The Best American Poetry

Post Wherein I Propose the Annexation of Canada by the United States by Means of Daoism [by Anthony Madrid]

All right, let’s all try and remain calm. I’m not going to go up the front steps and walk through the front door, here. I’ma go around back and come in through the kitchen window. So I need you all to be patient.

FIRST CONCEPT. What I call “social” reading. What do I mean by that. I mean reading contemporary poetry in a spirit of (a) wanting to know what’s going on in Poetryland, and (b) shopping for friendships. This is rather different from reading like a normal person, who simply wants a good time. People who read socially (in the sense I’m advancing here) don’t mind as much if they’re not having a good time. They are playing a different game, with different stakes. They want to know “the lay of the land”—and that means they have to map the swamps and the abandoned parking lots just as much as the places where they might want to be. For a certain kind of reader, that knowledge by itself is enough to make the suffering worthwhile, and if you add to that the potential for discovery with all its attendant thrills—the possibility of finding uncharted isles where dinosaurs still live or whatever—you get some idea of the stakes involved for the “social” reader. The deal is you get a map going, and then you can give directions.

I also mentioned “friendship shopping.” Here’s where Facebook comes in. Today, the supreme ease with which you can have a written conversation (boing!, right there, instantly) with somebody whose poetry does it for you—and how quickly thát can turn into friendship, sex, children, a new civilization—well! this is another good reason to put up with the inevitable boredom involved in the mapping project….

SECOND CONCEPT. Virtually every one of you reading these words answers the description I am giving here. You piss and moan about it, but you want to know what’s going on and you want to “get into it” with people. It’s just like with music when you were in high school. You were studious—you just didn’t call it that. You wanted to know all there was to know about glam rock or rap or whatever the fuck was your deal. We were all like this. Metal. Psychedelic shit. Beck. The difference is: With poetry, you can “friend” Beck, and Beck has nothing better to do than chat with you, ’cuz he’s lonely and starved for praise….

THIRD CONCEPT (hold tight for this one). Americans ignore Canada a lot. Apropos of poetry, there is a certain amount of reasoning involved, and that reasoning is elegant and convincing: “Why would I fuss with Canada, when I haven’t even read _______ [some American poet]? I’ll come ’round to Canada later.” Also, many American poets have a certain amount of resentment towards Canadians, on account of the way the ones who come down here almost always parade their scorn of US backwardness and obnoxiousness (which would be fine, except they act like they don’t expect you to agree).

But here is precisely where I take my first step through the back window and into the kitchen sink. Listen: There is no actual reason to think of Canada as a separate country. Thinking of Canada as a separate country is like thinking of the states of New York and Pennsylvania as separate. You can, if you insist, but the warrant for doing it is slender. Who in the world is gonna stop her ears and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna know what’s going on in Philadelphia; I’ll get to Philly after I’m done with the rest of the US….” (I deploy {PA + NY} as my example here because those two states’ combined populations = the total population of Canada. Plus most of Canada’s people live right there in that zone anyhow.)

—But here’s the clincher.—Go back to Concepts 1 and 2. Admit it: you are a social reader. You can’t get enough of charting the cliques: the Cool Kids, the Freak Shows, the People Who Can’t Write for Shit but Are Total Babes—OK, then! there’s this whole other neighborhood you haven’t been to yet…. It’s right there across the street, and you’re putting off checking it out ’cuz you’re silly!

I’m not saying Canada is this golden Shangri-la where exciting things are happening, 24/7. No, the whole beauty of what I’m driving at is precisely that Canada represents more of the same of what we already got, down here—more Cool Kids, more Freaks, more friends, more everything! You can’t get enough, right? You wanna know all there is to know, right? Well….

FOURTH AND FINAL CONCEPT. Daoism. I have in mind, in particular, the emphasis in the Daodejing on “actionless activity”—and stealth. You probably see where I’m going with this.

The Canadians don’t need to know about any of this plan. We will simply annex them, mentally. We’ll quietly start reading them, and caring about them, and reviewing them. We should submit to their online journals. We need to know what those journals are.

Again: There is no need to announce. Indeed, we want it to go down such that “when our work is done, our task accomplished, throughout the country, people will say it happened of its own accord” (Daodejing 17).

My brothers and sisters, join me in this. Go, reread the Daodejing and let us march upon the Canadians with our minds. They cannot resist us if we have the Dao on our side.

• • • • • • • •

The Widows' Handbook [by Bruce Kawin]

For the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival:  what it means to keep writing even if it looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or left in a drawer.  It seems appropriate to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published for the first time.  The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be published in a few months by Kent State University Press.  You heard it here first.  Putting this book together and getting it published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how many publishers declined to read the manuscript.  The book was edited by two bereaved women, Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn.  I wrote some questions for them.  Lise answered first, then Jacqueline. 

Bruce:  Are you both widows?  Do either of you have experience as editors or creative writers?

Lise:  I am a widow; my second husband and I had been happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her burden.  As for my editing experience, I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry.  I’ve published a few poems in collections of poetry by linguists.

Jacqueline:  Not only that, but there was a wife—the Lawful Awful, from whom  he had been estranged for years.  I have been a professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.

Bruce:  How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?

Lise:  Fifteen queries to likely-looking places, resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent.  But after we were in negotiations with KSUP, one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.

Bruce:  Did you consider self-publishing?  Did you reject the idea, and why?

Lise:  I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because KSUP will make it available as an e-book.

Jacqueline:  In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it at all—not even as a last resort!  Promoting the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a project.

Bruce:   How did you attract manuscripts?  Where did you place ads or notices and what did they say?

Lise: Jacqueline is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:

WIDOWS: Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding (including but not limited to finding new love or focus).  We are a published poet/editor and a scientist/professor, both widowed.     Manuscript will be submitted to trade publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30,     2011. Send with SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].

Jacqueline also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word.  Some of those friends helped put her in touch with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert).  She also selected a few widows’ poems from the anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman & McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from their own books.

Bruce:  Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?

Lise:  Most women who are widowed – especially older women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories.  For many women, the social isolation (because some married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship compound the devastation of losing their partners.  My late husband had been widowed twice before we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses.  So I would never consider a man’s grief to be less deep than a woman’s.  But…he found new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife.  That said, I wish we had included some older gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to their grief.  (The "beauty trap" catches them as much as it catches women.)

Jacqueline:  As Lise says, in our gendered society the social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants to admit.  I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.

Borges and the Camels [by Bruce Kawin]

                                                                          for John Ashbery

Two stories from the mid-1960s.

When I was an English major at Columbia, I took a creative writing course from Kenneth Koch, who changed my life.  Actually it was a class in modern literature with some creative assignments.  I have never met anyone who knew so much about modern literature.  He assigned books we had never heard of, like Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Pasternak's Safe Conduct, and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (which became my favorite novel and which I've taught for years; a student told me recently that Woody Allen likes it too, which makes perfect sense).  He sent us out to review The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  He had us read Borges's Ficciones and the latest issue of Art and Literature.  And he told us stories.  One of them dragged me into a labyrinth, made me part of it.

 

As a way of explaining "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," Koch told us that he had been sitting on a New York park bench with Borges when Borges said that the way one could tell that the Koran was an authentic document was that there were no camels in it.  If someone had wanted to create such a book and then plant false, artificially aged documents that appeared to establish its existence in the 7th century C.E., that person would certainly have included some Arabic local color, such as camels.  Koch wanted to show us how Borges could read even the Koran as a potentially false text and how the fact that there were no camels in it could prove the Koran was authentic if one was in a Borgesian mood.

 

At the time I was also taking a class in what was then called Oriental Humanities, and the assignment for that week was the Koran (trans. A. J. Arberry).  I read it with Koch's Borges story in mind.  There are two camels in the Koran. 

 

The question is, did Borges know that?  Koch apparently did not.  If Borges did know about the camels, then he was doing an advanced Borgesian number on Koch and anyone to whom Koch might tell the story, expecting that someone who heard the story and knew there were camels in the Koran would have reason to doubt its authenticity.  That was the trap that he set, and the story ends with my hearing the story, finding the camels, and wondering what I had been led to wonder.  Or it ends today, with my writing this.

 

Because Borges may not have known about the camels.  He could simply have been raising the issue that the Koran could be a faked and planted and falsely substantiated book.  I don't know whether Koch was in on the joke (I never discussed this with him; I was mostly too intimidated to go to professors' office hours), and I don't know whether Borges knew he was setting a trap.  I met Borges a decade later when he visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I got a chance to ask him about the paradoxical final sentence of "Borges and I" ("I do not know which of us has written this page"). He said there was no paradox and that "Borges and I" was a simple record of how he felt when he got mail addressed to Borges.  So readers may have made up the ultimate Borges, the one who lays out labyrinths for careful readers, the one who knew Koch would someday have a student who would hear the story, read the Koran, and be convinced that its existence was a literary conspiracy, a student who never would guess that Borges might just have been careless and missed the camels.

Is There Poetry in Soccer? By Alissa Fleck

Musing on how to make sense of myself as a soccer player with the heart and mind of a poet

The diehard poet sees a poem in everything. The most seemingly unpoetic experience still offers a story through her lens. Who can say exactly why the poet’s brain works this way?

In some cases, it is an organizing factor. In others, it is a mechanism of defense or cathartic process. At times we construct narratives to protect ourselves from what is raw, painful or inexplicable. We put language onto what we cannot understand, we grapple for a semblance of sense or beauty. Words protect us. That’s how we can write poems about trauma, for example, how the most unimaginable pain can become poetic.

What about distinctly “unpoetic” experiences of the everyday? Poems exist on the most mundane of subjects. Nothing is mundane in the hands of the skilled poet or, rather, the mundane becomes extraordinary in that it is mundane.

But how much of life does the poet approach, not with the images or pieces of a poem, but with the actual poetic process itself?

Everything I do seems to fall into the same general interest areas, requiring use of similar parts of the brain—I write and research and write some more; I curate a reading series for poets; I make music—with the notable exception of playing soccer. I like to think language is a realm in which I have some degree of mastery and playing music seems to exercise the brain in many of the same ways. Where does soccer fit in, besides making me—ideally—a more well-rounded person? 

While I enjoy the game immensely, I am all but incompetent on the soccer field. At the risk of constructing a false dichotomy, I’ve always considered myself more intellectually-inclined than athletically. Of course the two need not be mutually exclusive; indeed perhaps I can fuse the disparate pieces of my life and say it is possible to see the sport of soccer—or any sport for that matter—as a poetic experience. 

For skilled players, there is a great deal of, well, skill to playing soccer. There is foresight and strategy. You make predictions, take gambles and develop systems of spoken and unspoken communication with teammates. You get better by practicing and watching the masters (rarely in life, however, is that not the case). 

There’s a certain art to the balance of the game. You must learn to read your opponent, to think ahead and visualize. So much of the game is lived abstractly, in one’s head, before any play is made. A play takes a moment, while visualization and strategy last all match—even all season. Soccer involves immense amounts of running and passing and work, punctuated by small, intense bursts and climaxes as when a player takes a shot.

How similar all this sounds to the poetic process. A great deal of work goes into crafting a poem. There are hours upon unseen hours of toiling for the little bit that's ultimately displayed. To begin to understand that work, you must read between the lines, unfold and dismantle the finished product.

All poetry is also a conversation, just like soccer, though neither is a conversation in the most traditional sense. Poets converse with their contemporaries and their predecessors, while soccer players converse with their teammates and their opponents. They get to know each other intimately. As my sports fanatic uncle has always preached: “Everything you need to know in life, you learn on the soccer field.”

There’s certainly rhythm and repetition to soccer, as with poetry, but there is also a lot that is unpredictable and beyond our control. Despite certain limiting repetition of a soccer game, there are infinite possible outcomes. 

In poetry as in play, we can control what we do but we cannot necessarily control the consequence. We cannot control how a game will unfold just as we cannot control how a poem will unfold—what will it become once it’s left to others’ interpretations?

Alissa Fleck is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on Bitch, Truthout and Narrative.ly and in the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and more. She writes a weekly literary column for NY Press.

The Punk Singer and The Florist: A conversation between Frankie Rollins and Selah Saterstrom. By Sarah Suzor

From Scene II of Barbara Guest’s play, The Lady’s Choice

Christian: You like only myth,

            And so you would go riding,

            Greensleeves and all

            To where love’s hiding.

Antoinette: I like you.

Christian: Lady in the heavy manner

            Of kings, you do not please.

Antoinette: Am I not pretty?

Christian: Pretty a dash, but not

            To my tasting.

Antoinette: And do I not please?

Christian: You please yourself.

Antoinette: You rock me.

Christian: You rock all foundations.

            You are almost an earthquake.

Antoinette: Your name?

Christian: Christian.

Antoinette: Than you’ve some charity.

Christian: Enough to lend.

Antoinette: Spend it on me.

***

I am obsessed with well-written dialog; I find it to be one of the most intriguing aspects of a story. Here Guest serves us her characters’ attributes with little explanation needed. Antoinette is some version of a privileged debutant, and Christian is some version of a shining nobility who Antoinette thinks she has fallen for without even knowing his name (so it’s also clear Antoinette is severely desperate). Remarkably, these are assumptions Guest leads us to without having to write much at all.

Today I am going to be featuring an interview with two fabulous fiction writers, Selah Saterstom and Elizabeth Frankie Rollins (who I will refer to as Frankie). They both speak about each other’s writing as operating not from what is explicitly written, but instead from what is implied within the writing. For example, from Selah’s 2007 book, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press):   

For my response essay I begin with the sentence: There are worse things than enduring sadness. The teacher reads it out loud. I shoot this girl Bitch Lisa a look like: fuck you, I’m deep (pg. 67).

Implication: Narrator- 1, Bitch Lisa- 0.

And this is an excerpt from the beginning of Frankie’s Origin, a novel in installments, where a husband and his pregnant wife are venturing off to settle an island:

Paramon spoke saying, “You look pained. Are you alright?” He rested the oars against his chest, mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, which was soiled with two days’ rowing. His eyes, despite lack of sleep, surprised her with their shine.

“Darling,” she said smiling, pulling herself up a little in the boat, straightening her damp skirts at her feet. “I was only thinking of tea in china cups.”

He blinked and winced.

“No! No reproach, Paramon. I was only making fun of myself. Not complaining. Just trying to make light of my homesickness." (From Chapter One.)

Implication: the woman’s miserable.

We, as readers, are often drawn into characters and scenes by what we can assume about the person, or the situation. It's really psychological; this way other people's stories can become our own. Selah and Frankie know that. They also win the award for Most Creative Dialog this week. (See Frankie’s answer to: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?) As you will read, these two clearly display a real, and rare bond, a bond that originated not only from encouragement and inspiration, but also from friendship.

Be careful, like Guest’s Christian, they’re easy to fall for.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Frankie Rollins: We met in a barn. At grad school. Goddard College’s Haybarn. Selah walked in and I saw her across a room of full of people and folding chairs. She had this great big bright aura all around her. Our eyes met and I smiled and waved to her like I knew her, automatically, instinctively. She waved right back. After the readings, we found each other and introduced ourselves. The only thing strange about any of it was the moment when I realized that I did not, in fact, even know her name.

Saterstrom: I’ve known Frankie for 13 years. 13 has always been a lucky number for me.

We met in Vermont at Goddard College where we were both pursuing MFAs in fiction. Frankie was ahead of me in the program, but I had seen her around: she glowed. I mean that she changed the energy of any room she was in and in a visceral way – such a presence – this was a fact, and in my book she was 100% glorious in every way that ever has mattered.

A limited, limiting clarity: A conversation between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer. By Sarah Suzor

From George Oppen’s poem, “Route” (1968):

Your elbow on a car-edge

Incognito as summer,

I wrote. Not you but a girl

At least

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful

            thing in the world,

A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry

But to achieve clarity

***

Oppen is often included in the Objectivist poetry movement, a movement (reluctantly) defined by Louis Zukofski as poetry exhibiting “sincerity and objectivity.” I bring up Oppen in conjunction with today’s interview because “clarity” is often a notion that’s counter to the popular assumption of poetry. As a poet, I frequently find myself in conversations with people who are insistent that poetry is riddled with hidden metaphors and secret allusions, or that it’s a category of private, encoded language, intended to be truly comprehended by only a select group of individuals.

The collected bodies of work between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer defy the “encoded” assumption of poetry. This doesn’t necessarily make their books easy or accessible, it makes them clear. Standard’s 2005 book, Water and Power (Agincourt Press) is still one of my favorite books, and Paul’s recent release Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing (Seismicity Editions) is my latest greatest affinity. Wholly Falsetto speaks with certain straight-forwardness that, I’m assuming, most readers can find some sense of application within. For example:

5^th November

Because a tall man is a fool, says Aristotle, and traffic is unbearable, the days much shorter, your eyes often kind to me as the music too is lost at sea. Along the coast lights are going on and off, even if it’s too early to fall asleep and catch the leggy young blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on her finger (pg. 22).

And from Standard’s The Notebook of False Purgatories (Chax Press), I borrow my favorite line of all time:

“Progress is progress / and never the other way around.”

In their collaborative fiction effort, which follows this interview, Paul and Standard alternate chapters. They offer two different viewpoints on a small fishing community feuding over water rights. An avid reader of both Paul’s and Standard’s work, I can’t tell who wrote what chapter. I say that to instill this: the way these two approach creating— their intention— seems mighty similar. I think Paul says it best when he mentions that the best part of working with Standard is that they never have to explain much to each other. To me, this is a gift that is almost as difficult to come by as sincerity, objectivity and clarity. Anyway, read the goods. Then go catch that leggy blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on their finger. In dreams, or otherwise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Paul Vangelisti: We met through my good friend and colleague Martha Ronk, who was one of Standard’s teachers at Occidental College. That would have been about 1994-95, almost twenty years now.

Standard Schaefer: I met Paul through my professor Martha Ronk. I was aware that she wrote poems and that she knew people in LA who wrote poems. She hadn’t really won any awards or published much poetry yet. I think maybe I one of those kids who drive their professors crazy because even though they might really appreciate a literary education, they really want to create. And I think Martha might have had it in mind that if I met Paul and saw how hard he worked, I’d either drop the subject or at least stop hounding her because Paul obviously loved to discuss poetry. That was probably 18 or 19 years ago.

SS: What about your writing career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

PV: I’d probably have to say that I wouldn’t have tried my hand at a novel, that is, committed myself to spending the time and determination it takes to work through chapter after chapter or a significant length of time. Also, I don’t think that in the last 10-15 years I would have paid as much attention to, or at least framed questions about my own practice and poetics necessarily in the same historical manner had I not talked about and read through certain problems with Standard. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can certainly make him think more critically about the ones he relies on.

Schaefer: Well, I’d be a fiction writer with a drawer full of poems that I never finished. I was always more attracted to the formal and aesthetic freedom possible in poetry, but I just thought to do it well you really had to work hard. Paul assured me that you did. It’s just that I noticed that setting the constraints for myself was way more fun than following the constraints of fiction because whether or not it’s mainstream it is full of conventions that I began to realize kept from doing the thinking-through-language that I always understood to be the point of writing. Paul I think showed me that you just think through writing and use poetic constraints of various types forces you to think differently than you did previously.

SS: Standard, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Paul’s work?

Schaefer: There’s a line of Paul’s in a poem called “Rime”: “who can deny the sincerity of hot dog stands envisioned as hot dogs.” I was partial to it for a long time because it seemed to capture the vapidity of LA at time when it was trying to cast itself as the creative center of the universe and where I could see a lot of good ideas were being milled and refined into hopelessly literal, one-note affairs.

SS: Paul, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Standard’s work?

PV: There are many but how about this one for starters, from Desert Notebook, 2004-2008: “Perhaps there was never a desert and we made it the first time we looked up to Mars.”

SS: What’s the most exciting project you two have collaborated on together?

Omnipotent: A conversation between Omnidawn Publishing's Rusty Morrison and Gillian Hamel. By Sarah Suzor

Umberto Eco, from his collection of essays, On Literature (English translation published in 2004):

I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?

My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense. 

One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.

Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader (334).

*** 

I didn’t use Eco's quote to debate or analyze its contents; I used it because I think it speaks to the tremendous importance of those who bring books to life: publishers. 

Presses are one of the most essential part of the writing community. And because “small presses” typically strive to publish work “beyond mainstream literature,” small press publishing houses are vital to poets, translators and writers of experimental fiction. Today I am featuring an interview between Rusty Morrison, co-founder of Omnidawn Publishing, and Gillian Hamel, senior poetry editor for Omnidawn and managing editor for the press’ online imprint, OmniVerse. In 2001, Rusty founded Omnidawn Publishing with her husband, Ken Keegan. Today Omnidawn is one of the most well respected, highly regarded small presses in North America. Omnidawn, with tremendous help from Gillian Hamel, has also renovated the press’ old blog into the zine OmniVerse, which has become one of the best contemporary online resources for interviews, new creative work and essays. Omnidawn Publishing’s website lists approximately 50 full-length poetry titles (many of which have won prestigious awards and prizes), and OmniVerse now credits over 100 contributors; a stunning achievement, especially when one considers Omnidawn’s short 12 years of existence and its small masthead of staff members. Interestingly, both Rusty and Gillian combined two of my questions: 1.) What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry, and 2.) What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry? Says something, doesn’t it?

Eco: “One writes only for a reader.”

Me: “One writes (or reads [or lives]) only to experience the thrill of fascination.”

In any case, these are two women who deserve a lot of praise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Rusty Morrison: Gillian is a friend of Sara Mumolo, who works for Omnidawn. Sara told us that she knew a poet who would be a perfect addition to our staff. Gillian has exceeded every expectation that I had; she’s become such an integral part of our team, I can’t imagine Omnidawn without her.

 Gillian Hamel: I came to Rusty and Omnidawn through the wonderful, nebulous network of the MFA program at St. Mary’s College in the fall of 2009. My friend Sara Mumolo, who went through the MFA a year ahead of me, had been in Rusty’s workshop at SMC and was interning at Omnidawn. She got me some review copies of Omnidawn’s books for our MFA’s literary journal, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, and I was so impressed by their exquisite design, literary sophistication, and all-around excellence that I asked her about interning there as well. She was happy to set me up with Rusty, and I couldn’t be more grateful to her for being another pillar of influence in my involvement with poetry.  

SS: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

GH: In a way, everything – Omnidawn opened up so many different avenues to me of exploration and innovation in understanding poetry, making books, and talking to other poets. I doubt I would have taken such initiative to design and manage an online journal, or to start my own chapbook imprint. There are so many other important people I would never have met. Most importantly, however, to the question of ‘career’ within this question, I might not have ever learned to take myself seriously as a poet and a functional participant in the project of poetry – which is to say, I would not have learned not only to trust my abilities in those areas, but also to understand when my limitations aren’t as serious as they seem.

RM: I did a second-take when I saw the word “career” in your question. I understand why you’ve used it, since you are asking about my work as Omnidawn’s co-publisher and poetry senior editor. And, certainly, in that context, I want to talk about the ways that Gillian Hamel’s presence continually renews and enlivens my approach to what Omnidawn can do and can become. I also sense that your question is broad enough to allow me to share the ways that my relationship to Gillian has enlivened my own writing, since I do see myself as being a poet as much as I see myself as a publisher. These two kinds of work fill the space that should mean “career” to me. The dictionary defines “career” as “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.” Poetry and presswork certainly have taken over all “significant” time in my life, but I wonder if one can speak of “progress” when discussing a creative project—be it a press or the poems I write. How does an artist gauge “progress”?

One of the most valuable aspects of my relationship with Gillian is that her vitality—her continually fresh approach to aesthetics—opens me to my own beginner’s mind. I can trust that she shares my way of seeing “progress” as including regress and digress, and even a salting of anti-gress, which can lead to new ingress. These aren’t typical words for articulating “career” path success, but they are essential words for constantly re-envisioning what a press can do, and what a poem can do.

SS: Rusty, why did you start the online magazine, OmniVerse?

RM: There wouldn’t be an online magazine called OmniVerse, if it weren’t for Gillian. Ken and I had wanted to create a magazine that would be a place to foster conversations about literature and the arts (a place where we could publish work that had nothing to do with Omnidawn), but it wasn’t until Gillian envisioned the form that we actually ventured into this.

SS: Gillian, how did you get the position of Managing Editor for OmniVerse?

GH: We’d had a slowly dilapidating blog, in its heyday a lively hub of news and discussion of all things Omnidawn and the broad poetic community, curated expertly by the inimitable Craig Santos Perez. As he began to limit his involvement in this project and focus more on his teaching career, Rusty generously offered me the position of the blog’s senior editor. However, my inability to navigate the format so capably combined with our rising presence on other social media outlets eventually rendered the blog much less relevant than it had been. The space in social media to focus on Omnidawn was well-established, and so we wanted to cultivate something for the work beyond Omnidawn’s immediate reach of publication. With Rusty’s support, I decided the best thing to do was serve another facet of Omnidawn’s involvement in the poetic community and, somewhat selfishly, fulfill a longtime dream of mine of founding and editing a literary journal. In my opinion, there will never be enough places to showcase the diversity of new work, criticism, and engagement in our art form, and I’m glad that Rusty and Ken agreed there was a place at Omnidawn for me to indulge this passion with one more outlet. 

SS: What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry? What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry?

RM: My husband Ken Keegan and I began Omnidawn in 2001 because we believe that small, independent presses are essential: they disseminate fresh, lively, culturally pertinent and provocative literature. A society needs many small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. As Italo Calvino tells us, “… the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language." 

Ken had wanted to begin a press for years, but we never felt we were secure enough financially to do this, and we never felt that we had enough time. But, in 2001, we realized that there is never enough time or money to begin a project like this—we realized that if we waited any longer, then we’d never do it. So, we plunged in, aware of the precarious nature of publishing. We have no regrets; we are excited about every new book, every new project. But it is an excitement tinged by our awareness of the precariousness and challenges of small press life. I suppose that our awareness of the risk helps us to savor every moment, every pleasure.

I share this history because I think it’s the best answer for both parts of your question. I am constantly rewarded by the opportunity to be in conversation with writers whose voices are resonant and relevant to the changing moment in which I live. What’s most difficult is that the work of running a press doesn’t end at 5pm, and the week doesn’t end on Friday afternoon. We remain thrilled by the challenges, and always a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities.

GH: I decided to conflate these two questions because – and perhaps this is going to sound a little cheesy – the ways in which the work of poetry challenges, frustrates, and exhilarates me are pretty much inextricable. The limitations of things like money and physical space and time are obviously stifling and need no further examination, but the fact of their inevitability makes the result of your work a victory that is both indulgently contrarian and deeply valuable. It seems facile to make these kinds of statements, but I think it’s sort of pointless to argue against them, especially where poetry is concerned. We all know we’re working in such a fraught, marginalized space, and we carry on in spite of that and because of that and with the sort of forbidden knowledge that it’s actually what makes us thrive. In a way, I kind of love that things like e-readers are becoming so ubiquitous because it’s begun to validate the craft of what I do – as the imperative for the cheap and utilitarian in printed books disappears, we have more room to explore the medium, to discover the interplay between printed and digital materials, to return the art to the form and let the poetry breathe in the space that’s been created.

Confidence = Generosity: A conversation between Elizabeth Robinson and Travis Cebula. By Sarah Suzor

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (“Letter 8,” 1904):

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. …How are we to forget all those myths at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about the dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps every terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants to help us (pg. 52).

***

Whoa.

I love these letters. They are such an incredible inside look at the indestructible positivity Rilke carried with him throughout his career. Here he’s basically telling his young correspondent, Mr. Franz Kappus, that there’s no need to panic; we are all, at times, stricken with torment and doubt (about our lives, about our crafts), and, although we can never alter the past, we can always alter our perception of the past as we move forward into the future. Rilke is instilling the next generation with realistic optimisim. 

“But only someone who is ready for everything… will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”

Exhaustively. The word itself seems to tempt one into it;

I dare you

to draw yourself,

exhaustively,

from (into)

your own existence.

As I consider today’s interview between Elizabeth Robinson and Travis Cebula, I find Rilke’s haunting notion to be the perfect introduction. These two poets are some of the most inquisitive and prolific writers I know. The two descriptions – 1.) Inquisitive and 2.) Prolific – both require a certain curiosity that “excludes nothing.” Elizabeth is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart (Ahsahta Press). She has taught all over the country: the University of Colorado Boulder, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Montana, and she founded (with Colleen Lookingbill) EtherDome Chapbooks and (with Laura Sims) Instance Press. Travis’ second full-length collection of poetry, Ithaca was recently released from BlazeVox Books. He has founded Shadow Mountain Press and in 2011 he received the Pavel Srut Fellowship from Western Michigan University. Travis also teaches at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris (avec moi). I love how both Travis and Elizabeth make a point to comment on each other’s generosity throughout this interview. As Elizabeth says about Travis (and, in my opinion, about people in general): Confidence = generosity.

With that, I gratefully share the stage.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Elizabeth Robinson: Travis was a student in a remarkable graduate workshop I taught at Naropa University in the Spring of 2008. I looked forward to going to that class all week long and when I arrived, I’d just feel such gladness and affection for the students. As writers, they were so dissimilar, but they read and responded to each others’ work with real insight and respect. Travis threw himself into the experience. He gulped down contemporary poetry and poetics, he became an expert reader of his peers’ works, he experimented voraciously as a poet. Later I got to work with Travis on his M.F.A. thesis. I think the poetry part got written pretty fluidly, but he also had to write a 30 page essay, and I continually challenged him on aspects of what he wrote. He had conceived of a really interesting approach to poetics, but I just kept returning and suggesting changes here, pressing back on ideas there. I thought he’d eventually want to throw me in front of a train. But no: each iteration was cheerfully revised within a week or so. If he was ever frustrated, he didn’t show it.

Since then, though we both seem to be in transit quite a lot, Travis has been an endlessly prolific writer, an attender of readings, a respondent in a writing group, a recommender of books, an occasional shoulder to sob on: in short, a friend.

(He’s also a terrific cook, and my kids are wild for his peanut butter brownies, though I think his blueberry coffee cake is to die for.)

Travis Cebula: I’m pretty sure our paths first crossed in January of 2008. It was definitely my second semester of graduate school, which means I met Elizabeth on the first day of a poetry workshop she was teaching in the MFA program at Naropa University that semester. We may have strolled past each other on campus before that, but that was the first time we spoke.

She walked in the door of our classroom in the historic (and historically clanking and smelling) Lincoln building. I remember initially being a little frightened of her, which seems a bit silly in retrospect, but it’s true. In addition to her obvious competence and intelligence, which are evident at first glance, she had a strong no-nonsense air about her on the first day, probably to make sure we were focused. Understandably. Students at Naropa have a tendency to lose focus for a number of reasons. Her demeanor was a little intimidating, because none of the other professors I’d encountered at the school up to that point had taken anything quite so seriously. The pedagogical tone was normally much more laissez faire, which makes perfect sense if you know anything about the philosophy or history of the institution. But Elizabeth made it clear right off the bat that she had higher expectations for our class. I remember thinking, “I really don’t want to be around when she gets angry. I really don’t want to be the one who makes her angry.” It might have been her mother bear side showing on the first day, just so we knew it was there. That can be scary.

I’m glad she did, though. Everything turned out perfectly, and it didn’t take long at all for her to warm up to the class after she determined we were serious. I’m grateful to my program advisor at that time, Todd McCarty, for suggesting her class to me. Suggestion is a bit of an understatement. What he actually said was, “You NEED to work with Elizabeth.” He was absolutely right, and not just for me. The few people who were fortunate enough to be in that workshop together are still friends, in close contact, and every one of us is still writing on a regular basis. We go to each other’s weddings. We read together. We collaborate. We publish each other’s work. Seriously, how often does that happen? An entire workshop? Elizabeth started all of that.

But, don’t get me wrong, I still don’t want to be around when she gets angry. That would suck.

SS: What about your writing career would be most noticeably different had you two not met?

ER: My life in Colorado has often been difficult and estranging. Travis is a generous, dynamic, and enthusiastic colleague. I think I would find myself more isolated at this point if I had not met Travis. He is a staple participant in my life as a writer in Colorado. Because of his travels, his writing, and his general inquisitiveness, he often brings news of books, presses, and communities that I’m glad to learn about.

TC: I know a few people, including myself, who unabashedly refer to Elizabeth as our “Poetry Mom.” I hope she’s comfortable with that. Does that answer the question?

I think that if I hadn’t met Elizabeth I wouldn’t have a “writing career” in any kind of recognizable sense. I don’t mean I wouldn’t be writing right now, which I’m pretty sure I would be, but rather that my development in the other aspects of a writing life would be stinted at best. A career is something more than just work (or a job); it entails building relationships, a broad engagement with community, and responsibilities that extend into the world, into time. I think I’d still be trying to teach myself what to do in that regard, how to get to that next level, and asking myself questions like, “How do I submit work to a journal?” “What should I be reading?” “How do you write a book review?” “Are these poems a book yet?” “How do I know if there’s a reading to go to this weekend?” “Who can I talk to about what I’m writing?” “Who do I want to talk to about what they’re writing?” And many, many more.

Now I think of a writing career as a collage: the community, the conversation, the teaching, the publishing, the reviews, the support, the readings, the late nights spent talking, the love, the friendship, the editing, the sequence, the ups, the downs, the offers of and reception of support, all in turn. No, I wouldn’t have a gestalt of all of that yet if I hadn’t met Elizabeth. That’s an easy conclusion to arrive at. My life would be very different without her. I am a little curious if, conversely, the more recent part of her own career might have been any different had we not met. I wonder, have I offered her anything in return? I suspect the answer is, “Perhaps, but not nearly enough.”

SS: Travis, if you had to pick, which of Elizabeth’s books is your favorite?

TC: I hate questions like this, if for no other reason than it’s always impossible for me to give a straight answer. I love all of Elizabeth’s books, and for different reasons. Not equally, mind you, but to narrow my list of favorites down to one is challenging. They all offer different perspectives on life and the human experience, and they all carry what I believe to be astute and beautifully written perspectives on different aspects of life. Which is to say, she has successfully avoided the trap of writing iterations of what amounts to the same book over and over again. Asking me to pick a favorite book of hers is like asking me to pick a favorite part of life….

Actually, that might be easier. In that case, at least I could throw out junior high school. I’ll offer Harrow as my favorite, for the simple reason that it’s the first one I read, and thus the first one I fell for. The trauma she weaves into that book while avoiding even a hint of melodrama is breathtaking. Barring that, I would choose “whichever one I’ve read most recently.” So, Counterpart is making a strong case for itself at the moment, which may disprove one of my earlier statements. Her descriptions of devils and hell are strongly redolent of my experiences in junior high….

SS: Elizabeth, what has been most rewarding about watching the evolution of Travis’ writing career?

ER: I think Travis proceeds pretty fearlessly. It’s always really exciting to see someone who has been your student get published, whether discrete poems in a periodical or in book form, but Travis approaches writing much more expansively than that. He is traveling, meeting new people, finding out about contemporary presses. I guess what I find rewarding about observing Travis is that he understands so many ways of writing (that is, he can be very stylistically diverse) and participating in a writing life through friendships, projects, reading. When I work with people, I understand that they might not write poetry forever because other commitments and projects will come into their lives, but I always hope that they will really stick with it and find out what writing will yield in their lives as an ongoing adventure. Travis is one who has made that commitment and I am grateful that I can continue to be in conversation with him as a poet.

SS: Travis, if you had to guess Elizabeth’s favorite color you’d pick?

Discussing discussions: A conversation with James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. By Sarah Suzor

Jack Spicer, from his 1957 collection, After Lorca:

Dear Lorca,

…Things do not connect; they correspond…. Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write each other.

Love, Jack

***

The irony here is this: in 1957 Spicer wasn’t dead and Lorca was.  Now Spicer’s dead, and I’m not. So, either Spicer was psychic or this is the way things really do work: a ladder of correspondence.   

A creative profession, perhaps more than any other profession, is one built, culled and cultivated from groundwork that has already been set, hence innovation via (some kind of) inspiration. I know no writer who isn’t a living, breathing representation of the influences they have encountered. The future gains new ideas and models of creativity this way; we’re constantly marching up a long ladder of either intrigue with, or rejection of something outside ourselves. These things which one chooses to correspond to, or move away from, construct the notion of a “history,” a history that inevitably makes a creative career larger than simply one’s personal contributions. Sounds important, right?

In many ways the story of Ezra Pound editing T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land makes the poem itself much more intriguing. In the annotated edition of The Waste Land we see the working relationship Pound and Eliot had refined. Indeed they were pals, but the friendship formalities go by the wayside when Pound stepped in as “editor,” leaving brash, “Bad- but [I] can’t attack until I get typescript” commentary all over Eliot’s written script, and cutting major sections and lines of the poem with the justification, “Too personal.” Some of Pound’s comments are extremely funny, especially when one imagines what Eliot­­– “The Old Possum,” as Pound called him– must have been thinking while looking them over. However, Eliot took many of Pound’s edits into consideration because he trusted his advice. And later in the annotated edition we see Pound return as Eliot’s ally by championing The Waste Land to other colleagues. This is a 1922 letter from Pound to John Quinn:

 

“Eliot came back from his Lausanne specialist looking OK; and with a damn good poem (19 pages) in his suitcase…. About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop.”

The rest is history. And that’s my point.

So, I’ve decided to infiltrate the Best American Poetry blog with contemporary examples of “working relationships.” Each day I will feature two writers in a conversation that highlights the aspects of their lives and careers that have been enhanced by writing together, learning from one another, or publishing with each other.

The most beautiful findings in each of the interviews are the descriptions of the lifelong friendships that have been created between these artists.

James Belflower mentions he wishes he could bridge the gap between New York and Arizona just to sit down for coffee with mentor, Cynthia Hogue.

Elizabeth Robinson looks forward to hearing about the new communities Travis Cebula encounters during his travels.

Rusty Morrison says she fully trusted Gillian Hamel to see Omnidawn’s online magazine OmniVerse come to fruition.

Standard Schaefer and Paul Vangelisti constantly alert each other to work that might pique each other’s interests.

And when asked about the best advice Frankie Rollins has imparted, Selah Saterstrom answers: “To risk everything for my biggest life and best work.”

To risk everything.

You picking up what I’m putting down?

Enjoy these conversations as they come down the pipeline. I have also asked the featured writers to collaborate on a new creative piece between the two of them. This is intended to honor each other’s talents and abilities, but most importantly, to put a new spin on their “relationship,” one that we, as audience (as the future), can correspond to and with.

 

I’m kicking off the week with an interview between James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. James’ second full-length collection of poetry, A Posture of Contour, was just released from Spring Gun Press, and it is a beauty. He’s pursuing his PhD at Suny Albany, and he curates the Yes! reading series. Cynthia is the Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the English Department at ASU. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, interview-poems and photographs (with Rebecca Ross).

I’ll let them tell the rest of their story.

Thumbs [by John Beer]

 

The work of criticism is always, let’s say, ephemeral; Saint-Beuve’s name survives only because Proust was against him. Even more fleeting are the reactions of the mere reviewer. “No serious critic can devote himself, frequently, exclusively, and indefinitely, to reviewing works most of which inevitably cannot bear, would even be misrepresented by, review in depth,” sniffs Renata Adler in her screed against Pauline Kael.

So the outpouring of emotion in the wake of Roger Ebert’s death might seem a transitory thing; already, the passing of the Iron Lady (of whom more later) has moved him off the screens. The rise of Siskel and Ebert neatly paralleled in time the switch from the decade-long Prague Spring of New Hollywood to the blockbuster-driven economy still churning its way through the Marvel and DC lineups. Even if Ebert’s courage and openness in the face of his disfiguring illness and his resolute identity as a newspaper journalist in the twilight of that industry render him heroic, he and his partner might still seem like emblems in a narrative of cultural decline, banally and profitably celebrating the culture industry’s assembly line, whatever caveats they might have about individual products.

But I want to offer a different view. Sneak Previews and its successors enjoyed an astounding success, given how unpromising the show’s basic structure might have seemed: two untelegenic, middle-aged white guys bickering about movie clips. The show operated on the premise that arguing about culture could draw a mass audience. And it did. “Thumbs up or down” may have been the takeaway message, but both critics made clear that those decisions were made for reasons, and reasons that each would emphatically try to make the other acknowledge.

Maybe those arguments weren’t always the most sophisticated. And maybe the very act of treating Weekend at Bernie’s 2 as worthy of detailed consideration was as much a con as it was a tribute to critical open-mindedness. But in their humble way, Siskel and Ebert offered a model of rationality, one on which thinking wasn’t a matter of following an algorithm or asserting a purely subjective preference. In other words, it was a humanistic kind of education.

And it strikes me that poetry criticism, that much-lamented field, could do with more of a dose of At the Movies-style debate. We have our dramatic flareups, as with the fascinating byplay between Marjorie Perloff and Matvei Yankelevich last year. But too often, even when critical disagreements break out, they either proceed at an austere level of abstraction or wind up with people talking past one another. I’d love to see a pair of writers devote themselves to detailed and contentious consideration of recent books or poems of note. There are some excellent examples approximating this: Al Filreis’s Poem Talk, for instance, or the byplay between Christian Wiman and Don Share on the Poetry podcast, but I think there’s room for a similar effort that's neither tied to a particular publication nor emphasizing a scholarly conversation.

***

The use of thumbs in the poetic context, though, might have its risks:

What a thrill—

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

 

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

(Sylvia Plath, "Cut")