12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rob Schlegel

Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and January Machine, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Jacket2, New American Writing, The Volta, and elsewhere. With the poet Daniel Poppick, he co-edits The Catenary Press [see the '12 or 20 (small press) questions' here].

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was published the year I moved to Iowa City, where my wife was enrolled in Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. Winning the Colorado Prize gave me the confidence to email Geoffrey G. O'Brien to ask if I could sit in on his course, "The End of the Poem." As a result, my more recent work is engaged with more formal constraints. Before moving to Iowa City, I was a student in Joanna Klink's incredible graduate workshops at the University of Montana, which is where I received my M.FA. Moving from Missoula to Iowa City is like being traded from the Los Angeles Dodgers to the Boston Red Sox. You move from one rich and complex poetry culture to another. Despite their relative isolation, Missoula and Iowa City are two of the most fertile (feral) creative communities in the country.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My father is a painter and sculptor. As a teenager I used to sit in the passenger seat of his car while he made sketches of cows in fields west of Portland, Oregon. Often we’d be listening to music. One day my father played "Desolation Row" from Highway 61 Revisited. I sat stupid for eleven minutes, rewound the tape and listened again. A few days later my father and I were in Music Millennium and I found Dylan's The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, (1961-1991). I went home and listened to "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie," on repeat for three straight hours. I realized then that the real work for me is the cultivation of the soul by way of the imagination and intellect.

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?
Except on very rare occasions the “final” poem looks nothing like the original draft. Over half the time I spend "writing," is actually revising. What is a final draft, anyway? My recent poems incorporate a bit of research, so I've been keeping a significant number of notes while also developing some sense of the poem's ark.

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?
About six months ago, I woke up with this rattling around in my ear: "Mabel get your beanie on! It's February 3rd!" Who is Mabel? Where did she come? No idea, but the lines spawned a poem called "Taurus Teez," which is about a family of t-shirt designers selling shirts out of the back of their Taurus. More recently, I woke up with this in my head: "Me and Baryshnikov are high and wrecking the house." The day before, the photographer and bookmaker David Schulz told me about how Baryshnikov's real-life daughter briefly attended the college where I currently teach. Dave was driving me up a very steep gravel road (no guardrails) and my palms were sweating. This poem developed into a dramatic monologue told from the perspective of an obsessed Baryshnikov fan that equates the dancer with Saint Roland, the patron Saint of Riga, Latvia (Baryshnikov's birthplace). Both of these poems have become part of a larger sequence that is a loose reimagining of Flaubert’s “The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitator.”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
One of my favorite readings was at Studio One in Oakland. It was the last of a series of readings I gave after my first book was published. That night, I fell asleep in Suzanne Dyckman's guest bedroom, feeling weirdly anxious at the prospect of ever writing poetry again. Reading “finished” work somehow distances me from the initial act of writing. That feeling of starting something new never feels more impossible than immediately after reading my own poems. 

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?
Right now I am interested in how ekphrastic writing might exist alongside the dramatic monologue (Robert Browning) while at the same time expanding to include room for loose narratives. New poems are trying to fuse the voices of artists and saints. One of the most recent monologues fuses the voices of the poet and filmmaker Nick Twemlow and Saint Julian the Hospitaller, who is the patron saint of Carnival workers. The haunting after-effect of Nick’s short films is uncannily similar to the bizarre horror play (or helljoy) that seeps from the grimy machination and flesh of the midway. But there are so many other theoretical questions! Some of my favorites are continually raised and addressed at The Claudius App; The Volta; Boston Review; Montevidayo. The most interesting questions are asked by poets/artists/writers who might not have any idea of what is going to happen next in their process, which is terrifying because if they are truly giving in to the moment—utterly open and vulnerable—haven’t they lost themselves! How can they know who are they are, or where they are? To me this is the real light inside any creative act. The light that exists in becoming (for now).

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?
When I think about my role in the "larger culture," I feel like crawling into a sleeping bag and hiding in a basement somewhere in eastern Montana. I feel this way because I am convinced I'll never have a better response to this question than the one Franco Loi provides when he says: "What a poet offers, in time, is the ongoing proposal of a person who is outside all the cultural representations. The official culture of a city, of a nation, is put into crisis by poetry. From the poet's speech the city enhances the vision of itself and of its own social and conceptual motivations, it remembers in a renewed way the figure and nature of what it is to be human. I mean by this that a society, in the highest sense of the word, is that which listens to the poet. Accepting poetry is accepting the different, the other. Thus the openness of poetry toward the city is the openness toward the possible, toward the unknown and the infinite that's above it." But just when Loi gets me thinking about the city, my friend Brandon Shimoda gets me rethinking the entire concept of "city," and the poet's role in this “place” that might not even exist. In a recent interview at BOMBLOG, Brandon says, "I think that in the United States city is where people go when they realize, consciously or not, that they don’t trust the American experiment and that they want, rather, to climb back into the womb of the King. Unless they were born there, in the womb, which has, in many instances, been yanked out and discarded, or otherwise turned inside out. This is in the guise of great trust in the American experiment and a belief that it is centralized in city. This is not true of all cities or people, but there is a general loss of faith in country. And country is where people go when they have lost faith in city." I wonder how John Clare would answer this question. Ashbery? Marianne Moore?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
So far most of the editors I’ve worked with haven’t necessarily suggested major revisions. Stephanie G'Schwind, editor for the Center for Literary Publishing, is remarkably enthusiastic and a tireless advocate for contemporary poetry. Most recently I’ve worked with Ryan Murphy and Sally Ball at Four Way. They are equally brilliant and helpful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
One night Robyn Schiff told me that one of the most memorable pieces of advice she received from Jorie Graham was that she should have a baby, and collect sky miles. Also, this, or something like it, from James Schuyler: "It's time to pull up the flowers and plant something more difficult to grow." Which is what I tell myself when/if the creative process starts to feel too comfortable or predictable.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
My own poetry seems constantly informed by what I’m reading. I’m especially influenced by poetry that I’ve reviewed. When I was living in Missoula I wrote a review of Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts (Compleat). It was summer. I read the book when I was car camping in the Bitterroot Valley. Each night I fell asleep in this anxiously verbose state of mind (like I was drowning in a language I knew, but that was nonetheless overwhelming). When I finally returned home it was hard for me to speak simple sentences. Silliman’s poetry forced me to reconsider my own very practical relationship with language. It was like having a deep-tissue massage on my tongue/brain/ear: a painful process, but worth it in the end. Engaging so deeply with that book changed the way I thought about syntax, and it changed the way I thought about subjects, verbs and nouns.

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 wish it began with an hour of reading Joan Didion. But it doesn't. Most mornings I wake up when my 3 year old crawls into bed with me. A few minutes later I’m preparing two bowls of Grandpola (my grandfather’s recipe) with yogurt and blueberries from my father's garden in Oregon. Then we sit at the kitchen table and eat. Through the window we'll often see the neighbor’s cat pass by on the sidewalk. After that, I bike my son to his preschool, then there is maybe a little time for Didion before I teach.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Eliot said that the poet's mind is “a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." I'm hesitant to force the particles into something too soon, lest I develop a shitty compound. So I generally don't look to return anywhere for "inspiration". For me, not writing actually feels necessary for me to refuel. At some point when I least expect it the tank overflows.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I like your style. Though I have to say I'm having difficulty thinking of a fragrance. My mother's breath? When I think about "home," I think of my friend Jeremy Abarno. His family owned Sunset Grove, a nine hole, rural golf course surrounded by alfalfa, corn and strawberry fields. Lots of gophers. In junior high, Jeremy and I walked the empty course, looking for lost balls we would hope to sell back to the golfers, who, by this point were getting sauced in the clubhouse. Hunting for the balls, I’d wear my yellow Sony Walkman and listen to Nirvana, R.E.M. and sometimes the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid. Every once in a while, when the batteries in my Walkman died, I'd hear this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvAUgFb1cLY

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?
Yes. Several poems in January Machine are indebted to musicians like David Berman, Bonny Prince Billy, Smog, The National, and Sigur Ros.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Whitman, Oppen, Bishop, Plath, Kafka, Borges, Beckett, Flaubert; Stevens, Stafford, Raul Zurita, Marilynne Robinson, DeLillo, Nathalie Stephens, Lydia Davis, Dana Ward, Brandon Shimoda, Kurt Cobain, Richard Pryor, Louis C.K, Melmoth the Wanderer, Caliban, George Saunders, Frederick Kreissler, Satie, John Prine.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to buy a blue 1985 Mercedes Benz 300TD wagon and drive it from the west coast of the United States to Cape Breton, where Brandon and Dot are curating a collection of beheaded statues of Saint Francis.

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?
Bicycle repairman.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
In Jr. High, High School and college I kept a sketchbook and spent many hours imitating Hopper and the Wyeth's. They were my father’s favorite artists. I started writing after hearing Dylan, and reading Hopkins's terrible sonnet, "No worst, there is none..." I could never hear or see painting's music. I also think I was drawn to the more private nature of poems, which seems counter-intuitive because isn't the poet expected to perform (readings) far more than a painter or visual artist? If I'd learned to play guitar, I'm pretty sure I would have wanted to become some version of Bruce Springsteen/Bonnie Prince Billy/David Berman/Feist/Chan Marshall.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Books: Daniel Poppick's poetry manuscript, Movies; Justin Torres's We the Animals. Film: Pina, the Wim Wenders documentary about the German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I recently completed a manuscript called Almost Air. I think the actual lives of artists and saints are cloaked in their works. In this book I intend to remove some of these cloaks in a series of dramatic monologues that fuse the voices of artists and saints. Drawing from my knowledge of ekphrastic writing and Victorian Poetry (in particular Browning’s dramatic monologues) I intend to marry the dramatic monologue with the ekphrastic encounter, while expanding the boundaries of each to allow for a narrative that might reveal the imagined (and real) desires and terrors of each historical figure and myself. One monologue, titled “Blessing the Throats,” fuses the voices of the Irish-born, British painter, Francis Bacon, and the 4th Century Armenian, Saint Blaise, who was known for blessing human throats to keep away evil and illness. Another monologue, titled “Sister Wolf,” fuses the voices of Saint Francis and the 17th Century Spanish painter, Diego Velazquez.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Daniel Poppick and Rob Schlegel on The Catenary Press

Founded in 2009, The Catenary Press is based in Iowa City and Walla Walla, WA. Recent and forthcoming titles by: Elisabeth Benjamin, Jennifer Moxley, Alice Notley, Hannah Sanghee Park, Margaret Ross, Robyn Schiff, and Heather Tone. Our chapbooks have been reviewed in Boston Review and The Kenyon Review.

Daniel Poppick’s poems have recently appeared in BOMB, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, OmniVerse, and elsewhere. A chapbook is forthcoming from Petri Press. He lives and works in Iowa City.

Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing, 2009), and January Machine (forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014). He teaches creative writing and literature at Whitman College.

1 – When did The Catenary Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?
ROB: I started the press with my wife, Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, in 2009. In 2010, Dan Poppick agreed to become co-editor. Dan’s enthusiasm and editorial vision has been paramount to the press’s evolution. Our original goal was to publish long sequences in handmade, artist quality chapbooks. Most journals seem to publish only one or two poems by any given poet, which makes it difficult for a reader to get a sense for what the poet is really up to. Better, we thought, to celebrate the long sequence, the mind in the act of unfolding, while also providing readers with an extended example of an individual writer’s work.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?
DAN: It began with an itch to read and talk about contemporary poetry as dynamically as possible and it's probably still that.  Hopefully every new chapbook we publish subtly changes the nature of the space the press creates; I have faith in the Rube Goldberg machine that brought us from the epistolary gift-architecture of the prose poems in Elisabeth Benjamin's The Houses to Alice Notley's visionary, lyric re-coding of the "relationark" (her word, now everyone's) in Secret I D, which is forthcoming. Constellating different kinds of art makes for a more versatile machine. As we go on, The Houses looks more and more like an appropriate lodestar—we want to make a gathering space. And obviously we want to be challenged.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?
ROB: It seems to me that the best small publishers cater only to their own tastes, prioritizing the strength and originality of the work itself over any other potentially threatening exterior influences. Unfortunately, a lot of larger publishers are often slaves to sales, public popularity, and opinion.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?
DAN: Anything novel that we're doing as a press comes from the poets (and our cover designer, Rawaan Alkhatib). Elisabeth Benjamin, Hannah Sanghee Park, and Margaret Ross all let us debut their work, for which we remain grateful because it's totally singular; I mean no one in American poetry is writing like Margaret Ross. The same could be said of Jennifer Moxley or Robyn Schiff, any of the poets we’ve published.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?
ROB: We pay attention to two things: poet’s work, and the materials and production of the actual chapbook (as a physical object). We publish poetry we love. And we try to reciprocate that love in the time and effort we put into the physical production of the chapbooks. By prioritizing these over everything else, we know we’re honouring the poet and her work, which is all any publisher should strive for anyway. Reviews on websites like the Boston Review and the Kenyon Review have been helpful in spreading the word, but most of the sales, can likely be attributed to word of mouth—friends of friends literally talking to one another about our poets in our communities and beyond.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
DAN: We spend a lot of time searching for the right work and figuring out how to arrange it, but then we usually leave it alone. Occasionally we'll do little structural experiments and reconfigurations with individual poems, but always with the poet.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?
ROB: Our books can be purchased on our blog: http://thecatenarypress.blogspot.com/, and at one of the country’s best independent bookstores, Prairie Lights in Iowa City. They are also available at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?
DAN: We couldn't do what we do without Rawaan, as Rob mentioned—or Vincent Peiffer, our intern, who seems to know everything about string, for one example. We need that. Both of them have been incredibly generous with their time and talents. And I can't really imagine doing this without Rob, who had the original vision anyway. We talk each other into things and destabilize each other's impulses, which is all good, but three years in I'm terribly gullible when he makes "jokes," like a few weeks ago when he told me he was going to start writing for Men's Health. Turns out this is false. Rob is omniplausible.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
ROB: We are always thinking about how another writer’s music/process/habits might influence our own. In this way, Elisabeth Benjamin influences the way we think about compressing explosive narrative into smaller and smaller fragments; Jennifer Moxley enhances our understanding of how to use and subvert what might be considered “classical” subject matter; Alice Notley gets us thinking about our own private relationship to the muse, while also challenging our notions of where the individual lyric fits into a longer, serial work; Hannah Sanghee Park’s formal inventions (unlike anything anywhere) reveal the fertile ground where form and content blossom; Margaret Ross’s and Robyn Schiff’s long, meticulous lyrics inspire us to pay more careful attention to how we actually LIVE in the world with other HUMAN BEINGS; Heather Tone’s sequences reinforce for us how repetition and metaphor contribute to verisimilitude of a singular and shared experience.

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?
DAN: I think it's pretty much irrelevant. I doubt we would do it at this point, but only because there are too many other poets we want to work with instead.

11– How do you see The Catenary Press evolving?
ROB: We set out wanting to publish the best long poems and sequences we could find, and I think we’ve succeeded in doing so. We have talked about possibly anthologizing these first seven chapbooks into one anthology, which I think could function as a significant marker of this rich moment in contemporary poetry.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?
DAN: If this poetry finds a readership it wouldn't have otherwise and we've made a solid, beautiful vessel for it, then we've done our job. Rob has already sort of mentioned this, but I like that we’ve become for really ambitious lyric poetry in particular, poetry that sometimes gets overlooked elsewhere because it’s “difficult,” but we’re not the only press doing that. Anything else that happens comes from the poets. And like just about everyone and everything else right now, we're working with a tight budget, so no gold-leaf editions for us, sadly, not right now, though there's always the internet.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
ROB: I still think of us as “starting out,” and hope to always think of us as that way. That said, some important models have been Bateau, Effing Press, Ugly Duckling, Cannibal, The Pines.

14– How does The Catenary Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see The Catenary Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
DAN: It's been said a thousand times, but of course poetry is a conversation. Iowa City is thick with it, and some of my favorite presses and journals have hatched next door, sometimes literally. When Rob and I were getting started on Catenary I was sharing an old house with Jeff Nagy and Eric Linsker, who were at that time starting The Claudius App, which is among my favorite poetry journals in America right now. Our sensibilities diverge wildly, but what they're doing is so lushly ambitious and problematic in (I think) the best ways. They raise the bar, or perhaps sledgehammer it. The same could be said for Song Cave and Canarium Books, both of which also have roots in Iowa City. We overlap with them (Robyn is an editor at Canarium, Jennifer has a chapbook with Song Cave), but what we do is obviously different. I don't know that sewing chapbooks is a conversation. The poetry is the dialogue.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?
ROB: Public readings function as a kind of celebratory “coming out” party for the work itself. We’ve had a few book launches/readings at Prairie Lights in Iowa City, and one in Boston last year. With Dikembe Press, we’re planning another reading for late February/early March (2014) in Seattle.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
DAN: At this point the internet is more or less half of our worldly existence, so it isn't so much a matter of furthering goals as furthering reality. This is like asking "How do you use language to further your goals?" That said, we're only in print, so it's a good question. "How do you use language to further your goals?" would also be one.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?
We are not currently taking submissions.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
ROB: We’re very excited about forthcoming chapbooks by Alice Notley and Heather Tone.
Heather lives in Jupiter, Florida, and this is her first chapbook. It will consist of two long sequences, “Combinations,” and “Gesture.” Both poems seem to engage the notion that as humans we are in constant revision. I mean that as widely as possible. As mentioned earlier, the poems are also deeply entrenched in repetition. Heather’s use of repetition suggests that by repeating a word so many times, one can diminish the referential value of that word until it begins to resemble something like an art object, a shape on the page. This formulation is provocative in its own right, but it takes on even greater strength when situated within the context of Heather’s uncanny use of metaphor: “I gestured to the sink, and it said it felt like a meadow./I gestured to a meadow, and it gestured to the forest./I gestured to the tree, and it gestured to a tree that was farther away.”

DAN: It’s difficult to talk about the work of a poet who abjures idol worship as fiercely and gracefully as Alice Notley, but in the spirit of answering the question without bullshitting around I think she’s one of the great American writers of the last fifty years, even as she works from abroad. She’s inimitable—as poets, all we can do with her influence is walk through the door she’s kicked open. Secret I D speaks honestly to this moment of unprecedented surveillance and all of its ontological and spiritual quandaries while tinkering the English language into new slang so that maybe we can actually talk to one another from inside the panopticon. In a sense it’s a new cold war poetry in which the poet is a spy for and of everything, a spy inside relation itself, even “a spy in the afterlife.” At one point in a poem called “Tell Me the Language,” she claims “I write for those who don’t read my poems.” This seems earnest to me, and it speaks to what one might hope for in really ambitious art. Book by book, sequence by sequence, poem by poem, I think Alice’s corpus radicalizes the self and whatever reality it touches with kindness and violence in equal measure. In this sense she has been writing one book her whole career, and Secret I D is the next word in it.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Ongoing notes: late August, 2013

[a view of the bookshelf closest to my desk] Another summer, nearly over. I’m always reminded of one particular song by Leonard Cohen during this period: “The summer’s almost gone / The winter’s tuning up.”

We pack the apartment, prepare for the new house; prepare for the baby. The next few months will be one of enormous change.

If anyone is willing to help move over a couple of loads of boxes on either September 10^th, 11^th or 12^th during the day, send me a quick email. The more the merrier, and the faster it will go.

Enormous change, and possibly even chaos. I welcome it.

Ottawa ON: I’m fascinated with the occasional items that poet and Apt. 9 Press editor/publisher Cameron Anstee [see my profile on both he and the press here] has been producing over the past couple of years through St. Andrew Books: limited-edition chapbooks of his own writing, predominantly produced to coincide with one of his readings, or some other event. After The Turning of Pages Should Not Be Audible (2011) [see my review of such here] and She May Be Weary (2011), the third of these chapbooks is One Hundred Additional Frightening Things (2013), “Published in an unnumbered edition of 30 copies for a reading at Raw Sugar Café, Ottawa ON, 10 August 2013, with Christine Miscione, Nicholas Papaxanthos, and Michael e. Casteels.” As a poet, Anstee has long favoured the sequence, and most (if not all) of his dozen or so chapbooks are chapbook-length sequences that highlight the breath, the meditative lyric stretch, and a particular cadence of attentiveness to the line. The poem here feels stretched further than what Anstee has composed previously, with distances between the stanza/sections, some of which works brilliantly, and some of which feels as though it doesn’t hold together as tightly as some of his previous works.

water in lungs, everywhere

a knife, removed

the moment before no longer falling

locked at the knees

the same pain just a moment longer each time

any new ache

bones in the fresh air

full anaesthesia

no answer from many doctors

and then -

Taking title and epigraph from Jim Smith’s One Hundred Most Frightening Things (blewointmentpress, 1985) [see Anstee’s discussion on the book and poem here], Anstee’s writing focuses on such small, personal moments, etching and imprinting each word on the page. Given the meticulous care he gives to each phrase, it is difficult to imagine any of this poem drifting away anytime soon. The poem ends:

naked, the first time

naked, this time

writing about sex

how dry my hands already are

I continue to break watches you give to me

it often feels beautiful to live here

Gee, You’re so Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain

the best parts remain with you

days I can say nothing to

there is a touch that will be our last

Iowa City IO/Wall Walla WA: New from The Catenary Press is American poet Jennifer Moxley’s limited-edition chapbook, FOYER STATES (2013). Produced in a numbered edition of one hundred (I have number seventy-nine), FOYER STATES is a reworking of fragments of The Iliad, focusing on Helen, and her abandoned daughter Hermione, among other characters such as Eurydice and Aristaeus. Through two short sequences, Moxley’s lyric exploration balances a fine measure between formal language and a more experimental lyric, between the old and the new, a balance that not only holds the poem together as a whole, but manages to make the whole sequence thrum with a fresh and renewed energy. Moxley isn’t the first contemporary American poet to explore the story, given Lisa Jarnot’s work on the same a few years back, holding her own lyric line between the ancient and the contemporary. Is this a singular and self-contained work, one wonders, or part of something far larger?

To assuage the hatred of having a mind but understood the privilege.

She listened to fate and saw its face: A woman holding a dying soldier.

A lover, a mother, it makes no difference. The solace of woman’s flesh

Shredded by pointless death. To hide their murderous exploits experts

Punish the girl. Eurydice bitten into lament. It was her fault.

Her unedited sweetness demanded ending. Aristaeus followed suit.

Loveliness, he believed, must be consumed. The thoughts of a man

(was he really a man?) who caused the death of all his bees.

It was Hermione who told us that when in death Eurydice missed

Only the scent of earth’s flowers, had forgotten her husband’s song. (“FOYER STATES”)