NA: Tell me about Cleveland State University Press. What distinguishes it from other presses?
FG (above, right): Well, our name—for one thing. We are Cleveland State University Poetry Center, not Cleveland State University Press. Of course this is a small thing, but it's important to me because it helps me remember that our mission should not only be to discover and publish the highest quality contemporary poetry being written today, but also to be the "center" for poetry in northeast Ohio.
That is, our mission, as I see it, should give equal importance and resources to the following three pursuits: 1. We must discover and publish the best contemporary poetry through our two yearly contest and New Poetry Series (BTW, the deadline for submitting a manuscript for our first book contest and open book contest is March 15 via Submittable). 2. We must solicit nationally recognized poets to come to Cleveland to give readings and workshops. 3. With the help of our graduate student interns in the NEOMFA, we must create inventive, interactive literacy/poetry programs and bring them to underserved communities in north east Ohio.
Another distinguishing feature is our longevity. CSUPC published its first book in 1971 and has since published over one-hundred-fifty titles.
NA: Every year I look forward to the winning books from Cleveland State’s competition. I am hoping you will say a few words about the winners from 2013?
FG: Sure. The Tulip-Flame by Chloe Honum was picked by Tracy K Smith as the winner of our 2013 first book prize. The poems in this collection are not only gorgeous and spare and lyrical, but they are also finely crafted. I know this because part of my job as an editor is to painstakingly give the author a very close reading of each line of each poem and then have a conversation with the author about issues of consistency of style, punctuation usage, and word choice. It's a very old-school way of editing. I have had to learn to not edit the heart out of a poem or line or phrase. But this method is also very rewarding for the poet because, for one big thing, it's rare to have someone read your poems so carefully. For another thing, it gives the author a kind of confidence in the poems she may not otherwise have. And, it's very rewarding for me because reading so closely teaches me how to write and how to edit my own poetry—And, believe it or not, it's fun!
As a publisher, I like to involve the author in the design of the book cover and interior. Some poets do not want this responsibility and extra pressure, and hyper-awareness of production deadlines. This is perfectly understandable. Bur for those who do, like Chloe, the results can be stunning. Chloe and I agonized about the cover and whether or not we should use a combination of a matte and glossy finish or just stick with an all matte finish which is the current style of most books of poetry. Well, thanks to the amazing designer VJ Scribe, the matte/glossy combo turned out even better than I had hoped. When you first pick up the book you don't notice the shimmery gloss of the cover art. But then when you hold the book just so in just the right light, you SEE what it means to be a tulip-flame.
Here is a poem from The Tulip-Flame:
To The Anorexic
Sleepy child, what are you sewing? Where do you imagine you
will wear it? Morning falls like yards of satin in your lap. Each
time Mother wraps her arms around you, your shoulders are
smaller than she expects — do you enjoy this, that it takes a
moment to find you? It is winter and the fields are numb. Then
it’s spring and poppies flaunt their blood-soaked composure. For
months you’ve felt the tug of hunger, like a balloon tied to your
wrist. The sky asks nothing. Let your hand float up, and answer.
A Boot's a Boot by Lesle Lewis won our open competition. This is Lesle Lewis’ fourth book. And what a wonderful book! I experience her poems as Derridean play. Her poems are unapologetically written in the same vein as Ashbery and James Tate and yet her voice is unique. The leaping that takes place between phrases and sentences and lines is raised up to the level of form. She strives for sincerity and excellence and has a persistent need to push the boundaries of the kinds of emotions that can be experienced through associative leaping. She is the skittery poets poet, if you will.
The amazing designer for A Boot's a Boot is Dede Cummings.
Stop Wanting by Lizzie Harris is a first book that got taken in large part because Tracy K Smith, our first book prize contest judge said if we are going to publish another book besides the winner, that's the one we should publish. I couldn't have agreed more, so several months later Lizzie's gorgeous and startling book of poems has appeared. Lizzie's poems make me think of raw, lyrical energy machines. Here's one from the first section of Stop Wanting ( BTW, the amazing designer of Lizzie's book is Adil Dara):
Before It Roots
take the body. Bury it.
Roll the body to show the face, let it see above.
if a man holds up a fist to you, pretend to drop the shovel. Hide your body from the storm clouds, find the richest soil. ask: What should grow from this?
geranium will sprout from the mound, flower with earlobe, petal like eyelids.
Whisper to the body, you are the last thing that soul hears. Make the body a promise:
You’llbe buried in the ground where no one can touch you.
Don’t lie to the body: No one will touch you again.
NA: What distinguishes a manuscript in a contest? What makes it a winner?
FG: I'm very much a student of Pound when it comes to this question. I am just as severe and adamant about needing to discover the new. It takes very little time for me to decide what isn't a winner because I begin reading with the knowledge that most manuscripts are going to be a disappointment. Most are either too clever or too sentimental. For that matter, most poems are either too clever or too sentimental.
Then if a manuscript passes that test, the next thing: It has to be new. It has to make me think in a way that I never knew I could think. It's got to make a new wrinkle in my brain. Once these considerations are addressed, I get to about 10% of whatever I started with.
This is when luck, and of course, the judge comes into the equation. For the 2014 first book prize our judge is Ilya Kaminsky and for the 2014 open book prize the judge is Erin Belieu.
NA: How about a Lesle Lewis poem?
YouHaveFinallySpentEnoughTimeAlone
It hurts like the death of a loved one even when we tell ourselves
no loved one has died and how much worse that would be.
The rain is dark pink.
We have dinner and in it there is not an inch of art.
It’s a recipe for winter squash soup.
It makes for a long line of women with crazy heads.
It makes for a throbbing curiosity.
We bury ourselves in the dirt under the water, but our bodies will
be discovered and we will be tried for the murder of ourselves.
Who will drop a flower from a window for us?
We tiptoe so we can be perfect.
We draw shapes around ourselves.
How we put it together matters.
We cut along the horizon lines.
In your face is another face I could love.
NA: Cleveland has some great local poets. Are there any books coming from Cleveland authors in 2014?
FG: We have a wonderful book coming out in the fall by the Russian poet, Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Cleveland poet, Phil Metres. Perhaps he can say a few words about this project.
NA: PNA: Phil, could you say a few words about your translation of Arseny Tarkovsky? Who is Tarkovsky? How did you become his translator?
PM: (above, left): Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989) is one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, a poet lauded by his elder, Anna Akhmatova, as “the one true Soviet poet.” I first read his work in 1992, just a few years after his passing, and was immediately intoxicated by the music and gravitas of his poems. He survived the entire Soviet era by his work as a translator of poetry. He suffered a leg amputation during the Second World War after having been shot, accidentally, by a Soviet soldier on the front. Ironically, Tarkovsky—one of the most beautiful nature poets—had been stargazing and hadn’t heard the soldier call out for the password. Tarkovsky wrote under the shadow of Stalin for most of his early adult life, and only later did he emerge in the public sphere, though his renown grew with the publication of his first book in the 1950s and when his son (the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky) used readings of his father’s poems in his films The Mirror and Stalker. Anyone familiar with his son’s films will immediately recognize the kindred vision—its project of “sculpting time,” as his son once wrote, making art a kind of habitable temporality. There’s the scene that begins The Mirror, in which, for me, the main character is the wind, the wind rushing through everything in the landscape. That, to me, is the primordial Tarkovsky.
NA: This is not your first book of translations, right? You also have a book from Ugly Duckling Press?
PM: This will be my fourth full-length translation project, and second in 2014. All of them were the fruit of seeds planted during a Watson Fellowship year way back in 1992-1993, in which I studied “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change,” interviewing poets, translating, and generally losing my mind in post-Soviet Moscow. They are: A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), and Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014). Tarkovsky couldn’t be more different from Rubinstein, in tactic and theme. Tarkovsky works in traditional rhymes and meters, while Rubinstein is a classic postmodernist. It’s roughly the distance between Stevens and Ashbery. But I love both of them for their own genius. That’s the fun of translation: to inhabit such different aesthetics and word-worlds, trying to find some way of carrying across the magic, or making analogous magic.
NA: I’d love a sample poem from your forthcoming book.
PM: This is a poem about his near-death experience during the Second World War. I wrote an essay about translating it that you can read here.
Field Hospital
The table was turned to light. I lay
My head down like meat on scales,
My soul throbbing on a thread.
I could see myself from the outside:
I equaled no more
Than a stout market weight.
There
I was, amid the snowblind shield
Pocked along its western side,
In the circle of never-freezing swamps,
Of trees with fractured legs
And railway stations with split skulls,
Their snowy caps blackened
Again and again.
On that day, time stopped.
The clocks no longer ran, the souls of trains
No longer flew along the lampless levies,
Upon the gray flippers of steam;
Neither crow weddings, nor snow storms,
Nor thaws penetrated this limbo
Where I lay in disgrace, in nakedness,
In my own blood, outside the future
And its gravitational pull.
But then the shield of blinding snow
Shifted and began to turn on its axle,
And seven lucky planes flew low
Over my head, turning back,
And gauze grew hard as tree bark
All over my body, and another’s
Blood flowed into my veins, and
I breathed like a fish on sand,
Swallowing the hard, micaceous
Cold and blessed air.
My lips were covered with sores, and also
I was fed by a spoon, and also
I could not remember my name,
But the language of King David came
Alive on my tongue.
And then
Even the snow disappeared,
And early spring, rising on tiptoes,
Draped her green scarf over the trees.
Here are some links to some of our translations that should appear in the book:
Too Poems,(POETRY)
A blind man was riding an unheated train(POETRY)
I learned the grass as I began to write . . . (Center for the Art of Translation)
Two Poems(Guernica)
[O if only I could rise, regain memory and consciousness…] (The Journal Magazine)
NA: How does CSU find its authors? Are they mostly from the CSU poetry contest?
FG: Yes. We publish up to 4 manuscripts from our fist book prize and open competition. But, as in the case with Phil Metre's book of translations, sometimes we publish the best books, wherever they happen to come from.
NA: I had the pleasure of visiting one of your classes, and your students lingered after to tell me how much they loved your classes. Did students help out with the press?
FG: Yes. The ones who could dig what I'm doing were especially helpful. The others, not so much. I'm much more willing to adjust to my students’ ideas about poetry and taste in the classroom setting. In fact, I love teaching and I especially love teaching David Hume and about issues of taste. But as a publisher and business person, I find that most of the students I've worked with need more support than I have time to give—The very few who really get it, get it and help a lot and then go away too quickly to do their own amazing things.
NA: You also have this site, Poems by Heart. What is that about?
FG: Ah, yes. That little site was born at Sewanee Writers' Conference. I had the idea like a lightning bolt and immediately started recording poets reciting poems they have memorized. I have every poet first talk about why they chose the poem or what it means to them to have memorized it. Then I ask them to recite it. But I haven't published a poem to it in a long while. It's one of the projects I can't wait to expand and update in the next year or two.
Speaking of expanding, on April 8th I'm launching a weekly, 26.4-minute-long (average commute to work in America = 26.4 minutes), audio podcast called the "Don't Tell. Show." It's going to be a sort of Radio Lab / Studio 360 / This American Life for the AWP crowd. I was so psyched to find that the domain name "DontTellShow.com" was available! Thanks, internets. Thanks, Ezra Pound.
NA: How many new poetry books does CSU publish each year?
FG: We have published as few as three but as many as five. This year we are publishing 3 to release at the AWP and fourth book of translations in September.
NA: What are some highlights of CSU Press? (Feel free to provide links, photos, references, etc.)
FG: The two most fun things we did this year were participating in an annual event here in Cleveland called Ingenuity Fest. Ironically, what we did there was not at all innovative. We set up 4 typewriters. One was electric, the other three were manual. And we also provided paper. People lined up to write a poem on an index card. So many people wrote poems! So many people have never even touched a typewriter.
NA: How many new poetry books does CSU publish each year?
FG: We have published as few as three but as many as five. This year we are publishing 3 to release at the AWP and fourth book of translations in September.
NA: I’d like close with a poem of your choice from one of your poets.
FG: Your request reminds me of a thought experiment my 11 year-old daughter likes to pose to me that always has something to do with her and her brother falling off a cliff, and I can only save one them—
Born in San Diego on July 4th, 1970, Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, pursuing an independent project called “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Response to Historical Change.” Since receiving a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University in 2001, Metres has written a number of books, including A Concordance of Leaves(2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), Ode to Oil(2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007), Instants (a chapbook, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004). and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr 2003). His writing–which has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry–has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award (for the forthcoming Sand Opera), the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. His work has been called “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original” (Cleveland Arts Prize citation). Lawrence Joseph has written that “Philip Metres’s poetry speaks to us all, in ways critical, vital, profound, and brilliant.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Polish, Russian, and Tamil. He is an professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing, and lives with his wife Amy and two daughters.
While earning an MA at Washington College and an MFA from Vermont College, Frank Giampietro was the president and general manager of a retail appliance business in Dover, Delaware. His first book of poems Begin Anywhere [available for purchase online from one of the following: Amazon | Barnes and Noble |Indiebound] was published by Alice James Books in 2008. He is the co-author of Spandrel with Denise Bookwalter and Book O' Tondos with Megan Marlatt. Awards for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University, a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Florida Book Award. He is the creator of La Fovea, and Poems by Heart. His poetry, nonfiction, short-short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals including 32 Poems, American Book Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, CutBank, FENCE, Hayden's Ferry, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, Subtropics, and Tampa Review. He was a resident scholar at The Southern Review from 2010 to 2011 and the managing editor of Alice James Books from 2011 to 2012. Currently, Frank Giampietro serves as the interim director of Cleveland State University Poetry Center and visiting assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University and in the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program.
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. Follow Nin on Twitter here.
Oops, the contest links at the beginning of the interview are formatted as email / mailto links. I'm sure that's easy to fix. Until then, here's the link for the first book contest:
https://clevelandstateuniversitypoetrycenter.submittable.com/submit/25085
Good interview! Thanks!
Annette
(outsideofacat.wordpress.com)
Posted by: Outsideofacat.wordpress.com | March 09, 2014 at 01:20 PM