12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Loudon

Rebecca Loudon lives and writes on Camano Island in Washington. She is the author of three collections of poetry Tarantella and Radish King from Ravenna Press and Cadaver Dogs from No Tell Books and two chapbooks Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home from No Tell Books and TRISM from Horse Less Press. Rebecca teaches violin lessons to children and tends three cats and a huge unruly garden.

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?

My first book changed my life in a small but powerful way financially as my editor at Ravenna Press let me pre-sell the books and keep the profit. I had just lost my job at Microsoft and was a single mother in a tight squeeze. It was also a lesson on how to choose my poems carefully for publication. I pretty much just stuck everything in Tarantella and let it fly. My most recent work is not that different than my previous. I just work more carefully and slower. I have discovered that prolificacy is not and should not be a goal for me. I still feel driven and always have.

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

My grandfather was born on Robert Burns’ birthday so I was exposed to poetry starting from the time I could walk. My grandfather had a great Scottish brogue and a deep booming voice and he read not only Burns but Don Marquis Don Blanding anything he had in his house truly. I was entranced by the music and rhythm of these poems and I was the only grandchild allowed in his study because I listened. I started writing poetry at five the same time I began violin lessons. This was such luck because I have never differentiated poetry from 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?

I wrote my third book on the heels of my second book. My writing came fast and hot. My first drafts then looked nothing like the finished poems. I am a furious reviser. The poems in Queer Wing-ed are different. They were born fully formed like ugly babies but they took forever for me to research and to write and it took me a year to distance myself from the project before I could write again or put the manuscript together. I have a ton of copious notes for my current project. Way too many notes.

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?

After my first collection which was piecemeal and disconnected I began to write as part of a continuum with a whole manuscript in mind. Radish King was written as a love letter. Even the shape of the book resembles a post card. I knew exactly where I wanted it to go. I wrote Navigate in my car every day on my way to work in the morning in a fever dream ill with pneumonia scribbling in a large notebook as I drove. Dangerous. I wrote the poems for Cadaver Dogs my fourth book one after the other in the exact order in which they appear in the book. The manuscript I’m finishing up now Queer Wing-ed has taken me almost ten years to write. To be more direct poems begin with an idea floating through my brain. If I don’t jot it down somewhere it will disappear. I used to carry a notebook with me all the time. Now I email ideas to myself with my phone.

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

Oh I absolutely love to perform my work. Before my first public reading I had my son videotape me (raise your hands if you remember videotape) practicing and I was horrified by the results it was like watching a video of myself eating. No one ever needs to see that. I had been told to make eye contact with my audience to capture the attention of every person in the room not to move or act out the words etc. This just didn’t work for me. I found that the best way for me to present my poetry was to connect with the poems themselves to be wildly in love with them to let the poems do the work to speak from the dark places from which much of my work springs. I am in One True Love with my new poems and when I read them I sing I bark I sway I move my arms around and I never make direct contact with my audience instead I pull the audience in. All my years as a professional musician all my years on stage help a great deal. I have absolutely no stage fright.

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?

In my work right now in my current book I attempted to solve a murder and to explore the inner life of the “outsider” artist and writer Henry Darger. I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams though I have yet to send the finished manuscript to a publisher. I am spending time with it. I am dancing with it. I have no formal education and barely a high school education and so have escaped theoretical concerns in my work. I tend to read voraciously and I write from the gut. I try to be fearless and engage in deep play at the same time a delicate balance.

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?

My role as a writer is to write the truth as I see it and to support other poets other presses young poets beginning writers. I taught a poetry workshop in my house for over eleven years. We met once a week. Eventually the workshop grew up and the poets either kept on writing or gave up. It was a huge learning experience for me.

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

Oh I find that process absolutely essential. I have had such joyful good fortune to work with my three editors Kathryn Rantala Reb Livingston and Jen Tynes. All three editors worked openly and lovingly with me. Lucky indeed.

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

Ignore advice.

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 want to be the person who writes every morning but this is hard to navigate for me. This has changed for me since I retired from my 40 years of factory work. I used to write at work and during rehearsals for the orchestra of which I was a member for 20 years. Now I am infatuated with living on an island in a forest. Now my forest and my beach dictate when I write. I’d still like to be the person who writes every morning. I think it’s possible since I practice my violin at a set time every single day.

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

I return to beloved fiction. When my writing gets stalled I try not to read poetry because I don’t want the influence of outside poets and writers to influence my work. I am a fierce re-reader. I read books I adore and wallow around inside them until I feel a spark.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs.

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 a professional musician and music inspires me first and foremost always and forever. Visual art has heavily influenced my work especially the poems in Queer Wing-ed which are poems about an artist. In researching this book I traveled to Chicago to Vermont to New Hampshire and to New York and saw and devoured the most amazing art in these places. Nature inspires me every day but I rarely write nature poems.

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

I recently met the poet Elisabeth Workman during April when we were both participating in National Poetry Month writing a poem a day. I had not read her work before and it completely amazes me. Don Mee Choi is an incredible writer who is also doing brilliant translation work. I read every thing I can by Aase Berg. Her poetry is incredible and honest and translucent. There are too many writers to name here but those three are my right now inspirations.

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

Live on a boat.

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 would love to be a painter. I used to be one but I finally realized I would never find excellence inside painting. If I did not have writing I suspect I would have died. Art truly does save lives.

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

Music noise escape a desire to map out my brain.

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

The last great book I read was American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

The last great film I saw was David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am putting the finishing touches on Queer Wing-ed just cosmetics now it’s near completion. I’m also working on a strange hybrid manuscript that chronicles the nine years I spent writing Queer Wing-ed. It is titled Strangle Town and it includes my Henry Darger research my travels during my research as well as what it was like to write the book while losing my job and living in poverty. I also have a manuscript on the back burner titled Spokane which consists of brutal poems about my childhood.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: late September, 2012

Everyone should keep mailing me books for possible review. Chapbooks, especially. Why do I keep having to beg Canadian presses for chapbooks?

Don’t forget, the ottawa small press book fair still has tables available, for the fall 2012 edition on November 17. Can you believe I’ve been running this thing now for eighteen whole years?

And can you  believe I'm actually getting married tomorrow...?

Philadelphia PA: In a beautiful hand-sewn edition of one hundred and twenty numbered copies is Jennifer Bartlett’s Anything has to be easy enough to get done (Albion Books, 2012), a short essay on the American poet Larry Eigner.

Writing a biography is like putting a puzzle together—or, as Pee Wee Herman says, “Certain questions get answered. Others spring up. It’s like unraveling a big cable knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting…” To give ten years to something is a daunting task, and yet people do it all the time—to jobs, children, spouses, friends, art. The journey of discovering someone’s life—someone’s mind—is, at turns, engaging and intrusive, tedious and exhilarating. So that I might find myself on any given day thinking, What does reading Moby Dick have to do with writing a Larry Eigner biography?

It would appear that this is part of something larger, an actual biography that Bartlett is writing on the life and work of Larry Eigner, a poet I know very little of, but am interested in. There have been a slew of poet biographies lately, from the recent Richard Brautigan biography, to forthcoming biographies on Robert Duncan and bpNichol, all of which have been long awaited. And will there ever be a further biography to continue what was covered in the biography of Robert Creeley from a few years back? In this short work, Bartlett focuses on the complications of discussing and not discussing Eigner’s writing in relation to the fact that he lived with cerebral palsy, something that a number of his friends, commentators and reviewers seemed to find uncomfortable, even if the author himself didn’t seem to.

The question then becomes how to talk about the poet’s work without stressing CP too much. Eigner’s biography is interesting, yes. But what is more interesting is how his body informs the work. A poet’s corporeal condition always informs his or her writing, but in the work of a poet with CP, the connection to the poetic movement is laid bare, and (due in no small part to the simple difficulties of navigating an “abled” world) even intensified. This can be a cause for excitement—or is a cause for excitement in the case of Eigner. Particularly because Eigner’s poems were typed before computers, one can see the skeleton, the underpinnings, of the connection between soul/body/breath/poem.

The conversation reminds me of a performance I saw in Ottawa through Louis Cabri and Rob Manery’s N400 Reading Series by British sound poet Aaron Williamson, a writer who is deaf. To be able to perform, he had to do an hour’s worth of vocal exercises beforehand, and the act of performing sound poetry became as much a physical act as anything else. How could it not?

I am very interested in seeing what becomes of this project.

Brooklyn NY: From nonprofit art and publishing collective Ugly Ducking Presse come two new gracefully-designed chapbooks: Ernst Herbeck’s Everyone Has A Mouth (2012), translated from the German by Gary Sullivan, with contributions from Oya Ataman and Ekkehard Knörer, and Sandra Liu’s On Poems On (2012). I’m fascinated by Herbeck’s Everyone Has A Mouth, apparently the first collection of the late Austrian writer (1920-1991) to appear in English in the United States. As Sullivan writes his short but compelling introduction:

While working in a munitions factory in 1940, Herbeck reported the feeling of animals or other people—often a girl—invading his body, controlling his thoughts and actions. He was briefly institutionalized, released, and later served for half a year in the military. He was hospitalized again in 1945 and forced to endure shock treatment. He spent the rest of his adult life in mental institutions, most of it at the Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic near Vienna.

In the fall of 1960, the psychologist and writer Dr. Leo Navratil (1921-2006), head clinician at Maria Gugging and a promoter of art brut, met with Herbeck for the first time. Wanting to provide the patient with an outlet for personal expression, Navratil gave Herbeck a blank postcard-sized piece of Bristol board and a ballpoint pen ad asked him to write something on the subject of “morning.” After a period of consideration, Herbeck wrote the first poem in the present collection.

Navratil was struck by the results and continued to meet with Herbeck, each time prompting him to write another poem, until the poet’s death 31 years later on September 11, 1991.

For about a half-decade, I ran weekly poetry workshops through Jack Purcell Community Centre for people living with mental illness, and there are qualities here I recognize from the poems presented during those days. There is a quiet, subtle essentialness to these poems, if not a gentle urgency. Although I’m not sure why the translations are presented so gracefully throughout the small collection, yet the originals appear en masse at the back in a much smaller font, sometimes three to  a page?

Yellow

Yellow is the sand of the earth

Yellow is the color of the bronze forests.

Yellow is the hearts of flowers.

Yellow are the asters.

Yellow is the meadow. of money.

The franc is yellow. — brunette.

i have seen a yellow franc.

yellow is for example my pencil. (Ernst Herbeck)

Seemingly a first chapbook by Sandra Liu, On Poems On is constructed out of a series of meditations on light, and its absence. An uneven little book, some of the pieces are tight, and some meander; her strength comes from the tight lines, such as in the poem “Take a look at this,” holding a line break as deliberately as a thought.

Take a look at this

The lyre of clothesline outside my window

vibrates slightly, silently. Typhoon #3 calmed.

The large white and crinkles shut in the window

across from me, probably a one-block distance away, billows;

rests; billows. A plastic bag; an apron, maybe a skirt;

a plastic bag. My glass acts like it’s melting.

An action figure in a floral print housedress

walks away from the market. Grocery bags included.

Headlights at sunset, doesn’t seem to apply to boats.

Fast cars pass the chinks between buildings.

A burst of kitchen steam. A flickering tv.

A woman, another one, a granddad moving around.

A t-shirt on a hanger drying inside.

A billowing apron hung out. (Sandra Liu)

Grand Rapids, MI: From horse less press comes another new chapbook, this one from Seattle poet and musician Rebecca Loudon, her TRISM (2012), a prose-poem sequence that weaves through a narrative of bears and the divine. I’d be interested to hear some of her thinking behind such a sequence. Is this a Victorian western about bears, or something entirely other? Exactly what is the story, here?

The girls were named Alice the boys were named Jack. Their room was a wheel on a ship. Approach cautiously. Rouge was the place they looked for. Played wounded in battle. Trism Bear scouted the courtyard. Bears have no patience with rhetoric. Drank up felt the beer rise. Alices disappeared in the past making police work difficult. Took care at the conference of birds plague masks unguents curious recipes. Alices lowered the shawls from their foreheads under the influence of pebbles. Jacks leapt to their feet. Safety’s luxury came late. Broken glass on the Marilyn Shrine oranges and pine a candle made from human fat. The moon was down but there was enough light for horses to ford the river. Cherished a secret grudge against breathing machines. Did not let Trism Bear hear. Alices and Jacks were homeless and waiting for food. Desolation Point. The difficult miracle of anvil wince and shit. They were what was found there.

eleven eleven #13

There was no hope

that a reading

customer could

leave this thick and

cold silence. She

shivered and rose

again looking

to go for coal.

She put water

once in the hot

water bottle

which could not sing

any more while

the new she-cat

slept in its fur

behind the stove.

Egoistic

particulars

raised their eyes to

look across the

old window prints

of falling snow –

the street had turned

completely white.

Alone, she crossed

her happy arms

desiccated

upon her chest,

and put her nose

outside to re-

cord the world of

whole spectacle. (Victor Coleman, “ivH 58 [coda]”)

The most startling thing about the thirteenth volume of the bi-annual eleven eleven: A Journal of Literature and Art (San Francisco CA: 2012) might be in the inclusion of new poems by Toronto poet Victor Coleman, a writer who rarely (it seems) appears in trade journals (although, as I learn through Coleman’s bio, a chapbook of this work appears or has appeared this year with Toronto’s BookThug). I suspect the inclusion of work by Michael Boughn, a writer who co-edits and co-conspires with Coleman (including co-editing the recent University of California Press edition of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book), might have something to do with that. Possibly. But either poet’s work is worth more than the price of admission, and I wonder what the late John Newlove might have thought about Boughn’s poem in this issue, the odd, hilarious and marvelous “Doukhobor Butts”? The piece begins:

The truth is often saggy, naked, dimpled

in ways unsuspecting youths from the desert

intersect with a kind of stunned but vague

recognition that north is more direction

than most needles can tell. Is it

the condition that wreaks or the havoc

that conditions? The flames bear confusion

into the thick of alien’s sudden

illumination. […]

For the two hundred and fifty-plus pages of the journal, I’m a bit surprised at the sheer amount of writers I’ve not previously heard of, a wide range of magnificent work by such as John Pluecker, Floyd Salas, Lee-Ann Roripaugh, Judy Roitman, Eugene Rico and Clay Matthews, all new discoveries, thanks to this issue. This is the benefit, I suppose, of a journal that doesn’t consider the writers they publish for another issue or three. And the bee images by Rebecca Szeto, “from the ongoing series Traces: Daily Meditations on Just Beeing,” are quite stunning. Otherwise, it’s good to see new work by familiar names such as Sarah Rosenthal, françois luong, and Rebecca Loudon (a recent discovery).

from Lizard

Mostly eats the living.

On account of her

eyes. They see what

moves. She stalks

the world nude, I

want to say reveals

the world’s nudity.

Want to say, we’re

all that emperor.

That lonely thing

with mirrors (Sarah Rosenthal)

Another particular highlight was the interview Peta Rake conducted with Newfoundland-based photographer/performance artist Kay Burns, and her work The Other, a series of staged photographs of the artist as female historical figures who lived their lives as men. Might this be a touring work, perhaps? As Rake introduces the interview:

Dress is an exploration of not only self, but of the other. Enacting these alternate identities has become a process of discovery for performance based artist Kay Burns. The women Burns researched and portrayed in her project, The Other, made a “pragmatic decision to dress as men in order to move forward in a career path that would have been unacceptable for women at that time.” And the women have such varieties of career; Margaret Ann Bulkley as the military doctor and surgeon Dr. James Barry; Mary Charlene Parkhurst as the stagecoach driver for Wells Fargo Charley Parkhurst; Charlotte O’Leary as the zoo keeper and bear trainer Charlie O’Leary. What becomes integral to Burns’ project is that the women she seeks to re-inhabit do not implement male dress as one-off masquerade, but that they had lived their entire adult lives as men, with their female genders only revealed posthumously.