12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kristin Sanders

Kristin Sanders is the author of CUNTRY (Trembling Pillow Press 2017 and a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series), This is a map of their watching me (BOAAT 2015), and Orthorexia (Dancing Girl Press 2011). She has taught at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo; Loyola University, New Orleans; Belmont University; and Louisiana State University. She is currently a poetry editor for the New Orleans Review and a contributing writer at Weird Sister.

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 chapbook, Orthorexia, was with Dancing Girl Press in 2011. Of course, that first published chapbook or book is very validating. My first full-length book, CUNTRY, is coming out in June 2017. I’ve been working on this project, and publishing pieces from it, since 2012, so it feels good to have it out in the world. In between was a second chapbook, This is a map of their watching me, from BOAAT Press in 2015. I don’t think these books have changed my life, but they’ve affirmed the sense that I want to write about certain themes—gender, sexuality, feminism—and are a record of how I felt in my twenties.

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

I think my love of reading and writing poetry has to do with the English teachers I had in elementary school, high school, college, and grad school. Poetry teachers are the best, aren’t they? My high school English teacher, Mrs. May, who I adore, made a Xeroxed poetry packet for her classes. I still have it. One of the poems in the packet was Denise Levertov’s “The Secret.” The romantic ideas in that poem probably influenced me more than I knew.

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 don’t start with notes, but more of a conceptual idea. The writing usually starts loose, and then I have to pare it down.

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?

Book from the beginning, usually. If I write an individual poem I often don’t know what to do with it next, if it doesn’t fit into a specific project. I have a few of those, and they make me sad. They feel homeless.

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

I do enjoy readings! I like to participate in readings at all stages of the creative process. I’ve been reading (and, okay, singing) pieces from CUNTRY since 2012.

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?

Theoretically, I’m interested in writing that makes the reader feel uncomfortable, not only in regard to content but also genre and the hybrid text. There’s a Hélène Cixous quote which I always remember from Laura Mullen’s brilliant “Hybrid Text Talk”: “If you haven’t, as a reader, burned your house down, if you are still at home, then you don’t want to go abroad. People who don’t like what I call ‘the text’ are phobic, they are people who... dislike being displaced” (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing 81). What’s the use of art that feels easy and safe? The questions I’m interested in have to do with bodies, sexuality, desire, gender, feminism, and technology’s effects on these things. The questions are constantly changing, developing—pornography, identities, labels, trends—and yet the questions are unchanging, always the same—love, the nature of desire, communication between two people, the ways we move in the world as individuals and within our prescribed societal roles.

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’m going to quote Chris Kraus on this, because I can’t really think about the role of the writer divorced from the roles of gender: “Because I’m moved in writing to be irrepressible. Writing to you seems like some holy cause, cause there’s not enough female irrepressibility written down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world. I could be 20 years too late but epiphanies don’t always synchronize with style” (I Love Dick, 210).

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

I haven’t had that experience yet. Most of my poetry editors and publishers have been fairly hands-off, which has benefits.

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

One of my favorite quotes is from Rumi: “Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious.” That’s probably an odd choice, because by all accounts I’m a generic-looking, rule-abiding Californian woman. My risk-taking tends to live out in my writing.

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?

No writing routine! I write in bursts, most often at night. I’m a night owl. I have zero willpower in the mornings. I’ll press snooze for hours.

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

I turn to other books, or I talk to any of my brilliant women friends (or my sister, or my mother) to compare stories, bounce around ideas, get advice, etc. I’m lucky to have an amazing network of intellectual, artistic friends. I’d get more writing done if I spent less time reading and socializing, but I’d be a much less happy person.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Eucalyptus.    

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?

Books influence me the most, but also music and visual art. My dad is a painter, and my uncle and cousin are country songwriters. I spend a lot of time thinking about how different forms of artistic expression are limiting in different ways. I suppose I’m influenced by the idea of boundaries, whether those are self-imposed or imposed by genre or industry. I hate feeling limited or controlled, and literary writing allows me the most freedom.

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

Hélène Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick. Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Plath, and Sexton. Louise Glück and Margaret Atwood’s poetry. The life-outside-of-my-work writer friends who are not just important but necessary are Laura Mullen, Megan Burns, Carolyn Mikulencak, Jenn Marie Nunes, Mel Coyle, Elizabeth Hall, Ben Kopel.

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

Figure out a way to teach English—which I love—without grading a gazillion papers—which I absolutely hate.

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

I did attempt to be a country songwriter in Nashville, but I’ve mostly been a writer and English teacher. I might’ve missed my calling to be a tap-dancing contortionist.

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

I wasn’t good enough at not saying impolite/gross/weird/sexual/darkly humorous things—in country songs or in real life.

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

I’ve been on a huge Jean Rhys kick; I’m currently reading her biography by Carole Angier. I also recently read Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex, which I think is saying a lot of the same things I’m saying in CUNTRY, but through research and journalism. I just re-read The Lover, too, to remember how gorgeous a book can be.

19 - What are you currently working on?

A novel and essays.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Montana Ray, (guns & butter)

      (smoking)

                                                              (embarrassing) (as it is) (can’t help dragging

                           ur sexuality to breakfast) (words come out sleazy) (can’t get ur eggs

          over-easy) (w/out a snort from the proprietress) (& see how polite old men’s

        eyes pop) (as they walk by the open window) (where u

      write) (I provoke) (I endure) (it’s not my fault)

     (he’s out there                        w/ a handgun)

   (& a busy intra-                    familial torturing

  plan) (these things happen) (bc

 they’re accepted) (in this milieu)

(from middle school) (we lay

blame on spaghetti straps) (bc

men like big guns, like big tits)

New York poet, translator and scholar Montana Ray’s striking first full-length poetry collection is (guns & butter) (Argos Books, 2015), a collection of concrete poems alternating between the shape of a gun with the occasional recipe. Composing poems in the familiar shapes of a handgun, Ray’s poems write out a culture of guns and gun violence, especially one that also connects sex and male violence to gun culture, composing a direct critique of what has become entirely too prevalent in North American culture. She also utilizes an intriguing use of parenthesis, holding together her short, accumulated phrases together, almost afraid that, without being held together, they might bleed and spill out across the page. As the poem “(when u broke the protective order)” begins: “(I became a walking statistic) (walking to & fro / the precinct) (telling anyone who’d listen) (my x moved to the nabe) (from 3 states / away) (to stare me down) [.]” In an interview conducted by Emily Brandt, posted in May 2015 at Weird Sister, Ray writes:

A lot of the language is sourced, so in the first poem I wrote for the book, the lines just cohered together in the shape of the gun. I’ve said this elsewhere, but the first poem I wrote in that shape is the first poem in the book. I’d received a text from my babysitter that said, “I might be late. A gun war is on.” Or a slightly less poetic version of that sentence. And I walked out to do my laundry with Ami; and some guy on the street was like, “You can touch it,” and then when I came home—I used to live in front of a tattoo parlor, I still live in the same place but the tattoo parlor has moved, and it’s now a fancy restaurant—one of the tattoo guys there, who I had a little crush on, he’d just gotten a new tattoo on his leg that was Billy the Kid’s gun. I was like, “Do you like guns?” And he said, “I like Billy the Kid.” So basically half of the language in the poem is sourced from one day’s interactions. I was also thinking about art, how you see guns on necklaces and on bags. The appropriation of that shape is done by designers of all sorts, and I wanted to do that for poetry.

Her poems are thick with fear, frustration, determination and resolve, and she writes on pregnancy, motherhood and the body, sex and violence (and male sexual violence), domestic matters, human closeness and serial isolation, and a culture of family, neighbours and recipes, alternating between what heals and restores, and what so easily threatens to destroy. Throughout all of this, much of the book is anchored in the immediate, as she writes to open the poem “(moonchild)”: “(don’t give up on him) (take the moon) (we created it from / our sorrow) (& it hangs in there) (I lug him upstairs) (I make soup) (call the home- / opath on Thanksgiving) (the exterminator on Xmas morn.) (perform the necessary / exorcisms) [.]” Further in the same interview with Emily Brandt, they discuss the book’s alternating elements of nourishment and violence:

EB: The book felt very nourishing, like a meal, in part because of the visual elements. There’s also so much narrative and so much rich language. As a writer, you’re creating this form and moving through it so beautifully and challenging so many of our ideas of what a mother is, what a child is, what violence is, what nonviolence is, what a book of poems can do. I had a student who was wearing to school yesterday this t-shirt that had a blonde woman in her underwear pointing a gun at whoever. I said to him, “I’m kind of offended” and he said, “It’s about power though. This is about power.” So I said, “Yeah well, her mouth is open, she’s naked,” and he was like, “But she’s got some power.” So then I showed him your book and he flipped through it and read a little of it and handed it back to me and said, “Miss, it’s the same thing.” So how is this book not the same thing as his shirt? Or is it?

MR: That’s the best question I think I’ve ever been asked. I think there is probably some sort of relationship there because I feel like the book does glamorize violence. It doesn’t show you how fucking fucked up it actually is, and it can’t because it’s a representation. It’s about a play therapy kind of world. But the book isn’t really selling anything. Because it’s outside of the pop culture market, maybe it gets away with some stuff that otherwise it would be more accountable for. But I think the whole book is about that, about film. There is a poem in there about a woman—“(una pistola) (bajo el vestido)”—in front of a camera with her shirt undone holding a machine gun on an album cover, and the complexities of that situation. Because she also has a gun below her slip for at night when she’s in bed for her pinché lover, uncle, guardian. So there is this duality of a glamorous vision of a woman with a gun during the daytime on an album cover, versus the threat of actual violence and a woman using a gun as self-projection against male sexual aggression.

6 x 6 : issues #32 + #33

I thought to write

and wrote a language

that I use, I didn’t write to that

language as in a letter or something

but one cannot be blamed

for thinking so. Isn’t it odd

the channels words cut open like

look over here I am stuck in one

and there’s an earthen weight

bearing down with lexical meaning

so it’s really hard to talk any longer

about this, if not entirely

impossible but I’m learning

effective communication skills. (Tony Iantosca)

I’ve long been an admirer of the American poetry journal 6 x 6, produced through Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse. As the title suggests, each issue features healthy selections of work from six contributors, and the most recent issues to appear at my door include work by James D. Fuson, Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Henning, Tony Iantosca, Uroš Kotlajić (translated from Serbian by Ainsley Morse) and Morgan Parker (issue #32), and Amanda Berenguer (translated from Spanish by Gillian Brassil and Alex Verdolini), Jeremy Hoevenaar, Krystal Languell, Holly Melgard, Marc Paltrineri and Cat Tyc (issue #33). Part of the appeal of the journal, other than the obvious appeal of a journal that supports strong writing, is the variety of form and style displayed in each issue, as well as translations from other languages (and countries), and a list of contributors running the length and breadth of emerging, established and all points in-between. This list can include poets I’ve known the work of for years, to those I’m being introduced to for the first time. Take, for example, this excerpt from Brooklyn based filmmaker/poet/video artist Cat Tyc’s “Memory Is Not a Test”:

10. Being the sixth wheel, she wishes for a bigger dance floor to watch the lunar eclipse from.

More copper than red, and everyone goes home to spoon and make babies.

Baby this, and baby that. They always get the last word.

Her cab driver says, that in his country, it is believed that if a pregnant woman sleeps through an eclipse, her child will not come to term.

His stern sensitivity garnered prudent reservation.

She saw herself in him. Sometimes when no one was looking, she would walk around the apartment without a shirt on.

Just to try on that petulant boy role.

Enough already, it is fall, and she is still swatting mosquitoes.

The author biography on her website writes that her work is “interested in exploring the paradoxes of class,” and her work in this issue of 6 x 6 is enough to make me curious to see what else she’s produced. In a recent interview over at Weird Sister she says: “I am identifying as a writer first mostly these days because that is my primary creative act in this moment in time. The last few years I have been focusing on filmmaking but after a while I found myself wanting to differentiate from the conversations I found myself in. If I called myself a filmmaker, the conversation would always devolve towards film festivals, camera models, distribution models, financing…. All of that felt really disconnected from some of the things I feel most passionate about in filmmaking and making art in general which are story, character development, and directing. After being frustrated in this way one too many times, I remembered that all of those aspects I loved stemmed from writing and I realized it might be a lot easier to get back to my favorite parts of filmmaking if I just stopped and said, ‘Hey, I’m a writer.’ I think creative identity, like most identifying quantities, is for the individual and the individual alone to decide. It also feels important to mention too that in honing my focus back on writing…it helped me reconnect to the literary, or to be more specific, radical poetics, which are at the foundation of my education and have been my primary creative community for most of my life.” Another is poet Tony Iantosca, author of Shut Up, Leaves (United Artists Books, 2015), a poet with, beyond a handful of pieces posted in a variety of online journals, a remarkably small online footprint. As one of his untitled poems from his “Excerpts from Creative Writing” in issue #32 reads: “A cloud in the shape / of a shape. It is shaped / how it’s shaping itself and being /shaped too I suppose because / it’s a cloud. All my problems / shape up to be rainstorm / and then it all becomes / something else entirely.” Of course, one can never overlook Barbara Henning, who has a striking and powerful matter-of-fact meander on life and film reminiscent slightly of the work of Toronto poet David Donnell:

Madagascar

I’m watching Madagascar

with the boys—hilarious

hip city zoo animals end up

in Africa but long to come

home to the Central Park Zoo.

With the emergence of zoos,

pet keeping and animal toys,

John Berger explains that animals

were slowly disappearing from

our daily lives. When the boys

take a bath, Like stretches his

long young thin body under

the warm water and we play

with little action figures

and plastic frogs. Then I put

my feet into the tub, singing

row row row your boat gently

down the stream. Later

it’s raining and we’re together

under an umbrella, walking

through the park. Surely,

radioactive ocean water

from the Fukushima Daiichi

nuclear plant will migrate

around the globe and even if we

don’t die this year, we will

all die eventually, so for now,

let’s hold each other loosely.