In “Dusk: An interview,” Courtney B. Maum at BOMBLOG gets at “the claustrophobic aspect” of the poetry of Arda Collins, whose work has “illuminated the pages of The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and jubilat, among others. Currently, she’s a Doctoral candidate at the University of Denver where she’s working on a new manuscript of poetry”; and she’s the author of It Is Daylight (2009), which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. The interview is immediately atmospheric, filled with tomato sauce and beer steins and vegetarian pizza in Amherst, MA. Maum uses lines of Collins’s poems, “interspersed with security questions from the Bank of America,” to prompt conversation:

CBM You do not arrive on time, or ever.

AC Oh, “Central Park South.” I was like, I know this song! (Long pause). The coffee table is an homage. / He tried to help you remember, / that is his job.

But for more of an answer, I like thinking about being outside of time a lot. Time and no time are the same thing. We’re arriving on time, or never. We’re doing it right now. This is the best time because the light is changing, and it’s too bad, because I can see it and you can’t ’cause it’s behind you. It’s that feeling you’re just going into open time. It’s right here on earth, right now. This is the cosmos.

CBM That’s why we’re drinking the Beer of the Gods.

AC Exactly!

CBM What was the name of the first school you attended?

AC Ocean Avenue Elementary School. I feel like this is one of those things if you get the name of the street, you’re going to come up with my porn star name* or the house I’m going to live in twelve years from now.

(*After some deliberation we decided that combining the name of Arda’s first pet and the street her elementary school was on did, in fact, create a great porn name: Mitzy Ocean.)

CBM The components of your dinner are waiting for you downstairs.

AC Components of anything are critical. Dinner is definitely not the point there; components are life’s basic pleasures. If you take a bunch of stuff, not at random, like you went towards four things, or twelve things, or one hundred things, they wouldn’t form a composition on their own. If you could make an arc out of them—actually it wouldn’t even be you imposing it—you could follow what they did. Like we’re doing this now. The components of today were partly the drive here and the way the road looked, the pale sunset and the dark tree. Those are the components of the dinner downstairs. This is the same thing as dinner.

CBM In what city did you honeymoon? (Enter full name of city only.)

AC I feel like the city was snow. The city was the woods, and it was snowing, and there was an actual moon and there was an actual honey. The snowy forest by a frozen river. Take that Bank of America!

Read the full interview here.

The Tin House blog features an interview with Northampton poet Emily Pettit, one of the many inspiring forces behind the Western Massachusetts poetry scene. Drew Swenhaugen asks Pettit about the literary organization Flying Object (founded by her brother Guy Pettit), her new book, Goat in the Snow, as well as Pettit’s Factory Hollow Press and the magazine she co-edits, notnostrums (busy bee!!):

DS: When I think of Amherst poetry, even East Coast poetry, Flying Object is where I begin. You seem to have a poetry tradition behind you with James Tate and Dara Weir, amongst so many others at UMass. When I was at Flying Object this summer, I saw a signed copy of John Ashbery’s Flow Chart, among a perfect sales room of small press gems. Jesus! From the West Coast, this seems like a poetry paradise. Do you feel like your amidst such a poetry legacy?

EP: I do feel that I am living in an amazing poetry community! An amazing poetry community composed of poets from the past and poets making poems today. Poets making marvelous poems today—Peter Gizzi, James Tate, and Dara Weir—the UMass MFA program poetry faculty—are phenomenal forces of poetry. Past and present UMass MFA students makeup many other fierce and friendly and forward pushing forces! When one looks at the number of incredible poems and books written by people living in the area or who have in the past lived in the area—it is oh so remarkable! Emily Dickinson did her thing in this place. I repeat, Emily Dickinson did her thing in this place.

Oh, and the impressive list of all the publishing goings-on:

When one looks at the presses and journals that began or are now being run or helped run by past and present Umass MFA students or people living in the area—it is awe inspiring—for example Agnes Fox Press, Bateau Press, Brave Men Press, Flowers & Cream Press, Minutes Books, Pilot Books, Slope Editions, The Song Cave, Wave Books. Journals I might think of include—Conduit, GlitterPony, Invisible Ear, Jellyfish Magazine,The Massachusetts Review, Model Homes, NOO Journal, notnostrums, Rain Taxi, SKEIN, and Verse. And I am missing many things right now!

And events at FO:

People who run events at Flying Object include, but are not limited to—The Boys Upstairs run by the boys who live above Flying Object; CELAN SALON run by Nathaniel Otting; THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF HADLEY FOR IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE run by Heather Christle & Don Blair; LOOT run by Elaine Kahn and Bill Nace; and THE WHENEVER WE FEEL LIKE IT READING SERIES run by Michelle Taransky and myself. Workshops taught at Flying Object include Creative Writing with Rachel B. Glaser, Poets & Poems with Emily Pettit, and Bookmaking for Writers, Small Press Publishers, and Dabblers
with Betsy Wheeler (and sometimes when we are lucky, a Pickling Workshop taught by Jono Tosch is offered!).

Day to day operations at Flying Object are organized and run by Guy Pettit—my brother. Guy is magic and has made a magic space in the space that is Flying Object. Originally the building that Flying Object occupies, was the town of Hadley’s Police and Fire Station. Then it became apartments. Then Guy invented Flying Object. Guy is the most amazing inventor.

Certainly there’s a lot happening out there, and the Pettits are in the eye of it. Oh, but what about Emily’s own composition? Let’s read her title poem.

“The Female Grotesque” is a seriously great interview with South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon — read it all here at Guernica. More about her, from Ruth Williams:

[F]or Kim Hyesoon, poetry engages directly in a political struggle in which Korean women articulate a “new voice” that allows them to inhabit multiple and fluid identities free of restrictive gender norms. It’s an incredibly powerful tool in women’s struggle for equality because it is only the “language of [a] poetry that has schizophrenia” that can force the “father language down from power.”

While Kim Hyesoon’s poetry certainly has much to offer women poets and readers interested in feminism, her work also presents a unique voice coming out of the landscape of a fully industrialized, globally ascendant South Korea. In light of the ongoing military and economic ties between South Korea and the U.S., such a voice is worth examining. Regardless of gender or national identity, the allure of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry lies in its enjoinder that we embrace the differences we embody even if these aspects of ourselves are maligned by culture at large. “If someone asks,” she writes, “Is / anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.”

Given the powerful imagery, language, and experimentation that typifies her work, Kim Hyesoon is one of the foremost Korean poets today. Among the first women to begin publishing in Korean literary journals in the late 1970s, Kim’s work has earned her numerous accolades. . . .

And a sample of their conversation:

Guernica: Your poetry is grotesque, asserting a kind of violent ugliness that disrupts the poem’s surface, seemingly offering an open challenge to those who might assert that women must write only about “pretty” things. What draws you to this?

Kim Hyesoon: We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become “the paper made of human meat,” we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play. It is not possible to explain women’s poetry until you sympathize with how women painfully go through the experience of having these tattoos carved on their bodies. At this point, women’s language is the butcher’s language who sells his or her body. It is grotesque and miserable. Female poets can finally step into the world of language after crossing this river of the grotesque; the words cannot gush out of their mouths until they cross the river of screams where you witness death like everyday affairs.

I also came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together. The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.

I went to an international poetry festival in Rotterdam, Netherlands recently. I heard one poet saying that poets are healthy people and poets talk to the world through their health. When I heard them saying that, I wondered who judges which one is healthy or not? In my opinion, poets talk through the symptoms of disease. These symptoms of disease are predictions, screams, and songs.

Hyesoon also discusses speaking through these symptoms, attending a candlelight demonstration against the government, confronting the traditional lyric poetry of South Korea, the visceral human body in her work, and the intersection of feminism and poetry:

Specifically, I think the self who writes poetry is different from the self who makes a claim about abolishing the wage differences between men and women. Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world.

Also read about the current state of feminism in South Korea (“Currently, Korean feminism is on the brink of death”), modern male poetry in Korea and “the prison of metaphor,” and more more more here.

Montevidayo‘s Johannes Goransson is also excited about the interview. He leads us to some of Hyesoon’s poems as well. Find them here.

“Three falls ago,” after a rush of interest in Ariana Reines, student and poet Carina Finn’s Christmas wishlist included every book by the author. “Because my mother has always bought me any book I have asked for without question, I did get these books for Christmas and I spent all of winter break that year reading them and re-reading them.” Finn has gone on to interview Reines about her new book, Mercury (Fence 2011), over at HTMLGIANT. A prime example of their back-and-forth:

There are moments in the text that almost have an air of petulance – especially the poems that appear before “Truth or Consequences,” i.e. “All the Single Ladies,” “Body Stocking,” “Arena,” etc. Were you writing voluntarily when you were writing these poems, or did you feel otherwise compelled by some internal or external force?

The question you ask, was I writing voluntarily, is a marvelous one, and one I have asked myself every so often all my life. Does one ever write voluntarily? I suppose such people exist, people who do things simply because they volunteer to do them. The moment of volunteerism in Mercury occurs on its final page and it’s a bit cryptic. Perhaps this shall not make sense to the casual reader, but in many ways the magic at work in Mercury consists of me volunteering to do what I am already in any case compelled by forces external and numinous to do.

People who wake up one day and decide they’ve had a good career breaking horses and running the numbers, why not sit down and write a poem… I have nothing against these people because writing a poem is always a good thing to do. These people are perhaps my distant cousins but they are not my sisters. Alejandro Jodorowsky prescribes morning poetry writing to every living human as excellent medicine, as a kind of universal nerve tonic, and I think he’s right; so that would be a kind of voluntary poetry writing that would be great, truly a health. I can see myself doing that, although I don’t do it now. I think if I could do that then I could write my own gay science like Nietzsche’s gay science: the book of my great health.

That said Mercury is of course also a book meant to take your temperature and harmonize your chakras and do acupuncture on you and improve your overall health.

My best writing seems to have to be forced from me by some other force but that force has to be one whose power I agree to serve.

What I like to work at and what I was very careful in the assembly of, in Mercury, is a ground, a field, a structure in which the poems can resonate together as much more than merely themselves. And that takes voluntary work, and it is work I enjoy doing pedantically and maniacally, over and over until it is almost right.

To write the science fiction novel I have planned will require real physical supports, four walls and a door, a regular drug supply, good light, someone to help out around the garden (because I will want to have an herb garden for the novel), and trees, and a large bed in which to dream. I wrote many of the poems you say sound petulant on my Blackberry in the summertime. The best state for writing poems, for me, is having enough money to eat and living in the same place for a little while (not too long), having a big bed, and being in love. Then whatever it is that forces me to write the poems does so without hurting me too much, only as much as it hurts to reach the total nadir of existence that one can touch on any given day or night and that can only be exited through a poem. I admit to you Carina that there are times when I am sure I would die if I weren’t writing right now. How can i know? It is like that nightmare or ghost story about the woman with the ribbon round her neck. All that said I think I am through writing poems for a while, maybe forever.

Finn moves on here to ask Reines about the “troubadour lineage of poets with virtuoso talent and crippling romanticism,” but we’re pretty halted by that last line up there. It’s not revisited. As for Reines and the troubadours, she replies, in part:

So actually I think, and I have had a hard time explaining this, the poem is a way for me to make what I feel to be my androgyny, such as it is, tangible, in sort of caricatured and hackneyed ways. One needn’t read Chrétien de Troyes for this to resonate. Have you seen The Sword and The Stone? Or Robin Hood, or The Facts of Life? I think (and I realize you didn’t ask this part of the question, but I am using your beautiful question to ask myself other questions) the fact that I never feel feminine or masculine enough, and the almost aggressive or aggravated heterosexuality in my poems, has to do with my desire for lyric to achieve the total romance of being both the knight and the lady in distress/lady in the high tower for whom he, the knight, does great things. However obviously Mercury has many kinds of weather in it and there are spaces in which the voice is the incantatory voice of a crone at her cauldron, or a French intellectual too exhausted and cynical to have feelings. . . .

The interview also includes details about Reines’s “megapoems” (“…they are so much fun because the difficulty that prompts them is so strong that the ecstatic state with its two antennae up — one for lyric purity and the other for critical intensity — is strong enough to keep going and going”), and what it’s like to work with Rebecca Wolff. Read it all here.

Jericho: While your first book, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering, often makes use of prose formally, I think of its poems as mostly written in lines. In contrast, your most recent book, Discipline, is most definitely a book of prose poems. Why did you make this formal decision for Discipline? What is your conception of the prose poem? What does it enable you to do that lines don’t? Is form shifting again in the work you’ve written since the publication of Discipline?

Dawn: For me, form emerges when language ends. I do not think of form as a framework or a device that comes before the concern of the poem (what it attends to)—as in “I’m going to write a villanelle.” I would never do that. When I studied with Myung Mi Kim—O, such a long time ago now—she introduced me to two phrases that at the time were revolutionary to my young mind: “the page as canvas” and the “tyranny of the left margin.” I started to think about what the poem would do if not hindered by convention. How would it act? And why would it act that way? The ways in which the poems act on the page, then, is mostly fortified by what wants to be said, and these acts become a part of the saying. But, it is a reciprocal relationship. When one is working in the form—the prose poem, say—the form itself begins to contribute to how utterance happens.

In Gathering, one question at hand was, “How does one speak bodily and psychic trauma if trauma has no language”?”. The poems are mostly lineated, but also, truncated in speech because this is the investigation. In Discipline, we are in the post-tramautic state. The body is running around doing all types of things sometimes without its own consent. It does not know its interior space. It’s reflective in a banal confessional way. The poem attends to the sentence here more directly in part because of these attentions. But, this may be an over-simplification.

Brown also asks about the origins and evolving of the Black Took Collective:

Jericho: Can you tell me what makes a poem experimental, and how your idea of that compares and contrasts to the other founders’ ideas? Because it is “a group of experimental black poets,” I have to ask, what kind of contribution do you believe black poets in particular make to the experimental tradition?

Dawn: I have no idea what makes a poem experimental. I don’t think there are a certain set of factors or approaches that define experimental poem. Perhaps it exists only in a liminal space? To experiment, I think, is to play, to not be bound by convention, to operate toward discovery, to be willing to fail—from the Latin experiri meaning “to test, to try.” I’m always talking to my students about “productive failure” because they get all caught up in making this perfect, polished, little darling of a poem. Experimentation is liberation from that notion. What it produces, I don’t know. I do think, though, that black poets and other poets of color often do a kind of cultural work in their attention to the experimental. M. Nourbese Philip’s powerful epic work, Zong!, about the slave ship “Zong,” for example, thinks through personhood in its formal attention to language, that gives us a new way to consider what it means to be a “non-being” or an abject body during Middle Passage annihilation. Or, the fragile reconstructions and disfigurings of Craig Santos Perez in his book from Unincorporated Territories [saina] where he enters the conversation about oceanic identity, making present, this forgotten place, Guam. Experimental poets of color are doing this kind of work, necessarily, in some ways saying that conventional means cannot attend to the matters of racial and/or national identity, rootlessness, or the effects of global militarization. Conventional language, to paraphrase Erica Hunt, re-produces conventional ways of knowing.

The interview also includes some pretty amazing photos of Martin and other poets. Read it all here.

Canarium Books’ Joshua Edwards has interviewed Marfa Book Company’s Tim Johnson for Poetry Society of America, and it’s aces. You might know the small town of Marfa, Texas as an art hub, but Johnson is pushing the poetry hard. He might be the Guy Pettit of the Southwest? And he certainly believes in bricks and mortar:

There’s that secular vision that looks, that shops, or passively admires, of which we’re somewhat wary. And there’s that other kind of vision, one we experience as a kind of responsibility to make things, to be active, and, consequently, to engage. It may sound like I’m paraphrasing Matthew Stadler (of Publication Studio), but it’s certainly worth repeating that bookstores occupy a curious spot in the commercial world. There is, and probably has always been, this sense that they exceed a simple commercial service and provide a kind of reflective and even generative site for cultural activity. This is what we’re investigating at the Marfa Book Co. Or, at least, that’s the way it seems to me, because that’s what interests me about what we do on a daily basis. We try and test the nature of the bookstore. And, to an extent, we even flaunt or try to confuse the commercial aspect. And we do that by hosting performances, films, music, art shows, by releasing albums, publishing books, and so forth. And some of this stuff we do for free. Or we have books that are not for sale, and we intend to have a “library” of books that you can check out but you can’t buy. At the same time, we need to pay the bills, to make sure the space exists in five and ten years.

Edwards tells us that Marfa Book Company has three poetry sections. And art books of course. They even have The Bernadette Corporation’s The Complete Poem. And they’ve hosted the likes of hosted Harryette Mullen, Farid Matuk, Susan Briante, Allison Hedge Coke, Kevin Young, Adrian Matejka, Ben Lerner, Michael McGriff, Mark McMorris, Kristin Naca, Christian Campbell, Fady Joudah, and Eleni Sikelianos. They’ve also recently entered the publishing world! The Present Order: Writings on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay is excitingly just out. More on that:

Joshua Edwards: You had a really interesting show up in your gallery space when I was there in late 2010, work by Ian Hamilton Finlay that sort of exists at the intersection of poetry, graphic art, and minimalism. You guys also published a beautiful book to go along with it. It seemed like Marfa was the perfect setting for Finlay’s work, although he was a Scottish gardener. Can you talk a little bit about the gallery space, and that show in particular?

Tim Johnson: Sure. Within the bookstore there’s a fairly large gallery space where we present maybe six shows annually. And I would say, at this point, the exhibition of printed works by Ian Hamilton Finlay was our most ambitious. Finlay, who died in 2006, was such an inspiring person: poet, publisher, gardener, visual artist. And his work is, for me, deeply engaging and also, sometimes, quite troubling. Frankly, the work is somewhat difficult to describe. For example, he made “standing poems,” “folding cards,” artists books, concrete poetry, “poem prints,” and a host of other kinds of work for which there is very little precedent in the literary world. The exhibition included examples of all this work. And, because we really wanted to demonstrate our respect for Finlay, we published a book, The Present Order: Writing on the Work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, which features new and newly-translated contributions by seven individuals, including Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Stephen Scobie, a Canadian poet, friend of Finlay’s, and the principle lender to our show. It’s our first book, and we thought that Finlay would be the perfect subject, as he was really a principle practitioner in many of the fields that we find most interesting.

They also talk about Johnson’s own work:

Joshua Edwards: It’s interesting to me that much of your own work as a poet wouldn’t fit into a book and doesn’t really conform to the mainstream discourse of poetics. You’ve got sound poems, musical mash-ups, poems that depend on scale, sculpture that interrogates the idea of the book, collaborative works—all of which make inquiries into form in a very different sense than one sees on the open page. Maybe this is a leap, but this seems to be reflected in store, also.

Tim Johnson: Well, perhaps because it pertains to language, this will qualify as poetic. While arranging the shelves for the current configuration of the store, I decided that Cormac McCarthy’s books would always appear in the same place. That is to say, regardless of where the alphabet would situate them, they will always appear at eye level, on one particular shelf. Other authors’ names may appear before or after McCarthy’s in the common order, but because of where we are, the popularity of his titles, and the laws of marketing, McCarthy has trumped the alphabet.

As to my own work, I suppose I’m somewhat restless. I’m often trying to elude my own presumptions about what a poem is or does, where it’s found, the nature of its instantiation, and so forth. And I live among a lot of artists, so that has probably influenced me.

Read the interview in full here.

Rail: You launched Shepard’s book right around the time Soft Skull was acquired by Counterpoint. With sort of parallel beginnings, I’m wondering what your long term plans are for Solid Objects?

Winter: We started with smaller books. At some point we’ll probably try to start to print longer books. When you start something, you want to start manageably. Realistically. Electronic publishing, that’s something that could be introduced at some point, as sort of an adjunct to print publication. Right now we’re enjoying printing things.

Rail: So I’m sort of curious, Mac Wellman’s Left Glove, your second book, was a play. Randy Bradley, an epistolary novella. You have three such different styles.

Lubasch: We were interested in printing drama right from the outset. Not too many small presses print drama. Wellman was in a sense a really natural choice. His work combines dramatic and poetic elements, based on ideas of movement and the relationship between words often associated with poetry. You may not know why an activity is taking place, but you don’t really need to on some level. You just respond to it. It’s incredibly moving.

Winter: As far as Morrill’s Randy Bradley, that attracted us because of its great humor and eccentricity, its humanity. It’s a portrait of a … very peculiar character with a strange worldview, incredibly human. You follow a story with a Japanese film director with a play about a lost glove, with characters who are not really characters (one character in Wellman’s play is the article “the” and another is the conjunction “and”). Follow that with a tightly knit portrait, like Randy Bradley, then that, too, is a surprise. You have to keep things interesting.

Generous spirits, it seems! Read the full interview here.

Finally, this is your second book with Ahsahta, after Pioneers in the Study of Motion several years ago. That kind of relationship with a press is pretty rare these days. I wonder if you could close by saying a few words about Ahsahta and your experience working with them on two different projects now.

It has been a great gift working with Janet Holmes at Ahsahta. She’s not only a fantastic editor and incredibly smart about the publishing business, but she’s an amazing poet. (See: F2F and Ms of My Kin for a sense of the intelligence and diversity of her work.) In every part of the publishing process, I had the privilege of collaborating with someone who cares for the poems line by line. When we were working on Pioneers, she sent a first set of galleys with the explanation that she thought Futura would be a good typeface for the titles because of its association with William Carlos Williams. Swoon.

I am going to start a fundraising project to clone Janet. Then we can still get more books from Ahsahta and more poems from her.

In all seriousness, this brings me back to economics. So much of the best poetry that is happening today comes from people like Janet who have always worked incredibly hard and are working harder still in the grip of the Great Recession. But I don’t know how long we can continue to count on these extraordinary efforts. We are all tired and working too hard and worrying about our job security and our health insurance and the kinds of opportunities that will be left to our kids. But on top of all of that heavy lifting, we have to imagine a different economic future. We must refuse to accept the narrow possibilities offered by our current political and economic system. If we the poets, researchers, rabble-rousers can’t imagine it, who will?

Go read the rest. There’s a video and text of a poem, too!

Who do you imagine your ideal reader to be?

Well, anyone who can read! We really strive to have an eclectic body of work in each issue. This word is thrown around a lot: eclectic. To us, it means various modes and styles of getting into the realm of being that each piece of writing embodies. We think of our jobs as populating a room with this “eclectic” crowd. We have 100 or so pages to orchestrate an interesting conversation between artists. Our ideal reader is someone who looks for this multi-faceted relationship in their reading. Not just reading to find a “good” poem, but someone who reads in order to be pushed a bit out of his/her comfort zone and who puts thought into that experience.

I was a little apprehensive when I first showed this collection [Furia] to other people—not because of what it revealed about me, but because I wasn’t sure how it would affect them. I went around telling my readers that I was okay and not to worry about me. My friend Levi Romero, who wrote a beautiful cover blurb for ‘furia,’ said it best when he responded, “I know you survived, like I did. Some come to poetry because it’s trendy and hip and they learn how to write it, sometimes well. Some of us come to poetry por que no nos queda otra. We’d die without it. It’s not a game. Poetry is healing, powerful, sacred, holy.”

So yes, I had literary influences—Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, Francisco X. Alarcón, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Carmen Tafolla and I’m strongly influenced by musica ranchera, especially lyrics written by Cuco Sanchez, Jose Alfredo Jimenez, and Juan Gabriel—but poetry for me doesn’t come just from an aesthetic impulse…writing poetry is literally how I survived my life and my experiences without breaking down or zoning out or giving in to self-destructiveness. No me quedó de otra—there was no other way, no alternative, no rescue. I’ve made it this far one syllable at a time.

And about those guerilla tactics we mentioned before:

My guerrilla writing tactics! It’s all about approaching writing with mobility, spontaneity, and ‘quick strikes’. Given my time constraints—two jobs, being a caregiver, my own health demands, no maid in sight; considering that I can’t afford to go away to residencies or writing colonies, etc.; and having obligations that mean I can’t live in someone else’s basement or out of a backpack, I had to find a different way of approaching writing.

First—mobility. I’m not dependent on having an office, a writing space, a desk or anything else. I used to love writing in cafés…don’t have the time for that anymore. Now, I write on the dining room table, on the bus, while I’m in line at the grocery store, during breaks and lunches from work. I write on loose sheets of paper where I’ve printed poems and stories in progress, in a composition notebook I always carry, and sometimes, on my laptop. Spontaneity comes from creating a discipline out of being ready to write at any moment—in whatever length of time opens up—whether it’s while dinner is in the oven, while I’m at the doctor’s office, or the bus is late.

Mobility and spontaneity are both dependent on preparedness. For me, that means carrying my work-in-progress around with me everywhere I go. Not just on paper but in my mind. Daydreaming time and contemplation time can happen at any of the above places, any of the above times. Striking quickly means you can’t afford the luxury of a day or an afternoon to ‘sink’ into a project. Instead, you live your spare moments planning, dreaming, weighing words. And then, when those five-plus minutes open up, you swoop in, write, and then withdraw.

Read the whole wide-ranging interview here.

This makes our Monday: Levi Rubeck has interviewed Peter Gizzi over at BOMBLOG. As they mention, the talk surrounds the topics of “loss, literature as instruction manual, and the accident of selfhood.” The two poets also chat about punk, publishing’s digital revolution, and what’s personal about Gizzi’s most recent collection of poems, called Threshold Songs. To jump ahead: “Poetry is essentially a threshold experience—in my case, ‘threshold’ because I was constantly waking—and simply going with it because there’s really nothing else to do but one’s own work and to build an environment out of this larger, unstable, multiplying narrative we call the world.”

Rubeck did his homework:

LR In an interview with Rob Casper for jubilat you said: “I learned I’d like both to be clear and to suggest something larger at the same time; I’d like the thought to be both more exact and yet more open in what it is trying to take on.” What are some of your methods for navigating that line or “threshold” between clarity and larger, potentially existential or metaphysical themes?

PG Let me begin by saying that I have often characterized my voice as, simply, an ongoing narration of my bewilderment as a citizen in the world. I find bewilderment to be a productive place from which to compose. It’s a word I like as it has both “be” and “wild” in it, and I also hear wilderness. Let’s be honest, life is strange and gets stranger; it’s strange to be here. So for me selfhood is also a biological phenomenon, enacted by the body I have to work with; it’s my instrument. In one of my poems in this book I say “the biology that composes I is shared with I.” Sometimes I think that my language has a kind of sonic blur, trying to transmit the impersonal frequency of pure neuro-hormonal energy. This might sound crazy, but in the act of locating a ground in this otherwise dark process, I came to an understanding that was, for me, revelatory: that the sensory data recorded in my poetry is, at the same time, a fiction of consciousness and the physical reality of my nervous system. Sometimes I think that I’m only an ethnographer of my nervous system; it’s certainly peopled. So what do I mean when I say that I want to be clear and to suggest something larger? One of the jobs for me as a poet is to listen to the exterior world in relation to some otherwise illegible interiority. I want to connect these two and give the resulting relationship a sound.

One of the central concerns in my poetry and in this new book in particular is that the poems keep turning. It’s the turn. They keep turning in on themselves, and they keep questioning themselves. It’s like that interior argument when you’re lying awake at night. I’m trying to find a way not to come to easy resolution but I want the poems—and within them, the lines—to be like little stations of meaning, steps, or moments, of illumination, and then I want it to turn again. And if I can turn it again, maybe I can get underneath the vast, or even push further a momentary notion. It’s a really turvy book, and in that way it is personal and interior, and it is at a constant threshold. But all of that said, I am still really interested in meaning and the meaning that it wants to make. It’s not that it’s meaningless, even though there’s much meaning in meaninglessness, but it’s trying at the same time to accommodate the not knowing and yet give it some kind of purchase, to give it some reality, and to value it as itself.

And Gizzi is strikingly honest:

PG Poetry has always been an extremely private art for me. And with Threshold Songs, sadly, it felt more so. There was certainly a pressure. But there’s always a pressure for me; it’s a necessary condition for my syntax, for writing. I never write about my life; I write out of my life. So the particular pressure of the last few years was the real unfathomable losses of three major people that occurred in a two and a half year period. The first was my mother, which was preceded by a year of comforting and caring for her. Though the condition around it was difficult, it was one of the most exceptional years of my life. It was a gift, in fact, for both of us. She rose to the occasion, and I guess I did too. Interesting to think that my mother brought me into the world, and then matter-of-factly showed me how to leave it. So in that year, we both opened and found a new way, a truly deeper way to connect. It felt like we were actually listening to one another for the first time. That heightened sense of listening is something I’ve always highly valued in the act of writing, and here I was just simply living it. I guess I always am, but her terminal condition had a matter-of-factness about it I simply accepted.

Emily Dickinson, in talking about her mother in one of her letters, wrote “I never had a mother, until she became my child.” It’s one of those things that you read that is both a beautiful construction and an enigma, and then, simply and suddenly, you understand it, you live it. I begin to see all literature as a kind of instruction manual. At the age of maturity, both Odysseus and Dante go to hell and confront their mortality. When I was young it was a kind of romance, and now I see it as a kind of handbook—it’s not a metaphor, it’s real. Robert Creeley said to me at one point, “as one loses people in one’s life, it’s like living in a neighborhood where each year another house has burned down.” But you know, that creates a new opening, and then the sun shines through, and you experience it in a different way.

After my mother, less than two years later, my eldest brother Michael, who was also a poet, died suddenly. And then four months after that, one of my closest friends, someone I’ve known since high school, the artist Robert Seydel, died of a heart attack. I did say earlier that life was strange, and I wasn’t being casual. The thing I’ve discovered is that when someone close to me dies, it touches and animates the other losses I’ve experienced. Those people don’t go away, they just occupy a larger discourse in my interior life. I’ve lost now many people that I knew and loved and did not understand when I was younger. And now I have all these voices ricocheting in my system….

Read the full interview here.

Flying Object of South Hadley, MA is shaping up to be more than just a reading site, gallery, letterpress studio, and bookshop filled with rare small-press treasures (yes, it is all these things) — their website is also amazingly fun (check out Jono Tosch’s guest Tweets, the Photo Opportunities and “It’s My Decision,” a new series featuring “a poem by somebody”). Another recent addition is an interview with poet and Forklift, Ohio editor Matt Hart! Hart gives a shout-out to journals he finds neighborly, including Agriculture Reader, Big Bell, H_NGM_N, Lumberyard, Lungfull!, Sixth Finch, Gondola, Toad, The Equalizer, BPM, Jellyfish, and Coldfront. And he talks more in-depth about Forklift, Ohio:

2.) How did your Journal start?

Eric Appleby and I started Forklift, Ohio back in 1994, and for the most part we’ve been publishing ever since (with a couple of hiccups along the way). We’ve now done 23 issues, and 24 will be out this spring. We do chapbooks here and there (this spring we’re doing one by Stuart Dischell called Touch Monkey), and this spring we’ll publish our first Forklift book book, Wolf’s Milk by Juan Sweeney de la Minas de Cobra (the Oklahoman-Bolivian poet, translated from the Spanish by Chad Sweeney…

In ’94 Eric was just out of college, and I was just off a year in a Master’s program in Philosophy. We were both newly transplanted to Cincinnati where we still live, and we wanted to get a journal going as a way to get work into the world that we thought people should read. Of course, it was also a way to insert ourselves into, and hopefully expand, a community of writers and artists. I should note that we had done a journal in Muncie, Indiana (we both majored in Philosophy at Ball State) before Forklift, OH called Nausea Is the Square Root of Muncie.

We were sitting our kitchen (we were roommates at the time) talking about what to call the journal, and I being the dork Pavement fan that I was said how about Forklift. And Eric said, Yeah, that’s alright, but it needs something. Let’s make the “forklift” a place—Forklift, Ohio. Then came the industrial bit, and since we love food as much as we love words, cooking needed to be in there as well—especially since Fork/lift-ing is what one does when one eats in Ohio and other places, too.

The first ten issues were tabloid size on newsprint, and then we decided we wanted each issue to be an object that people might enjoy looking at and holding as much they might enjoy reading it. That’s when we started trying out weird binding materials—like Schluter Ditra and flooring substrate. One issue had a bolt through the center, another looked like a tiny clipboard wrapped in caution tape. Still another came a bag of chili mix, complete with dry beans and all the spices. The recipe for the chili was a jigsaw puzzle on the back sides of the poems.

Read it all here.

Poet, professor, scholar, and cuteness expert Sianne Ngai has been interviewed for Cabinet Magazine–lucky us! Ngai is “interested in states of weakness: in ‘minor’ or non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency; in trivial aesthetic categories grounded in ambivalent or even explicitly contradictory feelings.” “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” she says. Go on, go on:

It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled. So there’s a sadistic side to this tender emotion, as people like Daniel Harris have noted. The prototypically cute object is the child’s toy or stuffed animal.

Cuteness is also a commodity aesthetic, with close ties to the pleasures of domesticity and easy consumption. As Walter Benjamin put it: “If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle.” Cuteness could also be thought of as a kind of pastoral or romance, in that it indexes the paradoxical complexity of our desire for a simpler relation to our commodities, one that tries in a utopian fashion to recover their qualitative dimension as use.

Ngai differentiates between cuteness and the zany:

While the cute is thus about commodities and consumption, the zany is about performing. Intensely affective and highly physical, it’s an aesthetic of nonstop action that bridges popular and avant-garde practice across a wide range of media: from the Dada cabaret of Hugo Ball to the sitcom of Lucille Ball. You could say that zaniness is essentially the experience of an agent confronted by—even endangered by—too many things coming at her quickly and at once. Think here of Frogger, Kaboom!, or Pressure Cooker, early Atari 2600 video games in which avatars have to dodge oncoming cars, catch falling bombs, and meet incoming hamburger orders at increasing speeds. Or virtually any Thomas Pynchon novel, bombarding protagonist and reader with hundreds of informational bits which may or may not add up to a conspiracy.

Another minor state is the “interesting.” Adam Jasper asks her more directly: “In what ways does ‘interesting’ conform to, and differ from, the traditional aesthetic categories such as the beautiful and the sublime?” To which Ngai responds: “The difference is that the blankness or indeterminacy of the judgment of interesting seems to explicitly invite us to fill in the blank with the concept later. The interesting is an explicitly epistemological aesthetic, in a way that the beautiful is not.” After talking a bit about Kant and “the ubiquity of the weak judgment in everyday conversation, and how it gets used to implicitly invite others to demand, in turn, that the person who has just proclaimed something interesting take the next step of explaining why,” Jasper and Ngai get at poetry and the visual:

Could you tell us more about what Schlegel had to say about the interesting? Is there an overlap between the interesting and the ironic?

In a 1797 essay called “On the Origins of Greek Poetry,” Schlegel explicitly sets the interesting, which he associates with the literature of modernity, in direct opposition to the beautiful poetry of the Greeks. While die schöne Poesie is objectively rule-bound, universal, and disinterested, die interessante Poesie is subjective and idiosyncratic, open to interminable particularization because no laws govern its determination by any content in particular. So here is the historical link between the maker of interesting art and the figure of the romantic ironist: both are defined by the lack of attachment to any particular worldview, and thus by an ability to “take on any subject-matter or artistic style” (as Hegel put it, negatively—he was not a fan of irony, nor of the Schlegels). In a way that may come as a surprise to many, the aesthetic of the interesting thus has a fairly lofty pedigree in high theory and literary criticism.

There is something intriguing about the gesture associated with the interesting: pointing. Pointing at something interesting is both vague and precise, and implies that there is more to see than can be seen, that we have recognized something portentous but at the same time are not sure what it is. The gesture is a promissory note, an assertion that this thing will reward further inspection. Does the mute and indicative nature of pointing itself reveal the nature of the interesting?

Yes! No one brings this out better than John Baldessari, which is why his A Person Was Asked to Point (1969) played such a central role in my thinking about how the interesting functions as a specifically narrative or diachronic aesthetic—one that unlike the instantaneous thunderbolt of the sublime, tends to unfold in a serial fashion, over time.

Linked always to the relatively small surprise of information, or the perception of minor differences from an existing norm, the interesting is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality. So we can see why Susan Sontag suggests that it is an aesthetic closely bound up with both the nineteenth-century novel and the history of photography. In On Photography, troubled by how the use of “interesting” as a notoriously weak evaluation tends to promote a general “indiscrimination,” Sontag trenchantly notes that “the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera.” If it is “not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph—only less interesting [ones],” the reason why photography becomes “one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions” is because “the photographic purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality,” makes everything comparable to others of its same kind or type.

We can thus glimpse the connection between late twentieth-century conceptualism—famously obsessed with acts of documentation, classification, and the presentation of evidence—and a range of realist practices from the previous century. Indeed, conceptual art’s “crucial innovation,” as Liz Kotz suggests, was its unprecedented pairing of photography with the language of ordinary/everyday observation: the “notes on reality,” and on social types in particular, central also to novelists ranging from Henry James to Georges Perec. As James famously said, “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.”

Yes, the whole interview is that…you know. Read it all here.

Here’s a taste then make the jump:

Mark Cugini: First and foremost, I think it’s worth mentioning that you said if someone liked Black Life, they’d probably like Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death. I couldn’t agree more, but I’m sort of curious — how do you think they’re similar?

Dorothea Lasky: I would say the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die is more like Black Life than Life After Death. Life After Death, for me, is more like my next book, Thunderbird. Nevertheless, Black Life is indebted to Biggie’s album because in both the speaker is a “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner.” And also, in both, the speakers give you the sense (I hope) that it was not a choice to be so, but more a condition thrust upon them by life itself. On a formal level, I am interested in how Biggie folds all kinds of language and voices (some so not his own that they can’t help but become so) into short, clipping lines. They have a casual air, but of course, they couldn’t be farther from casual if they tried. The essence of coolness.

MC: Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense — especially the “born sinner” line. Not to get too liberal-arts-school here, but Biggie was raised by a single mother in a low-income neighborhood that was overrun with gang violence and drug use. I do think it’s obvious that the speaker in Black Life was thrust into situations where she lacked control, but those are instances of a different nature: it seems as if she’s addressing interpersonal relationships instead of class issues. If that’s the case, how does it end up that both speakers end up with such swagger? Does it maybe have something to do with owning their personal tragedies?

DL: Thanks for saying that about swagger! What an important word for what we are talking about. Of course, content and the socioeconomic background of poets affect how they craft their personae and what those voices say. I do think, however, that class issues and interpersonal ones are inextricable. Class is rife with everything we do and vice versa. Biggie, to me, is like any poet who takes pieces of life and weaves it into his work. He includes the people he meets and how these people affect him and what they say. I think this is where swagger comes from. It is the craft, the skill, the flow, that connects all of us as poets. The ability to take the muck of the everyday and make it beautiful.

But after that he jumps into an interesting and wide-ranging conversation with poet Simon Armitage, who turns this premise on its head, saying that if everybody sitting on the bus or the tube in the mornings was holding a book of poems, he might not want to be a poet at all:

“There’s something about poetry which is oppositional and it’s a form of dissent. I mean, even in its physical form, it doesn’t reach the right-hand margin, it doesn’t reach the bottom of the page. There’s something a little bit obstinate about it [...] Poetry’s always had a complex relationship with language. It’s alternative. It’s independent. It simply cannot be a mainstream art form.”

Watch the whole interview right here:

The Capilano Review is at it again! They’ve just printed “Deleted Scenes” from Ted Byrne’s interview with Lisa Robertson, which opens TCR 3.15 (Fall 2011) and is called “This Animal, the Pronoun: An Interview.” We need to purchase the physical issue to read the entire thing (those contents are drool-worthy, so no problem), but we’ve got ideas for weeks based solely on these “outtakes.” You’ll note the cinematic tack; yes, it’s relevant. Robertson discusses Marguerite Duras’ minimalist masterpiece Natalie Granger, George Cukor’s The Women, filmmaker Michael Haneke, and other things Netflixable. But there’s more! Byrne manages to touch on most of Robertson’s oeuvre, including Debbie: An Epic, The Men, and the recent R’s Boat:

LR In a pretty big way in most of The Weather, and definitely in a lot of R’s Boat, it’s not the content of the sentences that’s particularly interesting. I wasn’t aiming to write or select or work with “good” sentences or interesting sentences. I was much more interested in working with very banal or “bad” sentences. It’s banal yet true to observe that any æsthetic and stylistic judgment that you might make about any unit of literature, from a body of work to a book to a phrase, is completely contextual. There’s no real value in any content. Value’s just what relationships are built through sequence, through temporal distribution. Whether you’re talking about an institution or a paragraph it doesn’t really matter what the units are. It’s what starts happening between the units, and across the time structure that’s interesting. . . .

TB Yeah, okay, but I still think that the procedures that were involved in constructing The Weather…I certainly know more about The Weather now than I did before you told me some of the things you told me.

LR But does it change your reading of it? Does it become more interesting really, or…?

TB I don’t know.

LR I’ve never tried to hide my…as far as I have methods or techniques, I’ve never been coy about them.

TB No, in fact you’ve described them.

LR But I don’t think it’s really necessarily that interesting. If you could actually narrate to somebody the way you actually wrote this book, it’s always going to be a little bit of a snow job, because how can you actually narrate the way you wrote the book? You represent certain parts of how you did it, but what does that give anyone? Does it give somebody the sense that they could go and write the book, or does it give them the sense that that helps them as a reader, in some sense, to get to the “real” meaning of the book? I don’t feel that it’s useful to be mystifying and secretive about what writing is, and so that’s why I talk about it, because people seem to want to know, but I actually don’t think it’s very interesting.

TB I don’t have any need to take issue with that, but…

LR If Sir Thomas Browne could tell you how he wrote “Urn Burial,” do you think that would make the text that much more amazing, because Sir Thomas Browne said “Well, you know, I cut my quill, and these are the books I was reading, and I had this conversation with this guy and…” It wouldn’t change the way you read the text.

Then there’s the city and the country, and living “beyond the beyond.” Byrne says: “There was a comment in ‘Lastingness,’ or a quotation from Flaubert, from The Dictionary of Received Ideas that–what was it? Something about the suburbs in relationship to revolution. That when things start going wrong in the suburbs, the order may really come to be shaken….”

They also discuss Algeria and the 1968 uprisings; Marx, Lacan, Benjamin, Violette Leduc, Jean Genet, and Rousseau. Byrne even brings her a book to talk about:

Les Girls

TB I brought this to show you [Petrarch’s Four Dialogues for Scholars]. I’ve had this book for years‒maybe I bought it from your bookstore, I don’t know, but…

LR The cover doesn’t look familiar…

TB I never noticed the inscription before and I thought it was really funny: “To Dean Eagles from Les Girls.” You imagine Dean Eagles, the classicist, having a little collection of girls in his class, who stuck together because they needed to…

LR A chorus, a little chorus line. Great. This is nice: “I did not steal but inadvertently took a few words from him who often stole so much from Homer, Ennius, Lucretius and many others.”

TB Which essay is that? Which dialogue?

LR Appendix, Three Letters. “To Boccaccio.” Oh my goodness. It’s just so amazing that it’s possible to read something like that.

TB They were threatened by literacy. I recognized in one piece, on the multiplicity of books, or something, there’s a dialogue about…the dialogues are always between Joy and Reason. Of course, Joy is a woman. In these mediæval and renaissance dialogues, Folly is always a woman. Folly would dialogue with Reason. But this is Joy and Reason, discoursing on different topics. And there’s one on how there were too many books being written. And so many people writing books who really don’t have the right to write books.

LR It’s hilarious if you just read Joy’s first lines. “What do you think of the fact that I myself write books?” “I write.” “I do write books.” “Books I do write.” “I write ardently.” “I write much.” “I write, and this is my only enjoyment.” “The urge to write is enormously strong.” “I have written much and am still writing.” “Much I have written.” “I write and hope to become famous by writing.” “I write nevertheless, yearning for fame.”

TB What is he saying to her?

LR He’s saying all kinds of hoo-hah. (In an affected, pompous voice:) “As I have said before, perhaps you might better plough or hoe.” (Laughter) “A great many roads often mislead the traveller.”

TB Well, fuck you, I’m going to write! She doesn’t give it up, does she?

LR “I have an abundance of books.”

TB What’s her last word?

LR “I write nevertheless, yearning for fame.” That is so great. “O distinguished Folly! No wonder parchment is more expensive than it used to be.”

TB Everybody’s writing! It’s the demand.

LR This is great. The illustration of the scriptorum. “I have a goodly number of books.” “I own books which are aids to study.” “I keep many excellent books.” (Laughs) It’s kind of like Dépardieu selling a vacuum cleaner! [cf. Nathalie Granger] “Did I mention my books?”

TB Except in this case Reason just keeps talking! (Long pause) I like the sense that you get from Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia that he’s not that bright. You’d be making a mistake, I think, if you just extended it to his period, that everybody just made arguments that were based on false premises and that was it. But he says things that, as you read them, you sort of laugh. You’re laughing from a position of modernity, and there’s a kind of foolishness that you’re recognizing. There are also really brilliant moments, but Cavalcanti’s little treatise on love, “Donna me prega”…

LR I haven’t read it…

TB …is just so much smarter than what’s going on here, it’s just…

LR Well this was not published.

TB No, it wasn’t even finished.

LR It wasn’t finished. Just, you know, to vaguely defend Dante. Maybe he realized it was a crapola text and ditched it.

TB It’s possible.

LR But it’s one of the pleasures of reading it, too, that it’s just so rife with paradox.

Enjoy it all here, and check out TCR’s past interviews.

Philadelphia poet and 2011 Pew Fellow Pattie McCarthy was recently interviewed by Karen Rigby for Cerise Press; and interestingly, they look at the book “not as object, but also as a matter and manner of working.” They go on:

This way of working is striking, and for some readers, perhaps even antithetical or radical (especially in light of the contemporary rush toward a completed product)…

It doesn’t seem radical to me. It seems like most poets I know are working on long poems or projects. There may be people who don’t like or don’t use the word “project,” but I can’t see how poetry — individual poems or single long poems and everything in between — can not be a long-term task. I prefer to avoid rushing toward a completed project mainly because I am such a slow writer anyway. If the project is huge, and I know it will take me a year or two to write it, then a month of not writing or a stalled section or research that goes nowhere — these don’t seem like great tragedies in the larger scheme of a big project. The long haul is easier for me. The roomier a poem is, the better. How much can we fit in there? And for how long can we work on it? The more and the longer the better. Perhaps the long poem avoids anxiety about completion about the next project. Also, for me, research demands the long poem. It takes a long time for the project to become a product. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Rigby and McCarthy also get all Medieval:

Much of your work reveals a keen interest in medieval history and etymology, as well as an appreciation for the concrete detail and the “wondrous strange.” Do you think there may be something to that idea that poets may often be writing one poem and its variations…?

Yes! I am sure that I am writing one poem and its variations — I believe most poets are. And why not? To use the examples you cited, there’s a lot to medieval history and etymology — more than I could ever think about in detail in a writing lifetime, so I might as well keep thinking it over and over. The way one will approach the same area (say, medieval history) or even the same small detail (one painting or one word) will change over time and in new contexts. I love this idea.

How did you encounter a passion for medieval books of hours?

There are three main things that have always interested me about books of hours. 1) They were the first books that were widely owned privately. So they were domestic objects. Women were a particularly large part of the audience for whom books of hours were made (most of the images in books of hours seem to be of women as well, though I have never sought out an accounting). 2) They were objects for private devotion. I love this early gesture of reading and thinking as part of one’s privacy. 3) I like how books of hours manifest time — in the daily sense (the offices: matins, lauds, marking the times of day), the yearly sense (the calendars at the start of most books of hours), and the endless sense (this would have been the religious sense, that the timeliness of the books is forever). It was also interesting to me how many books of hours were made to be used in a particular place (for Paris use, for example), which put the time of that book in a specific geography. Oh, and lastly, many books of hours have excellent marginalia. Obviously I still find them pretty interesting. Of course, they are also beautiful.

McCarthy is also the mother of three small boys. This comes into play:

You’ve mentioned the “interruptions and selvages of mothering.” Has your process of composing work changed significantly? Or your views on what poetry can change or accomplish?

Well, yes. The process of writing has changed in every possible way. As I mentioned, I write very slowly. There is a luxury to writing slowly. I no longer have that luxury — so I have tried to teach myself to work faster, with more urgency. But Woolf was right! (“That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”) “I am interested in etymology and history, in how language changes through use, disuse, acquisition, fragmentation, amelioration and pejoration.” To speak specifically and personally about it, after tbe birth of my daughter seven months ago, I have had almost no time in solitude. (Of course this means I’ve started researching the history of privacy.) While on maternity leave, I had my two older sons home with me as well. For approximately five months, I spent no time alone at all. I was never alone in our house. I was never alone at a coffeeshop. I don’t think I was ever alone in the car. It was a total lack of solitude and silence. This is a practical matter, not a philosophical one. But I am getting very interested in the juncture of practicality and philosophy. When I started to worry a little, it occurred to me that no one would suffer for lack of a poem by me for a year — and it will come back. There is no need to panic. And it did come back.

I’m reminded of that famous essay by Adrienne Rich — the one about writing “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law.” In it she writes about her work becoming more fragmented while raising her small children. I have found the opposite. I find myself more interested in narrative now that I have children and spend so much time telling stories and hearing them make up their own (of course, their stories are marvelously nonlinear and wandering). Having children has attuned me more intensely to how we use narrative in daily life and in writing. It has also broadened my interest in language. I am interested in etymology and history, in how language changes through use, disuse, acquisition, fragmentation, amelioration and pejoration. I’m equally interested in the great vowel shift of the fifteenth century and the “apex of babble” (Roman Jakobson) that precedes language in young toddlers. My views on what poetry can accomplish remain pretty much the same — I think mainly it can show us a mind at work. And that that is thrilling to see.

Read the full interview here.

Here’s some some:

AK: There’s so much that’s playful yet quite mordant in your work—it’s right there in the titles of two of your collections, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, and Sad Little Breathing Machine. You mess around shamelessly with words—you were the first to put “rapture” and “rupture” in adjoining lines, I believe—but there’s a certain austerity of attitude even in your jokes, it seems. “We practice drawing cubes—/ That’s the house squared away.” Some of your poems read a little like Lewis Carroll or Ogden Nash by way of Poe. Have you ever had a weakness for any of those writers?

Matthea H: Absolutely. I love Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Gorey (I just read a collection of his letters to Peter Neumeyer—oh to have received those decorated envelopes…) Poe less so. The wordplay in Nash’s poems is so delicious—this is one of my favorites:

The Shrimp

A shrimp who sought his lady shrimp
Could catch no glimpse
Not even a glimp.
At times, translucence
Is rather a nuisance?

I haven’t, however, written any poetry for children. My two children’s books (The Little General and the Giant Snowflake and the forthcoming Cecil, the Pet Glacier) are both in prose. My poems are playful, but usually underneath the play is something quite dark or sad—a shark, or a razor blade. I’m not sure why I’m more optimistic in my prose, but so far that has been the case.

AK: Sentimentality is almost a third rail in poetry nowadays, and you seem to touch on the topic in a delightfully oblique way in “The Gem is on Page Sixty-Four.” You write, “Sentimental outbreaks were not uncommon & there were crews / Trained in containment but they could never predict the next / One.” This in a kind of dystopia where it seems we’re meant to identify with the rebels and not the containment crews. But you could be called pretty rigorously unsentimental yourself. In “The Crowd Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away”, you take the most flagrantly sentimental artifacts—pretty, miniature ponies—pair them with psycho-pharmaceutical packaging, and subject them to terrible abuse, even unto being devoured by rats. (This poem should carry a warning label, Do Not Read to Eight-Year-Old Girls). Even more subversively, in “Ideas Go Only So Far” you flout the sentimental conventions of motherhood by inventing a baby that’s machine-washable, although as it turns out, not indefinitely. Have you no heart? Or do you mistrust your readers’ hearts, in their gooier manifestations?

Matthea H: No one’s asked me that before! I do have a heart, it’s just small, black and made out of velvet.

In the first poem you mention, I’m definitely on the side of the sentimentalists, but I’m not a Hallmark aficionado. I don’t think about whether my readers are sentimental or not—probably like me, there are things that reduce them to a puddle of goo and things that leave them cold. I’m very sentimental about animals—I can’t bear to see them die (so sadly I couldn’t watch the amazing series Planet Earth—too much weeping when the polar bear begins to starve), so writing the poem about the tiny ponies was hard. I felt bad about killing the baby too—I particularly liked her incarnation as a “peacefully blinking footstool”— that would be a useful and soothing kind of baby. I didn’t think she was going to die, so I was shocked when she did. The rhyme led to her death. The word “dead” was orbiting the poem the minute I wrote that her flaw was “dread.” A friend of mine asked me to read that poem at her wedding and I had to convince her otherwise!

Go get more more; follow the link!

DS: Translation is a highly discussed genre in contemporary poetry. Many small presses have started translation book series, many of them are excellent … amazing poets that haven’t been read in English. Which also means the original content of these books in their native language has never been read. Is the ideal of a translation to capture a “sameness” with its original?

MZ: This issue is at the heart of the whole project of translation. Sameness, or accuracy, is part of the equation, but as Walter Benjamin points out in his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” complete sameness is an obvious impossibility. It’s definitely a concern for both the reader and the translator (not to mention the original writer). As Benjamin also points out, different texts are more or less translatable. I think people worry a lot about this, maybe too much. Each translation is a compromise, and should be understood as much.

There is a different reason why, beyond some kind of important, yet ultimately abstract ethical responsibility to an impossible ideal of sameness, it is best to stay as close as possible to the text. A translator must be willing to accept an element of strangeness or unfamiliarity or even infelicity in the new text. The worst thing a translator can do is to unconsciously allow his or her own ego — the desire to be seen as a “good” translator or writer — to begin to control the translation, so that subtle “improvements” are made in the text. This almost always results in clichéd, familiar, boring, language in the translation. If a translator finds him or herself saying something like, “that’s what the original seems to be saying, but it seems weird or unusual in the translation,” that is almost certainly the very place where the particular style of the author, what makes this author interesting and challenging and worthwhile as a creative artist, is manifesting, and to take that away and replace it with “acceptable” language in the translation is a disaster.

I heard Richard Pevear (who along with his partner, Larisa Volkhonskaya, are the preeminent translators of Russian prose) express this idea, one that I have had for a long time as well, in a talk he gave recently at UC Berkeley. So I think I’d like to give him the last word here, from an essay he wrote about translating Tolstoy:

“But then, literature is precisely not the conveying of information. It is the making of an image, and through the image of an experience, using all the resources of language — rhythm, sound, texture, tempo, suggestion, intonation. What’s more, every good writer has a particular way of using those resources. That is what the translator must try to follow as closely as possible. The transposition can never be total, and therefore it is always worth trying anew. In this way translation, which is a dialogue between languages, also becomes a dialogue in time, a fresh response to the ongoing life of the original.”

A new interview over at BOMBLOG: poet Nathalie Handal tells Rattapallax editor Ram Devineni of her recent experience visiting Afghanistan, where “she taught a poetry workshop to young Afghani women students at Kabul University and participated in many literary dialogues with other poets from the country.” Specifically, they chat about the role of the poet in the world (Handal is pretty well-traveled–she’s in Dubai in the photo above; and you can watch her in Andalucia at Rattapallax TV, for instance); meeting other writers in Afghanistan; and her approach on teaching in another country:

RD What was your experience in Afghanistan and with its people?

NH “To understand where you left the sun, you must know where you discovered it.” I wrote that line in my notebook during one of the workshops, but I am not certain what triggered it. Was it the students insisting: “We want peace. We want to live. We don’t want Taliban?” Was it their persisting question: “Will you tell others who we really are—lively, endearing, welcoming?” I understood their need. I heard their heartbeats, earth-beats, the music that stirred deep in their folklore. I found the people beautiful—a cross between Asia and the Middle East—their piercing green or black eyes, almond shaped or slightly slanted, the men’s tall, often statuesque, well built frames. Faces that kept the breadth of history. It was also a gift to meet writers I had read while editing the Norton anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond. I felt close to the language—Pashto and Dari—which at the base is Farsi but has Arabic and Hebrew words. The students inspired me to try to communicate absence—what it feels like to exist in a world where absence, in time, will shatter myth. In the end, I discovered a people I knew and wanted to know more about. And surprisingly, roses—red, orange, mauve—grew everywhere in the city. I left Kabul with that striking image—yellow roses in the ruins.

RD How do you teach poetry or run a workshop in different countries? Is there universal themes or approaches?

NH There are two workshops that seem to work everywhere I go. The first, “Poetry as Cultural Voice,” which explores ancestry, gender, cultural memory, and identity; how our ancestry, the languages we speak, the memories we have inherited (stories told by our grandparents, parents), and the places we have lived affect the poems we write and how we write them. The second, “PoetryMap,” is a workshop for poets to sharpen their writing skills and expand the imaginative boundaries in their poems. The premise of the workshop is that a poem is like a map, from its early stages to the end, which provides a chart for possible journeys. The explored analogy of writing/making poem-maps encourages students to expand the spaces in which they navigate literally, culturally, and metaphorically. The workshop encourages students to have a great dialogue with their work and the world.

A short film also accompanies their conversation. Visit BOMBLOG for more.

A little bump, then you can take a full hit after the jump:

Why were Milosz and Herbert in New York City? What was the occasion?

The anthology “Postwar Polish Poetry” [edited by Milosz] had just been published [in 1965] and was a very important book. I had introduced a number of remarkable poets that season, and I felt deeply indebted to Czeslaw for “Postwar Polish Poetry,” which was a revelation to me.

How did your friendship start?

Czeslaw was older, and I didn’t pursue a friendship with him, but he did. He was the one who initiated it, and I was honored and happy because I loved his company. He came to see me a few years later in France, and we spent time together in the area that my book “The Mays of Ventadorn” describes. Over the years, we kept meeting up in different places. He came to see my wife and I on Maui, and we met from time to time in Berkeley when he lived there.

You mention “The Mays of Ventadorn,” which describes your immersion in French troubadour poetry. That never would have happened if Pound hadn’t told you to go to the South of France — did he function as a mentor to you?

Well, on that occasion he did. He used to send me postcards, little postcards written in pencil, most of which seem to have been lost. You know, when you move, you lose things. One I remember completely said: “Read seeds, not twigs. E.P.” But the thing about Pound was … his politics were terrible. I didn’t know what they were at the time, which was fortunate, or I don’t think I would have gone to see him.

Though Milosz is gone, can he still function as a mentor to other poets?

Oh, I think so, and I think every poet can do that. I still find myself reciting for pleasure, as I have ever since I was 18, [Yeats'] “Sailing to Byzantium” and hearing something in one of the lines that I didn’t hear before. You go on learning. What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing — an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream. You make some terrible noise of pain or anguish or anger or something like that. You make a sound, an animal-like sound which, with time and society trying to calm you down, begins to take shape into something.

Coldfront’s Ken Walker has got his eye on independent publishing in a new feature for the site, one which hopes to focus on the small worlds:

From broadsides to chapbooks to matchbooks, independent poetry publishing is an amazing silent preponderance and decentralized multitude. And, with self-publishing websites and bookstore gadgets becoming as ubiquitous as the “Big Four” has in the distribution of “literature,” independent poetry publishing is just as important now as it was when New Directions or Burning Deck or Graywolf first began; that said, it is also easy to mourn the end of so many others. So, here is the beginning of a database of “spotlights” that put a different indie poetry publisher under the microscope of a few introspective, slightly solipsistic questions. Hopefully, this will further the dialogue of who’s publishing whom and what quality of publishing they are engaging in.

Walker starts with O’clock Press, which recently published its premiere issue of poetry journal CLOCK to much East Coast delight (that’s not a snack). You can listen to readings from the launch by Macgregor Card, Alina Gregorian, Cole Heinowitz, Dawn Lundy Martin, and others at that link. “The magazine, itself, as you will read, is handmade, hand-stitched, produced on a super-low budget and topped out at 100 copies. It’s lovely and arrived to the launch party at Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books in a myriad of colors. They have also, via the press, printed and published chapbooks and a play with plenty more to come, soon, including the second issue of the magazine.”

Walker interviews co-editors and founders Kit Schluter and Andrew Durbin (they’ve also just brought on board one Allen Edwin Butt). The recent Bard grads reflect on their publishing process; moving and shaking in New York; the notion of “poetry communities;” movements that have served as literary or formal inspiry (Durbin: “I try my best to steer clear of these kind of temporal distinctions—they seem more like traps than opportunities for productive discourse”); and poetry and the arts:

KW: Is there an essential quality to poetry that separates it from the rest of the arts?

KS: Poetry can, like music, expire in time, but only when read aloud. Like the plastic arts it can be experienced time and again as a spatial arrangement, but only when read on the page. (Pierre Alféri’s Cinépoèmes are especially interesting conceptually for their ability to, like film, make poetry expire both in space and time.) Like much fiction, poetry can recount a narrative, but only if the poet is interested in doing so; and like fiction that has shed its obligation to ‘tell a story’, poetry can do away with its devotion to time’s narrative arrow and really start fleshing out its specialty: investigating language as a primary means of experience, and not as a means of merely recounting experience. This, for me, is what poetry has that the other fields of the arts do not: the genre’s ability (obligation?) to force language into a space of nudity, in which it must speak for itself and not for the speaker using it. What is most fun about poetry is the way it rejoices in unforgivingly straining grammar to arrive at new spaces of experience; and moreover, the way it brings us to use our language self-reflexively, which allows us a clearer understanding of our relationship to and our subjective home in language. We can read as much philosophy of language as we would like, but until we put down our rational guard and allow the language on the page, and not the ideas behind it, to produce experience, we will not be dealing with poetic language.

AD: Charles Bernstein, quoting David Antin, once said that poetry isn’t a genre, it’s a supergenre—a practice that can collect numerous genre within it, including fiction, philosophy, epic, lyric, what have you. I think that he’s right—and that drive to include everything in a poem is what makes poetry so exciting. I think that any language- oriented practice can be poetry. In my own writing I’m interested in the ways the American novel can be reinvented as a poem. In fact, I want everything to be reinvented as a poem.

Read the entire interview here, and/or order yourself a copy of CLOCK.

The infamously unpronounceable EOAGH has an interview up with one of our favorite New Narrativists, Robert Glück! Glück and Tony Leuzzi quickly dig into Keats, dyslexia and writing, Glück’s frustrated relationship with visual art, and distinctions between the prose poem and the short story, which caught our eye:

Often in your work there appears to be little distinction between what some might consider a prose poem, an essay, or a short story. How do you make these distinctions?

I don’t. My way of dealing with it is to not make the distinction. But I don’t really like the term short story—and yet I have story collections. I simply call them stories. Or pieces. The short story has a history I do not feel especially related to. Other traditions are more important to me.

Such as?

Well, the modernist writer Blanchot made fictions called conts (tales). In these conts, which I admire tremendously, there’s a pressure brought to bear on language itself, and a porousness. By porousness I mean that one sentence doesn’t necessarily pick up where the last one left off. So you find a kind of air between the sentences. They can take any direction at any time. It’s composition by the sentence. These are things I think about, and one could talk about some prose poetry that way, as well as lyrical fiction….

Do you see yourself as an eclectic?

I assemble as much as I write. It’s rare for me to just sit down and write something from beginning to end. My old boyfriend Nayland Blake had a retrospective in New York. He asked me to be part of a night of readings where writers respond to his work, so I sat down and wrote what I felt was the trouble with our relationship (laughs). My piece was about bunnies—he uses bunnies in his work—two bunnies who are both bottoms sitting in bed not knowing what to do. They love each other but they don’t know what to do…

Yow. The interview goes even further–for fans of his work, it’s a must-read. Details about the making of Margery Kempe:

Why did you turn to her in the first place?

Well, I first learned about her in 1966 in a Medieval Studies course in UCLA. At that point she wasn’t well known and we read only a few pages of her book in an anthology. Her book had been lost until it was discovered in a castle library in 1934. Before then, all that existed were a few prayers. When it was discovered, people were hopeful that here was another great English mystical text. In fact, her first editor, in his preface, kept referring to her as “poor Margery,” since she was so disappointing—in her vulgarity and self aggrandizement. It’s not a lofty piece of piety. Even then I thought there was something in her story for me. I felt her book was a comedy, like Patrick Dennis’s Little Me, in which Belle the starlet continuously brags about herself, but you realize through her bragging that she is a flop. I felt that Margery was the Little Me of the 15th century. I liked the fact the she didn’t seem to understand her own experience. I felt that she lived at a time when that would have been hard to do because the paradigm itself was changing–just like today. Only a few years after I was introduced to her, I did a junior year abroad in Scotland and I was hitchhiking around Northern Europe looking at the Flemish masters, looking carefully at the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent, the Hans Memling museum in Bruges…so that period has always been important to me. In a way, writing Margery Kempe was the fulfillment of that interest.

In the early 70s I tried to turn Margery’s story into a musical comedy. I even wrote songs for it. I liked the idea of a musical comedy that ends with the crucifixion. I liked the clarity of her lust….

They also talk about cataloging errors, critical theory in the 70s, and Glück’s 1989 book, Reader (image above):

Back to Reader, I was really moved by the prose poem “Hitler.”

There’s a bit of the Holocaust in all of my books—I don’t know why—and the effect Hitler had on the Jews. In Denny Smith I talk about his Americanizing the Jews. The prose poem “Hitler” was my attempt to record a moment of understanding: Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was not a punishment, it was to make something beautiful—that was his impulse.

Through cancellation—

A terrible minimalism. He was attempting to make what he thought was beautiful: a pure race. Before this revelation, I could only understand the camps as a kind of punishment.

Punishment suggests a certain kind of intimacy Hitler did not seem to have with the Jews. One punishes to redeem. When you punish someone you are invested in them.

I realized that was not the case for Hitler.

Were the earliest poems in Reader the ones you wrote for Kevin [Killian] and Dodie [Bellamy]?

No. The earliest ones were aimed at the grandest historical writers, Wordsworth and Basho for example.

How do these poems work when you read them to an audience?

Some I have only recently attempted, like the double-columned one about Jack Spicer.

Do you share with Kevin an obsession with Jack Spicer?

My obsession is nothing compared to his obsession (laughs). Jack Spicer was ours in a way. He was a local writer, almost tribal in spirit, who happened to be great. Spicer addressed our concerns, yet there’s plenty in him that will remain obscure. He grapples with the largest issues, and he expresses what one often feels as a gay man….

Some of [his writing] was not meant to be understood, otherwise he would have written it differently. He also liked to travel in the direction of nonsense—nonsense was an important ingredient.

The interviews touch on the writing process, reading habits, how to deal with the great timesuck that is the internet, and more. So far, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Cate Marvin, Matthew Dickman, Evie Shockley, Ilya Kaminsky, and Cathy Park Hong have all weighed in. Here’s Hong, on her changing notions of poetry:

I always believed that poetry is capable of being anything and prefer to keep that question open-ended. It’s more that my ideas have changed about what poetry should do. When I was younger, I used to be more idealistic about poetry’s function in society—that political action and intervention were possible via restructuring of language. But now, I think maybe it’s enough that poetry can nourish individual consciousness or, to put it another way, maybe it’s enough that poetry’s primary purpose is to make people feel things. Then I change my mind.

Find all six interviews here.

“Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die,” says Howe. “The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that.”

Hear the whole, wide-ranging conversation here.

Jose Antonio Rodriguez’s poems are unlike any I have read. I imagine that for the most part poets are comfortable with the idea of populating the page with words that will inhabit these white spaces. But Jose’s poems refuse to simply fill in white space. His poems have an oral quality to them—they beg to be heard more than being read or written. There is a feeling of discordant conversation, where speech is the beginning of acknowledging that which muffles the everyday poetry necessary for survival. Where despite the oppressive violence of poverty, where despite all that displacement, language remains and it remains with all its possibilities for transcendence.

Rodriguez tells Vazquez in the conversation that the landscape of south Texas is a defining influence for his work (“The bridge with its barbed wire and police dogs looms large in my imagination because my family crossed it constantly and it never felt normal or comfortable showing identification to an armed officer to cross back to what I considered home”). They talk about feeling bifurcated by that environment, how it relates to language and identity:

LV: In “Freshman Class Schedule” you begin to put words —to name and perhaps deconstruct—this feeling of bifurcation. You write of your academic success and how despite these achievements you are still stuck, still “brown:” “Brown like the Dairy Queen workers/ Brown like the drop-outs/ Brown like the juvies/ Brown like the machos.” Now this poem is a very moving depiction of that struggle, of feeling very much American but being reminded of one’s place, of one’s brownness and the shame that comes with that brownness. Would you agree that this poem and many of the poems in this collection subvert that shame and turn it into a medicinal balm for the bruises and wounds of negotiating a new identity in the U.S.? And could you comment a little on how you arrived at this?

JAR: One of the aims was to articulate shame, its sources and its power. Whether this articulation is soothing or medicinal, I’m not sure. I suppose that’s up to the reader. In some of the poems it may be, in others it may be unsettling or disorienting — all valid responses. But I do think that the articulation itself can serve as the first step toward transcending shame. Much of its distorting power, how it can warp the self, is that it necessitates silence on behalf of the wounded, it demands it in fact. So I thought, can I begin to map a way out of it by having a narrator who may not be empowered enough to take on the sources of shame but is beginning to acknowledge them, bring them to the surface, to language.

LV: Another theme in your poems is the violence of restrictive space, of a landscape of economic hardship closing in, constricting the physical spaces inhabited by the voices in some of your poems. I am very much intrigued by your use of space and voice to explore this theme of space. Particularly in poems like “Between Snores and Polyester” and “Buick with Automatic Windows.” It seems to me as if these two poems themselves echo the oppression of those landscapes by acting as physical borders, by warping their form around these voices. And yet the voices in these poems also have begun to articulate, to map away out—through language—from these restricted spaces. What is the relationship between space—the violence of not having the adequate space—and language?

JAR: One attempt was to try to communicate the link between space and self, the idea that what we come back to every day, whatever living space that may be, can influence how we see ourselves — not only that a house in ruins in this case can be representative of a broken (or bruised) spirit, but that the specific living conditions can come to symbolize how one interacts with the world. So that the speaker who is forced to share a tiny space with so many other bodies, for example, can become the speaker who is overwhelmed by the world outside of that living space. Or a voice muffled by so many other voices and bodies can become a voice that fails to bring clarity to the speaker. Hopefully the language communicates that confusion, but also the idea that as long as the confusion is being articulated, there is the chance that language will arrive at order or stasis or a satisfying narrative.

They also discuss internalized shame, the “liberating power of the resurfacing of the past,” observational and narrative poetry, and how it feels to have a first book in hand. To read more about what Rodriguez is up to, the full interview, the first in what will be on on-going series, is here or check out his blog. You can also read (among others) his poem “Avocado.”

The interview focuses on the roles of being a teacher and a poet before turning to Mackey’s work:

Your work is often described as being “mystical,” which seems to imply a separation from the concrete stuff going on around you, from the mundane. But to what extent do you see yourself responding directly to the events around you?

We’re all having experiences of the public—news, things that reach a mega-audience, entertainment, popular culture, politics. We all live in that world. That world has a lot of tools with which to convince us that it is the world, and maybe the only world. But I think that we’re all aware of the limitations to that. We’re having experiences, we’re having apprehensions, we’re seeing things that don’t quite square with that public discourse. One of the things that arts have generally functioned to do is to give a person, whether artist or reader, something that gets more into the graininess and the particularity of lived experience that is not so generic as public discourse and the public representations of experience. The distinction between public and private, mundane and mystical—that distinction is largely maintained by public discourse. One of the things that makes art matter is the fact that it complicates that distinction.

The mundane is in my work, however mystical readers may see it to be. I see art as an act of transposition—a musical analogy. You get a piece of music in one key, and you transpose it to another. I think that art transposes the mundane, but it doesn’t abandon the mundane. Art loses one of the sources of its vitality if it doesn’t stay in touch with the world.

Read it all after the jump.

Timothy Donnelly–author of, most recently, The Cloud Corporation and reader at tomorrow’s Danny’s Reading Series in Chicago–speaks to Astri von Arbin Ahlander at a blog called The Days of Yore, which indulges our interview fantasies with talks of childhood dreams. Here, the two also chat about writing programs, cooking, gardening, systems of order, Donnelly’s daughter, New York as a grad student (he ate a lot of oatmeal), how Donnelly got his great jobs (he’s a poetry editor for Boston Review), why the decision to get a PhD in English, how he felt first seeing a poem of his in print, and other exciting things you don’t get to know till the bio comes out. In fact, the Boston Review job came about partly due to a psychic! Read on:

How did you end up at the Boston Review?

The Boston Review was always a great magazine, but it was much more local in its scope back in the 90’s, at least in terms of its poetry. All the editors lived in the Boston area. The Boston scene was really strongly represented in terms of the books that were reviewed and in terms of the reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief, Joshua Cohen, wanted to shake things up a little, get national with it. He contacted a number of his contributing editors and asked if they knew anyone who was really hungry and wanted to take this on. Lucie Brock-Broido suggested that he interview the poet Mary Jo Bang and myself. We were in the same year at Columbia. Josh met with us and he liked the idea of going with us as a team. We ended up working together for about eight years, before Mary Jo decided she had been doing enough.

The funny thing is that one night, maybe in my second year of classes, Mary Jo and the poet and currently an editor at BOMB, Mónica de la Torre, and I were down in the West village and we went to a psychic, on a goof. The psychic said to me, “You know someone else who was just here.” And I said, “Yes, I do.” She said, “You and the older one, you have a business venture that is going to be coming your way.” And this is even before we had talked to Lucie about this. She said, “It is going to be very lucrative for you both and you both have to work at this together. A lot of success will come from this. I see you traveling somewhere that begins, C-A…” And I said, “California?” And she said, “No, no. Not California. I see you looking at large pieces of paper. And you are talking about the paper…” Then maybe two weeks after that Lucie called and said she had recommended Mary Jo and me as a team for the Boston Review and that we had to come up to Cambridge and interview.

As for his parents:

How did your parents feel about your decision to pursue life as a poet?

Completely, completely supportive. I think that they have always thought, “Oh, well, he always figures it out.”

My father came from a relatively small Irish Catholic family and my mom came from a larger, French Canadian Catholic family— a lot of siblings and they didn’t have a lot of money. Her father worked multiple jobs, in a factory, in a foundry, at a catering company, things like that. I don’t know all that much about him—both of my mother’s parents were dead by the time she was 16—except that I look a lot like him and he worked all the time and cooked and listened to classical music and read library books and had a good sense of humor.

In any case, I have a strong work ethic from both of my parents, but from my mom I think I also inherited anxieties about death and poverty, the feeling that there is never going to be enough money, the feeling that we have to be very careful because everything is slipping through our fingers. I am getting a little more comfortable lately, but in the past, my inherited fear of poverty often manifested itself in a complete disregard for money, as I mentioned before. I just put the thought of it right out of my head. I did run up some bad credit card debt in my 20s because I just didn’t want to think about that. But I also felt this occasional panic—I’m not going to make it! I can’t afford to live!

Then there’s the relationship between cooking, gardening and writing!

You realized you wanted to create things. You loved to cook, people eat what you cook. You loved to garden, a garden is, in a way, consumed, at least experienced. With writing, did you have a sense of consumption, that there was an audience out there that would consume what you made?

Not when actually writing, no. It was just for me, or for the page, or for some vague imaginary other. I think it is a compulsive thing, largely—like a need to feel something like control, focus, order, and the power of bringing something into being. I do sometimes feel like there are certain things you can do to control and organize your thoughts to make you feel more whole, integrated, rather than diffused and chaotic— those are both states that I am very susceptible and prone to.

My writing, though less traditionally formal than it used to be, still tends to have pretty pronounced structural regularity to it. But even in that structural regularity, the lines go long and digress, wind around, leap forward and reverse. That’s how my mind’s frenetic tendency and the impulse I have to control or perfect things come together formally. I don’t think perfection is possible and if it were I’d probably take one look at it and yawn or run the other way. But the dream of it, the striving for it—that’s another story. Of course you’re doomed to fail but I’d rather fail at grandeur than settle for a modest success.

To continue reading the quite enjoyable interview, go here.