The Best American Poetry

A LETTER AND POEMS FROM ISH KLEIN [ROBERT FERNANDEZ]

Ish Klein’s poems are a synthesis of imagination, virtuosity, and feeling the likes of which I’ve never seen before. For this post, I asked Ish to write a poetics statement and asked if I could include her poem “From a Book of Changes.” Ish also sent along her poem “IN THE BEGINNING.” My thanks to Ish for her generosity and her efforts.

—RF  

Dear Robert, 

I’m writing this for you. I see you as my brother and I like your poetry. Here is an account of how I wrote “From a Book of Changes”. What precipitated the writing of it was just me trying to impose order on me. So I will give you the circumstance and some notes on form. This will include what some numbers mean to me. 

In spite of everything, I like the poem; it was what I did at that time. I was still me then and a decent person even though I was troubled. 

THE ATMOSPHERE 

When I was writing “From a Book of Changes” (2009 through early 2011) I was struggling with intrusive thoughts. I’d be shocked by a thought and then it would get stronger. It was like mental Tourettes. I would think something filthy then I would think, why am I thinking this filth? That can’t be me. Like the worst thing you could imagine—with knives in genitals, and other things. Since I knew I didn’t want this, I figured someone must be doing these thoughts to me. Implications spread. Things on the radio, things people said, I took very personally. As a result I lost trust in most other people and was alone most of the time. 

To protect myself , I intensely imagined the strongest man in the world. The idea was that my need would make a sort of scream that he could hear and then he would come here and help me. The poem was the happening after the summoning. 

The ‘you’ in the poem is a strong man. He takes many different forms (like Odin). In fact, the “you” probably is Odin. We get into a sort of wrestling match for control of the book. The book is my brain. Maybe I am not the best one to be in control of the book and yet I can’t seem to help myself from trying to exert influence. Well that is human; to want Odin and not want Odin. He probably isn’t really bothered; which is why he’s him. 

THE FORM 

The form is in tercets because three is the number of spirit. The third thing. The first thing is me, the second is you and the third thing is the thing between us: spirit, or our relationship. 

That there are 22 tercets was determined by the number of turns the poem took; more or less. Two is the number of wisdom. Yes it is this and yes it is that. Two equal halves. Finally that there are 66 lines is because as I wrote the poem in anger, so it remains angry; energy circling low. The poem is stuck in the physical world. I’ve attached a relatively new poem to help the old one out. 

Thank you for being interested. I would love to know what your process is. Do you like Raul Zurita? His poem “The Sea” is one of the best poems I have ever read in my life. 

Sincerely, 

Ish 

June 30, 2012 

p.s. about the fourth dimension which is maybe an area where time is simultaneous though distinguishable by different rates. Rates manifested as colors (the wavelenghts). I think it might look like colored string on fast metal. Or moving metal. My relationship to it is like everyone’s.

POEMS BY AMELIA ROSSELLI AND A CONVERSATION WITH ROSSELLI TRANSLATOR DIANA THOW [ROBERT FERNANDEZ]

Please welcome the scholar and translator Diana Thow, who for today’s entry has generously provided poems from her translation of Amelia Rosselli's Serie Ospedaliera (Hospital Series) in addition to some illuminating and insightful Rosselli context and commentary.

—RF

                        From Serie Ospedaliera (1963-1965) 
                        Amelia Rosselli/translation Diana Thow 

                        Lifting of weights and particularities of fate 
                        little doves eyed my strength 
                        taken from your take-off like 
                        candy, the vocation melted into 
                        a semantic revision of our quarrels 
                        and birds. None of the soldiers who really 
                        wanted to remarry was able to tell me 
                        who is it that really marches. 

                        ….solitary in the didactic regions 
                        I held the brigantella disappointed by 
                        such a miserable fate, oh 
                        see I’m exploding, don’t run away, the 
                        piano’s machinegun subtracts 
                        sensations, metro, camphor, the curved 
                        red lips bricks of the safe.

                         * 

                        A thin little voice: enough to open the shutter 
                        of the little window, that changes the world 
                        and its surfaces are a part of your 
                        migraines. Enough to barely open, open, your 
                        sleep measures itself against the sky, where 
                        a tragic image stays. 

                        You open a wall: another appears, to take 
                        your pulse. You can’t razor the wall, you don’t want 
                        to save yourself those few spirit hours, forcing 
                        its mysterious cells. And still, you feel like 
                        a fallen pine between the new pine groves, 
                        straight end to rotten pity. 

                        *

                        You scare yourself with all your heart 
                        with the air that shakes and sheds you; 
                        dreams radiate down through the 
                        illiterate facades, you count 
                        blood in fat drops 
                        falling full into your hands 
                        withdrawals from the anguish of knowing 
                        where the air is what does it move why 
                        it speaks, of ills so watered down 
                        to seem, so many things together 
                        but not one you forget, your 
                        dragging night and blood 
                        through immense days.

[Note: “You scare yourself with all your heart” first appeared in the estimable THERMOS]

RF: Who was Amelia Rosselli? 

DT: In her words: 

            Born in Paris afflicted in the epoch of our fallacious 
            generation. Laid out in America among the rich fields of landowners 
            and the statal State. Lived in Italy, barbarous land. 
            Fled from England land of the sophisticated. Hopeful 
            in the West where nothing now grows. 

            —from “Contiamo infiniti morti…” in Variazioni Belliche, translation Cinzia Blum and Lara Trubowitz) 

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was a dynamic, idiosyncratic and intensely lyrical presence in postwar Italian poetry. She was in a category of her own: not only multilingual (she grew up speaking English, French and Italian), she was often the token female in the largely male dominated field of Italian literature at that time. Rosselli was born in Paris in exile. Her father was the famous antifascist leader Carlo Rosselli, and her mother was British. Her very name bore the scars of Italy’s struggles to liberate itself from the fascist regime in an era that was trying to forget its fascist past. After her father’s assassination, she spent formative years in upstate New York with her extended family. During this time her grandmother read the children Dante in Italian so that they wouldn’t forget their Italian language and heritage. Amelia finished high school in London, and moved with her grandmother to the family home in Florence in the 1950s, eventually relocating to Rome, where she would live for the rest of her life. Her voice was as distinctive as her poetry: she spoke Italian with a hint of a French accent (most noticeable in her French pronunciation of the letter R). In addition to her work as a poet, she also worked as a journalist, editor, and mentor to younger poets. 

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in conversation with Geoffrey Gatza of BlazeVOX

NA: I love your description of BlazeVOX: “We are an independent publisher of weird little books.”  Would you elaborate on the weird little books you publish?

GA: Hurray, I am glad you like our description. It started out as a descriptive joke but then developed into the best abstract of our mission statement.

BlazeVOX [books] Mission Statement

BlazeVOX [books] presents innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Our books push at the frontiers of what is possible with our innovative poetry, fiction and select non-fiction and literary criticism. Our fundamental mission is to disseminate poetry, through print and digital media, both within academic spheres and to society at large.

We seek to publish the innovative works of the greatest minds writing poetry today, from the most respected senior poets to extraordinarily promising young writers. We select for publication only the highest quality of writing on all levels regardless of commercial viability. Our outlets of publication strive to enrich cultural and intellectual life, and foster regional pride and accomplishments.

BlazeVOX [books] consciously acquires a collection of titles providing focus, continuity, and a basis for the development of future publications. Through the publication of works of significance, BlazeVOX [books] is committed to the dissemination of knowledge.

NA:  How long has BlazeVOX been in existence?  How has it evolved over time?

GG:  BlazeVOX started off as a college project while I was at Daemen College, Amherst, NY in 1998. The school is near Buffalo so our contacts with poets and poetry are vibrant. I wanted to start a creative writing journal but we only had a budget of $100. I took that, bought a copy of Dreamweaver and learned how to design web pages. I used this format for the college journal and it was a great success. In 2000 I started BlazeVOX as the online journal was gaining momentum. The goal of the journal is to present innovative fictions and wide ranging fields of contemporary poetry. Our main goal is to provide good quality poetry. The technology allows for a very low overhead in our operation. We moved into book production, as there was a real market for us to expand our horizons, and once the Print on Demand systems began, we hopped right on board. The technology had been awful up until 2004 but now is fantastic. We have published 280 books and over 1000 writers in our online journal and other outlets. Our family of fine writers includes Kent Johnson, Bill Berkson, Anne Waldman, Clayton Eshleman, Lee Ann Brown, Tom Clark, Ray Federman and Gloria Frym and many, many more. I do think that I have succeeded in our aims. Through publishing hundreds of books and poems online we have been able to make a huge impact on the poetry world.

NA:  Have you always been the editor? 

GG:  Yes I have, but I have had a lot of help along the way. We have a few volunteer staff members that help in the choosing of books, ebooks and pieces for the online journal. Most of the actual editing of the books is a collaborative process between the author and the press. We work together to make the best book we can and I am very happy with the way that I am able to engage on each book. I am more of an open spirit when it comes my editorial style. I hesitate to put myself into the poet’s poems, or a fiction writer’s realm. I have a trusting intuition in our authors and I believe in them and their work. We have a very small operation so in many cases I am also the overall book designer, photographer for many of the book covers, web manager of online content, blogger, manage the accounting and any other job that needs doing. It is a wonderful life and I am thrilled to be a publisher. 

NA:  How does one become a BlazeVOX author?

GG:  It’s a very simple process; one sends his or her work to us by email. If the work fits in with the audience we have cultivated then we look to see how viable that work would best project. We have many outlets of publication, an online journal, ebooks, kindle books and printed books. So there are many ways in which we can promote poets and writers. We do have one guiding philosophy; the work must not suck. We are open to established writers as well as emerging voices and for one to feel that one’s work is of quality is an important step in being a writer and we want to support that. But we also get work that just does not fit into our scope of publishing and in many cases I forward those writers on to presses that concentrate on their specialty. As of right now we have over nine hundred good quality manuscripts on hand and we continue to receive more. It is very exciting that there is so much great writing going on right now.

NA: You publish authors from around the world.  Can you talk about the International aspect of press?

GG:  We have published poetry and fiction books from many countries including Japan, Scotland, Ireland, England, Greece, France and Canada. We now have distribution to many of these countries through their local Amazon.com; which will help increase our exposure to these countries. So the press, through the wonders of the internet, has made leaps and bounds across the English speaking world. It is exciting to reach such a vast audience of readers and writers and I am looking forward to what can happen in the future. It has been a wonderful experience to work with writers from so many countries and I have learned a great deal. But one aspect is the same, writers have the similar concerns regardless of country; they all want a well designed book that reflects who they are as a writer and that their writing conveys in print what they envisioned in their mind.

NA:  I am a huge fan of one of your authors, Tom Clark.  How many books of Tom’s have you published?  I was wondering if you could say a few words about him.

GG:  Tom is awesome. We have just finished up on his fourth BlazeVOX book, Distance. We have also all available, the Tom Clark Set which includes all four of his titles, including At the Fair, Canyonesque and Feeling for the Ground. I am fond of all Tom’s books of poetry, novels, essays and biographies. He has embodied the literary life and it was a real honor to publish his new works, poems that seem to get stronger and stronger. He is on an incline right now and it might be time for a major retrospective of his life’s work. This is the reason I so enjoy being a poet and publishing poets, one can get old, is allowed to age with dignity in their field. One gets wiser, more refined in one’s talents and how one is able to achieve in a poem the lessons learned over a lifetime. It makes me look forward to what the future holds in store for us all. 

NA:  I am also a fan of Tom’s blogs, both his personal blog and the BlazeVOX blog.  He does such a beautiful job of linking poetry and art and photography.  How helpful is it for the press to have these blogs? 

GG:  I too enjoy Tom’s blog. Just today he has mixed wonderful black and white photos of downward facing staircases with a poem by one of our new authors, Beth Copland. There is a considerable readership of Tom’s blog, 2000 page views on a normal day. It is an excellent, non-traditional form of advertising, announcing, and directing to those who are interested in this kind of writing. Our blog is also the best form of announcing new publications and other bits of BlazeVOX information. Social media is in its heyday now and blogs are very much in the public eye. Our recent imbroglio, you can read about fully here in a recent Huffington Post interview. The whole event erupted and subsided in the blogosphere and on Facebook. It then took on a life in newspapers, essays and more traditional forms of media. Thankfully that has all been resolved favorably. But to actually answer your question about how helpful our blog is, I would have to say that our blog gives us an outlet, the ability to add a face, or rather a personality to the press. We are able to address visitors to the BlazeVOX site and deliver our latest information about new books, new reviews, book-tours and readings of our authors and other tidbits of data that might be of use. This way we have our web presence as a destination, a place to read and be current with all that is going on.

NA:  Could you say a few words about your newest authors?  Is there any one thing that might categorize them as BlazeVOX writers?

GG:  Here is a brief list of ten new and forthcoming titles that give a good idea of what we enjoy publishing. You can read a preview of these books in the new section of the BlazeVOX Journal – Book Preview. They are all available on Amazon.com, SPD and in our own online shop.

A N   A N A T O M Y   O F   T H E   N I G H T  by Clayton Eshleman (Poetry)

Comma Fork / Moving Parts by Ted Greenwald (Poetry)

“now, 1/3” and thepoem by Demosthenes Agrafiotis  
   Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis (Poetry in translation)

Distance by Tom Clark (Poetry)

Transcendental Telemarketer by Beth Copeland (Poetry)

Mylar by Eric Wertheimer (Poetry)

Circles Matter by Brian Lucas (Poetry)

to go without blinking by Aimee Herman (Poetry)

Continental Drifts by Cheryl Pallant (Poetry)

Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins
   Edited by Barbara Henning (Fiction and interviews)

One aspect that binds these books together might be that they all push the bounds of what one thinks of as a poem and prose. That frayed area of what is possible is still an open frontier, one which we enjoy exploring. In picking books for publication we try to choose the best manuscripts available at the time. We try to not choose a school, or movement or any one aesthetic that would categorize the authors. That is a bit unfair to them and their work, as they write as individuals and their work stands independent of any one book. But there is overlap; communications between books and authors tend to develop in both positive and negative ways, this is unavoidable and we try to incorporate that as a form of serendipity. It is an unusual moment for poetry and it's production, but it is a glorious time as well and I am thrilled to be a part of it.

NA:  Can you talk to me about the fiction you publish?

GG:  We have an exciting list of great fiction titles from some of the best experimental voices writing today. You can see the list here, but some authors are Mark Wallace, Dennis Barone, Tom Carey, Christine Hamm, Norma Kassirer and coming out in the fall is a collected edition of fiction and interviews with Bobbie Louise Hawkins.

NA:  A lot of presses are funded by universities and/or contests, but I believe BlazeVOX is an entirely independent press. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being an independent press?

GG:  We are an independent press and it is wonderful. Right now we are working on getting our not-for-profit status and we will be ready to meet the future with a bit more certainty and foundation. There are many advantages not being associated with a university. We have the absolute authority to publish any book we want while avoiding committee think. We have the ability to publish the ill-advised as easily as work from promising writers. We navigate blithely through political and artistic/theoretical differences so that the many voices of the innovative poet can have a safe refuge. There are as many disadvantages to being on our own that revolve around the instability of life. It is a precarious situation with no real salary, university grade health insurance, a form of tenure, and so on. But I wouldn’t trade this situation for anything. 

NA:  Could you describe some of the happiest or proudest moments for the press?  Feel free to provide links to reviews, events, readings, etc.

GG: The happiest moments of the press have been quite recent. Our survival through rousing support of writers, reader and scholars may be categorized as one or two of the saddest, bewildering, discouraging, resounding, glorious, hope-filled moments in my life. I am thrilled by the quality of work we publish and are able to live up to the standards we have set for ourselves in our mission statement. We have had over 50,000 books sold through several outlets and that is fine number of objects to place into the world, considering we are Print on Demand, there is a big demand for poetry and alternative forms of literature. I also base our success in how well respected and beloved BlazeVOX has become. It is a wonderful feeling to work with such talented writers, and I have been able to work with my literary heroes.

NA:  I was thinking it would be nice to end the interview with a quote or excerpt from one of your books to give us a taste of what BlazeVOX has to offer.

GG:  You can read a preview of ten new and forthcoming books in the new section of the BlazeVOX Journal – Book Preview. And here are two poems from two new books by Tom Clark and by Aimee Herman. 

From: Distance by Tom Clark (Poetry)

 THE ROCK

Again, and again
to return
to the rock
face, asking
the same
questions
of the mute
stone
oracle. How
long, then?  And
if not
now, when?

 

From: to go without blinking by Aimee Herman (Poetry)

go get yourself loved

 Ninety milligrams of side effects will not remove his lisp. On a Friday, he slathers Federico García Lorca over vocal chords like controlled cologne that reeks of Granada. Calls his tongue a Communist, as it slurs war into his teeth. Beside him, a girl grabs his knee and squeezes an erection off his taste buds. The swelling distracts his s’s; suddenly he is cured.  She took off her socks and climbed her way through stinging nettle and curious ivy. It was the histamine that took notice of her triangular bones jutting, the pull of skin, the color of cockleshells or plaster. Twenty-minutes later, she brought peeled fingernails toward ankles and itched the irritant away. She was not ready for a relationship at this time. What happened is this. She closed her eyes, which she pretended were moss—not the color but the plant—knees bent in the only way they could and found Braille between her legs. Upon further examination, she attempted amputation. Pink wigged man intrigues red haired lady at basement bathhouse. She drips oiled wax along the seam of his arm, which is veined like skirt steak and dotted with drops of hair. It is his birthday and buttercream-covered penguins decorate his cake. Her pale pink fingers press into his bleached and blotted forearm, his wrist, above his elbow. She nods when he asks her, “Do you like men who dress as women?” She shakes her head when he offers to tie her up like Christmas or roast beef.

 

---

Geoffrey Gatza has received awards for his poetry from the Fund for Poetry and a Boomerang Award. He is the author House of Forgetting, Secrets of my Prison House (BlazeVOX) Kenmore: Poem Unlimited (Casa Menendez 2009) and Not So Fast Robespierre (Menendez Publishing 2008) and HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children (Meritage Press 2008), He is also the author of the yearly Thanksgiving Menu-Poem Series, a book length poetic tribute for prominent poets, now entering it's eleventh year.  His visual art poems have been displayed in gallery showing. Recently, OCCUPY THE WALLS: A Poster Show, AC Gallery (NYC) 2011 occupy wall street N15 For Ernst Jandl - Minimal Poems with photography from the fall of Liberty Square. And in, LANGUAGE TO COVER A WALL: Visual Poetry through its changing media, UB ART GALLERY (Buffalo, NY) 2011/12 Language for the Birds. He lives in Buffalo, NY with his girlfriend and two cats. Find out more about Geoffrey here.

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here.

The Other Latin@: A Q&A with Blas Falconer [by Emma Trelles]

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.

March Madness Continued: Poetry hoops with Natalie Diaz [by Catherine Woodard]

Natalie Diaz, 5’11, played point guard in NCAA March Madness for four years at Old Dominion University, a storied women’s college program. Diaz reached the NCAA finals as a freshman in 1997 and to the Sweet Sixteen the other three years. After college, Diaz played professional basketball for several years in Europe and Asia. Writing got her full attention after a career-ending knee injury during an unlucky, no-look practice pass in 2004. Diaz returned to ODU for a MFA in poetry and fiction. In early April, the week of the NCAA championships, Copper Canyon Press will publish Diaz’s first book of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec.

Diaz, 33, is a Mojave and Pima tribe member and the director of a language revitalization program on her home reservation, Fort Mojave on the Colorado River in Arizona. Which means she is the point guard and coach for transmitting the Mojave language from the last four fluent Elder speakers (two in their 90s) to rising elders, the youngest in day care and all ages in between. Diaz credits her college basketball scholarship to opening many possibilities in her life, including writing.   

The first half of the interview is with Diaz, poet and fiction writer. The second half is a Q&A with two Diaz poems, Two Things You Need Balls To Do: A Miscellany From a Former Professional Basketball Player Turned Poet and Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball. Game goes to overtime with your comments. 

CW: What’s basketball got to do with what you do now?

ND: Basketball is my core. It made me who I am.

CW: What does that mean?

ND: Basketball gives you a mental and a physical strength to navigate things. You discover the body in a new way. You learn the body’s limits and then you learn you can push further. It opened up a part of me that I wouldn’t have accessed otherwise. It shows in my writing; the physical world that’s how I know how to situate myself.

CW:  Your role as the head learner-teacher strikes me as requiring very complex coaching and teamwork. You are racing against time to keep a language alive and growing. What’s the most rewarding?

ND: With the elders, we’ve learned to read each other and trust each other. Like basketball, it’s the same goal of supporting each other and pushing each other until you just become one mind. Like being a point guard.

CW: You say you’re in love with the sound of dribbling a basketball on a wooden floor. Does that relate to your writing?

ND: There is a kind of music in it. Is it the touch or the sound of it? You’re just so connected to it. It’s like a line of poetry when I know it’s the best I can do. Right now I’m pretending I’m dribbling the basketball.

CW: Your basketball coming of age was coming off the bench your freshman year in the regional finals for seven key points and five rebounds, including the one that clinched the victory that sent ODU to the Final Four. Do you have a writing equivalent?

ND: The final year of the MFA, I started writing – and reading – in a more focused way. And the next year I won the Nimrod International Journal poetry prize. (The journal’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize came with publication, a $2000 prize and an all-expense paid reading.)

CW: What do you hope readers will carry away from your first book of poetry, When My Brother Was an Aztec?

ND: These poems weave together a cultural and personal mythology from numerous threads of identity. They struggle with the violence of brothers, reservation, body, hunger, and other types of love. At the core, a sister fights for or against a brother on crystal meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus are invoked and invited to hash it out at the dinner table. These poems illuminate dark corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, a million pinto beans, chiming and hands beneath a red dress, and Custer in an ambulance, reducing the violence to beauty or hilarity, to something bearable.

2^nd Half: Q&A with two Diaz poems  

CW: Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good at Basketball was written in November for a basketball fund-raiser to endow a scholarship for a Native American MFA candidate at the University of Idaho. What are the top two reasons?

ND poem: 1.The same reason we are good in bed.

2.Because a long time ago, Creator gave us a choice: You can write like an Indian god, or you can have a jump shot sweeter than a 44 ounce can of commodity grape juice—one or the other. 

CW: Why is basketball popular on reservations?

ND poem: 10. Really, though, all Indians are good at basketball because a basketball has never been just a basketball—it has always been a full moon in this terminal darkness, the one taillight in Jimmy Jack Tall Can’s gray Granada cutting along the back roads on a beer run, the Creator’s heart that Coyote stole from the funeral pyre cursing him to walk alone through every coral dusk. It has always been a fat gourd we sing to, the left breast of a Mojave woman three Budweisers into Saturday night. It will always be a slick, bright bullet we can sling from the 3-point arc with 5 seconds left on a clock in the year 1492, and as it rips down through the net, our enemies will fall to their wounded knees, with torn ACLs.

CW: You’ve described your sentences as hungry lines. What do you mean by hungry?

ND poem: 8. On the court is the one place we will never be hungry—that net is emptiness we can fill up all day long.

Questions for Two Things You Need Balls To Do: A Miscellany From a Former Professional Basketball Player Turned Poet, published in Southeast Review

CW: What’s a foul in writing?

ND poem: Traveling: (a) in poetry is encouraged, (b) in basketball will land you on the bench.

Fouls = Rejection Letters BUT in poetry, you don’t have to keep track of the # you accumulate, which is a good thing for some of us. (In the event there is a rejection letter limit, please, I’d rather not know.)

CW: Can the basketball court be compared to the blank page?

ND poem: Buzzer-beaters and miracle shots are non-existent in poetry—every poem I’ve desperately heaved into the mail with more prayer than craft or confidence has been off the mark.

CW: Your worst poetry and basketball injuries?

ND poem: The Matter of Rejection Letters: Sure they hurt. They bruise the ego a little. This is where basketball comes in handy—remember ‘No Blood, No Foul,’ and, ‘You’re either hurt, or you’re injured.’ If your fingers aren’t broken, if your nose isn’t bleeding, get out there. Plus, getting your 3-pt shot blocked (a.k.a. rejected, stuffed, packed, denied, shut down, faced, etc.) into the 3rd row by Chamique Holdsclaw in the NCAA Finals, in front of over 30,000 people, and on national TV, is so-much-worse than having the New Yorker reject you quietly, politely, and over the privacy of your email.

Another thing, in basketball, no one will give you cryptic pointers about your shot, like ‘Memorable, but needs culling.’

Injuries:

I tore my ACL, meniscus, and MCL (the unhappy triad), fractured my leg and wrist, severed a blood vessel under my eye socket, had numerous concussions, many jambed fingers, dislocated a shoulder, gritted through IT-Band Syndrome and cortisone shots, pulled muscles, sprained ankles that I still have nightmares about—all playing basketball. 

Vs.

Once, I was rushing to the post office to make a post-mark deadline and I stubbed my toe on the curb out front.

CW: Compare the finances of basketball and poetry.

ND poem: Similarity: The cost of basketball shoes, which need to be replaced every 3 months, is equal to the amount you’ll spend on contests.

CW: Which is more thrilling, basketball or poetry?

ND poem: I know I can’t fill the void that basketball has left, but some days when I rise from my desk chair and feel shooting pain in my knees (which are not yet thirty in poetry years, but in basketball years are ancient) and creaking in other joints, I recognize these aches as close to what I once had. And every now and then, I let go of a line or an image and know instantly, as soon as it rolls from the curve of my mind or my gut, that it’s going in, that it won’t rattle around the rim, it won’t brick-up and fall short or bounce too hard from the backboard, that it won’t fall flat on the page…and it’s smooth and sure and turns the net to flames, and as much as I want to stand and watch it, and pat myself on the ass for how beautiful it is, I know I have to keep moving on down the page.

Catherine Woodard has played coed, pick-up basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals.  In 2011, Woodard was the featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Joe Pan of Brooklyn Arts Press

NA:  Tell me a little about the press. Who started it, how long has it been in existence?

JP:  I founded Brooklyn Arts Press (BAP) in 2007, partly in response to watching modern dancer friends, artists, and filmmakers successfully establish their own companies, and partly out of frustration of having my own book get short-listed for a few prizes while continuing to shell out contest entry fees unsustainable on a copyeditor’s budget.  So I started BAP with my own book, with hopes of publishing 4 or 5 new poetry books a year. I’d published some of the poems in my collection in lit journals and had the rest generously picked apart by peers and professors at Iowa, so I felt like I’d paid my dues in terms of editorial scrutiny; plus, starting with my own book, I was free to make the mistakes I couldn’t afford to make with the works of other writers. I picked up book design pretty quickly, having worked for ad agencies, and blindly inched my way through the troubling, shifting terrain of printing, distribution, and marketing. It was great to have total  control over my words and the final product, and the responses I received from writers I admired, to whom I sent copies, were well-worth the time, effort, and money. That winter, after recouping the initial investment with sales, BAP opened its doors to poetry submissions. About that time I took a gig as a Co-Director of an art gallery, and while making studio visits around New York, stumbled upon some amazing artists, which is how BAP began publishing art monographs. In 2009 we halted publishing because the stuttering economy killed sales. Since then we’ve bounced back. In 2010 the sheer number and quality of submissions jumped dramatically. In 2011 we started a poetry chapbook series and began generating revenue, gaining recognition in the community for the quality of the books we publish, both in terms of writing and overall aesthetic. Several of our books eventually found their way to “Best of the Year” lists. And 2012 is looking to expand upon that awesomeness. We attended AWP for the first time, and will be at  conferences and book festivals here in New York.

NA: What makes your press unique?

JP: In terms of small presses, not much. We’ve had years with income and years without, like most independents, though Small Press Distribution, whom we signed with last year, has done spectacular work in getting our books noticed. Our first chapbook, Joe Fletcher’s Already It Is Dusk, hit their bestseller list, as did Carol Guess’ Darling Endangered (our first foray into lyrical fiction). Sales overall have spiked. As a distributor SPD connections are as varied as they are valuable. They have access to libraries and universities and secondary buyer channels.

 A few things that differentiate us from other presses might be that we don’t hold contests or charge for submissions. If you charge a contest fee, you’re beholden to choose a winner. We never want to put ourselves in that position. BAP is less a business venture than a love affair. If I’m going to spend 6-8 months reading, editing, designing, publishing, and marketing a book, it’s because I believe in the author and the work. By the end, I feel as if the book is partly my book, too, and can’t imagine engaging in a process, in a relationship, that from the outset I suspect will lead to a hapless marriage.

Our motto is Pay It Forward. The profits from each book, minus shipping costs, royalties, and promotion, get put into producing the next new author’s book or a subsequent print run of the original book. I don’t pay myself anything. Our editors do it for the same reason I do, and many of our readers and designers are former BAP authors and artists giving back. We compensate them with copies of the books they work on. Most of our authors and artists get  an honorarium plus copies, and we split the eBook proceeds with them 50-50. For future print runs, we work on a sliding scale, so if a book sells out and we enter a subsequent run, the author receives another batch of author copies and an equal or larger paycheck than the first. If we’re lucky, one big seller pays for the publication of two or more new books. It’s usually the costlier art monographs that contribute the bulk of this service.

NA:  How many books do you publish each year?

JP:  Last year we published 4 books. We have 3 lined up for summer 2012 but our submission period just ended a few weeks ago and the batch of full-length manuscripts we’re reading now is promising. We receive between 100 to 250 manuscripts per reading period, January and June, and choose 0 to 4 for publication.

NA:  How do you promote your books?

JP:   The best form of promotion is self-promotion. One of the tragic ironies of MFA programs is the lack of classes devoted to the business aspects of managing your art. When I’m writing, I’m not thinking sales. When I’m sitting across a café table with my agent, I’m thinking sales, I’m thinking marketing. If I’m not, I run the risk of publishers taking advantage of me. Remember, not so long ago big house publishers were offering writers 5% royalties on eBooks being sold for $9.99 per unit. I’ve recently read a blog post that suggests 35-45% should be the rate, if the publisher and writer are meant to split costs and profit equally. We settled on a 50-50 split because the math is easier, and because writers deserve more for their efforts.

So we encourage self-promotion, be it on a blog or with Twitter account or Facebook or by a shouting maniac on a street corner.  We bring to the table print availability via our website, SPD, and Amazon, and eBook availability through our website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, the iBookstore, and anywhere else we can place them. We email-blast a newsletter and update our Facebook profile. We send out review copies, asking our authors to provide 10 to 20 places that might be amenable to reviewing their work, so that authors can sort through the aesthetic camps themselves. We distribute to ocal bookstores and to any bookstore where the author is doing a reading. Readings sell books. As do book parties and book launches. When we launched Jonathan Allen’s art book Superstructure at the Lu Magnus gallery in Manhattan, the lovely owners let us hang his work for a night.  I brought a keg of beer and we invited everyone we knew and we sold books. But the biggest asset we have is the writer. Even an agoraphobic germaphobe has access to the internet, and some days I’m not too far off that description myself. In the end, word-of-mouth is our best resource.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press

Ed note:  During AWP, Dancing Girl Press will participate in an open studio event with book signings on Saturday, March 3, from 1pm-8pm at our studio space just up Michigan Avenue in The Fine Arts Building, 410 S Michigan, studio #921, Chicago.

NA:  Tell me about Dancing Girl Press.

KB: The dancing girl press chapbook series publishes a yearly schedule of handmade chaps devoted to work by emerging      women authors.  We are also particular interested in the intersection writing and visual arts, so the studio as a whole produces a number of book, paper, and ephemera related arts.  We have been housed in the historic Fine Arts Building in Chicago for the last 5 years.

NA:  What inspired you to start a press?

KB: In 2001, I had started an online poetry journal, wicked alice, so the press was a product of both a desire to put something a little more tangible than html out into the world, as well as a personal interest in art and book design.  Once I had given it a trial run with producing a chapbook of my own, it was no time before I had lined up our first author (the late and fabulous Adrianne Marcus) and secured a saddle stapler, some cardstock, and a decent printer.  There were a lot of great micropresses proliferating around that time (Effing Press, Big Game Books, also lots of journals entering the physical book realm Diagram/New Michigan Press, Tarpaulin Sky), so I decided to throw my hat in.

NA:   Why do you only publish women-poets?

KB: My background as a reader, writer, and scholar has always been women’s writing, so when I founded wicked alice, it was my intent to focus my publishing efforts there, mostly just as a way to define the endeavor.  Over time, it became more of a political act, as again and again, statistics showed the dearth of writing by women in the poetry world and in the general poetry conversation, and not just historically. I feel like my role, as an editor and publisher, is to get those books out there, to increase the number of women poets taking part in that conversation, particularly emerging writers at the point where their work is taking off.

NA: How many books do you publish each year?

KB: Over the years we’ve grown from publishing around 5 books to around 30 each year.   Our publication list is usually a mix of submissions and solicitations. We’re pretty lucky in that we’re pretty much self-sufficient, each book funding the next and so on.  I sell artwork and accessories to maintain our studio space, but the books are pretty much keeping each other rolling.  I hope to continue to grow as large as finances and time constraints allow, since I feel like the more we get books out there into the world, the more people there are reading them, talking about them, sending us amazing work.

NA:   How do you attract and promote writers? How do readers find out about your books?

KB: Mostly, it’s all word of mouth.  A lot of our poets wind up sharing news about their books, or touting other books we’ve published, which leads to more people taking an interest and sending us work. Social networking is increasingly a big part of it. As with most poetry publishing, the author does the bulk of the work in promoting and we’re lucky that so many of our poets do it so well. We’ve also built up a good following of steady readers who purchase our titles quite regularly.

NA:  What kinds of work are you particularly interested in publishing?

KB: I have a pretty open mind when it comes to styles of poetry, ranging from more innovative and conceptual work to traditional lyric and all things in between.  The only requirement is that it interest me in some way, be it subject matter, style, format, use of language. As I mentioned, I also love books that engage with the visual arts in some way, so we occasionally publish manuscripts that include drawings, photography, diagrams, charts, etc. (either by the writer or in collaboration with a visual artist.) Also, books that engage socially and historically or with other texts.  I also like surrealism, dreams, logical illogic.

NA:  I would love to see a poem or two from one of the books you have published that somehow exemplifies your aesthetic.

Hold Steady [by Michael Robbins]

When I was a wee bairn in the seventies, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. My earliest act of literary exegesis was attempted when I was eight or so, as I listened again and again to a secondhand eight-track cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Paul Muldoon writes of Leonard Cohen, “his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called ‘poems’ I’ve read.” The list of artists of whom I could say this seems long until I remember why “most” of the “poems” I read are “so-called.” Popular music—rock and roll at first, soon followed by pop, country, jazz, disco, R&B, the blues, soul, hip-hop, metal—has been for me less a passion or obsession than what Kenneth Burke said poetry was: equipment for living. I remember listening to “Tumbling Dice” as a teenager and wondering whether even the Stones themselves understood what perfection they had achieved. I didn’t get people who simply put music on in the background as they talked or read or ate. You had to, yes, immerse yourself in it, like a religious mystery. In college, before I quit drinking, I rarely got laid, in part (only in part) because the end of the night would inevitably find me pressed against a stereo or jukebox, trying to filter out the sounds of a party or bar so I could concentrate on the Ramones. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Rock and roll is, among other things, our profoundest celebration of the ridiculous.

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Rodger Moody of Silverfish Review Press

NA:   Silverfish Review Press has been a press since 1978.  Have you always been the editor?  How has the press evolved since then? 

RM:  I’m the founding editor. Silverfish began as a literary magazine publishing three issues a year. One of the issues was a poetry chapbook. The magazine published, poetry, prose poetry, short fiction, translations, and interviews. The last issue was released in 1997. Around 1996 Silverfish began to shift its focus to full-length poetry titles.

NA:    What inspired you to become an editor of a press?

RM:  When I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon (1976 - 1978) I had a work-study job at Northwest Review. My job was to pick up the daily mail, log in the submissions and distribute them to the poetry and fiction staff. I had the opportunity to eavesdrop on staff meetings and conversations between the editors. When I was about to graduate it occurred to me that starting a literary magazine would be a way to keep in touch with the writing community. I thoroughly enjoyed graduate school and was concerned about being swallowed whole by working just to pay the rent. What I really wanted to do was to learn the ins and outs of book publishing.

NA:  How many books do you publish each year?  How does one become a Silverfish poet?

RM:  The press releases two titles a year, three if the financial support is available. Silverfish sponsors the annual Gerald Cable Book Award for a poet who has yet to publish a full-length collection and there is a second series which is generally by invitation only though Silverfish will read unsolicited manuscripts.

 NA:  You began as a chapbook press and then began doing full-length books.  Do you still publish chapbooks?

RM:  Silverfish no longer published chapbooks. I love everything about the chapbook format. I’ve hand sewn a few which is a fun learning experience. I’ve also had a few printed with spines. Selecting endpapers is challenging, and fun. But because the format is physically small, bookstore owners are reluctant to stock chapbooks. They simply get lost on the shelves. I’m also enamored of the pamphlet format.
   
NA:   A lot of presses are funded by universities, but Silverfish is an independent press.  How do you stay afloat, especially in economic times like these?

RM:  Over the years I’ve learned how to network with our distributor --Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Silverfish is a nonprofit c 3 501 tax exempt literary organization. And though fund-raising is more difficult than I had anticipated, Silverfish has been fortunate to have had generous patrons and a few donors who give small, annual donations, some year after year. Author readings and reviews help get the word out about new and backlist titles. It also helps that Garrison Keillor has read several poems by Silverfish poets on The Writer’s Almanac and that reviews have appeared in publications such as Library Journal, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review. And the press has been fortunate to consistently receive grant support.

A Conversation with Anthony Madrid [by Michael Robbins]

I first heard of Anthony Madrid when we were on the same "local poets" bill at the University of Chicago in May of 2009. I read before he did. When I got to a line that riffs on Roethke, I noticed a tall goofy-looking guy in his late thirties or early forties nodding with recognition and pleasure. A few poets later, that goofy-looking guy stood up and read some poems that shook my confidence but good. I emailed him the next day, he wrote back immediately, and thus began one of the most important friendships of my life.

After a few disastrous title misfires, Anthony's book I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say will be published by Canarium Books this summer. It's the book of your dreams, if you know how to dream.

Here's "Rhymes," the poem that made me want to go back in time and publish it under my own name before he could write it. Our interview begins after the jump.

 

THE door is rusted; the wall is clean. Red, yellow, orange, green.
Many a maiden has come between | a gentleman and his luck.

Red, yellow, orange, red. Never you mind what the minister said.
You live, you die, and then you’re dead—so go ahead and be evil.

The smallest cage in the human zoo. Red, yellow, orange, blue.
Ready or not, it’s time we do | away with all this uplift.

So, purple-orange, black and white. Oh say can you see by the traffic light?
Your kid can try with all his might, he’ll never do long division.

The 400 Blows was about a kid. Red, yellow, orange, red.
It could have been me and yet instead | they set the controls for tragic.

Oh orange, orange, yellow, black. A passionate fuck to patch the crack.

A narrative designed to attract | children and other retards.

 

Regarding yours of March 18: yellow, yellow, orange, green.
Most of these citizens aren’t really mean, just reckless with people’s feelings.

Oh green, green, que te quiere green. God got giddy on Halloween.
Jebus, the Jolly Ghost, and He | put a razor blade in the apple. Now,

You’re on your own and off your meds. Greens and yellows, blues and reds.
It’s only with certain groups of friends | you dare undermine the uplift.

So, purple-orange, yellow-blue. Polly, gimme your answer true.
I order demand and require that you | tear it, little parrot.

So, let’s hear it all for the cash machine. Purple-orange, yellow, green.
Dirty Bomb and Laser Beam | are here to collect the rent.