Elizabeth Marie Young, An Inventory of Almost Everything

 

12 Strange Facts About Lobsters

Tell me one fact about Kentucky
Two facts about yourself
Three facts about Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Four facts about Janet Jackson
Five facts about the Victorian Era
Six facts about koalas
Seven facts about mermaids and August-born babies
Eight facts about earthquakes, Edgar Allen Poe and Usain Bolt
Nine facts about Saving Private Ryan
Ten facts about diet soda
Eleven facts about how deep breathing can hack
    the vagus nerve
And twelve facts about lobsters

The second full-length poetry title from Boston poet Elizabeth Marie Young is An Inventory of Almost Everything (Boston MA: Subpress, 2026), a collection that follows Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (Fence Books, 2009) as well as her monograph on Catullan (and Roman) translation Translation as Muse (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), and a couple of chapbooks [including this one I reviewed last year, a title that does seem to have been absorbed into this current collection]. Assembled as a book-length suite of extended lyrics, the poems of An Inventory of Almost Everything work to explore and articulate a minutae of accumulation, cataloguing an array of everyday chaos into a kind of order. “Let’s learn the language of flowers / Let’s get stoned / Let’s live in the night hours in the company of corpses,” begins the poem “We Who Are About to Die Salute You,” “eluding our psychic censors / Let’s work some homegrown magic / Let’s work some miracles with the fluidity of gender [.]” Borrowing as her poem’s title what was rumoured to have been said by Roman gladiators to their emperor, she instead maps out a constellation of empathic growth, ways in which one might seek foundation as an empathic human, able to better function within the larger framework of human interaction, society and civilization itself. There are numerous ways poets over the years have attempted to articulate for themselves how best to be, or become, but this title is curious for the purposeful way the author collects such a range of unwieldly, world-ending and stressful narrative threads into such thoughtful weaves, offering both instruction and solace. As the poem “The Seven Characteristics of Living Things” provides:

We began living side by side, then divided into sponges,
various types of worms, jellyfish and their relatives, insects,
spiders, crabs, shrimp, sea anemones, trilobites, corals,
various jawless fish, bottom-dwelling filter feeders. 

Oxygen turned iron to rush that sank to the seafloor,
producing banded iron formation. 

The earth once more froze over.

We wanted it documented in a central database – the voices
that had spoken, which ones required touch to flourish,
which ones spent their lives in absolute darkness, moving
slowly through that darkness without knowing why. 

We wanted crystals, fire, snow, and other things
that lacked the breath of life.

“You would think it’s impossible. It’s not.” she writes, as part of the sequence “The Seven Characteristics of Living Things,” “You look at the leopards hauling their kill into the branches. / They too would probably rather quit than be challenged to change.” There is such delicate detail to her lyric, one thought or phrase placed carefully against another. The collection is, as the title informs, an inventory, a purposefully-crafted sequence of moments clustered, ordered and catalogued. “How dare you take what isn’t yours? // It was the easiest thing in the world. // I took what the universe gave me.” she writes, to close the three page accumulation “Don’t You Love Being Alive?” The poems offer a particular kind of expansiveness that is quite impressive for so sleek a volume, offering just a hint or suggestion of incompleteness, “almost everything,” and whether or not a matter of beyond her reach or purposefully excluded. “You know who you are.” she concludes, at the end of the descriptive lyric “There Are Two Kinds of People in This World,” or, as in the sequence “349 Things I Don’t Need to Worry About Right Now,” the cluster of repetition, a mantra repeated four-fold, writing: “This is just a feeling / It does not control me.” Throughout, Young offers a handful of poems composed more overtly as lists, utilizing such as a means through to an end in curious ways, from “11 Things Floating in the Inland Sea That Once Covered Most of North America,” “16 Reasons to Love Yourself,” “12 Things That Don’t Need Sweaters” and “35 Life-Changing Questions to Ask Yourself Today,” a piece that includes “Have you talked to the guy upstairs about all the equipment / malfunctions? // Did you actually just throw that reusable diaper in the trash? // Who are you really? // Why are you scared?”

Nada Gordon, The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015

My review of Nada Gordon's The Sound Princess: Selected Poems 1985-2015 (Brooklyn NY: Subpress Collective, 2024) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. See my review of her chapbook-length selected, The Swing of Things (Subpress, 2022) here.

Ongoing notes: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks: J-T Kelly + Mark Statman,

I’ve been seeing these Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks that Jordan Davis has been producing out of Brooklyn for a while now—see my review of Buck Downs’ GREEDY MAN: selected poems (2023) here and Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things (2022) here—so I’m pleased to see copies of J-T Kelly’s LIKE NOW (2023) and Mark Statman’s CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS (2023) appear at my door.

The chapbook debut by Indianapolis poet and innkeeper J-T Kelly, LIKE NOW, offers an assemblage of short lyric first-person narrative and layered accumulations that sway and play, such as the short poem “Plunder”: “Pomegranate—ripe, / Unbroken— // I, too, hide my heart— / Fruitlessly.” There’s something of a disjointed lyric reminiscent of Canadian poets Stuart Ross, Gary Barwin and Alice Burdick, each composing poems that lean into disconnections, connections and surreal threads and sly humour across the short lyric. I’m curious in how Kelly’s poems form across such narrative disjoints and jumbles, and how these pieces shape themselves not simply through a completed thought run all the way to the end, but one that rests somewhere in the middle, allowing the reader the space through which to complete on their own. I am intrigued by these poems of J-T Kelly.

West

What I said when I was leaving.
Your friends and their boots.
I left it there on the key stand.
The road is dry. But I still think about
standing on the on-ramp outside of Bismarck.
At the mercy of. Sometimes forty-five miles
from a pay phone. I went north because
Zach didn’t listen and had gone south.
He had been picked up and taken to some field.
They tried to set him on fire, but the gasoline
dissolved the adhesive and he broke free.
The wheat so near to harvest must have swayed majestically
as he ran, pain in his eyes, suffocating,
And deciding to finish grad school, which he did.
You, it turns out, consider me to be.
The headlights extend sideways out of the low stalks of winter
    wheat.
The passenger seat holds my fur-lined leather mittens
and your anthology of poetry from The New York school which I
    will not give back.
You can go to hell. I’m going to Seattle.

I hadn’t actually heard of New York-based American writer, poet and translator Mark Statman before seeing this new title, although the acknowledgments of CHICATANAS: SELECTED POEMS offers that he is the author of six poetry collections, two works of prose and has translated collections by Federico García Lorca (with Pablo Medina), José María Hinojosa and Martín Barea Mattos. I’m fascinated by the idea of the chapbook-length selected poems, something Davis has been exploring for some time (there was also the chapbook-length Stuart Ross bilingual Spanish/English ‘selected’ I reviewed recently, published in Argentina), and I would almost think that putting together a chapbook-length selected would be far more challenging than attempting one book-length, even beyond the consideration of weighing the possibility of ‘best’ against potential ‘representative of this author’s work,’ etcetera. I’m curious as to how the poems in this collection might be representative of Statman’s larger canvas of writing, offering first-person lyric musings via hesitation, soft and slow unfolding of narration. There’s a slowness here his lines and breaks require, both firm and thoughtful, never in any particular hurry, because you’ll get there in the end, either way, whether losing a poem through a young woman’s accent (“the disappearance of the poem”) or a piece on the death of Kenneth Koch, that opens the collection, “Kenneth’s Death,” that begins: “he’s dead and / I still don’t believe: / years later / I’m walking someplace / and I’ll think / this is something / I’ll tell him / when he gets back / when he gets back / as though where Kenneth’s gone / is simply too far away / to telephone or / send a postcard [.]”

chicatanas

some mysteries have
to be that way
Alma asked me yesterday
if I was going to
the casita today
was I going to harvest
our chicatanas
giant ants from
whose toasted bodies
legs and heads removed
Alma makes a
sharp spicy salsa
the chicatanas only come out
once a year and every year
since we bought the
casita we’ve had them
they emerge before dawn
the ground wet it’s either
on the 24^th or 25^th of
every June St. John’s Day
I ask Alma
but how do you know
which day 24, 25 and she
smiles and says because
the morning after
the dawn fills with
small white butterflies

 

Ongoing notes: even later March, 2023: Maureen Scott Harris + Buck Downs,

Nice that folk have started sending me chapbooks again; why do so few publisher send along chapbooks? I’m looking at you, various (other) publishers I’ve already reviewed titles by. 

Toronto ON: Kirby’s knife|fork|book really does produce some elegant-looking titles, and one of their latest is a chapbook by Toronto-based poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris, her More Than One Homage (2022). This small collection is halved through a handful of poems assembled from elements of her great-uncle Will’s diaries alongside a handful of poems composed in homage to other writers and/or their works. As she offers in her notes: “My great-uncle Will was born in 1891. I remember he had large hands, calloused and dirt-stained, and a large laugh. He was a farmer, and my favourite person in the world when I was eight or nine. He wore big boots, denim overalls, long-sleeved workshirts, and a train engineer’s cap. He laughed a lot, sitting at the kitchen table, or leaning, foot up on the running board of a neighbour’s truck. […] ‘Will’s Diaries’ arose as an interaction between the diaries themselves and Robert Kroetch’s essays and poems. The italicized lines in ‘How to begin’ and ‘Wood (Winter)’ are Kroetsch’s own words, lifted mostly from his essays.” Her poems from the diaries do have the feel of some of those early Kroetsch long poems, whether The Ledger (1975) or Seed Catalogue (1977) (both of which are reprinted in full in Completed Field Notes: The Long Poems of Robert Kroetsch, published by The University of Alberta Press in 2000), offering a kind of collage of archive and sketched-out notes through accumulated fragment. Writing out her own kind of ledger, she offers a clear cadence of moments and movements through this lyric assemblage. As part of her poem “Will’s Diaries: Wood (Winter)” writes:

each morning      a blank page
a white page
see him     swaddled          in coat
& steam              from his own breath

the days keep going on
conversations
chores
            chores
                        chores
                                    chores

fix stable          fetch hay
milk cows        fetch ice
chop oats         fetch flour
kill pigs            fix hen house
feed & water the stock

(where did the water come from
in frozen winter? that pump
in the yard, its wooden handle
the well, surely frozen too)

There’s such a concrete scene articulated through those short bursts, and I’m intrigued by these homages, these experiments, offering poems for and through her late great-uncle, and similarly, for and through and from poets including Philip Whalen, Sei Shonagon and Lyn Hejinian. The homages, as much as her poems from her great-uncle’s diaries, are wonderfully responsive, allowing the influence and rhythms of her sources to infuse themselves across her lines in a really lovely way. Her poems respond as much as they echo; and echo, as much as they provide homage. As the third of the three-stanza poem “One day before the equinox, or, Walking to work I see,” subtitled “After Lyn Hejinian,” writes:

The trees firmly leaning are not waiting for spring but absorbed busy in manufacturing what will seasonably occur. Reasonably occur. When the goose crossed my field of vision I was musing rabbit with nose twitching, Rabbit stood upright in a field (the grass was dry, beige, bent at the tips) front paws hanging limp, listening and comic peering round one ear flopped over (bent at the tip). I raised my eyes from the field of grass to the field of bare tree branches and beyond that the field of clouded sky. My glance fell upon the long-necked bird at first unknown. The goose seized my eye and carried it along the curve of its slow flight till it was obscured by the field of rooftops or lost in the field of bare tree branches. Even a squint did not clarify the blurred disappearing. I smiled through and kept walking. The cardinals wheeted. As they had for some time.

Brooklyn NY/Washington DC: Given my familiarity with Washington D.C. poet Buck Down’s work over the years, having produced his chapbooks Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017) and Another Tricky Day (2020) through above/ground press, as well as working through a couple of his collections—Unintended Empire: 1989-2012 (Baltimore MD: Furniture Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and OPEN CONTAINER (Washington DC: privately printed, 2019) [see my review of such here]—I was curious to see what Jordan Davis had put together for Downs’ chapbook-length GREEDY MAN: selected poems (Brooklyn NY: Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, 2023). Since my familiarity with Downs’ extensive publishing history only exists across a relatively shorter span, I would have been curious to see a bibliography of where (and when) the thirty-two poems assembled here had been selected from. I know I’ve compared Downs’ work in the past to that of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert (for a kind of extended, documentary-style ongoingness), or even that of New York School poet Frank O’Hara (for the “I did this, I did that-isms), but there’s something about the overview of this particular collection that paints instead a portrait of a poet comparable to a more pessimistic, even paranoid, version of the surrealisms of American poet Ron Padgett or Canadian poet Stuart Ross. As the poem “MYSELF CONTAINS MULTITUDES” reads in full: “and some / of these fuckers / have got to go [.]” The poems that sit mid-point and beyond in the collection are the structures I’ve become familiar with through Downs’ ongoing work—short bursts that wend across the page through an accumulation of short phrase-lines—so it is interesting to see the left-justification of some of these presumably-earlier poems, such as this:

TURN OFF THE PICKLE

there is a lot
of laughter going
on among the
introductions

beneath the waves
there could be
a steady under
current       as in
the realization
that the boy wonder
is a regis
tered trademark

I found a magic
vessel on the stone
beach and liquor
there inside it I knew
could restore me
to what I had once
been and so I took
off the plastic lid
and poured it in
the water

Ongoing notes: late March, 2023: Amanda Earl + Nada Gordon,

I can’t believe you’ve been missing out on our thirteenth annual VERSeFest: you know you can stream each of our events for free, yes? Whether live or archived? There’s so much going on!

Ottawa ON/Montreal QC: From James Hawes’ Turret House Press comes Ottawa poet Amanda Earl’s latest chapbook, Fear of Elevators (2023). Given how much of her past few years have featured heavily on producing visual works, most of which is part of her work-in-progress “The Vispo Bible,” it is good to see Earl still exploring ideas through text as well. Working through her anxieties around elevators, living on the nineteenth floor of a downtown Ottawa apartment building, her introduction to the collection begins: “Fear of Elevators began when the elevators in my building were being repaired and replaced.” Constructed as a collage of prose—essay, fiction, fairy tale, archive, memoir—and poetry, from the narrative lyric to the visual. Earl playfully moves back and forth with ease across fragments and directions, and even offers her own reworking of Robert Frost’s infamous poem “The Road Not Taken” (first published, as I’m sure you know full well, in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic) through her poem, “The Elevator Not Taken.” She manages to echo the cadence and rhythms of Frost’s piece quite well, and the playfulness of this particular poem is rather delightful, as the first half reads: “Two elevators fell and rose in a highrise. / And glad I could not travel both. / And be one traveler, long I stood. / And looked up at once as high as I could. / To where it lurked on the top floor. / Then took the other, as just as dangerous. / But having perhaps the more expedient claim, / because it had arrived and I had to pee. / Though as for that elevator passing / there was a worn down as the other, / really about the same.”

There is something curious about the way Earl utilizes collage for this particular item, furthering a structure she’s been employing for a while now, simultaneously pencilling a through-line across what might be seen as a scattershot of layered sections, one on top of each other. The effect is interesting, and one she’s explored for some time, with varying degrees of success. It is interesting to see her expand the possibilities of chapbook-length structure; might this be something eventually book-length as well?

In the Roppongi Hills complex in Tokyo, Japan there have been 32 accidents involving the revolving door since the building’s opening in April. A six year old boy was killed. Seven people became stuck in the revolving doors & three had to be taken to the hospital by ambulance for treatment after suffering serious injuries. The company also said 20 accidents have occurred involving smaller, hand-pushed revolving doors. The sensor doesn’t activate at first & the door continues to revolve for at least 25 centimetres. Mori Building is Japan’s biggest private developer. Sanwa shutter fell 14 yen, or 2.2 percent to 619, on Friday.

Evil revolving door tries to kill clueless innocent people! Looks like someone tries to enter the wrong way from the left? Is this a hit and run? Or is the wind blowing too fast? The glass shattered perfectly fine, like safety glass is supposed to: Instead of large dangerous pieces of glass which could kill, safety glass breaks into tiny pieces which won’t do as much damage.

Brooklyn NY: For a while now, Brooklyn poet Jordan Davis has been producing chapbook-length volumes of selected poems, one of the latest is by Brooklyn-based American poet Nada Gordon, her The Swing of Things (Subpress, 2022). This is the first of Gordon’s works I’ve encountered, so I’m unaware of the larger scope or scale of her work, so this “remix” is a curious introduction, and one reminiscent of how Phil Hall reworked selected scraps to assemble his own critical “selected poem,” Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015) [see my write-up on such here]. The chapbook-length poem “The Swing of Things” is structured through untitled sections (as well as an array of photographs, some of which suggest their own collage-works), short bursts that exist across each page; some of which group, or even cluster, allowing for its own kind of collage-work possibility. Her visuals and text both suggest the familiar but one that is twisted, turned and shaped into what is unerringly new, and some of which is just enough to unsettle, question or even simply wonder. Gordon’s poems hold a delightful heft, subtle in its play and dark corners, writing from both the shadow and the sudden light.

I believe in meerkats –
Where’re you from, you long skinny
curious dark-eyed thing?

 

If I fall into the hole of this poem
will you pull me out?
It’s a hairy catastrophe,

 

like putting HOT PINK PAINT
on an apocalyptic feeling, stinking a little
of the would-be sublime

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Jaramillo

Laura Jaramillo is a poet and critic from Queens, New York living in Durham, North Carolina. Her books include Material Girl (subpress, 2012) and Making Water (Futurepoem, 2022). She holds a PhD in critical theory from Duke University. She co-runs the North Carolina-based reading and performance series Paradiso.

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 Material Girl didn’t change my day-to-day life much because I was a broke grad student when it was released and couldn’t do much to get the word out about it, but over time, the book found its audience and connected me to other writers and thinkers who I eventually felt I was writing with and for. Material Girl now feels like a digest of my influences at the time, a very New York School inflected-book about living in New York, montage-y, talk-y poems. I think my new book Making Water tries to make a new form, one that is maybe less inherited and more my own. My poetics up to now have been grounded in geographical place, and I wrote Making Water while living in North Carolina, which is a little bit urban, a little bit rural, and a little bit suburban all at once so I wanted to write something that really reflected the experience of moving through this new swampy viney parking lot-filled landscape. I think there’s an idea from people who live in major cities that moving to the south is giving up on being part of culture, or something, but what I found in living here was that having more time and space for study gave me the capacity for an expansiveness to my writing that I has lacked living in cities. I reflect on this in the new book: “Give it up for space // transmuted into time // By year three // Memory will become // Imagination tall as // loblolly pines

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

When I was teenager, I liked the spoken word tracks on punk and riot grrrl albums, and the emotional screeds in zines, and poetry seemed like the closest form to that so I started writing it. Poetry has always just felt the right amount of flexible for me in the sense that I can use so many different voices and different materials in poetry. And also, poetry never feels unrelated to “non-fiction” to me. There’s a way that a poem has to be “true” to work even if the poem is totally abstract or fictional, and that sense of intuitive truth value has been a guiding principle in my writing across genres. Fiction, on the hand, has just always seemed like an impossible amount of infrastructure to manage.

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 take notes for years and look for patterns in the notes and those notes congeal into poems. Once a few poems are drafted, I start to poke around and see whether there is a conceptual foundation for a book. Once I feel like I am speaking to a specific set of questions, then some of the poems compose themselves in my head and some are works of obsessive revision. The initial process of shoring up the foundations can take me three to five years and then the end stages of drafting and editing takes a year.

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 am working on a book from the beginning, even when I try to write one-off poems, it almost never works, it always turns into a series and the series expands into a chapbook or a book. I feel that whether I consciously embrace it or not, I am always kind of in the vicinity of the long poem tradition. 

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

I consider readings one of the most valuable tools for editing and shaping my work, both in terms of listening for the parts that are getting the audiences’ attention and where there are disconnects, as well as conversations that spring up after readings. When a reading is organized in a manner that makes readers and listeners feel welcome, they’re one of the rare opportunities for intellectual exchange and connection in what I feel to be an otherwise hyper-atomized U.S. literary landscape. Readings are kind of democratizing because you can’t hide behind prestige or credentials–the audience is with you or they’re not. 

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?

My work is animated by roughly two theoretical concerns which are more like infinitely generative questions that never get fully answered in my work and often overlap. The first question is how can I write sensation when our sensoria are constantly changing through technology, trauma, historical change, etc.? Gender is very central to this aspect of my writing–I am perpetually writing from the porosity of the female body. The second question that I am constantly circling is: how do we sus out reality in a world of images? The problem of images is that there is much pleasure and so much illusion in them, so the question of what the feeling of reality is under those conditions interests me.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I find it interesting that lots of young people still want to be writers despite a vanishing readership for literature and the destruction of literary infrastructures through austerity politics, so there seems to be some drama that the role of “writer” is playing out in the culture, but I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. A great mystery of our time.

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

I have never worked with an outside editor but I would welcome the chance. There is too little editing in contemporary U.S. poetry! Too few critics and too few editors. 

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

“Don’t process it too much”

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to cultural criticism to film/media writing)? What do you see as the appeal?

I wrote poetry first and criticism much later, but learning to write scholarly critical prose and also film criticisms for a newspaper made me a better poet. The act of learning to describe films concisely made me sensitive to how easily visual description becomes overwhelming for the reader. So now when I write poetry, I have an even more urgent sense of “ok, let’s make every word on the page count!” Visual description is both the precursor to any critical observation and the basic unit of building “the world” of the poem, so I am pretty obsessed with this slippage between description, world building, and critique.

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

I only have a set routine when I am very close to being done with a piece of writing. Otherwise, there is no routine to speak of. My writing is sporadic and woven into my day or chunked in however it fits at any given time.

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

Although it’s a bit embarrassing, my high school love of T.S. Eliot endures and whenever I’m stuck, I go back to Eliot, especially “The Wasteland.” 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A specific ratio of gasoline to earth reminds me of one of my former homes, Bogota, where my family is from.

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?

Photography, film, visual art, fashion tend to be at the center of my writing. I grew up in a family of photographers so it was expected that I would also be a photographer but instead I am a visually driven writer. 

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

Though I’ve never thought of becoming a fiction writer, reading fiction is incredibly important to me and to this day the most relaxing thing I can think of is having nothing to do except read a massive nineteenth-century novel. When I was a kid my parents would send me to Colombia to visit relatives every summer and I did nothing but read so the deep absorption in big novels like Jane Eyre, Les Miserables, In Search of Lost Time probably really shaped my sensibilities as a person and as a writer.  

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

I would like to write a multi-volume memoir.

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?

If I wasn’t a writer, I’d be an interior decorator or a make-up artist. 

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

Writing doesn’t cost anything.

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

The two last great books I read were Akilah Oliver’s Flesh Memory: The She Said Dialogues and Karl Larsson’s Form/Force. The last great film I saw was American Honey (2016) by Andrea Arnold.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on several things: a manuscript that will be a diptych with Making Water, tentatively titled Burning Sequence, which is loosely about post-9/11 American culture and the pandemic. I am also working on a book of essays about the decline of Colombian cinema during the War on Drugs. The essays blend my family’s stories, my own experience as a diasporic Colombian, and key moments from Colombian film and television history to narrate how the war psychically shattered the country. I am also writing a suite of bilingual sonnets culled from classical and modern Baroque Spanish-language texts called The Cannibal Sonnets. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Camille Guthrie

Camille Guthrie’s new book is Diamonds (BOA Editions 2021). Her previous books are Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois, In Captivity, and The Master Thief (all from Subpress). Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, Pleiades, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, and Tin House, as well as in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2019 & 2020, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, and Art & Artists: Poems. Guthrie has been awarded the Isabella Gardner fellowship in 2020 from MacDowell and a residency at the Yaddo Foundation. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont. https://camilleguthrie.me

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

There’s something marvelous about having the object of your first book: the thing in your hands that you made. I’m forever grateful to the poet and lawyer Beth Anderson, whom I met at Brown when I was at the MFA writing program, and who chose my book, The Master Thief, for Subpress. It does change your life. Being a poet is an odd thing to be (and a great thing): to say “I have a book” is a lovely thing. My new book DIAMONDS is very different from my first book. Wiser, bolder, whiskery, chatty, more funny and more playful. I haven’t reread my first book for years; it’s like looking at an old photo of oneself, and I’m not at all nostalgic. After I went through a midlife crisis, I want to say something intimate, while still remaining interested in poetic formalities. My new poems are both more raw and more performative.

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

The word “poetry” always seemed to have sparkles about it, and I was pulled to learn whatever I could about it. In high school, I started reading poems seriously—Plath and Sexton, of course—and was hooked. And began writing with earnestness. I first fell in love with novels. I loved my junior high library’s copy of Dune so much that my mother bought it for me. It was transporting. I loved the book itself: its dusty smell smelled of Arrakis! I love novels and read them, teach them, think about them all the time. I guess one has an affinity for one more than the other. The pleasure and difficulty required in the precision and crafting of words on the page compels me to write poems.

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?

Five years seems to be my pattern. I write many drafts and don’t have that much time to write. And, it takes a long time for books to come out! It’s a slow business. I’m not Keats, that Sweetheart of the Ages, so first drafts don’t fall into my lap from the sacred branch of vision. I don’t take a lot of notes anymore. I try to write without thinking too much, trusting myself, letting go of doubts, writing as if not even looking at the page—slant, indirect—so that the final poem appears after many attempts, revisions, additions, cuttings. When I write something formal, such as the sestina “Beautiful Poetry,” which is more like a short story, I work on it for years because I want it to fit the form and yet sound conversational. It’s the same process with free verse poems; I want them to sound as if I’m talking, but they have undergone great revision. Helen Vendler writes about how lightly Shakespeare approaches his beloved subject in sonnet #18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” Shall. Ah, so lovely and seemingly casual. My aesthetic goal is to bring all of my attention and knowledge to form—on light footsteps.

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?

It depends. My first three books were intended to be “books,” with a theme in mind; the first on fairy tales, the second on the Unicorn Tapestries, the third on the art and life of Louise Bourgeois. DIAMONDS does have a tone running through it—that of a woman in a midlife crisis. The book is about all sorts of things: moving to rural Vermont after being a New Yorker; being a parent; looking at paintings; teaching and reading; falling in love; grief and longing. Poems come out of an idea or fact or feeling. Some examples: reading an article about a planet made of pink diamond; seeing the exquisite Vermont moonlight fall on the swing set; deciding that I admire Queen Gertrude in Hamlet more than I like her son now that I’m in my fifties; asking why my students pronounce “Satan” with a soft T in Milton’s Paradise Lost; looking at a painting by John Singer Sargent; realizing how my life would be much worse if I lived during Medieval times. When an idea persists, I write it down, then come back to it and see what happens. I don’t know what I think about it until I write the poem.

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

Oh, I love doing readings, although it does make me anxious beforehand. I’m deeply grateful to have a new book out, but it certainly would have been a lot more fun to be able to give readings in person. And, I miss seeing people. Some of the poems in my new book are funny, and they are hard to read online. I don’t know if those parts are coming through. Who knows? My performance of them improves with an audience. Performativity is a large concern of DIAMONDS—the performance of gender, of love, of domesticity, of duty.

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

I’m often drawn to write about beauty, paintings, gender, sex, family, love, reading, and writing itself. I find writing ekphrastic poetry endlessly interesting; Articulated Lair, my third book, was entirely about Louise Bourgeois. In DIAMONDS, I also wanted to write dramatic monologues; to apostrophize the writers I think of often; and to find a way to engage with “the anxiety of influence” in a way that is more conversational than adversarial.

            I had a lot of questions in DIAMONDS. Why does driving one’s kids to school feel like hell? Is there a hell for people who exaggerate their suffering by comparing things to hell? Why are biographers so rude to Fanny Brawne? What would it be like to date Hieronymus Bosch? How did Madame du Barry rid herself of rivals? What’s the perfect thing to wear to get divorced? Why do some images, like the painting A Young Daughter of the Picts (by Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues) seem alive to me, as if she is walking and talking? What guidance does H.D.’s Trilogy offer, as if a religious text? What are the effects of hyperbole? Are poems an answer to loneliness?

            My current questions are more about living in the country, culpability, clarity, and history. I don’t think I’m a good Modernist, which I’d like to be—like Mina Loy or H.D. I’ve been living in rural Vermont for thirteen years, and I still feel like a city person even though I’m trying. I want to look more carefully at what I see every day—the mountains, the trees, the fox in my yard. Within in the context of the history I’m living in now—the pandemic, climate change, the erosion of democracy, and so on.

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 remember Rosmarie Waldrop, that genius poet, talk about how one’s content follows you even when you try to avoid it and focus your attention on form. Every writer has their own content that they are beholden to. How they choose to share it with the world depends, of course, upon their nature, inclination, style, opportunity, and context. Some writers are suited to and compelled to be public poets. Some are more suited to introversion. I deeply admire the poets who are activists, organizers, editors, administrators, laureates, leaders, anthologists, directors, etc. I do think poets have a role in the “larger culture”! And, there are so many ways to do it. I loved Mary Ruefle’s project in which she mailed 1,000 handwritten poems (by other poets) to people living in Vermont, whom she chose randomly out of a phone book; a project she did in 2021 for her Poet Laureate fellowship for the Academy of American Poets.

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

I haven’t worked with many editors. Usually, with poetry, as you know, you submit a poem and the editor takes it or not. A few editors have made suggestions to me, and that’s been terrific. Jonathan Farmer, editor of At Length, is a marvelous editor. He always helps me make my poems much better. Usually, I rely upon several brilliant, generous girlfriends I have as writing partners to get feedback. These women in my life are golden.

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

A psychiatrist once said to me, in what seemed like an offhand comment, “Much of life is performance.” That wisdom has guided me through many a difficult moment. I often teach Judith Butler in my classes—her thinking about gender and performance has been invaluable to me, clarifying, inspiring. I love this quote from Butler: “The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one’s belief in its necessity and naturalness.” Much of these performances are, of course, daily—to perform being a woman, mother, professor, friend, sister, daughter. Since this new book is very personal and yet dramatic, I have taken the performing of being a writer more seriously, and I try to bring the original energy I felt while writing the poems to my readings.

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

I’m one of those poets who is often also writing a novel, essay, or some sort of prose. Some of my ideas are simply more suited to them. Plotting out a novel is completely fascinating, and although I’ve read tons of novels, I’m still figuring out how to do it. The critical writing I’ve done is a joy: to examine “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or “My Last Duchess,” for example, in Poem Guides I wrote for the Poetry Foundation, were very pleasurable. To read something so closely; to count the sounds in Keats’s ode. What an exquisite person he was! And, Browning is so full of wicked humor. I usually have writing, or voices, running in my head, so these other forms allow me to put them somewhere.

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?

A typical day, lately, begins with making coffee to wake myself up, packing my daughter’s lunch, and driving her to school. I listen to audio books or podcasts about poetry on the way home. I just listened to David Naimon’s engrossing conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop for Between the Covers, and now I’m listening to Lauren Groff’s Matrix. Wow, so fabulous. I’m there for the Medieval nuns, the visions, the labyrinth. A writing day is not typical, but if I have one, I get right into it: coffee, music, work: get at it! I try to put in time and let the ideas take over. I make lists of things to do and follow them. Taking breaks to eat, daydream, do laundry, text a friend. If I put in time every week, ideas or words come to me while I’m doing other things—teaching, parenting, cooking, cleaning. I’m a relentless reviser, so it can take me years to finish a poem. Incremental progress is my strategy. Occasionally, usually in the joyous Spring when Winter finally ends in Vermont, I will be taken over by inspiration and feel like I’m in a daze, in love. My whole self is taken up with an idea, and everything feels charged with electricity. I feel energy pouring down my arms, and my hands long to type. It is most wonderful, and I wish it happened more often.

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

Accustomed now to the parenting life, and life with a job, thank god, I’m good at getting right back into it with the time I have. I don’t feel stalled; I just feel pressed for time. I also love my job teaching at Bennington College, and it’s useful to be thinking about wonderful texts and about writing as a process with my students. Reading, of course, and looking at paintings is always an inspiration for me. While social media can be exhausting or depressing, seeing new poems posted and shared all the time is also exciting. Every week I read some poem shared by a friend or stranger that startles me and reminds me why I love poetry. Yesterday, I read some of Diane Seuss’s new poems, which were breathtaking.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

What?! I am surprised by this question. I do not know. There are so many homes to remember. My childhood home in Seattle. My teen home in Pittsburgh. My apartment in Providence. My apartments in Brooklyn. My first home in rural New York. My current home in rural Vermont. Right now, I would say that the aftershave my boyfriend uses reminds me of home.

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 like what he says. Yes, that’s true. I like to think of the writers I love as companions. Melville, my bosom friend, for example, often runs through my mind; I was driving home from picking up my daughter today and was thinking of that fascinating phrase “that hive of subtlety” from “Benito Cereno.” I am influenced by art, for sure, in particular paintings, and wish I could go to museums more often. Many of the poems in DIAMONDS are about art; there are poems about going to the Clark Institute of Art and looking at paintings by Rembrandt and Sargent; a poem about Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights; about Le Moyne’s A Young Daughter of the Picts. W.J.T. Mitchell’s definition of Ekphrasis appeals to me: “something done to something, with something, by someone.” Incredible. That’s what all poems are, too. Music also comes into the book with star appearances by David Bowie and Björk.

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

H.D., Mina Loy, Emily Dickinson, Nella Larsen, Shakespeare, Lorine Niedecker, Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Miriam Toews, Sei Shōnagon, Milton, Roland Barthes, Melville. There are so many I could go on and on.

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

I would like to publish a novel. I would like to go to Italy!

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?

Oh dear, I think I’m pretty good at teaching. I can’t imagine doing something else. But that’s different from being a writer. It’s a dream to be a writer who can live on one’s publications; that’s not common as a poet. If I “had not been a writer,” I would be a different person. I’d like to think that I would do work for women’s rights. I would have ended up being that strange woman who lives alone in the woods, and people say, Stay away from her. She’s reading and talking to herself.

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

There is no choice. Writing is hard, relentless, absorbing, possessive. When I’m working on a book, I feel bothered by it, “bothered by beauty,” as John Ashbery wrote. “No layoff from this condensary,” as Lorine Niedecker writes. When I’m writing, I’m also at my most happy—being alone and thinking and worrying over words. I often wish I wasn’t a writer; I have a naïve fantasy that I would be happier and calmer if I wasn’t. To have one job. I’m not good at other things, such as playing the flute or singing or surgery, so I’m sticking with poetry.

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

The last great book I read was FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews. Hell yeah! That is book is a force. I loved it with all my heart: its characters, its style, its structure. The last great film I saw is The Apartment, the Billy Wilder film from 1960, which I had never seen. I love Jack Lemmon’s physical comedy, his nervy, earnest, wiggly energy. I loved the pristine secretaries battling for dignity and love within the patriarchal structure of the office. I loved the lightning-fast banter, the comebacks, the Tiffany lamps and Modern art stuck to the wall with pins of his apartment. Most of all, I loved Shirley MacLaine’s performance. Her wholehearted longing, her honest tears, her warm demeanor in the Elevator Operator uniform. I feel like we all still work at Consolidated Life.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a draft of a novel about moving to the country from the city. It involves a bear. I’m also working on some new poems—about a Giant Sloth, the myth of Danaë, and a fungal carpet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;