12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Campbell

Sarah Campbell's recent books include We Used to Be Generals (2014) and Everything We Could Ask For (2010). Her literary criticism has appeared in Jacket 2, Arizona Quarterly, and The Golden Handcuffs Review. Radio pieces have aired on WNYC and as podcasts for the Poetry Foundation.

10 questions, answered

1. The work

Seven years ago, the proportions of my poetry began changing: almost overnight, everything got shorter. As this minimalism set in, I increasingly confined myself to a limited vocabulary. We Used to Be Generals continues in the confines of this particular "condensary" (to borrow from Niedecker).

Until I feel I'm not learning from it anymore, I’ll continue to work with this mode. It's still generative and challenging, even as it becomes increasingly familiar. It feels a bit like a relationship, living this long with a form and focus.

In the past year, I've also been playing around with different methods, using more direct collage and appropriation methods for longer series poems--and having fun being more playful and grabby.

6. Concerns

In this book, I'm interested in how the individual proceeds with the inheritance of the “generals” that used to be. The "used to be" registers in oblique snapshots in the poems: the friendship that rescues and then ebbs, expeditions to far-flung places, the “back to back” grind of one person and their relation to the company they keep/work for. Also, it’s a bit about aging and the deaths that come before dying.

What else? A person’s relation to him/herself, which is, if not epic, then at least the longest relationship from which there’s no “breaking up.” By rotating the cast of personal pronouns, I want to unfix the “I” so that it doesn't anchor the speeches, no matter how specific they sound. I understand self-expression as composite, uncertain, stolen, and shared.

7. The writer and culture

Use the poem as a kind of tool or machine for zooming in and out, for measuring and focusing on things we otherwise can't or don't see. As a goal, poems nudge, poke, or elsewise elbow the reader to figure something out, using that poem-machine. At best, the experience of reading (working over/with) the poem helps the audience see or think something the writer herself didn't imagine. The poem becomes more a part of the world (of culture) when it changes someone or something--even if just for a moment.

9. Advice

My friend Samina went to a swimming camp last summer. They told her, "Focus on the next stroke and make it a good one." That's advice I can use every day.

12. Inspiration

Walks, trips, a change of scenery. 

Reading, even without aim or conclusion.

Great writing inspires, of course. For instance, recently was reading Pattie McCarthy's book, marybones-- just a few pages in, McCarthy's poetry made me want to pick a pen, got me thinking about returning to a history-based project I'd thought about ages ago, but never got off the ground.

Listening to writers, artists, and historians talk about their own fixations and research almost always makes me want to get to work.

Encountering un-great or ill-conceived or almost-there-but-not-quite works can inspire me too, in a different way. When I can see the gaps or bulks in other work, I feel driven to go make something tighter (even if totally different). Deconstructing things makes me then want to go build something.

15. Important writer

Henry James is like home. I go to him, go back to him, and keep on calling.  For his acrobatic writing, his playfulness, his wonderful convolutions, his elaborate architectures, fussy fastidiousness, and sly humor--and a well-sustained curiosity about people's minds related to but also marvelously different from his brother William's. For all our differences in space and time and culture, I feel he really gets people in a way I want to too, and sometimes do. He was a watcher--and what an eye he has for what is idiosyncratic and shared, disguised and also gleaming in people's behavior.

16. What I would like to do

Take a really long walk-- several weeks long.

17. Other occupation

Museum curator

19. Last great book

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

20. Current work

A conceptual series poem called "Space from Space, or: How to See" lifting language from the color keys for NASA's satellite images of Earth. While thinking about the Nazca Lines carved ~ 400 AD into the Peruvian desert, biomorphs and geoglphys arguably best seen from high above, still visible today.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: early September, 2014

Summer turns to fall, and we start thinking about fall events, including the ottawa small press book fair, which turns TWENTY YEARS OLD with our event on November 8. How can twenty years have already passed? Madness. And of course, watch for my double book launch on September 25th at RailRoad, as well as the launch of the three fall Chaudiere Books titles (by Roland Prevost, Amanda Earl and Monty Reid) in October at the Ottawa International Writers Festival!

And Christine returns to work the same week as the small press fair, which means I’m home with baby Rose full-time. Will there be less of me here? Only time, I suppose, will know for sure.

Keep your eyes on the Chaudiere Books Indiegogo! It ends mid-month, and there are still plenty of amazing perks that have yet to be picked up. Christine McNair’s bookbinding workshop? An entire run of the long poem magazine STANZAS? The John Newlove documentary? And books, books, books…

Austin TX: I’m intrigued by the compact poems in Sarah Campbell’s new title, we used to be generals (Austin TX: further other book works, 2014). The author of Everything We Could Ask For (Little Red Leaves Press, 2010), the former Buffalo resident and editor/founder of P-QUEUE has collected some fifty short, sharp poems that turn and defy expectation, providing meditative twists and cognitive twirls.

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN

Enough was never enough

Hours, barbaric and blooming

The hole of it

All that waiting around

There is the loveliest sense of smallness to these poems, carved pieces of wood and glass that Campbell has crafted over a long period, some composed with a remarkable smoothness, and others, with a deliberate rough quality. Some even have a flavour of the surreal to them, breaking any sense of expectation, turning the poem slightly on its side.

THE GREATEST OF ALL GREAT

We saw our plans

Where they would have been

Had we not been still living

Mt. Pleasant ON: poet and publisher Kemeny Babineau’s new offering is the chapbook A Poem of Days (2014). Produced as “A cycle of journal entries” from January 7, 2013 to January 15, 2014, and subtitled “(for Nelson and you” (with the Nelson referred to as poet and bookseller Nelson Ball), Babineau sketches out a series of short journal poem/entries that accumulate into the small space of a year, writing out his own version of the poetic “day book” done in the past by such as Gil McElroy, Robert Creeley and others.

What is

the social value in this

:

Solitary musings

made quietly public?

The poems are short, self-contained and sharp, yet each seem to lean into each other in sequence, suggesting the sketches were constructed very much as a loosely-formed suite. One day follows another, and the moments Babineau chooses to highlight are very much influenced by Ball’s own work, as Babineau moves through single points, the significant pause, and an engagement with nature.

Sky, penciled in

Then sun, a clean

White eraser

If such appeals, Cameron Anstee also reviewed Babineau’s chapbook over at his own blog, offering some extended insight into Babineau’s published ouvre.