12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mark Weiss

Mark Weiss is author, translator or editor of seventeen books, including the poetry collection As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books, 2015), and the anthologies Across the Line / Al otro lado:The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002) (with Harry Polkinhorn) and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press, 2009). Among his translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction Press, 2006) and Gaspar Orozco's Autocinema (Chax Press, forthcoming). In previous lives he was a filmmaker, a psychiatric social worker and family therapist, a dealer in rare prints, and a university teacher. He lives on the edge of Manhattan's only forest.

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

I published my first book in 1976. It was something of an accident—I asked a friend to critique a manuscript. My friend, who was also a publisher, told me he wanted to publish it, but it needed some work. Really. It never occurred to me that I was ready for a book. Some of that book—it's called Intimate Wilderness (New Rivers, 1976)—reads like a homework assignment for psychotherapy, which it was, except that I assigend it, not my therapist. The rest is New American Poetry-inflected lyric. Some of it's ok, but it's not what I've been interested in for a very long time. My second book was nineteen very busy years later, and it's completely different, much more focused on process and the discovery of form-and-content. There was a fair amount of work in between that remains unpublished, though I hope to get around to it. The second book, Fieldnotes (Junction Press,1995), seemed to me a total departure, and I was so excited by it that I skipped the rest and published it myself, to get it out there as quickly as possible. My guess is that now I'd find some sort of evolution in the intermediate work. 

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

I started reading poetry when I was very young and writing it by the time I was 11. I always thought I'd become a novelist like Hemingway and lead an adventurous life and sleep with a lot of exotic women. As if writing, and fame, fortune and groupies, were that easy. I was very young

3, 4 - 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?

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 write what's available to me to write and it's been years since I've worried about the times when I don't write. There's more than enough poetry in the world that's not driven by necessity. In As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books, 2015), my fourth (counting only major collections), there are poems with a beginning, middle and end that seem to have a subject or even a plot, there are small poems grouped to be read in the order presented, and long poems made up of fragments. They all follow from my work habits—my studio is the notebook in my right rear pocket, where I jot down everything that happens in language (as well as thoughts and shopping lists, which only occasionally make their way into a poem). I may play with alternate syntactic structures or I may try for le mot juste, then, or later, when the longer poems are formed in my secondary studio, the one with a desk and a computer. The process may be very quick or take years of torture—it's a testing and testing of the metal. The space between the lines can also take time—silence can be as loud as speech. The idea is for the words to combine without explanation or apology. Amazingly, working this way allows the expression of a far wider range of a world than my former more deliberate process.

I attached as an afterword to my third collection, As Landscape (Chax Press, 2010), the essay “A Provisional Poetics,” which is as much a poetics of the provisional. It details both what I think I'm doing and how the accidents of living allowed it to happen.

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

I love giving readings, but I don't need to.

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 have no idea what the current questions in poetry at large are. Think of everything we know as a forest of undifferentiated phenomena. I'm interested in presenting the forest and also the paths through it.

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 don't spend a lot of time worrying about this. Of course I'm aware of how limited the potential audience for a poem or a book of poetry is, and at one point I imagined triumphant processions, but I do what I do because I have to and want to, regardless. It's not for me to say what others will find useful or compelling.

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

Not essential, but often helpful in the final winnowing. I have a select crew of informal editors.

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

“Expect to get wet if you sleep with children” (Cuban proverb). “Better alone than in bad company.” (fortune cookie).

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

I began translating, with the exception of a couple of very early and unimportant pieces, when I got involved with Across the Line /Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction Press, 2002), which I edited with Harry Pokinhorn. That must have been in 1999 or 2000. It led to another anthology, The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California, 2009), two books by the Mexican Gaspar Orozco (both forthcoming), and the Cuban poet José Kozer's Stet: Selected Poems (Junction Press, 2006). Its appeal? To convey what one's learned or loved. I've found it easy to move back and forth. For the first several years I was convinced that, having come to translating as a seasoned poet, it had little impact on my writing. That's true, in a limited way—I was already who I am—but it's certainly taught me a lot about language, including my own, and given me a range of new permissions.

I've translated very little in the past six months. I miss it. But it requires a different kind of time allocation. Let's say that I need to be in my secondary studio for more time.

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?

Except when I'm forming a book I actually try to avoid a writing routine. I'm interested in the accidents, what happens when I'm eavesdropping on myself and others. The Czech composer Leos Janacek used to carry around a pocketful of index cards on which he'd had music staves printed. He'd follow people in the streets, occasionally even hiding behind the bushes while lovers spooned on a park bench, writing down the music of the spoken language. He's one of my heroes.

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

I don't worry about it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Wet dog.

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'm deeply involved with classical and Indian music and the music and lyrics of traditional ballads, and with the visual arts. I'm also a hiker—I've been doing serious walks since about age 14. They all come in.

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

Too many, in several languages.

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

Whatever I can't conceive of.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I started writing at 7. Everything else I thought of doing has always been understood as a day job. Except filmmaking. For maybe six to eight years I worked towards becoming a film maker, but it was always making poems on celluloid.

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

God knows.

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

Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, in the Lysander Kemp translation. Michael Powell's The Edge of the World.

20 - What are you currently working on?

My next book of poems (I think). I'm also about to begin translating some poems by the Mexican/Scot Juana Adcock.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Gridley

Sarah Gridley is the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (2005) and Green is the Orator (2010), both published by the University of California Press, and Loom (2013), published by Omnidawn. She is an assistant professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

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

Weather Eye Open, my first book of poems, was published in 2005, when I was 37. Pragmatically speaking, my first book changed my life by opening the door to an academic career. Goethe is said to have cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life.” I am grateful for the opportunities that came with the book, but it is good to remember that (and speculate how) things might have turned out otherwise. If you let it, academia can seal you up in its own strange wordy world. I have always been drawn to other forms of work, mostly physical ones, and farming and gardening in particular. Currently I am satisfying a need to be more in the material world by taking a ceramics class (inspired by the writings of M.C. Richards, for whom clay and poetry were mutually explicating mediums).

I hope my work is evolving in the direction of greater openness, silence, and simplicity, but I know I have a long way yet to go. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called my work in Green is the Orator “always a bit of a challenge” and a recent PW reviewer of Loom said my language can be “showy” and “labored.” These assessments sting, which says they are probably hitting a mark, if not the mark. When I was working on my MFA thesis, one of my advisors wrote on the draft, “You don’t have to flash your trash so much, Gridley.” This is a really good point. Just because you can make what Dan Chiasson (in One Kind of Everything) helpfully calls filigreed language, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That said, Dylan Thomas was my first love in poetry, and it is hard to expel the Celtic filigrees he put in my heart and lungs and ears. I just looked, and filigree comes from filum (thread) + granum (seed). A filigree is a grain-thread. This is another thing that maybe makes my language feel difficult: I took Latin for six years and am enamored of the idea Thoreau has of its tawny grammar (he pirates this from Spanish, grammatica parda) In this vision of language, words are not tools but living transplants, re-grounded in the page “with earth adhering to their roots.” I write poetry this way, with this desire for linguistic dirt. Does that make my work difficult? Maybe, but I’d prefer to think it makes it solemn, in the sense of ceremonial. Like any word ending in “mn”—hymn, damn, autumn, column, limn—the word solemn is a little spooky. The silent presence of the “n,” visible though inaudible, is a shade from another language, not alive, exactly, in English, but not quite vanished, either. Words are, as Emerson says, fossil poetry.  

After the so-called “linguistic turn,” we are no longer supposed to think of language this way, as having anything natural (or essential) about it. Language is convention, arbitrary convention. Meaning slips kaleidoscopically through shifting signs. But as process theologian Catherine Keller suggests, we can appreciate and even process the intervention of postructuralist thought without having to abandon the idea of ground, without sealing ourselves up in text. In what she calls “eartheology,” ground is understood as something other than foundation or essence. Ground is understood as ground, i.e., as dirt, the “black, organic stuff of soil that gives birth to all life,” whose molecular structure exhibits “fractal self-similarity with no self-sameness.” “At every scale,” she writes in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, “life is the story of complex emergence within a ground shot through with quantum indeterminacies and chaotic nonlinearities, composed of cosmic instabilities braided into tensely persistent orders…These orders can be called open-system stabilities.” That sounds difficult, but also exciting to me, and real to me. Ann Lauterbach recently published a wonderful book called The Given and the Chosen. In it she says that form emerges as a third term between Eros and Thanatos. I believe in a very earthy sense of composition and decomposition. I believe in worms, snakes, dragons, and other chthonic helpers.

 I do not set out to make difficult poems but that is often the label attached to my work. People can get aggravated—even enraged—by poetry that is perceived to be purposively difficult. One reviewer on Amazon is very enraged by Green is the Orator: “This collection of poems, probably considered "difficult" by the author, is mostly the gibberish that seems to be in vogue in academic poetry circles… I know my academic friends will say good poetry doesn't have to have clear, concise meaning or even beautiful language if it's ‘experimental.’ To this I reply ‘Emperor Ashbery and his acolytes have no clothes.’” I am sorry to get someone so agitated and defensive about poetry. I do not imagine John Ashbery sets out to make people angry, either. Though I do not identify myself with Ashbery, or consider myself his “acolyte,” I do enjoy his work. As my colleague, Michael Clune, brilliantly argues in “’Whatever Charms is Alien: John Ashbery’s Everything,’” the poet’s effort is not to alienate, but to bring the alien into familiar orbits. Whether you like that effort or not, it is not done to pain or alienate anyone. It is experimental, yes, in the sense that it is trying to see what language can do and be. Can language bring the alien home? I admire someone who can work on that question. I guess I work on that question, too, but where “alien” takes on a theological orientation.

Difficulty is certainly not my intended effect. That said, I do not sit down to make poems for effects, good or bad. I do not make poems for approval. I sit down to make them as methods of inquiry and acts of awareness. At present I still have a skipping-stone brain, but I hope as I age and concentrate I will have more of a big gray boulder brain.  

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

Poetry was there in first words, first memories, first books. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I loved the sound of blueberries hitting the pail in Blueberries for Sal. I would come home from a school vocabulary lesson repeating the word lugubrious ad nauseam. Certain words were like tootsie rolls, taking up all of my sensory attention.

Poet Donald Hall invents three mythic characters, or tutelary spirits, to account for the psychic origins of our pleasure in poetic form: Goatfoot (a muscle pleasure, a delight in beats); Milktongue (a mouth pleasure, a pleasure in vowels and consonants); and Twinbird (the pleasure of match-mismatch, rhyme, image, metaphor). These characters were a vivid part of my childhood from as early as I can remember.

As a child I loved fiction, too, and nonfiction. I remember being very attached to a nonfiction book about an otter called Ring of Bright Water. I remember reading books chosen randomly from my parents’ or my grandmothers’ bookshelves. I came from a verbally rich home that encouraged me to read peripatetically. Early on, I don’t think there was any conscious discrimination among genres. And I think my love of poetry is still very much caught up in, cross-pollinated by, my love of fiction and nonfiction. I resist purist attitudes toward genre. Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape.

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 am a slow writer, and a compulsive re-drafter. I keep a notebook whose entries then become starting points for translation. It’s transcription (from handwriting to computer typing), but it’s also translation. There is an interesting translation process that takes place between notebook-thinking and poem-thinking. I like that span, because it keeps the open-ended, the en plein air, in touch with the finding and making of form.

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 never working on a book from the beginning. I think that approach would be a disaster for me. Books are bullies. To let a book into the playground of a poem would be like asking for a black eye. The poem as a mode of inquiry, which is the only kind of poem I am able to write, would run for the hills if the book’s shadow cast itself across the playground. After a certain number of poems are written, after they have started to play together, as it were, then the book is allowed in. Then the book has lost its power to bully.

As to where the poems begins? In silence. In disequilibrium. In curiosity. In wonder. In praise. In superstition. In faith. In disbelief. In accusation. In solemnity. In improvisation. To quote Dylan Thomas:

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: "I'd be a damn' fool if I didn't!" These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

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

            Because I myself prefer to meet poems on the page, in a space of solitude and with the opportunity for re-reading, spacing out, annotating, walking around, drinking ginger ale, sitting down, copying out, reading aloud, etc., I feel ambivalent about reading my poetry in a public setting where people are pretty much compelled to keep seated and pretend uninterrupted attention. For me, public readings feel like a certain kind of punishment fitting a certain kind of crime. The crime would be making material of introversion. The punishment would be requiring extroversion from an introvert.

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 have a lot of theoretical concerns behind my writing, some of which may have already leaked out here in preceding answers. Besides literature, the two fields I raid regularly for theoretical frameworks are philosophy and religion. Theorists like Levinas and Bataille, who theorized often in the intersection of these fields, interest me a lot. William James is a persistent influence on my work. And feminist theory, particularly of an ecofeminist stripe, is hugely important to me. The current questions have to be ecological. I can’t see how they can be otherwise. They have to be political, whether you conceive of political in macro or micro forms.

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 think that depends on the writer. I think we need writers who can be public activists, who have the ability to be polemical without degrading poetry to propaganda, and I think we need writers whose gestures are not so explicitly political, who work to make language as humane as it is has the capacity to be, even in its smallest gestures.

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

            I love working with editors. It is such a privilege to have someone look at your work with such care and skill. I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with both Cal Bedient and Rusty Morrison, both of whom taught me things about my work I wasn’t prepared to see on my own. I love collaboration in general, and to my mind, working with an editor comes under that rubric.

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

“If you start something, finish it.” This is a piece of advice the man I love repeatedly gives to me when he sees me flitting from one activity to another and completing none of them. He is a stonemason. In his trade, this advice has obvious importance, and in mine line of work (what he calls “my trade”), it has importance, too. I think this is part of what I’m after when I talked earlier about skipping stone brain evolving into big gray boulder brain. I want to work on the virtues of slowness, quietness, and stick-to-it-ness.

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

Not easy! As my skipping stone brain metaphor suggests, I do not identify with discursive thinking. I am trying to be better about that, while also keeping in mind that maybe my mind is not made for that. I very much admire the discipline of my scholarly colleagues. Scholarly thinking and writing is an art form, too. Very recently I turned in a 20-page term paper for a Religious Studies course I took while on pre-tenure leave. It is always a great learning experience to write in critical prose as opposed to poetry. A spirit of inquiry energizes both forms of writing, but in channeling that energy they make different kinds of turns and gestures. I think it was Charles Olson who said poems should be more like essays and essays should be more like poems. An essay is a different animal, though, than critical prose. What I value and admire about scholars, which I hope will school the kind of poetry I write in the future, is the skepticism they exercise on their projects. They are always asking what they are contributing in relation to what has come before. They are always stepping into the conversation carefully, never with the assumption that they have free reign to blah blah blah. I like and admire this sense of the word, discipline. It reminds me of Quaker meeting.

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

I do not fit the model of a scheduled writer. My typical day begins with coffee (in spring and summer) and with tea (in fall and winter). After that, it’s fairly up in the air.

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

Walking is the best form of inspiration for me. See Gary Snyder (from The Practice of the Wild):

Walking is the great adventure, the first mediation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of ‘Your ass is somebody else’s meal’—a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, ‘ecology,’ on the level of what counts, also a teaching of mindfulness and preparedness.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I love this question! It reminds me of reading Remembrance of Things Past as an undergraduate. I think it is in The Road to Combray where Proust says something about “the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.” Maybe because of this passage and Whitman’s poem, lilacs betoken nostalgia for me. But nostalgia is different than home. Nostalgia is a home-pang, pain associated with a home that cannot be fully reclaimed. But I am at home right now and my home itself smells like daffodils. Spring is the season when I feel most at home, and daffodils communicate the mounting energy of spring with funny subtlety. They remind me of something James Dickey wrote, “Wild hope can always spring from tended strength.” Home should be a place of tended strength, and the daffodil, a bulb flower, feels like an emblem for that.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think most of my books come from outside books. There is in fact an outside the text. There are classes in clay, there are paintings by Samuel Palmer, there are dinners with elders, there is mowing the grass, there is holding a cat who has just been lying in the sun, there are the voices of Sam Cooke, and Mama Cass, and Buddy Holly, there is mixing mortar, there is visiting a baby girl born last month on Shakespeare’s birthday, there are chives coming up, and conversations to be had. All of these things come into my work. Work, as Dylan Thomas suggests above, is an act of praise. The world is full of horrors and blessings. Work is a response to both, but it is a necessary cleaving, for me, to the thanksgiving side. What I call the Starbuck side. And I don’t mean a latte. I mean Starbuck in Moby Dick. 

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

Emerson

William James

Georgia O’Keefe

M.C. Richards

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

Build a tree house and sit in it.

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?

Well, I have known occupations other than writing. I have worked on a produce farm, in an apple orchard, on the landscaping staff of a seaside hotel in Maine, in an insurance company, in a bakery and in a library. My occupations have been various. That’s what’s a little disorienting about being an academic at times.

If I could go back and do something else, I would go back and be an arborist. A really good tree doctor.

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

Some combination of accident and perseverance and capability and word-obsession and luck. I write when I get the chance. I do not think of myself in light of the identity we call “writer.” I do not assume it as a consistent or durable status. Every day I either write, or I don’t. Maybe I will go outside and rake leaves or plant something. Maybe I will make some time to talk with a friend who is having a problem. Maybe I will volunteer at a local park. 

I do not put all my faith in writing. I have a lot of anxieties and skepticism about it, particularly when I attend writing conferences. When I stand back from writing it can too often seem like an occupation soaked in vanity, self-absorption, self-promotion, etc.   

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

            Book:   William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience

           

            Film:    Poetry (in Korean, 시)

20 - What are you currently working on?

            A retaining wall. A religious studies term paper (just finished!). A sweater for my nephew. Ceramics. A vegetable garden. Piecing my first quilt. Being healthy. Being kind. Saying no when it is necessary. Patience. Poetry. Saying thank you. Starting things and finishing them.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Karen Garthe

Karen Garthe's poetry has been appeared in Lana Turner, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Fence, Chicago Review, Aufgabe, Court Green, Omnidawn blogspot, American Letters & Commentary, Zoland Poetry, etc., and online at:

http://www.calibanonline.com/05/index.html

http://calibanonline.com/08/index.html

Her first book Frayed escort won the 2005 Colorado Prize published by the Center for Literary Publishing, Fort Collins, Colorado, and The Banjo Clock was published in June, 2012, by the University of California Press.

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

1) My manuscript had been submitted to contests for 10 years. It was a finalist eight times, so by the time “Frayed escort” was published, very few of the original poems remained. My writing had changed somewhat, and the challenge was to sustain coherence along the way. However, I don’t think that that’s so terribly difficult, since while a style may change, subjects and concerns tend to stay the same. Cal Bedient chose Frayed escort for the 2005 Colorado Prize. 

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

2) Poetry is my net both to read and to write.

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?

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?

3&4) The poem I’m currently working on is my project. For many years I’ve gotten up early, long before I even have to think about getting ready for work.  That morning time which is mine, alone, is everything. On weekends I mostly stay home and work for the duration.

Some poems leap fully formed and some take years to write. Occasionally, there’s a palette of verbiage like a chunk of marble from which the poem’s carved, sometimes it darts forth a precise, finished thing.

I read in many texts at a time, pick up and put down numerous books in a week. If one book refers to another, I often get that one, too. I decide quickly if something is worth my time, but I can miss things that way, so I do try to be careful. Not everything can be assessed in a blink. I’m not a note taker. If something is very boring (like a long, dreary lecture) I may take notes then appropriate them into a poem. “The Studio School” in Frayed escort is an example of this.  The art lecture from which that poem emerged was so boring I took notes to keep from falling asleep. I may write things down now and then, but almost never look at them again.  I just try to pay attention.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
 
5) I love to read my work. People have said “oh, now that you’ve read that, I get it” On paper poems may seem to be theoretical statements on materiality, but they’re not. They’re scored for the voice. 

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?

6) No theoretical concerns. As for questions to answer, simply preposterously large ones like “why are we here, etc.?”  The Unanswerables.

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?

7) The writer has a role in culture, but is no longer a rock star. No head shots on the cover of TIME. Writers aren’t diminished or gone, at least not yet. Language is only as good as the thinking it serves to express. If language devolves to OMG LOL, I can only imagine that quality of thought will have devolved, as well. Writers, especially poets, do indeed seem to write for their own constituencies in ever shrinking units of particularity and concern.  

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

8) I’ve been an editor, but never worked with one editor on my own behalf until Cal Bedient.  Poetry doesn’t edit like prose. Most, not all, prose or narrative writing  is better or worse, muddy or clear.  Poetry is dicey to touch. You can suggest, but you better have a terrifically trusting relationship with the poet you’re working with if you plan to take up the scalpel.

By the time “Frayed escort” won the Colorado Prize, it was as realized as it was ever going to be and there were virtually no changes from manuscript to book. The Banjo Clock is a different story. It’s a different kind of poetry book because it has a palpable trajectory that Cal created. He took poems from a manuscript-in-progress and sequenced The Banjo Clock. He also edited some of the poems. At first, I was shocked by what he’d done, and very upset by some of the edits, but I waited a few days until I got over myself. Then, I sat in my kitchen and read the whole manuscript out loud from page one. The flow was incredible. Cal’s edits were masterful and everything he’d done focused and furthered the whole. In the past, I’ve rejected many editorial suggestions because I didn’t feel the people who made them had an affinity for my work. But Cal liked, even loved its bones.    

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

9) I’ve gotten plenty of advice of all kinds, but for some reason I keep remembering something a friend told me when I lived on MacDougal Street in the Village many years ago. (While not a musician, I was very much a player in the Bleecker Street music scene of the ‘70s.) Anyway, at the time I was always broke. I didn’t pay attention to practical things so my lights were always being turned off and my landlord was always threatening eviction and at the 11th hour, a friend would always bail me out. One day, Neal Shulman (from the group Aztec Two-Step) was kind enough to help me pay my electric bill. Standing in line at Con Ed he said “Listen, Karen, I don’t mind doing this for you, but let me give you some advice: this is the small stuff, take my word for it. If you always have to worry about keeping the lights on and paying the rent, if you always have to deal with the small stuff, you’ll never really get to the big stuff, know what I mean?” Now, little did he realize that I was probably too preoccupied with gigantic imponderables like “why are we here?” to think about whether or not the lights would go out.  But the advice was not lost on me. At all. Besides, who wants to be a helpless, dependent kind of idiot like that, anyway?

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?

10) (I already answer in 3 & 4, I think)

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

11) Stopping writing is part of writing, but it’s tricky, because it’s a spooky cycle that isn’t easy to second guess. If no pen to paper continues for too long I will hit the skids inside because poetry really is my net. The wolf will start howling and if that goes on for too long, I won’t be able to write my way in or out of despair. And I make a great distinction between despair and depression which is just a response to circumstances you can mostly ride out.  Despair is paralyzing. The older I get the more afraid I am of despair which is the loss of even the idea of hope. Even if hope, itself, is a fiction, we need it.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

12) I grew up in a paradise of flowers and trees but my favorite thing is snow. My favorite smell is the Fall and kicking down a sidewalk covered with the leaves of  hundreds of trees, the smell of the decaying leaves and the musty ground with sharp sniffs of snow in complex air.

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?

13) I studied ballet and piano as a child, like lots of young girls, but instead of it affecting me as some of more graceful enhancement, it became my life. I was exposed to great music of all kinds at a very young age and received what I now know was a totally inspired music education. (I received inspired education, period.) At 15, I somehow acquired the complete Robert Craft recordings of Arnold Schönberg. If you think playing rock n’ roll annoyed parents, try Pierrot Lunaire.  I was in love with Vladimir Horowitz and still am. Nobody has ever played the piano like Horowitz. I wrote him gushing fan letters begging him to please come play in Baltimore.

Music made a dancer of me and I came to New York after high school to study at the American Ballet Theatre School, then on 58th Street. I took classes with legendary teachers like Valentina. Pereyaslavec, a tiny plump Ukranian woman in character shoes who carried a baton and used it. I also studied ballet with Igor Youskevitch, jazz with Phil Black, etc.

In a perfect world I’d go to ballet/dance performances during the week and on weekends I’d go to concerts. I try to see the Vienna Philharmonic whenever they’re in town, and the Berlin and the Cleveland orchestras. I even like/dislike certain conductors. Musicians making music in concert really appeals to me. I would like to have been Harry Carney or Cootie Williams playing trumpet in Duke Ellington’s orchestra band. Someone thought it was interesting that

I seem most possessed by things without words.

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

14) I am an unrepentant Faulknerian. Faulkner is my Ur Text Go-To-Guy and has been for 35 years. Once in restaurant in Knoxville, someone said “how come you like Faulkner so much, you’re not from the South...” (this was an accusation). I remarked on noted Faulkner’s universality. Now, though, I’d answer more personally because I can see that so many of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha characters and kin resonate my own (and they must resonate everyone’s, really, else how else account for that universality?). It took me a long time to see this. His so-called gothic regional South bubbles the rest of us with speed and ease.  You do not have to eat grits for breakfast, share spit with Ike McCaslin or trade rage with Rosa Coldfield to bring Faulkner authentically and immediately to heart.

This late summer I re-read Light in August which is, I think, Faulkner’s most bluntly, didactically brutal book. When I finished that, I read an essay by Styron on writing “Nat Turner” and on his friendship with James Baldwin.  Then I read Baldwin. I do remember Baldwin as a living breathing Figure in America. I was very young, but I do remember.  I have a recording of Baldwin debating Malcolm X, which is hard to imagine now in the sense that it’s hard to imagine two powerfully intelligent divergent points of view getting together in the same room to converse or debate in a civil manner. At this point, it’s even difficult to imagine that much public intelligence, period. In an essay titled “Faulkner and Desegregation” Baldwin takes Faulkner to the mat for “go slow” remarks on desegregation.  He also respects him.  Baldwin’s nature seems essentially elegant even while he suffers the two great social wounds of race and homosexuality – at a point in time that tolerated neither. I went to Light/Styron/Baldwin, because of Obama’s Presidency and the upcoming election. I feel that racism -- not jobs/health care/taxes, etc. -- are probably the real truth of the bizarre and extreme hysterics against him.

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

15) Sing and play the piano in a piano bar and night after night after night make it new.

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?

16) I’d like to have a garden but know perfectly well that if I did, I’d never see anybody again and I’m not ready for that. I’m mostly content in the sense that I am who I wanted to be when I grew up.  I figure that if you can say that about yourself, you’re ok.

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

17) Writing is language, language is thought and sound and these are the best things I know.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same;
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
       Hopkins

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

18) The last great book I read was Aerial by Bin Ramke. The last great film I saw was Beasts of the Southern Wild.

19 - What are you currently working on?

19) Poems. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;