12 or 20 (second series) questions with Julie Doxsee

Julie Doxsee is the Canadian-American author of five books of poetry: The Fastening (Black Ocean, 2022), What Replaces Us When We Go (Black Ocean, 2018), The Next Monsters (Black Ocean, 2013), Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2010), and Undersleep (Octopus Books, 2008). She holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2007) and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002). Upon repatriating to the states after nine years in Turkey, she moved to Pennsylvania in 2016, where she is now Associate Professor of English at Harrisburg University.

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

Funnily, I cracked open a copy of my first book, Undersleep, the other day for the first time in several years because I couldn’t remember much when I tried to recollect the signature poems therein. The return to the book was prompted by the memory of a significant event that recently arose via long-lost friend and it dawned on me that I may have included a poem about the event in Undersleep. My distance from the book object, as well as from that version of my poet self, meant I was reading a new book by a different poet (akin to the jolt of remembering a previous night’s dream while waiting at a red light or something). Back in 2006, publishing my first book changed my life; the Octopus Books crew, and then the Black Ocean crew, became my poet family. On an aesthetic level, my first collection was hewn from a secret recipe of University of Denver-inspired voices, friends, interests, books, styles, and editing advice. With each new book I publish, I have less and less exposure to these secret ingredients. The overall effect is The Fastening contains density that breathes with a grittier (more mature?) DNA, whereas the crafting of Undersleep left quite a lot of air and light on the pages. Also, I have lived and adulted 1000% since 2006.

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

I have only published poetry and poetry-leaning prose, but I started with multiple genres, as many institutional creative writers do. I discovered I was wired as a poet my senior year of college. I liked the freedom, the absence of rules, the legacy/movements, and the attention span involved in the act of writing poems. Also, like many of my poetry students today, I thought poetry was the best way to communicate the life of a confused, anxiety-ridden, identity-seeking, early-20s woman.
 
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?

Projects come on strong for me and manifest quickly after the initial spark. I start writing when preoccupation with the project nags to the point I can’t ignore it, then I write obsessively till I finish a first draft. Since I became a mother, this process is more difficult because I don’t have time to ride out the obsession. First drafts sit for a year or more in most cases, and the work of editing is where true enjoyment emerges for me; hence the first drafts tend to resemble distant cousins of the final manuscript. I think The Next Monsters is my only title that arose from copious journals and notes over a period of about 6 months.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

This is a great question because I have never thought about it. The answer is: since grad school I have never conceived a single poem without conceiving a book-length work. I guess that means my education instilled a project-minded approach to my poetic undertakings. 

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

In before-COVID times I would have answered “absolutely” that readings are a part of the creative process, but now (mostly for personal and family reasons) I find it very difficult to tour, plan, travel, and even to arrange online events. I have attended some smashingly well-done online events since the pandemic began, but after spending all day every day teaching on camera for the better part of a year and a half from 2020-2022, I was exhausted by the idea of getting camera-ready and zooming up for a 2-dimensional audience. And now, in the aftermath of the aftermath of ebbing/flowing emergencies, I hardly think about doing readings. I am hoping this will change in 2023.
 
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?

The current questions for me are always about human decency, vulnerability, puzzling masculinity, love, sex, and the dilemmas of personal and societal unwellness. As for the general poetry community, questions are infinite and dynamic, which contributes to the wealth of the genre. I have never tried to answer questions in my poetry, but I have played with questions (exposed them, posed them) using the strange fabrics of language and thought. The writing of The Fastening exposed a necessary pissed-off voice, too, that brought healing and resolve. 

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?

In my professional life, in addition to teaching poetry classes, I foster the learning of very precise intentional, connotational, denotational uses of language—as well as responsible research. It is not easy, especially in the last decade or so, to advise long research projects in the Googleverse. I am also super uncomfortable with rapid-thumb-jab communication (generally speaking) while at the same time realizing communication naturally evolves (also, I love a TikTok wormhole, so I hesitate to claim that a writer/creator identity has been mortally wounded by smartphone ubiquity and scroll fixation). I guess my answer is that writers have extreme levels of power in larger culture, especially with so many informational/artistic platforms, but without responsible media and carefully vetted curation, I worry about the survival of writing, writers, attention spans, art, poetry, and brain health. Also, I can’t envision what my sons’ writing lives will look like as they continue their educations over the next decade plus (???). It’s scary, frankly; thinking about the loss of complex written forms leads me to fantasize about a Mary Ruefle computer-free, 100% poetic lifestyle.  

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

No (not difficult) and yes (essential). Having a dedicated reader/editor is part of the publication process, and necessary to the eventual appearance of the physical book. After long periods of editing my drafts, I am no longer the best audience for my work—I am fully ready to hand it over. I am lucky, I guess, that my editing sessions have been minimally invasive. For some authors this is not the case.

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

*You can’t be an artist if you don’t take risks, you can’t take risks if you hate embarrassment* (paraphrase)

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

I read, read, read as much as possible. I also work on booking travel in the not-far future. Another recent undertaking is exploring markets around my home for much-needed cultural exposure. Within a few miles of my home there are Indian, Nepali, Middle Eastern, Moroccan, Pan-Asian, and African markets, and international food stalls in the central market. These explorations are guaranteed to provide infinite eye and soul candy, interesting conversations with proprietors and customers, and also tasty non-American fare (hence dense fodder for the writer spirit).

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Turkey will always be the most sensory of my homes, and where I felt most alive. Imagine lemon cologne, sage, sea-salty air, and mangal (wood barbeque). 

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 don’t believe that books come from books; I believe reading is essential to the learning the music of poetic language, but life experience, including visual art, nature, science, travel, dreams, quirky encounters with humans and animals, and so on, are what make the poet a poet.

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

There are too many to list—so, so, so many. Need a book contract for this answer!

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

I have many nonfiction writing projects I would like to work on, but I will likely have no time until I retire from academia. In fantasy I have many careers (I know this goes beyond the doable to-do list, but I seriously think about these things): stuntwoman, fisherwoman, medical doctor, actor, fiber artist, field reporter, attorney, stage diva, filmmaker, comedy performer, to name a few.

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?

See above.

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

Need for flexibility/multi-faceted identity and no boss? Wiring? Becoming a writer was the easy choice when books vacuum-dragged me into this orbit years ago. I am wired as an artist and poet/linguist, so the choice was made for me. Theoretically, if I want to be someone else or choose a different identity, research and fictionalizing would allow me to live out some of the fantasy occupations referenced in #15.

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

Brian Evenson’s The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell. Every Evenson sentence kicks my soul hard. After reading The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell, I was shattered that I would never have the feeling of reading it for the first time again. I don’t recall ever feeling this way about a book.

I watch a lot of movies—sometimes as many as seven a week (couch + popcorn + twilight). Barbarian (2022) was the best of 2022 for me. The strange meandering plotline and creepy jump scares as well as the total eccentricity (without resorting to supernatural tackiness) was akin to encountering genius enjambment and then encountering it again and again. Barbarian upended the passive viewing that tends to occur with my voluminous intake. Like, there is no way I could fold laundry during my viewing of Barbarian let alone pause it for any reason.

19 - What are you currently working on?
  
A book about my son, who underwent an intense medical journey over the past few years.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Eric Baus, HOW I BECAME A HUM

WHAT OUR SKY IS LIKE

This was how we spoke to the distant flicker. Our silence hydrated a speaker. Its form came to us in pieces culled from the canopic night. We wore diagnostic dust in a book that believed only in ablutions. We dried slowly. Now what our sky is like is like a hospital for the sun.

Denver, Colorado poet Eric Baus’ latest full-length poetry title is HOW I BECAME A HUM (Portland OR/Denver CO: Octopus Books, 2019). Baus is very much a poet of sentences (a term I have utilized previously referencing the works of Rosmarie Waldrop and Lisa Robertson), and how they accumulate, composing prose poems that occasionally run up against the line of what might be considered a more straightforward prose. It might sound fairly obvious, and even a non-descriptor, but his poems very much are built upon how one sentence follows another and then another.

The author of four previous full-length collections—The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009) [see my review of such here], Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011) [see my review of such here] and The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights 2014) [see my review of such here]—as well as several chapbooks, Baus remains on the side of the lyric poetic rather than any narrative prose-line. Some have described his work as surreal, but I would also suggest Baus composes far more on the “poem” side of the prose poem line than, say, a writer such as the late Russell Edson; despite being considered one of the greats of the American prose poem, much of what I’ve seen of his work actually wrote more on the side of the postcard story than the lyric. The book is structured in eight sections—“The Rain of the Ice,” “Bad Shadow,” “The Datura Plains,” “Plan for a Lake on the Ceiling of a Cinema,” “Wolfram Frock,” “The Mesmerized Moth,” “Autonomic Mica” and “How I Became a Hum”—the first of which, in the spirit of full disclosure, appeared previously as a chapbook through above/ground press, a section he references in a 2019 interview with Ian Lockaby for NDR:

I have a section and a poem in the book called “The Rain of the Ice,” which is a micro-erasure of the title of the essay “The Grain of the Voice” by Roland Barthes. One of the things I like about Barthes’s essay is how he argues that instead of further developing our critical vocabulary around music (creating more and more descriptive language) we should instead focus on aspects of sound that we unconsciously filter and flatten out. He writes: “the ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” I like that impulse a lot—to shift the boundaries of the thing being studied as a transformative act. By erasing a few letters in his title, I’m thinking about the fluid state embedded within the solid state—the “rain” that is always part of “ice”—and, in some oblique way, gesturing toward slipping outside of expected ways of talking about the world and about experience.

In the poem “Bad Shadow,” I found a way to graft in language from a blurb I wrote for Richard Froude’s book The Passenger: “Richard Froude was grown from film stills. Above all he was a mirror. Much of his soil was gathered from conversation. Nothing is outside the screen. His house was built entirely of redirected rivers. This caused a book of between, a book of plywood and polymers, a book we are never finished reading.” And I turned it into this passage: “Above all we were was a mirror. Much of our soil was gathered from conversation. Nothing is behind the screen. Our mouth was built entirely of redirected rivers. This caused a book of between, a house of plywood and polymers, a city we were never outside of.” I try to find as many ways as possible of repurposing and re-framing language. I tend not to make references in a conventional way, where I’m signaling the content or ideas of another work directly, and instead I prefer to zero in on some granular aspect, some tonality of the thing that I’m thinking about, and use that to build language structures that take on a character of their own.

The sections in the collection move through both sections as suites of untitled poems in sequence, and sections of stand-alone, individual poems. In certain ways, the differences between sections, structurally, could be seen as both very wide (a section of poems against a section-as-sequence), and very minimal (a sequence of poems with titles against a sequence of untitled poems). Is there a difference? I suspect, and even prefer, that it might not even matter, although the sections sans titles infer a slightly stronger connection between poems than the other sections, but this might exist only in my imagination. Either way, the effect of his poems are stunning, with the lyric inference sweeping up against and away from meaning, allowing the poem to be propelled by tone and language, words set up against further words for remarkable effect, and lines composed with both a lightness and great density.

STROBE EGGS

My brother’s lungs had synthesized a miniature sun. The swollen clouds collated. The blast’s grammar washed through his flickering cells. He bore storming twins. They wore lead.

Bill Carty, Huge Cloudy

Haze settles in rooftops,

red tile above

the midwifery center.

Outside, topiary like

lime-green popsicles

before summer

uncouples sweet

from stick. Some local

parade passes

the hillside’s jagged

tombstones. No, these

are teeth, clenched,

and we are driving over water,

grip on the hanging strap

when it seems we might tip.

What else am I doing?

What am I pretending

To do while doing it? (“AURORA”)

Seattle poet Bill Carty’s full-length debut is Huge Cloudy (Portland OR: Octopus Books, 2019), a collection of narrative twists and jolts, shifting perspectives and unexpected takes. Carty jostles the familiar and unfamiliar alike in such subtle, jarring ways, opening the question of whether whatever we thought was true or real might ever have been in the first place. “The car interior was esophageal red,” he writes, in the second stanza to the poem “OCEAN, THE GREAT CONDUCTOR,” “and in the headlight, my dancing / was a reenactment of my deep shame of dancing.” The third stanza in the quartet reads:

We had no governor, only the moon

making a smaller moon

on the car hood.

There is a sweetness to these poems, and a vulnerability, one that displays itself slowly, carefully and openly. The strengths of this collection are so wonderfully understated, allowing for wisdoms and shifts to simply float up to the surface when needed. “I arrive at, thinking,” he writes, to end the poem “NOT A MOAT,” “this really is despair, // so much broader than it is long.” Set in five sections of short lyric poems with an opening piece, Carty’s Huge Cloudy intersperces two sections of longer sequences—two and four—for the sake of stretching out, even accumulating, the narrative thinking within his short lyrics: the poems “AURORA” and “BOUNDING SPHERE,” respectively. Even the fact that the sections are numbered, where two and four are clearly each made up of a single poem each, seems understated, allowing the poem itself to reveal, and unfold. I appreciate that impulse to not wish to highlight what could only be understood, and appreciated, through examination.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brooke Ellsworth

Brooke Ellsworth is author of Serenade (Octopus Books, 2017).  She lives and writes in Peekskill, NY.

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?

Most of Serenade was written in a frenzy during the late summer of 2014.  In many ways, it was more of me working out the tangles from my first two chapbooks, Thrown and Mud.  I press upon a lot of history of feminine brutality and eco-disaster, do a lot of urgent lineation around flood zones.  Serenade became some metacognition of me listening to water, while realizing this was a self-eroding reflection.  Serenade changed everything, because I let the editing process chip away at the poems’ temporality.  I was doing a lot of hiking around the tidal estuary surrounding Indian Point Energy Center.        

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

I’m not sure.  I lineated my journals as a kid, which felt like the most personal and direct and private I could be.  My mom is a nurse.  As a kid I’d go to the hospital after school and type out occasional poems on their nurse’s station computer and tape them to the door.  

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?

I write in fits, I guess.  I have trouble distinguishing between drafts and new poems.  An ongoing issue I have is re-writing everything, but keeping the same title.  The paradox of Theseus’s ship?  Maybe I should call this a liturgical listening process.  There are sequences of poems in all of my chapbooks and in Serenade under the same title.  I find arguments are most explicit when they’re lineated and slowed down.    

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’m definitely more of a failed essayist than a poet.  I think of Serenade more of as a raging essay than I do a collection of poems.  I fixate on something and develop work in and out of that.  

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

I love audiences, and I love being a part of one.  Friends will tell you, I cry on either side of the stage.

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?

Serenade comes from a feminist/ecopoetic/angry place.  Lara Glenum writes in the introduction to the Gurlesque anthology that the concept of “catharsis” is a homogenizing agent.  All inherited ideas about catharsis = a failure of imagination to conceive of catharsis outside of the mechanics of power and control.  There’s no such thing as purity in art, outside of the modes of social and infrastructural displacement.  There’s nothing pure or timeless we gain access to through art.  This is especially important now, when this country actively neglects populations displaced by weather.  Artists and thinkers who are displaced by canonical narratives.  But do we pretend to forget history?  That in itself is a sad luxury.  

I don’t answer any questions, but I definitely wallow in my obsessions.  The story of Echo shows up in Serenade, for one.  Echo is the main character in my first chapbook, Thrown.  Her inability to express her ecstasy, her sense of catharsis at the sight of Narcissus.  But she is certainly in this state of catharsis?  She communicates through her disability, which is the excess of repetition.  Poems traditionally come at you with a built-in sense of discovery, of some sort of awakening.  Poems like that for me are hand-in-hand with poems who have a project of dominance.  For me, Echo is part of an erotic dynamic conceived outside of the dynamics of control.  Which isn’t separate from her predetermined annihilation.  Derrida really tenderly talks about her story.  About how she subverts Hera’s punishment by making Narcissus’s language her own.

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?

Putting together a book requires physical structure (walls, food, money).  The people I care about want to make books, or not, and keep their capital debt from destroying them.  Or the people I care about discuss carelessness with language and a divestment of literary arts interchangeably.  I’m also using “people” and “poets” interchangeably here.  The poets worth reading, the ones worth paying attention to, activate the complacent, or at least expose them.  

Cecilia Vicuña on a Harriet blog post last year, “Language is Migrant,” writes about living under the Chilean dictator Pinochet: “Complex public conversation goes extinct. Maybe the extinction of playful free speech is related to the extinction of species we are causing as we speak.” Vicuña here matches ecological catastrophe with language. Often it’s thought that pain breaks down language, or that writing and art are in response to suffering. Vicuña inverts the locus of agencies. One cannot say that one catastrophe begets the other; our contemporary catastrophes saturate each other. Language and the material world seep together, annihilating each other through political and ecological catastrophe.  Look at the effort by dominating political forces to neglect flood zones or entire communities devastated by weather events, or colonialist war events (Marshall Islands comes to mind as a horrific intersection of all these things.  Here’s an article that goes into that a little bit).  

By contrast, consider the terra we actively maintenance: the SUPERFUND site under Silicon Valley, where pipes and pumps suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast underground pools, which then gets shipped, treated, and burned in places like Oklahoma and Arizona, discharging waste in small towns and on a Native American reservation—all in the hope of making the water drinkable again and protecting workers of the tech giants such as Google and Symantec from toxic vapors. This toxic trail, like Echo’s (in)articulation, becomes an act of dispersement, a stain that seeps into the water supply that Narcissus gazes helplessly into. We cannot turn away from the reflection, we cannot turn away from language, nor can we turn away from the semantics of industrialized progress.

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

Definitely both.  I’m pretty defensive about my choices, and I really value friends and editors who ask me questions in ways that open up the possibility for other choices.  

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

Don’t eat sand.

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

I personally don’t benefit from their separation.

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 do a lot of writing on my phone on trains.  I can be a typical house cat with my writing structures.  Consistently, in the mornings, in the same spot.

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

I turn back to Pessoa (all of them).  I re-read Hiromi Itō.  Hélène Cixous’ The Book of Promethea.  Everybody should read Brett Walker’s Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease.  Also Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive.    

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Chapstick.  Boat fuel.  The combination of pitch pine and cigarettes.  

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?

I think it’s useful to know the rules for all these material realities and languages, in order to imagine better ways to build communities.

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

Anna Kavan wrote a book called Ice, which changed the trajectory of a section of Serenade afterwards.  Albert Camus’ American Diaries was a troubling, important read.  For a while, the 2nd section of Serenade bore an epigraph from his diaries (“Endless good weather.”).  It was maybe when I was reading it for the first time, but the way he wrote about his depression went deep for me.  

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

My response to this is a little NSFW.  So I’ll go with visit Lisbon so I can Instagram a picture of me with Pessoa’s statue.    

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’ve always been a writer.  

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

I mean, here in gig culture, we all do a lot of things to keep afloat.  

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

Although hardly a recent release, I saw Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba for the first time last year.  

20 - What are you currently working on?

The working title to my manuscript-in-progress is Disturbances.  It focuses more on invertebrates and depression.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;