweet shape at a time, ahead of me, toward__________. I am saying that it is the composition that lets that continuance happen. Then I pour honey over the steps (honing) and the bees come and make noise here. I am saying that there is no stalling. Just stalwart attentiveness all the way through…

12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

I grew up Mormon and my parents were very worried about us kids dying from eating a bad candy that might have been given to us by someone “creepy”—so Halloween is not a very fond thing for me to look back on or participate in in the context of costumes… I do however, love that my sweetheart who is an elementary school principal, dressed up as a large tomato one year. Also, a fish tank—yes, I said it--a fish tank…little yellowish paper fish swimming in the fish tank around Tracy’s body. Great stuff!

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

I think that this is so beautiful and correct. That books do come from books and from music and from nature and from science and from visual art and from dreaming and from memory (linear and ulterior) and from our aching and from vacancy and from hope. I could keep listing, but what I am saying is that I find it unimportant to differentiate the work from what it is that compels the work, because what it is that compels, for me, is always multiple. Therefore a more important work for me is to generate aggregates and forms capable of holding multi-fascinated content and context at once. This generativity, for me, will always be a needed polysemy.

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

I enjoy much of the Tibetan and Taoist spiritual writings. I enjoy reading G Stein at the same time as I read the King James version of the bible (I cannot read either one without making some sort of blatant act of superimposition or threading). I love reading and reviewing friend’s books (there are so many amazing writers engaging so many amazing projects!!!) and I really enjoy etching the future body, now. I make caves and alcoves—sweet sites to archive—and these creations of locations make me feel enabled to feed those locations with lactating, magical dna. Which are pages. Which are books.

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

I would love to ride a wild stallion bareback for miles and miles...

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I currently work (day job) in the transportation/ mobility industry, increasing mobility options (independences) for those who do not have that privilege. I think that this is a very good occupation. I am lucky. I guess if I could do anything I wanted, and get paid for it, it would be wonderful to teach music in a severely independent arts school. I have considered Montessori, but I think I would prefer to go even more wild than that.

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

The writing is both action and form. And it enables me to materialize the visions and their meanings in ways that are object or map—that are less abject. I think that working with self-invented and self-sustained forms, is an incredibly enabling experience. I think that this is true across the board (not only in writing)--

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

Book: I am currently reading A Discovery of Witches with my beloved sweetheart, in bed before we go to sleep. This process is so enjoyable (I am saying that I am not sure if it is solely the book that makes that it great;)—I also really recently enjoyed J.A.Tyler’s A Man Of Glass And All The Ways We Have Failed (sort of like reading M Duras in quality)…

Film: I really enjoyed Brokeback Mountain. I also love some of the oldie but goodies: Girl Interrupted, Winter Spring Summer Fall Winter, Like Water for Chocolate.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a non-novel. I am very excited about it. This may be the closest I have come to the discernible precision that I have been longing for, yet. Stay tuned!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

a new poetry collection by rob mclennan: kate street (Moira, Chicago)

kate street
a poetry collection by rob mclennan
published by Moira (Chicago; e-book available)
$14 US; order paper copies here;

cover photograph by John W. MacDonald;

Praise for Kate Street
Looking over Kate Street, over the rambling boulevard littered with "a permissible tryst", "a bedouin of shoes", the cagey tenderness of a father ushering his daughter into self-hood backlit by the "nuzzle-spent release of horror", one is compelled to trudge forward on the trail rob mclennan has generously broken, searching madly for "a pretty name for what we almost do." Love-worn, rage-prone, and intent upon reuniting with nature, these poems pick through the detritus of the contemporary conflagration without complaint, and deconstruct our flabby material acquisitions in search of real human connection. Never precious, these poems ask for forgiveness for their very existence in an oft-dismissive world, apocryphally offering: "I am at the end of the machine, extending whatever boundary of forgiveness that I would know too well." -- Paige Ackerson-Kiely

12 or 20 questions: with Christophe Casamassima

Christophe Casamassima is the author of the Proteus Cycle: the Proteus (Moria Books), Joys: A catalogue of disappointments (BlazeVOX), and Ore (twentythreebooks), as well as disparate titles like UNTILTED (Moria Books), Being/Time/Being (Xerolage), and Some Nets (BlazeVOX). He is the editor of Furniture Press, which awards the annual Furniture Press Poetry Prize, and is the Director of Literary & Performative Arts at the Towson Arts Collective. He may sometimes be seen as a faculty member of the English Department at Towson University in Baltimore.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, naturally it was my first book, the Proteus, published by William Allegrezza's Moria Books (http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html). Who doesn't reel at the first instant someone tells you that they're putting their faith in an incredibly long experimental work? My most recent, Ore, which will be available from twentythreebooks (http://www.twentythreebooks.com/authors.htm) in February 2010, was truly a turning point for me; this is the one that completely changed my (writing) life. I was in a creative slump after writing the Proteus, then Joys: A catalogue of Disappointments (BlazeVOX) (http://www.blazevox.org/catalog.htm), because it seemed inevitable that I would "run out" of writing. When Karen, my fiance, and I went camping last April, I brought along Olson's Collected. After reading for a bit, I suddenly caught wind that the lines that somehow, across poems, made more sense when taken out of their context and "mashed" with lines from other poems. You can call this pastiche or collage, and when I started writing the first poem, the light came flooding back. It took about 7 months to complete the work, which is comprised of 100 centos. This is quite an extraordinary work of appropriation. What feels different now, after having spent so much time working in the mode of appropriation is, sadly, that I've got this notion that continuing to write new strings of words/lines/poems seems facetious, superficial, fake. This is a personal quandry, and not to question the aesthetic of just about every living human poet here. But, for my own sake, it seems best to work in this Roman mode, of stealing and mashing and mxing, like a DJ. I have become a remixer, and this is my current quest. How does it feel different? I was creating strings of sounds according to their musical qualities; now I'm searching for the sounds that already exist. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a project called "Some Nets," or 4 long poems using lines from numerous sources. One is even an ABC acrostic of some of my influences.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry in the 5th grade, a silly rhyme about how my friend Lenny would lend me a penny. When I reached college I began writing more aweful verse about how depressed I was, you know, lots of suidical imagery and relationship woes. When I finished at the New School in NYC I basically made it through without really caring anymore about writing - it seemed so fashionable to ride on people's coattails and mimic their favorite writers. I was looking for a new sound. I moved to Baltimore to persue a teaching career, dropped out of that, then dropped out of two MA programs. But it was actually listening to experimental music that got me back on track, folks on labels likes Touch Recordings, cci, Barooni, Mego, etc. There was something that I always had in my head, my whole life through, that noise that could be made savory, that adults always criticized me for (I once hooked up a short wave radio to my stereo system at my parents house and listened to the military bleeps and clonks for hours, neighbors coming by thinking there was some air raid or something!) This is the point that I finally see how meaning is arbitrary, and that one can manipulate such sounds and essenses to their own devices. Words had this effect on me 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?
Well, drafts are the extent of my writing. I don't do too much "drafting" or editing even because, while I'm writing, a sound or rhythm permeates my consciousness. If I don't find it, I don't write. When I do find it, it is, in essence, perfect. It's like knowing exactly what the painting will look like even before one begins to paint. But this is not wholly true. I do write how de Kooning paints, this constant overwriting. This doesn't mean that I delete; it merely means I move around, expand, interfere. I work from the middle of the poem outwards. I begin by finding a sound, a line, I like, then working around the page until the rhythm is complete. I liken it to starting with a 4/4 beat, then adding syncopated elements so that, in the end, the phrase is the same except that it has been refined, or occluded, down to its atomic level. The music of Autechre is an aural equivalent. The process is quite slow; but if the sound is there, I just go with it, and it ends when it says "end."

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?
From the very beginning, it is a sound. Actually, it is a line. I'm a percussionist. Have been since I was a child. Poetry is music, it begins at music. And this music must have the best color and rhythm. It also begins when a simple idea becomes convoluted. That is, when I "mishear" or "misread" a particular phrase or bit of conversation. What is best now is to revise what I said previously about having foregone meaning: what I actually mean, if you can believe it (it will evolve as time goes on), is that when one thing becomes many, a phrase and its misinterpretations... by putting them side by side we suddenly have what I like to call a dichotomy. In my poetry, the act of writing is not to capture the best way to communicate an idea; on the other hand, it is the inevitability of having been confounded by such dichotomies that we're never sure what's right or wrong, what has been stated and what has been imagined. Like these answers here, my aesthetic changes, it is the only thing that changes, so that I may capture all sides of things. The book: I haven't written a short poem in years. The serial is the only necessity for me. It comes from the pain and persistence of trying to say all sides of things, without taking sides, without preferring or priveledging one over another.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I prefer public readings to writing for the public, yes. It's not necessarily a part of my creative process; that is relegated to me, books, sounds: I read a great deal, steal a great deal. I never ask for advice or comments on my writing from other writers. I just don't trust it. I've yet to meet someone who can be completely objective with my work. Honestly, I've yet to seek out that kind of commitment! My public performances are instances where I can practice the writing in space, to attract a great deal of attention from my audience, and, hopefully, to encounter the possibility of listening to my audience's interpretations. I'm not saying I take it to heart or seek advice or change my processes thereafter, but it is only human of me to be a little curious, a little egotistical, a little high-minded!

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?
There are absolutely no questions to answer. It is more like the answer, my answer to having been confounded all this time by how little we are saying when we talk to each other, how we can say so much trifling bullshit but never really say anything. Perhaps that is my writing, this trying to stay as close to nothing as possible by saying it over and over again, by manipulating it to the point of disjunction and fractal. Hence the appropriation: I believe that there is too much noise in the world, too much nothing in this world that amounts to dollar store bookbins. My writing is not writing, that is misleading. I merely take it apart and put it all back together. Disjointed. Can you say that is a theoretical concern? Maybe there are questions, questions like, "Who is listening to poetry?" "Who cares if another writer says something else?" This is not my concern. But it is.

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?
Simply: to make sure that the language continues to evolve, that we are made aware that language is a living thing, not so much delicate, but easily manipulable and malleable, and that we should all take advantage of it by using the old to forms to reach the new. This is evolution. And that is a poet's job. But I must make the distinction between writing poetry, writing fiction, talking, etc. Poets are the real lifeblood of this language. Their poems do more to show, not what to say, but how to say it. Culture: I don't think really that a culture can exist in the 21st century. Culture means exactly what it means on the petri dish. All I see, in America at least, is stagnation, distration, convenience. Where is out Lenny Bruce? Our Charles Bukowski? We are evolving towards sedentary livelihoods, we're nothing but livestock. Poets, by fucking the language, to stir up as much trouble as possible... that is their role. But is that role being fulfilled? Not when it it fashionable. Not when it is part of an exclusive stream of circle jerking, priviledged "rock stars" who care nothing about it, but merely feed off it.


8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Never have. My editors have given me absolute leeway, and that's how I like it. As petty as I am sometimes, just seeing page numbers around my poems gives me the chills! BUT... the editor is your first and foremost audience, the person who interprets the work as a collection. So one must work closely, as a collaboration. If your editor is a good one, they will ultimately see just how and why your book should be made public. Creating a book means creating a physical interpretation. And that is the highest and most pertinent honor.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hands down, from Charles Bukowski:
if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
It's like fucking on a hangover: ain't gonna happen.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Well, waking up for one, usually. I have no routines. When the rhythm comes, everything else has to be put down, including life. Because once it's gone, it's gone forever.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I think I answered that in the first question. Usually I keep from writing for a long time, let my subconsciousness, my dreams, tell me when I'm ready. For instance, when I begin dreaming in verse, in poems, I know the stake has been pulled from the well. It's time to write. And when the urge to write comes, you must submit. You can't force yourself to do it. It's not a train that runs on time. No... you sit there hoping the train will come, but are so afraid to move away, to take a piss or get a drink of water for fear you may miss it. That's the writing life. It is a burden!

12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
Honestly? I can't remember. What did I do this year? I always feign from putting on a costume. Always. God, this year, what did we do? I just can't remember!

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I am an avid musician, I play the drums and other percussion. I also am an avid phonographer. I take my microphones and mixers everywhere I go to capture the sounds of life around me. If you check out sitecitation.blogspot.com, you'll get, in essence, how nature plays itself without worrying to much about instrument and composition. If it were only that easy for us! But now I know that we all have the potential to compose music: no, I don't mean an opera or sonata... What I mean is, if you go out into the world, and listen very carefully to the arrangement of nature... the wind in the trees, the traffic, a crowd... and consciously begin to compose some sort of understanding of it, to know how to recognize the relationship all the parts play in the composition, then you are a musician. This is how I write, even from reading. It's pure consciousness.


14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
If it were not for Ulysses, I could have never written my first two books. The wealth of interplay and language in such books... such as this can never be understood without attempting to "answer" it in writing. The only way for me to have understood this book was to have written alongside it. I don't think anything has come close, nothing has inspired me more.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Move to the mountains with my wife-to-be. I'm from NYC, and everything about it just reeks of cliche. The only thing that'll make me more at ease in this world is fending for me and my family in foreign terrain. If life doesn't make you sit up and pay attention, then what's it worth?

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
This idea that I'd be anything else is insane. If I were not a writer, that would only mean that writing would not yet have been invented. And that means that I'd have been the one to invent it. As facetious as that sounds, it's true. But music, also, is equally important. I'd be destroying computers and mixers and effects pedals and radios and televisions if it were not for writing.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think it's genetic, like music is. My father used to sleep with a radio beneath his pillow and bug my mom, because he couldn't get away from the need to satiate the rhythms in his head. My father lost that, and I fear if I didn't do the same, feed the addiction I mean, I would lose it too, and feel at a complete loss. It is, after all, a life, and not a supplement. I don't think I have anything to say. Really. But being able to use language, to really manipulate its sounds and measures... this is why I write. Pure curiosity.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
In the middle of Finnegan's Wake and Gravity's Rainbow. Last book I finished were two by Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar and Trout fishing in America, two classics of surrealism, I think. Films, God, so many great films... The last great film I saw... Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. If I aspire to anything, with words, it is this.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A book called Some Nets. The first part, A Menagerie for Louis and Ezra, is a series of fake terza rima stanzas, each middle line containing a line from Zukofsky's "A" that has the word, or variation of the word "horse," surrounded by two lines from the Cantos, where each succesive first line of the terza rima must contain one word from the previous. The second part is a series of 108 couplets, or haikus minus one line, using lines from Gary Snyder. This is called "Maa Laa," the Buddhist prayer beads, which contain 108 beads. The next part is "End Lines." I take all the last words of Wallace Stevens' lines in "Harmonium" and create skinny poems, similar to those by Robert Creeley, depending upon the punctuation (or lack thereof) following these words. And the last part is "26rd," a series of poems that contain equal amounts of lines as the letters that spell the names of poets which make up the acrostic, one for each letter of the alphabet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;