At BOMBLOG: Arda Collins on Light, Time, Guns, Childhood...

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.