Friday, August 31, 2012

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Laura Mullen

Laura Mullen is the author of six books: The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive (University of California Press, 2011), The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded two LSU Board of Regents ATLAS grants, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Undersong, the composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of “The Distance (This)” (from Subject) premiered in New York and Helsinki and was released on Mode records in 2011. Mullen teaches at Louisiana State University.

FORTHCOMING: Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides (OTIS / Seismicity 2012)

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The swift and somewhat didactic answer is that The Surface allowed me to hunt for a tenure-track teaching job w/ some degree of hope. Not much chance of getting a job without at least one book, now. That isn’t why I wrote it (I write because I have to, as part of an on-going inquiry about reality and my role in it—an inquiry that has a certain, shall we say, desperation…).

Another answer is that the book turned me from someone who believed they might be, forever, reading poems aloud, into someone who began to be sure the work would have another life, alone, far from my voice and body. Of course I’d been thinking of readers before, but the publication of the book started a shift in my sense of where the connection occurred, to borrow Diana Taylor’s terms, it marked a movement from the repertoire toward the archive.

Yet another answer, or rather a notation, in passing: I didn’t write the book to change my life… (I’ll let others make comparisons between recent and previous work.)

“How does it feel…?” When I hear that question I have, in my mind, the image of someone climbing a ladder (very high, thin, and propped against nothing) with a hammer in one hand, and a nail in the other: fully intending to make sure one particular cloud stops changing and moving.
.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Where’s the “start” of a project? I wonder... It might be a phrase buried in a journal or a sadness you tried to ignore at a dinner table or a strange pleasure causing you to lean closer to the surface of a picture wondering just what is the quality, exactly, of that color, that line? What brings idea / feeling into just the right conjunction with materials at the perfect moment? It varies.The only thing I’m sure of is the need for attention, but using that one word makes it seem too fixed: sometimes the attention is scientific, ferocious, detailed…sometimes loosened by humor…--for instance. It varies and yes to all of the above.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Over the 30+ years since I began writing “seriously” (or taking myself seriously as a writer) there have been many, many, widely various, “usually”s. This is perhaps yet another answer to question number #1 is to say that writing one book of course informed my thinking and activity: after writing (or, after publishing) a book you begin to know—as we say of relationships—where this is going. Which isn’t to say that the work isn’t still exploratory: more so than ever as I’ve moved into performance and film, but even when it’s the question of a poem, however—as I confess—I’m not sure where “the very beginning” is located. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that (for a lot of reasons) I’ve never been sure I’d have a publisher (until Dark Archive I’d never stepped, as it were, into the same Press twice), so I couldn’t be, ha, can’t be, sure whatever I was / am working on would /will be a book-in-the-world. (Question for you: when is it a “book”? When you write it? When it’s published? When it’s read / reviewed?)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I was “the sort of writer” who wrote—at first—in order to perform the work, and now I am “the sort or writer” who is having a quiet but violent internal struggle around the structure of “public readings.” I still enjoy hearing people read their work aloud—or, I enjoy that a lot when the work is good and the venue is right. Naropa comes to mind as a particularly splendid place to be either a reader or a listener: both the work and the attention seem to be, often, of a very high quality. I used to chalk that up to the great acoustics and lighting as well as the fantastic atmosphere (Anne Waldman is key), but, as time goes on, I’m coming to believe that it’s—also—because everyone there has been or is involved with each other in other ways (talking and listening) intensely: there’s a feeling that the event is part of a larger conversation. That matters to me. There’s a certain sort of lecture model of the public reading that is breaking down—or I feel its failure. It's as if I woke up one morning and thought, gee, was that my dream? If a number of people are in a room just that fact (in the age of the "social network" and the virtual connection) matters: embodied encounters are as magic as the conjunctions that bring a poem (or person) into being. (The essential fact of existence itself is so thrillingly random and, as we way, over-determined.) Shouldn’t there be some response, some acknowledgement of this constellation of presences? And the live event? Distances and deaths put a pressure on these meetings I feel a need to acknowledge. Akilah Oliver would, when reading from her last book, remix the poems, improvising among the possibilities like Coltrane playing w/ the notes and phrases of a jazz “standard.” That’s a light on the road forward for the sort of writer I might be…

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes.

My work is a way of questioning: “edgewise questions inside the answers” (as Baraka puts it, in a poem for Theolonius Monk).

The most basic questions (hunger, love…) shift but never disappear, but if we wanted to talk just about poetry right now probably we could (if we can’t resist binaries) break it down into identity and idea: the current questions are about who speaks and how, under the pressure of a national uncertainty about the value of creative activity. On the one side, if you will, there’s identity, an area that encompasses both diversity issues (the urgent necessity of hearing from everyone) and the contemporary outflow of inherited (and contested) versions of the “confessional” as well as the lively spoken word tradition. On the other side of the (mirage) line in the sand (binaries are produced to collapse, right?) is idea, an area mapped out by Oulipo, the language poets, and the “conceptual” writers. The collapse of the line comes where we move out of the mode of what Julia Kristeva calls abjection ("not me, not that") in order to see the similarities as well as the differences—and to honor the shared history. Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget, for instance, should be read with Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day, and probably placed in context by a showing of Women Art Revolution, the documentary about women artists working with performance and the body in the 1970s, and some thinking about the Civil Rights movement...

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The “the” in these questions is impossible for me to move past without shivering, but any s/he alive has a role—or many roles.

I live my answer is my real answer but…I can say that as a language worker I feel a responsibility to listen to what my culture is saying and to re-present it: to make it available for that reflection which opens the possibility of change.

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

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

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

The difficulty—I’ll go farther—the impossibility would have been not moving.

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

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If this question (or rather the answer) is supposed to be useful, then one (true enough) response might be to say “language.” Though it's not so much "inspiration" as permission I'm seeking: the ease and freedom that come from really being in the medium: from stiffish technical manuals on writing or reading to random snatches of overheard dialogue, from graffiti to Great Works of Literature, it’s the medium itself that is, as Bruce Nauman put it (in another context) “an Amazing Luminous Fountain.” But I feel like I ought to answer this question differently (I have, elsewhere), that is, I ought to imagine there might be someone who would think, “O, super I’ll just try that next time,” after reading my answer, and so I should gush here…usefully. (Coffee and chocolate together really help.) But it’s hard, because this is no longer a question to which any answer-as-recipe—from anyone—would interest me! Why has your writing stalled? That’s a question I like: why are you unable to go further at a certain moment—with not just writing, but anything? Things change, we change, we move out of the prior recognition like a cramped shell, discarding that perceptual frame. And it's messy and vulnerable and exciting. For what it’s worth: my writing sometimes stalls when it moves out of the zone of what I know to be good and I get spooked by my own inability to recognize what I am doing. This isn’t good or even THIS ISN’T ART! That exciting movement, however, past the given (or earned) understanding, is a necessity, as is the time, faith and practice necessary to find out what happens (next).

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
There've been a lot of homes, but I live in Louisiana currently—the stench of mold is evocative.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Is there anyone who could say “No” (for real?): no other forms that influence…?

No, no: I’m actually completely constructed of language—I’m a name, made up of five letters, when I leave the sheets it’s just to go to the desk, no one can see me when I turn sideways…? 

I should confess that I don’t know who David McFadden was or is (resolutely not Googling) but this reminds me (in its form) of something a teacher would say (packaged for recollection), and (in its content) Mallarme's quote about everything in the world existing to end up in a book. (I'd reverse that, as addition: everything in the book exists to end up in the world.) My version of the didactic sound bite (said to students who don’t seem, to me, to be reading “enough”) is that the relationship between reading and writing is like the relationship between eating and shitting…

Can we see what books are made of? The world (I’d connect this with Gertrude Stein’s interest in the flow of writing) moves through us…—if we’re writers it’s turned into words in that process (as vs notes or paint or H2o)—and it’s only sometimes that we see, in the production, undigested evidence of what all we consumed. It’s easy to see that “The Wasteland” is made of books—among other things. But it’s obviously made of war also, the experience, the landscape, and the technology (for instance). We’re slowly on our way to the opening of attention (and advances in science) which might allow us to understand even more about how Eliot’s distrusted and denied “personality” shaped the quality of his embodied response to the realities of his moment.

Quick answer (having exhausted—for now—some others): I'm up to my neck in the visual arts (and film) and wading knee deep into music, as I've been collaborating with / influenced by some astounding composers and musicians recently: Jason Eckardt, Claire Chase, my encounter with the International Contemporary Ensemble in Helsinki (where Eckardt's setting of my work had its international premiere)...that's been life-changing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
If I sat here typing for two or three days I wouldn’t be halfway through the list of names and titles. And then, of course, that question’s probably most fully answered by the art, not the artist. Others will be able (if interested) to tell—from the books I made—what I read…

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to see what it was like to be someone or else, not “imaginatively” (I can sort of do that via attention, memory and creativity, I’m not terrible at it, but I’m not satisfied by it either) but really: to feel and think and be another (actual, not invented) being. My fear is that I would lose the very thing I am trying to get: the sense that this is amazing, new, different, thrilling. What if I got to be, o, let’s say a cockroach? And it was just like being me: no memory of having been something else, plugging along w/ my pest “to do” list (eat here, shit there, etc.). Or else, recalling Kafka, what if in that new shape and identity, also, all I thought about was A) negotiating the given conditions and B) being something else? Among the reasons to learn other languages—it might be as close as we can come—is the fact that that skill set actually does rewire your brain. But the one word answer here is travel: I’ve done it, just not (ever) enough.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
In high school the occupational tests pegged me as “Tour Guide” or “Gambling Bookie.” Really. I wonder what else was on the master list—and what was left off it (I doubt “Poet” was there). But this question makes me think of Carol Anshaw’s Aquamarine, or Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, or (as well) those choose-your-own-adventure books. (On some level it takes a fair amount of imagination just to live the life I actually have in a way that makes sense to me.) But I suppose I could fantasize about how my life might turn out, as we say, otherwise…and the other media I’m working with now would suggest possible answers. But... I did my picking a long time ago, and my “occupation” is teaching, actually—a super intense job in a culture that, often, seems to be saying there’s something either dubious or literally worthless about what I’m doing. (Since 2009 LSU’s budget’s been cut by more than $92 million…and it’s clear that a distrust of higher education is a nationwide issue at this point.) Meanwhile jobs are lost (outsourced, for instance) while financial pressures on the students increase. What seems urgent to me to imagine is what other occupations (!) I can recommend to students, and I think a lot about how to prepare people for the future instead of the past. How can I help to make sure those I'm teaching are being given everything they need to enter the game (so to speak) as it is played or will be played, instead of as it used to be. Art is very helpful in the process: it’s a way of practicing concentration and increasing focus, while learning planning and development skills as well as creative and critical strategies—and (at the same time)—boosting self-motivation and self-respect.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wonder if I can answer this in a way that helps to make sense of some of my other answers? No one alive in the 21st century can fail to feel how a singular answer to a singular question like this must—like the Great Man version of history—discard a LOT of reality (I do do “something else” a lot of somethings…), and yet…and yet we still ask each other questions like this and expect…(o c’mon, it’s a simple enough question, really…why…)…

Should I talk about meeting Jorie Graham and Jim Galvin at Humboldt State University, and mention the fact that Goddard (where I’d first hoped to go to college, after the long period where I thought I wasn’t going to college) had turned into a military school just at that moment? And do I mention money? There was no money to go to an out-of-State school anyway. Do I speak of my father, who’d wound up as a Longshoreman in Eureka in the 1960s, so (when I was choosing at school at the end of the ‘70s) I knew the area and could “choose” Humboldt State University because it was at once familiar and far away? Do I say, well, no one teaching Dance (which interested me) or Art (always a passion) said "This is what you should do with your life"? Or should I talk about being 14 and trying to kill myself, then tell you about my  grandmother giving me a journal, because she figured I needed to get some thoughts and feelings out—because not being able to say what I thought / felt made me feel like I should die (You want my silence? You can have it, in spades…)? Should I mention that both my grandfathers wrote? Or, should I tell you that I was the first child, and born into a family where language mattered a lot and so very encouraged to engage (I was reading at 2)…or…

We sort through possible answers to every question as we sort through the thick, complex and entangled realities we move through. Great. “Obviously.” But…I have problems sorting: I either can’t sort or don’t sort correctly. I can't forget the frame, the structure, the composition... That problem is one of my gifts: an anxiety about, a distrust of “sorting” allows me to move attention into new places in new ways.

Thank you (I mean this!) for asking (but…that oft repeated phrase…).

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

7/21/12:
Culture of One (Alice Notley).
White Dog (Samuel Fuller).

20 - What are you currently working on?
The third text in my trilogy of works playing with genre expectations (after The Tales of Horror and Murmur): this one takes on the Romance.  It's a hybrid text (poetry, fiction, nonfiction & the-lord-knows-what) addressing both the literary history of the Romance and the “low” (or mass-market) incarnation of the genre, looking at the ways we define relationships, and considering the stories we want and / or need to repeat. Rooted in a specific reading pleasure as well as the cultural history (and distrust) of that pleasure, the project’s scope includes the political, economic, and cultural pressures on love in this country, as well as our regulation of sexuality—especially female sexuality. Wit, a crucial perspective shifter, is one of the strategies by which I question a culture that both disavows and encourages “low” pleasures, while exploring the implications of inherited structures through unexpected approaches and forms. The frame provided by genre functions to assure the reader that certain expectations will be met, which actually allows me to destabilize and widen expectations, opening an understood story to critique, and making, I hope, other endings possible.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Thursday, August 30, 2012

call for proposals: “Whatever Else”: An Irving Layton Symposium

“Whatever Else”: An Irving Layton Symposium
The University of Ottawa
May 3-5, 2013


In recognition of the centenary of his birth, the University of Ottawa’s English Department invites paper proposals on any aspect of the work and life of Irving Layton. Once a towering figure in Canadian culture, Layton and his legacy—literary, political, personal—have suffered a generation of critical neglect. It is the aim of this symposium to address what has become an embarrassing lacunae in contemporary Canadian literary scholarship. We are especially interested in new and alternative approaches to Layton’s work. Email 250 word abstract to Robert Stacey at rstacey@uottawa by Nov. 12th.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

call for submissions: Summer Sport Poetry Competition: deadline, September 10, 2012;

Go for poetic gold! Pick any summer sport, any style, any form. Bring your competitive spirit. Established poets and first-time participants welcome.

Winners to be judged by Griffin-nominated poet Priscila Uppal. Three winners will be chosen and awarded “gold,” “silver,” or “bronze” prize packs. The poem that takes “gold” will be published online and in print in Literary Review of Canada.

Other prizes include subscriptions to LRC and copies of Priscila Uppal’s Winter Sport: Poems from Mansfield Press. Additional prizes to be announced.

Poems must be 30 lines or less, excluding the title. Entry is free. Poems must be original and unpublished. Poems must be in English. All submissions must include entrant’s full name and contact information.

Send submissions to games@reviewcanada.ca. All entries must be received by 12:00 pm EST, September 10, 2012. The winners will be announced September 24, 2012 at Poet’s Corner.

This contest is open to all Canadian residents.

Monday, August 27, 2012

In the Bee Latitudes, ‘Annah Sobelman



The Mess

and yes it was spreading our legs to
heart ‘ s desire , I was sure ,—
A year of one idea ,   toward spring –
A casual
insomnia .
But an  underbrush exploded .

 You open  its   year-long window   it doesn ‘ t  show much –
Some humans ! drown and
 alternately sleep –   you drown ,   toward spring ,   you sleep

That ‘ s  the  thing ,      your  neck stretched  way past your  body
lethal     , the stretch –
It ‘ s all  happening  without  witness .
Mothers  around the world
   complain .
Fathers  in the  economy cafe  drink  pink cocktails
      past noon .
Your computer ‘ s always breaking . You duct-
tape  it .
The landscape   doesn ‘ t show
itself  to you .

There is such a magnificent spacing in the poems of American poet ‘Annah Sobelman, in her second trade poetry collection, In the Bee Latitudes (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). Sobelman uses punctuation nearly as visual cues, altering a lexicon what of punctuation often is to what it could actually be. Who else would use two commas at the end of a line? Marvellous, really. It’s as though she is aware of punctuation in poetry as a medium unto itself, the space and the sparse and the parse of spacing. One only hopes she reads with the same breaks and spacings her texts display. 

In her In the Bee Latitudes, Sobelman utilizes a series of insect-like smallnesses, incorporating sentence and word fragments nearly to the point of collage, reminiscent of Toronto poet a. rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), or even Toronto poet/publisher Jay MillAr’s magnificent chapbook, Sporadic Growth:being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006). One wonders, what do these fragments work to achieve in their accumulations? Sobelman composes an expansive exploration towards understanding bees, bats and other subjects that she manages to shift into lavish abstracts disguised as poem-essays. Or is it the other way around?

After Awhile

         what      breaks      into
sentence  structure
  joins   friends

  the  bitterness  this  morning
             singing
sing    the  childless
  heart-stopping       ,    stop    .

what         your   depression
  felt    like     ,
  your     drowned
            tower

suddenly
above      water      .

i  can  tell  you  what     it     is
 not –


Sunday, August 26, 2012

12 or 20 (second series) questions with J.L. Jacobs

J.L. Jacobs lives and writes in Norman, Oklahoma. She studied art, photography and literature at the University of Oklahoma and poetry in Brown University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, American Letters & Commentary. Books include Varieties of Inflorescence, Leave, 1992 and The Leaves in Her Shoes, Lost Roads, 1999, and the chapbook DreamSongs, above/ground press, 2004.  Representative work appeared in American Poetry: The Next Generation from Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000. Recent work has appeared in Fascicle and Octopus.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
a.  Finishing the first book meant I completed graduate school.  The first book kind of calls you on to the next and the next.  Getting it published gives you the courage to keep at it.

b. Recent work is my old aesthetic gone awry.  I no longer try to be willfully obscure for its own sake.  I no longer (always) wear a mask b/c I am afraid of what this or that camp thinks I'm up to.  Now I rhyme, hard rhymes; I would never have done that before I had a close call with mortality that involves my spinal cord and nerves.  I started feeling the vibration of everything...including earthquakes no one else felt but were registered by the seismographs...I started being able to tell what key a piece of music written in a key was in..(unfortunately this did not last after beginning to recover)...but I began hearing everything differently in my head.  It was more than just the image that moved me to write. It was now  sound.  c. It feels friendlier; less like a cold artifact in a museum that is elegant, but untouchable.  My earlier work feels untouchable in that way.  Recent work is much more O'Hara-esque in its friendly gait and moving on.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Books as a child...Dr. Suess, Mother Goose.  In college, by happy accident, I took Elizabeth Robinson's Contemporary Fiction class.  She had us write two poems.  She invited me to study in a Directed Reading with her the upcoming Fall.  I did.  And, well, changed from looking at grad school in photography to looking at MFA programs, and the rest fell into place at Brown.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Both. But, usually, it comes pretty fully formed.  There are days and days of absorbing, composing when you wander around inside or out...caught, lost in doorways...then in a few days, whatever it is will wake you up early and so begins a new project. But this is the way it works for me for the whole process, not just the beginning. I think I first encountered copious notes with the novel because it required more research.  Poems are charged moments which spring up involuntarily in my head. A sight, sound, smell or bit of overheard song or conversation. Something gets tripped in my head, and the poem begins with two lines and you realize you'd better find paper because more are on the way. The novel certainly had a forward propulsion, but often the movement was toward the research; the writing coming together after it had all sifted in and the flour dust settled.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? 
See answer above.

Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Again, both.  I'm often consciously working on a larger project, like in Streets as Elsewhere, I was exploring women's sort of underground connections in a backbackwater area in the years after my Grandmother's mid-wife practice.  My first book was about her mid-wifing practice among hillfolk at the place where the Trail of Tears ended for many.  She was revered, delivered babies of every colour. But, I realized in writing the first book that these women who gathered to quilt or walk for cakes had powerful connections that were tacit.  They almost all had husbands, but they sort of run in different circles.  I wanted to understand the
silent, solid structure of that little community of people. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Love readings, both listening and reading.  I don't really consider it part of the process...it's like the cake. It's the public ritual of celebration by the fire, so to speak.  The gatherings and the proferrings.  It is part of why practice of poetry exists I think.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I've tried to keep theory behind the praxis and not the other way round.  Always been a lyric poet, who ducked and dodged being put into this here or that there camp. This question makes me think of a C.D. Wright quote: "Theories are beautiful, but they are feeble."  I'm over pretending I don't like things I do.  I'll admit Frost and Bishop and many more.  I've come to embrace the canonical, as well as the non-canonical.  I'm not sure I was ever able to clearly articulate the theoretical concerns without growing dizzy and weary and doubting myself.  The questions I've explored include geography of place and people, the Trail of Tears, bird-life, my own near death experience with spinal cord injury, and weather & environment, vegetable, animal, human.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
To tell the complete truth I think our role is twofold: we sing the "almost imperceptible" as C.D. Wright says, and we heal ourselves and others, hopefully.  Are we still the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Maybe.  I'm not sure anymore.  But I think we are the sort of priest / healers who offer ritual sacrifices in public reading venues.  We cannot afford to be selfish; we have responsibility to live mindfully and to sing the songs of praise and lament of the world we find ourselves in. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I've not enough experience to answer this one.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I've thought about this a great deal.  I think, for me, "choose your battles," "mind your manners," and "discretion is the better part of valor" are up there, cliches or not.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to photography)? What do you see as the appeal?
I segued into poetry from photography one hundred years ago when we used film.  My early poems were often like still lifes, relying heavily on the visual element of aesthetics.  It felt natural to move between the two. And, it was not until I participated in the Bayou Reading Series with Jeff Mims did I discover sound. Sound in me.  Now I can't close that door.  There were some unusual things that went with having my spinal cord almost severed.  I could hear things like you can't imagine.  The key a piece of music was in, for example.  I was all vibration and colours and sounds and words...the downside was unbearable pain. Moving into fiction is much more difficult, though I did finish a novel during that painful time.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Short walk with Fritz (Bishon Frise). Coffee. Check email & fb.  I keep paper and pencils handy, as I often find myself hearing a couple of lines in my head while doing laundry, baking, or walking my pooch.  Coat pockets full of notes which I type up later. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually, nature or music...mostly classical.  I think it effects your neurotransmitters.  Don't we know it does?  I think we know that.  I feel that way.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Catalpa blooms and lilacs take me to my Grandmother's.  Salsa on the stove takes me there also.  Rain.  I guess it's the smell of ozone, but I call it rain.  The musty smell of stale books, old books take me to my Great-Grandmother's. The smell of yeast rising also.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
For me, it is moreso everything but other books. Maybe other poems, or bits of poems that I can't get out of my head. Songs. Instrumental music mostly. Songs in languages I can't understand.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lorine Niedecker. C.D.Wright. Dante. Simone Weil. Wittgenstein. John Donne. Yun Wang, my friend-poet.  Jack Jordan, my friend-poet.  Carol Koss, friend-poet.  We gather when we can.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
See my second full-length collection published.  Parasailing is now out.  But, I'd like to see the Emerald Grotto at evening time.  And explore the Amalfi Coast.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
In an alternate universe somewhere I am an ACLU attorney. If they don't have ACLU, then something like that.  Law in the public interest.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
An happy accident, a life changing encounter with one Elizabeth Robinson in 1989 my senior year of college. Downsided, up. Ever. After.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? 
Many books are really good, same with films. Great?  C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining is one of the best books I've ever read.  I'd put it beside The Divine ComedyThe Golden Mean was a good book. The Mystical Mind by Newberg and d'Aquili (neuro-theology) was a great book.

films...I thought I'm Not There was pretty nearly great.

20 - What are you currently working on? 
a collection of poems just called After Amsterdam for now, and a scholarly article on neurological synaesthesia and poetry which looks closely at Ashbery, C.D. Wright, Bishop, De Chirico, Messiaen, which comes out of my work on Ashbery and Messiaen co-authored with Ronald Schleifer and published in Philological Quarterly.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Friday, August 24, 2012

from Notes on (a) Marriage: epithalamium: an essay-in-progress,



22/3/85
Nothing pleases a perfect wife, nothing. I told that to the blizzard.
The blizzard shrieked with laughter. Since then I’ve travelled often
to strange places, rain forests and tropical islands. I’m planning a
collection of turtle eggs.
            Robert Kroetsch, Excerpts from the Real World

A writer friend responds in an email, recommending I step back from wedding plans, and admit that the day is about her, and not us. He was much happier when he finally realized the same, and let his beloved proceed as she wished. Perhaps this is cynical, perhaps this is simply the difference between his wife and my soon-to-be, not in the least bit worried about either of us pulling too far in either direction, or tear at the other. How does one proceed? As Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once famously asked, How do you write, how do you make love in a new country? If, as Saskatchewan poet John Newlove wrote, the past is a foreign country, then the future as well, a fresh space in which to spread out, take root.

Kroetsch says much about desire, but little about marriage. What is this, I wonder. In the title sequence of Advice to My Friends (Stoddart, 1985), he slips two in the middle, poems composed around and about a wedding reception. “At the wedding reception, such as it is, / How Morenz is asked to say a few words.” A wedding poem, wedding song, interrupted enough by the narrator and the subsequent action that a second poem is required. An epithalamium interrupted by a (Greek) chorus of mischievous ghazals. Just how much might Kroetsch have known about the Greeks? Quite a lot, I’d suspect. Never lonesome, in detail.

8. Wedding Dance, Country-Style

This will not be, Mr. Ondaatje explains,
your standard epithalamium. He is taking
pictures, both in colour and black and white.
The bride and the bridegroom are dancing.

Actually, everyone is dancing. George
(which George?) is dancing, with Gertrude Stein.
All of Victoria, later, expresses embarrassment,
but the dance, the dance is full of marvels.

Roy Kiyooka arrives by balloon. He drops in
for a polka. He is the only person who brings
an escape plan as a gift. It is a collage
of 1,243 pages, in code, with maps and diagrams,

all of which Mr. Ondaatje photographs
as part of the epithalamium, and the ecstatic
document, in arrest, has about it the air

of a painting of a forest exploding into light,
or of a hockey game, under the lights, exploding.
But the dance, the dance is the first decoding.

Consider his volume of poem/journal entries, Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), written ostensibly as letter-poems to his then-wife, Smaro Kamboureli, during the period she was in Greece composing her own journal, in the second person (Longspoon, 1985). Kamboureli wrote a book about returning to Greece, and Kroetsch wrote a book about Smaro, returning to Greece. Hers less a journal of longing than a book of exploration, retracing her steps and working out what she’d learned. “December 5, 1983. Winnipeg is my home. I am writing my dissertation on the Canadian long poem. I am married to a Canadian. I dream in English. I write in English. And I’ve become a landed immigrant today. A status that legalizes my feelings about this city, about Canada, that allows me to live permanently where I already feel at home. But this permanence is provisional. I inhabit a plain that has many edges.” Hers is a book that edges, as his does, toward their own wedding, his second. Compare what Kroetsch writes in his, “When you get to Sifnos, take another look at the house / you mentioned. The one by the chapel. The one that you / said we might be able to rent a year from now.” to a section near the end of Kamboureli’s poem-journal:

June 6, 1982

Our plans for our Greek trip get more and more complicated. Now we’ve added to them the complications of a wedding between a Greek and a Canadian. We’re all frantic, but the wedding, of course, may never occur since none of the local authorities can provide us with the papers that the Greek church demands before it issues the wedding license. In the meantime, father has sent me the banns already printed in Macedonia. And mother has included in his letter the design of the wedding dress that my godmother has offered to make for me.

I phoned them: hold your horses.

I wonder, whose horses were whom? If these the same horses Kroetsch wrote about crossing the High Level Bridge in TheStudhorse Man (Simon and Schuster, 1969)? Most likely, not. In one of his later collections, The Hornbooks of Rita K (University of Alberta Press, 2001), he wrote his male narrator in love with a disappeared poet, the unpublished Rita Kleinhart. Unfulfilled, a desire that could never achieve, be disrupted, interrupted, or even deflected. It remains what it is, the perfect image of desire. It remains a love held in amber.

It is so much easier to love someone who is gone, and can never change. How immature, archivist. Perhaps I read too much into? Perhaps this is unfair, on my part. He writes:

We write as a way of inviting love. Each text is a request that says, please, love me a little.

Rita Kleinhart was an admirer of snow. Snow, she remarks, is the caress of impossible meanings. Snow is closure without ending. Snow is the veil that lets us see the shape of the dream.

Forever returning to the beginning, begin again, was Kroetsch less confident once he approached those inevitable ends? In the collection that follows, The Snowbird Poems (University of Alberta Press, 2004), another male narrator, Snowbird, writes out conversation to and with a woman, but this time a travel companion, Henrietta. They write out their names on the beach, in the sand. Writing footprints. They move as a marriage does, would.