The Best American Poetry

Seeking the Feet, part 1 [by Kathleen Heil]

Warhol & an unidentified breakdancer in his Factory, early 1980s. Photo: Paige Powell

 

The connections between painting and poetry have long been explored—Ut pictura poesis and all that good stuff—yet it seems to me that the closest cousin to poetry is not painting or music but dancing. Utilizing breath, syncopation, and space (as a field through which to carve the articulation of language, whether with words or with the body), dance and poetry move to keep things whole. Zadie Smith gets it; exploring the compositional relationship between writing and dance is a rich but neglected realm.

So what I'd like to do this week is investigate and celebrate the possibilities inherent in collapsing the false Cartesian distinction between the writing mind and the dancing body. Part of my interest in collapsing these distinctions lies in the fact that, though I have been both dancing and writing since childhood, the mechanisms by which I create in either context still feel all too compartmentalized in my own body. I don't necessarily feel present in my dancing body when I write, and I am usually trying to get out of my own meta-cognitions when I am composing in a dance space. So, in the past few years, I've been “seeking the feet” in my artistic work, to borrow a phrase from the twentieth-century poet and dancer Mark Turbyfill; I'm trying to get grounded, to let the nervous system, bones and muscle tissue, the head and heart work in concert with each other, to avoid prioritizing the imperatives of one aspect of the creative body over another. Maybe it's a matter of opening ourselves up, of trusting that, in the moment of composition, our faculties will be present in the way we need them to be—that, in seeking the feet, we can become more connected to what's within and without. Naturally, it's also a matter of just showing up to do the work, even when it doesn't work. On Sunday I attended an evening of three instant composition pieces here in Berlin. Two worked, one didn't. The relative success of each piece didn't have anything to do with the movement vocabulary used, it had to do with “being inside time,” as Berlin-based movement researcher Jan Burkhardt says. Of course, failure is as instructive as success, and in watching the two dancers and one musician improvise outside of time, fussily moving about the space in an attempt to be interesting, in the guise of personas removed from their personhood, I began to understand all that had gone wrong with my approach to a novel manuscript I worked on for several years: there we were, performing toward our idea of an idea, end-gaining, imposing rather than composing, our ambitions impeding the possibility of being present. We needed to stop describing what we wanted the moment to look like and embody it instead, to be brave and risk vulnerability, to be humble and allow what needed to happen to happen.

In recent years, I've also been engaged in the practice of literary translation, and so am especially curious about what it means to 'translate' modalities of movement into poetic contexts, and vice-versa. Just as a word-for-word rendering of an Italian phrase in English is a way of describing but not translating the phrase, to use poetry to describe dance seems to me to miss the point, or just graze it. As with successful translations, effective ekphrastic dance poems, capture, in my view, the essence of a dancer or dance by embodying structures and qualities of movement in language particular to the demands of the poem itself, rendering an equivalent effect rather than an observational gloss. If that sounds exceedingly abstract, fear not: I will follow with some favorite examples in subsequent posts.

But for now, here's a delightful example of ekphrasis flipped backwards: an excerpt from Nederlands Dans Theater's 2003 piece “Shutters Shut,” by resident choreographers Sol León and Paul Lightfoot, set to Gertrude Stein's 1923 recording of her poem “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Jerry Hochman writes rather beautifully on the expansive nature of this choreographic translation in a review of NDT2's performance at the Joyce in New York last year. I also love what NDT2 dancer Spencer Dickhaus says about “being the track” when performing the piece (a variation on “being inside time,” perhaps?) in this interview from Jacob's Pillow (min 1:50 to min 3:55).

What other propositions can dance offer to enrich poetic language, and poetry the vocabulary of dance? Dear Reader, I invite you to comment: I'm curious to know your thoughts on this, your favorite ekphrastic dance poems, and/or your own examples of poetry translated into choreographic contexts. In Parts 2 and 3 of “Seeking the Feet,” I'll share with you some poems that distill, in my moving mind, essential aspects of dancers and dance.

When Sinatra Campaigned for FDR [by David Lehman]

Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

 

Conservatives had a field day when FDR enlisted the Hoboken crooner who made girls faint. That was just the beginning for Sinatra. Here, an excerpt from David Lehman's Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, in book stores now.

The “Swoonatra” phenomenon reached its apex in the fall of 1944. When Sinatra performed at the Paramount Theater in New York that October, the throng of frenzied teenage girls—the so-called bobbysoxers—made mayhem in the streets. After a Sinatra performance—and Sinatra gave nine of them a day, starting at 8 in the morning—the girls refused to vacate their seats. Sometimes as few as 250 left theaters crowded with more than a dozen times that number. Police had to be called in. In what came to be known as the Columbus Day Riot, the bobbysoxers set in motion the pattern of behavior that marked the arrivals of Elvis Presley in 1956 and the Beatles eight years later. Having practiced their fainting techniques in advance, girls shrieked and swooned in bliss when the skinny vocalist bent a note in his patented way.

When Sinatra met Humphrey Bogart, the star of Casablanca andThe Maltese Falcon said that he’d heard Sinatra knew how to make women faint. “Make me faint,” Bogart said. Sinatra’s faint-inducing ability was also on the agenda when he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Fainting, which once was so prevalent, has become a lost art among the ladies,” the president told Sinatra in the White House on September 28. “I’m glad you have revived it.” Then the commander in chief asked Sinatra how he did it. “I wish to hell I knew,” Sinatra said.

The singer had wrangled the White House invitation when the Democratic Committee chairman asked his pal, the restaurateur Toots Shor, to a reception. FDR was glad to host Sinatra; it would counteract Bing Crosby’s endorsement of his opponent, Republican Thomas E. Dewey, governor of New York, Roosevelt’s old job before he went to the White House. “Look who’s here,” Roosevelt exclaimed and asked the singer to confide the title of the song that would be No. 1 on the hit parade next week. “I won’t tell,” FDR grinned. “Amapola,” Sinatra said. (The title may have sounded Italian to the president—and Italy was an uncomfortable subject in wartime—so he switched the subject.) The meeting went well, though the president was said afterward to scratch his head in wonderment at the idea that the skinny crooner had revived what he called “the charming art of fainting.” “He would never have made them swoon in our day,” he told an aide after the party broke up.

Continue over at the Daily Beast here. 

Every End Must Have a Beginning: Waiting for the Dead to Speak by Brian Fanelli [review by Patricia Welch

 

Now, perhaps more than ever, Brian Fanelli’s second full-length collection of poetry, Waiting for the Dead to Speak, is a much-needed celebration of hope and humanity in small-town America.

This collection set mostly in rural Pennsylvania, is a coming of age, a young man growing up, growing a social conscience, learning what it means to lose, but always sifting through the rubble to find that last shred of hope. In the current political climate, where plain empathy is sorely lacking, Waiting for the Dead to Speak is a much-needed relief from hateful, one-sided views; Fanelli’s ability to direct our attention to the other side, as well as the possibility of change, whether we are battling a bully, advocating for political change, or listening for ghosts to speak, is infinitely human.

Making the personal universal has always been Fanelli’s strength in his stream-lined narrative poems. Through his tight, precise language, rich images, and balanced narrative voice, we can’t help but experience with him the bully, or the Pennsylvania winter as a member of the working class. In “For Jimmy, Who Bruised My Ribs and Busted My Nose,” he understands and empathizes with his bully, just as much as his dying father and grieving mother in later poems. He gives us no choice but to follow suit:

This poem is for the bully who never cried,
who hid belt lashes from us, who ran from the sound
of his father’s battered Ford tracking him down,

the son whose hands tightened to fists like his father’s,
who uncurled his fingers to study my blood,
and then extended a hand to lift me up.

In this ugly election year, full of polarized political parties and venomous speeches, Fanelli’s ability to make us recognize the humanity of the bully, whether physical or metaphorical, is a well-timed gift.

Poems like “Adjunct Blues,” and “Listening to Springsteen on I-81,” remind us of Fanelli’s Scranton roots, and that he is tuned into the problems concerning our country today. These and other poems, like “Mid-Winter Scene,” give humanity to the working class that politics can’t seem to grasp, while simultaneously tapping into the power of nature to remind us of our human failings:

Today, my car inches over dirt roads,
as I slow down and eye fields of white
and ponder the dead-
my father, who laced up boots,
slipped on black gloves,
shoveled the sidewalk
in front of our countryside home.
A kid, I peered out the bedroom window,
spotted the green of his Packers jacket,
watched puffs of his breath rise as he hunched over.
I helped when I felt guilty.
Today, I think of the dead, grandfathers
I never met, and how their backs
must have bent like my father’s
as they labored in mines,
stopping only to wipe sweat and breathe.

The voice in Waiting for the Dead to Speak reverberates long after the book is closed making it a collection aimed at beginnings rather than endings. Understanding, compassion, and hope glimmer in a gray world.

Waiting for the Dead to Speak
NYQ BOOKS
98 pages / $14.95

Patricia Welch is a PhD student at Binghamton University in the Creative Writing Department. Her poetry and reviews have appeared under Kinney in PANK, Adanna, Yes, Poetry, and Indigo Rising. She lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.

"sweet home lambs": an interview with translator Jake Schneider [by Kathleen Heil]

Jake Schneider is a Berlin-based editor and translator from the German, born in 1988 in New Jersey. The incoming Editor-in-Chief of SAND, Berlin's English-language literary journal, his literary translations have appeared in Circumference, Washington Square, and the Massachusetts, Chicago, and Boston Reviews, among others. I recently exchanged emails with Jake over his forthcoming first book, Fragmented Waters, translations from the German of poems by Ron Winkler. Winkler, the author of four collections of poetry, has had his poems translated into twenty languages, and has also translated from the English books by poets such as Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Forrest Gander, and Sarah Manguso, among others.

KH: You worked on the poems in this book over the course of a decade, starting as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, and are still, to date, the youngest translator to ever receive an NEA Translation Fellowship, at the ripe young age of 23. Now that you're the ripe young age of 28, can you tell us what was it like to cut your teeth on translation so early? Has your voice as a translator of Winkler's work changed in the intervening years?

JS: I always credit the poet Jeffrey McDaniel, whose work Ron has long been translating into German. At eighteen, I was sitting in his office at Sarah Lawrence, trying to convince him to let me into his workshop, and during our conversation I mentioned that I spoke German. He pulled out a copy of Ron’s first book, and asked me to tell him about the first poem, curious about his translator’s own work. I was baffled by it, but I took the book home and gave it a shot. I’ve been translating Ron’s poems, on and off, ever since.

I think maturing as a translator means seeing the text in larger and larger units. As a novice who had spent all of a month in a German-speaking country, I was too preoccupied with Ron’s chemically synthesized neologisms and compounds (which I couldn’t find in any dictionary) to capture the flow of the lines. After moving to Berlin and listening to German in its own habitat, I began to understand better how Ron plays with the conventions of conversation and the absurdity lurking in ordinary stock phrases, both now and in the vanished East Germany of his childhood. He merges a memorized punctuation rule with a Cold War imperative—“a comma / always belongs between subordinate countries”—and, fast-forward to the age of CD-Rs, he sets fire to friendly music-sharing in a poem about the forest: “I can burn it for you, no problem.”

KH: In your translator's note, you explain that words in Winkler's poems often serve as double agents, “animalating” their environments, as in “animalated poem,” with multiple meanings: meteorological, morphological, metaphor-ological; the poems are rich with weather, flora and fauna that transmute on the noun-edge: “Lake Nonsense,” “birdbrackets,” “goose prairies,” and the “liquigevity of fish” for example. Can you tell us a bit about the process of arriving at these inspired metaphor-ological choices?

JS: All the inventions you mention are his. The fun part about translating the work of someone not handcuffed to the dictionary is that I get to coin words in my own language. The hard part is finding new coinages that “work” or subjectively “sound good.”

Feuchtlebigkeit is a good example of the stackability of German’s Lego blocks.Feuchtlebig literally means wet-lived, analogous to long-lived. Since Greek and Latin roots are easier to work with in English, I went for “liquigevity,” like longevity, as the noun form.

“Goose prairies,” a play on goosebumps, is a funny one. For obvious reasons, I decided against the more direct translation citing an Old-World landscape, which would have been “goose steppes.”

“Birdbrackets” is pretty one-to-one. I try to make music when I can because the original is musical and sometimes the English equivalents aren’t. Also, every line in Ron’s poem ends in a compound of some kind, so I tried to follow suit, even if English nouns usually demand more personal space.

KH: As a follow-up, what were your priorities as a translator/poet “animalating” the English-language landscape of these poems? Did these priorities stem from features particular to the syntactic structure of the German language, which is much more flexible than standard English in allowing modular constructions of complicated noun composites, as much as they did from Winkler's style and tone?

JS: My goal was to keep the poems startling without making the Anglophone reader feel like an outsider to an inside joke. That said, I don’t think any native German-speaker would pick up on every last allusion or know which words Ron’s punning on every time. I wanted to make the game internal to English rather than domesticating the wildness and adventure out of a worldly body of work.

The collection does treat language very differently from contemporary American poetry, which has its own set of interests and influences. The greater “fertility” of German words no doubt plays a part, but Ron is also exploring different stylistic questions and responding to different predecessors. I need to be careful not to let my own aesthetic background skew his voice.

KH: Winkler is an avid translator of poetry from the English. As such, I'm curious as to his involvement in your process of writing the English-language versions of the poems—did he give you free rein to make the choices you thought necessary to best embody the English versions of his poems? Or was the process more collaborative and interactive?

JS: Ron was involved with the translations the whole time, from answering early questions to checking the proofs, and I couldn’t imagine translating his poems without him. He always has expansive explanations for the smallest choice, and I’ve been very privileged to have so much input but also so much trust, which he offers all his translators who approach him. By the way, it was great to meet his Mexican translator last year, Daniel Bencomo, and discuss our shared experiences and trials. In fact, I even borrowed one solution from the Spanish version.

KH: I also loved the translation-ary telephone, the literal carrying across of language, that happens in the poem “the extent of deer,” which Winkler wrote in German after reading an earlier version of your English translation of his “deer meter.” To that end, “the extent of deer,” in the English, then, is a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation (if I've counted right [if I counted, would he like it, would he like it, if I counted]), as though the final lines of each poem/translation articulate an ars poetica for poetry in translation:

In “deer meter”their decelerated evolution gave us time. / so we abandoned them to radial decay and calmly went / back to our apartment products.”

and then, in “the extent of deer”: “their evolution was approaching the limit: to our / advantage, so we reverse-engineered them and headed home / to sleeker things

For example, in the first poem, the line “(→Schrödinger flickering).” flickers forward into “(=Schrödinger flare).” If observation renders translation (and language, for that matter) unstable, how does it feel to look back on your own translations? Do they shape-shift beneath your gaze? Or do that they feel finished, abandoned to radial decay?

JS: By now, after working on and editing them over a span of ten years, they feel finished. I read the final proof in one sitting without wincing. But a few times along the way, while I was looking for a publisher and focusing on other projects, I’d pull out the manuscript and despair that I needed to start over from scratch.

I do wish I could find that first English version of “deer meter,” which was one of the first poems I ever translated at 18. At the time, I was embarrassed about Ron’s amusement at my amateurish rendering. Now I’m pleased to have played a small role in the original collection.

KH: You're also getting ready to take over as Editor-in-Chief of SAND, Berlin's English-language literary journal, after serving as Poetry Editor for the past two issues. As Issue 14 launches this Friday with a party and readings by Lizzie Roberts, Lucy Jones, and Inger Wold Lund, what are your ambitions for upcoming issues of SAND, and what role do you see the journal playing in Berlin's literary scene?

JS: After six years, SAND is becoming a local fixture, like one of those rare Berlin expats who decides to make their life here. As a translator, I’m especially keen to bring in a variety of global voices. In the last two issues, we’ve published writing and art from five continents, including several translations, and I want to keep cultivating connections in some of these places. But we always print work by Berliners, who are themselves a very international bunch.

Apart from those all-night issue launches, I’d love to branch out to more types of events and collaborations. Our outgoing Editor-in-Chief Lyz Pfister has a cookbook coming out, and it would be fun to do something bringing together literature and food. I once organized an event called “Untranslatable,” a kind of round robin of impossible literary imports, and I’m always hoping to find time to do a sequel someday. Really, we all have dream projects in the back of our heads, so we’d like to make as many of them happen as we can.

KH: In a moment of serendipitous synchronicity, I sat down to write you these questions next to a letter that had just arrived from a friend, the artist Hilla Steinert, with this written across the envelope: “Ich stoße auf Spuren von Rehhufen im Schnee. / Sprache, aber keine Wörter” (“I come upon traces of deer hooves in the snow. / Language, but no words”). And so, to close: what's with the many deer populating the poems in Fragmented Waters. Are they a recurrent motif in Winkler's work? Or does he just like deer? Do you?

JS: Deer are just implausible creatures living in a parallel dimension. And don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of antlers. When I first arrived here in the second-largest city in the EU, I discovered a flock of deer living in the park across the street. They were just going about their business like the rest of us. That priceless, caught-off-guard look they pull—wait, do I belong here? do you?—defies translation.

---

Sweet Home Lämmer

du warst dir sicher, die Wahrheit dieser Räume

sei größer als Wolle, ihr über große Distanzen hinweg

gereichtes flauschiges Staksen eine Hoffnung,

übersetzt zu werden: in weniger sauerstoffhaltige Dinge

vielleicht. vielleicht nicht. vielleicht

wären sie gern eine Art Distanz zu sich selbst

(die Tierart Distanz zu sich selbst).

wären sie Kapitalismus, sie könnten alles verkaufen.

nur müsste der Zaun eine andere Ordnung haben.

[From Fragmentierte Gewässer by Ron Winkler. Published by Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2007. © Schöffling & Co. Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Frankfurt am Main]

 

sweet home lambs

you were positive that the truth of these spaces

was greater than wool, that their fluffy wading

spread through great distances was a longing

to be translated: into something less oxygenated

maybe. or maybe not. maybe

they want to be a kind of distance from themselves

(the species distance from themselves).

if they were Capitalism, they could sell everything

only the fence would need to be reorganized.

[From Fragmented Waters by Ron Winkler, translated by Jake Schneider. Shearsman Books, 2016, Bristol]

 

Silence Please: The Appeal of Dance During Hard Times [by Stacey Lehman]

Sara Mearns in Alexei Ratmansky’s Fandango. At back: (L to R): Scott Borg, Elena Heiss, and Felix Fan of the FLUX Quartet. Photo: Erin Baiano

“Wartime, here as abroad, made everyone more eager for the civilized and peaceful excitement of ballet. More people could also afford tickets. And in wartime the fact that no word was spoken on the stage was in itself a relief.” from Looking at Dance by Edwin Denby

Last Thursday morning I went online and impulsively bought a single ticket to that evening’s Vail Dance Festival: ReMix NYC, at New York City Center. The theater was mostly sold out; the best available seat was in the nosebleed section but I took it anyway, hopeful that I would find a single seat closer to the stage during the first intermission.

As curtain time approached, I began to regret my purchase. Wouldn’t it be nice to stay home? My husband would be out for the evening and I had laundry to do. I imagined myself folding and sorting while watching Law & Order reruns followed by the Kelly File. Perhaps I would phone the box office and tell them to donate my ticket.

Then, at the last minute, I shook off my malaise and made a mad dash to the theater, settling into my seat just as Leto was giving birth to Apollo to the strains of Stravinsky’s Apollo Musagete. I’ve seen this Balanchine ballet many times over the years and each time it’s a revelation. Last night was no exception with the versatile New York City Ballet principal Robert Fairchild stepping into the lead for the injured Herman Cornejo. Damian Woetzel, a former premier danseur with the New York City Ballet and the director of the Vail program, wisely restored the opening birth scene that Balanchine had omitted from later productions because he was “bored with it.”

There’s a narrative line to the ballet that follows Apollo’s growth—together with Calliope, Terpsichore, and Polyhymnia--from boyhood to maturity. Here’s how the brilliant dance critic Edwin Denby described Apollo in 1945:

Apollo is about poetry, poetry in the sense of a brilliant, sensuous, daring, and powerful activity of our nature. It depicts the birth of Apollo in prologue; then how Apollo was given a lyre, and tried to make it sing; how three Muses appeared and showed each her special ability to delight; how he then tried out his surging strength; how he danced with Terpsichore, and how her loveliness and his strength responded in touching harmony; and last, how all four together were inspired and felt the full power of the imagination, and then, in calm and with assurance left for Parnassus, where they were to live. . .

So Apollo can tell you how beautiful classic dancing is when it is correct and sincere; or how the power of poetry grows in our nature; or even that as man’s genius becomes more civilized, it grows more expressive, more ardent, more responsive, more beautiful.

As I had hoped, a kind usher found me a seat, front-row mezzanine, at intermission. I was seated next to Gal, a young Israeli tap-dancer who had traveled around the world to take classes the MacArthur Fellow tap-dancer Michelle Dorrance, who was next up on the program. When her performance began, an electric charge seemed to course through Gal’s body. Dorrance was joined by three others, the Jook dancer Lil Buck, Robert Fairchild, and Melissa Toogood, formerly with Marsha Graham. Dorrance’s clapping and tapping provided the music for this rapid improvisational performance that maintained a fever pace throughout. (If my husband were reading this, he would say that Melissa Toogood is the best name for a dancer since Maria Talchief.)

The evening’s program was a festival indeed, with six dances following Apollo. Those employing the classical vocabulary of ballet left me breathless and trying to hold on to what Arlene Croce called “afterimages,” the fragments that remain for the inward eye to recall when the dance is over. I was stunned when Gal told me she didn’t care for Fandango (choreography by Alexei Ratmansky, music by Boccherini). It is full of surprises and has the feel of a spontaneous encounter between music and dance, executed with good humor and stunning virtuosity by the powerful Sara Mearns of whom Gal said, “I don’t know what she is trying to say.” “Isn’t the beauty of the music and her amazing technique enough?” I said. Gal was not convinced.

The festival concluded with Lil Buck @ City Center: A Jookin’ Jam Session. Jookin’, a Memphis style of hip-hop, reminds me of the break-dancing I used to see on NYC subway platforms in the 1980s, taken to an extreme. It is fascinating to watch in the way that watching a dancer on point is; the body executes moves that are completely unnatural. A Jookin’ dancer moves as if without joints or bones. The head slides from side to side seemingly independent of the neck and spine. The arms undulate fluidly and call to mind those videos of a suspension bridge during an earthquake.

Thursday’s jam session began with Lil Buck and Prime Tyme emerging from the audience to “Gangsta Walk” by YOUNG JAI. I’m guessing that this is the music to which Jookin’ was originally performed. What followed was a demonstration of Jookin’s adaptability to a global range of music, from traditional Galician bagpipe, to Kazakh folk, to Chinese Sheng, to Bach. Among the musicians was cellist Yo Yo Ma, who arrived on stage without fanfare and who closed out the evening with Camille Saint-Saëns haunting “The Swan.” The audience went wild. 

I don’t remember what was happening in 2009 that inspired this post by David St. John, but it describes perfectly my feeling and state of mind as I walked home on an unseasonably warm evening, grateful that I had chosen dance over news:

Last night, I decided to go with friends to see The San Francisco Ballet, which has become one of the great American companies. It was exactly the right thing to have done. Watching the dancers carve the space of the stage with their bodies, each drawing a shifting calligraphy of flesh and bone along those pages of music, against the insistence of linear time, well ... it mattered. It made a difference. As each of the ballets passed through its sequence of emotive circumstances, the bodies of the dancers first stilled, then erupting, then collapsing, I felt something in me also quietly unclenching. I felt my own body, which had felt so fiercely coiled and provisional, assume a sense of its more natural place in the world again .. its place in the physical as well as the cerebral, imaginative world. I felt, for those few hours, slightly less mortal. It's one of the things that art can do -- defy time, and time's smug billboards announcing it, Time, will always go on, but that we, the living, will not. Yet art does go on, poetry does go on. And so as I said a week ago, closing the very first piece I wrote for my guest week here: We continue; we go on. Let me say it once again. We too continue. And we go on.

 

Kathleen Heil, Guest Author November 7-11 and Introducing Martin Stannard

moystrela; Berlin, Oct 2016

This week we welcome Kathleen Heil as our guest author. Kathleen is a writer, translator, and dancer based in Berlin. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Burnside Review, recent translations in The Brooklyn Rail, Two Lines, and SAND, recent fiction in Five Points, NANO Fiction, and Green Mountains Review, and recent essays in MAKE, the Collagist, and MAP - media / archive / performance. Heil has performed in New York, New Orleans, Berlin, and Madrid, and her current artistic research investigates the space(s) between writing and dance. More at kathleenheil.net.

Martin Stannard is an English poet and critic. His most recent collection of poetry is Poems for the Young at Heart (Leafe Press, UK, 2016). He has been living and teaching at a university in China since 2005.

Martin will be posting about his selections for Decals of Desire, a new on-line literary journal for which he is poetry editor.

Welcome, Kathleen and Martin. 

-- sdh

ABOUT ERIC ERIC [by Martin Stannard]

Of course, it’s not his real name, though I am led to believe one half is real; the other half, as he once remarked, is “an act of concealment.”

I first came across Eric Eric in 1986 when I was editing my then magazine joe soap’s canoe. A chap I know, Richard Catchpole, sent me some of Eric’s poems. In the course of a long and rambling letter catching me up on his recent doings (he thought I was interested) Catchpole told me he had been working temporarily for a company doing the catering for a telephone engineers’ conference, and he had “fallen in” with a chap attending the event who wrote “weird little poems”, and he thought I might like to see some of them.

One of the first poems I read, and subsequently published in joe soap’s canoe 10,  was this:

            AIR

            The air is where

            The air is. And where

            The air is, is where

            There is a stinking bus.

I was pretty much bowled over by what at first I thought to be a somewhat individual take on a minimalist approach to poetics, but I mainly fell in love with that sledgehammer of a final line that made me laugh out loud at the same time as realizing the poet and I at some point in our lives had experienced the same kind of bus service. This, for me, placed the poem absolutely in the everyday world, though it came with a dollop of questionable sanity for good measure. But I also initially assumed Catchpole was messing with me – he has his playful side, and I would not have put it past him to try and trick me into publishing a figment of his somewhat self-indulgent imagination. In fact, I was only finally convinced of Eric’s real existence when I met him briefly in Nottingham in 2008. We had kept in very occasional touch since I shut down the canoe, and he was visiting the city on some kind of training course to do with his work. He was still a sort of telephone engineer but now did something I vaguely understood to be to do with mobile phones; he said he was too near retirement to be much bothered to learn anything new, but it was a few days in a good hotel, and the financial subsidies he was getting for being away from home were excellent. Knowing I was back from China and working as the Royal Literary Fund’s Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, he suggested we meet up for a drink. I knew enough about him by that time to know that, if he was indeed real, this was an uncharacteristically sociable move on his part, and I jumped at the chance to meet him. It’s an hour and ten minutes of my life I will never get back, but they do say it’s not always a good idea to meet your heroes.

But I am jumping ahead of myself.

To step back to the 1980s, I had published Eric in a couple of subsequent canoes, but then he kind of fell off my radar until a few years later, by which time I’d shut down the magazine. But he had evidently decided that trying to goad me into opening it up again would be something of a mission for him, and his first few communications during the early 2000s somewhat harped on about it. But eventually he gave it up as a lost cause, and our contact settled into his sometimes telling me a poem of mine he’d seen was good, bad or indifferent, and sometimes letting slip an opinion or two about poetry in general.

I had learned that the poems I had published in 1990 were among the last he had written: unbeknown to me at the time, he had announced, in the personal columns of London’s Times, that he wished to devote the remainder of his life to finding the perfect corduroy trousers. Eric had also shown himself to be well-read but highly opinionated. He shared my liking for the poets of the New York School: he said he admired their brains and their wit. But he also once said that John Ashbery’s poems sometimes annoyed him, although he'd be able to find it in his heart to forgive if Ashbery would only respond to his invitation to go for a swim together next time they found themselves in the same city. I was never quite able to get to the bottom of that one. As for current British poetry, he told me when we met that he’d more or less given up on it. His withering assessment of some of the country’s most well-known and “much-loved” contemporary poets should probably not be repeated here (do libel laws apply on the internet?) and he said he was currently more interested in delving into the world of the pre-17^th century sonnet. When I asked him if he was writing sonnets he got up, in what I gather now to be true Eric fashion, and went in search of the pub’s toilet.

When my friend Rupert Mallin and I announced Rupert’s new art and poetry magazine, Decals of Desire, Eric pounced like a cat that had been lurking in the bushes waiting for its moment to catch a sparrow (though anyone less cat-like than Eric Eric is hard to imagine). It turned out that earlier this year he had taken up the pen again because, and I quote: “I am needed.” I had often asked him why he had never published anywhere other than the canoe, and he had simply said it didn’t interest him, and that he would probably still severely restrict what he called his “public appearances” – I had long since understood from some of the things he said that Poetry World as a whole struck him as not much more than a club for mutual back-scratching involving (with some honorable exceptions) people whose back one would not want to touch.

But anyway, he sent me a little group of poems with a note that he asked be added to them if we published: “This is some poems about people. I have others about animals, but they’re not as good.” This was quintessential Eric, and I was smitten. The first thing I noticed was that his style had not changed at all in the last 30 years. Here are a couple of the poems:

            THE DOORMAN

            Sometimes I think

            I am the door

            And sometimes I know for sure

 

            THE ARTIST

            I have feelings

            I have feelings

            I have feelings (and some paint)

Minimalism is obviously (and somewhat paradoxically) a pretty wide-ranging and at times contentious field – a minefield, even – and how it’s poked its head in the poetry door since the early years of the last century has surely been the topic of all kinds of books and essays and arguments. For me, it’s a debate in which I’m not very interested, insofar as I don’t care how long or short a poem is, or what’s been left out or left in: let’s face it, we have even had poems with no words in them at all. Call me old-fashioned, but I respond mainly to an elegance of language and the wit and intelligence of a writer, to something subtle and elusive in a piece of writing that makes me want to be alive and thankful for having had the privilege of sharing the experience of a particular poem, no matter its form or provenance. I’m not sure if that makes me sound like a moron or a genius, but no matter.

Eric’s minimalism, by which I mean his poems’ brevity, is not about itself (as some so-called innovative poetics seem to be) and it’s not a pose or a posture or the obvious result of a definitive and reasoned poetic. Yes, Eric understands line breaks and rhetoric, and even a little bit of French (and probably some Klingon), but he understands also that some things come naturally. I once asked him how much time he might spend writing a poem, and how much he edited and/or cut down. His answer was aptly brief: very little time, no more than ten minutes including drinks and toilet breaks, and absolutely no cutting down. They start short and stay short. It occurs to me that Eric’s brevity extends not to the point where what there is to be said has for poetic reasons to be only an oblique utterance uttered obliquely, leaving the reader to bring to the text what they will, but instead reaches with a workmanlike confidence only what it considers to be its point and where it’s satisfied there’s nothing else to say. And, if there were something else to say, Eric is certainly not the man to say it. And if he were the man to say it, he wouldn’t say it in a poem because that’s not what poems are for: if he wanted to say it he could write a letter to the newspaper, or start a blog, or bang his head against a Facebook wall, or troll around on Twitter. But he’s almost certainly better than that, and would rather spend time in his garden and grow his own onions.

I don’t think anyone else is writing poems quite like Eric Eric. For more than 30 years he has followed his own path (or fallen asleep on it) and if he had been bothered he could even have become a household name. But he isn’t bothered. He can’t even be bothered to be unknown. I love him for that. At the risk of over-exposing this somewhat retiring character, we are almost certainly going to feature him in the next issue of the magazine, too. He has sent some more poems, including this one:

            SELF-ASSESSMENT

            Do you think?

            Is this –

            (any good)

            ?

This little poem at first seemed to me almost inane in its simplicity, but the apparently unnecessary dash and parentheses are a wry nod towards a lack of necessity that makes us think, paradoxically, of necessity. One of the other poems he sent is about a glove puppet frog called Fred. It’s really good.

Note: Eric Eric’s poems in joe soap’s canoe can be found online at http://martinstannard.com/jsc/jschome.html - they are in issues 10, 11 and 13.

Decals of Desire is at www.decalsofdesire.blogspot.com

- Martin Stannard, Zhuhai, China, November 2016

 

Pete Ferry Weighs in on the Cubs

Thoughts on Being a Cubs Fan Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

 In The Great Gatsby, when Jordan Baker asks if she is missed in Chicago, Nick Carraway says, “The whole town is desolate.  All the cars have the left rear tire painted black….”  Well, today the whole town is ecstatic, and the tires are all blue.  People are weeping for joy at the drop of a hat, breaking into tears in public places and on public airwaves recalling granddads and first games and lost bleacher friends and decades of memories.  The sports talk hosts have just opened the spigots and let the catharses flow. 

 Actually, that was yesterday.  Today the whole town is relieved.  Our long ordeal is over and our shame is gone.  Yes, shame.  I’m not sure we knew we ever had it, but we sure know we don’t have it anymore.

 Now the question is, what are we going to do without it?  That’s because with the shame came all the character building stuff:  self-deprecation, an ability to laugh at ourselves, an inability to take ourselves too seriously, both pleasure and joy of a wry, ironic sort, and the clear, definite knowledge that “it’s only baseball.”  After all, with struggle and hardship come wisdom and humility, and without struggle and hardship…well, look at Donald Trump.

 Once when I was living in Mexico City in 1974 watching the washed-out Cub Adolfo Phillips play center field for the Mexico City Tigres, I saw a pudgy American tourist in a Cincinnati Reds ball cap approach two well-dressed Mexican teenagers who were leafing through a Sports Illustrated article on Cincinnati’s juggernaut Big Red Machine in the newsstand of the Hotel Camino Real.  “Hey,” the tourist said pointing at his hat, “I’m from Cincinnati!  That’s my team!”  He beamed at them as if they would be impressed. They weren’t.  His wide-eyed gung-hoism embarrassed me.  Maybe for the first time I was proud to be a Cubs fan. 

 Now I am again, but in a new and different and not entirely comfortable way.  I mean, we’re winners!  Little ol’ us!  The Little Blue Machine!  The woeful, pathetic Cubbies!  The team that has tried to win public sympathy as loveable losers as in, “well, at least we play day baseball (no longer so true), and the average guy can still afford a seat (no longer true at all) and we have a cute ball park.”  Cute!  Great arenas where epic battles are waged cannot be cute.

 So what are we left with?  There is the relief, yes, and that morning-after feeling that Peggy Lee sings about in “Is That All There Is?”  And  there is a hole in our identity, one that used to be filled with the knowledge that unlike the soft, spoiled cities, we didn’t need winning or success to feel whole, that we didn’t need sunshine and palm trees to go outside, that we didn’t need warmth to put our tops down on the first day of spring, that we had survived “The Blizzard of ’79”, “The Winter of ‘14” and Cub fandom, that we were strong enough, tough enough and just cynical enough to live in Chicago and be Cubs fans.

And we are left with a lot of questions.  After this season, this World Series, that seventh game, can there ever be others?  Was that the end of baseball?  Can I ever go out to Wrigley Field again on a cold April afternoon with a thermos of coffee and a good book and read my way through a bad game?  Will I ever again care enough to go to bed with my ear Abuds in to listen to a game from the West Coast?  Is there still hopelessness for humankind?

And may I please take some time off now?  I am exhausted!

-- Peter Ferry, author of Travel Writing and Old Heart

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Roy Giles and Corey Mingura of Arcadia Press & Arcadia Literary Magazine

DD: Susan Howe famously ends her book, My Emily Dickinson, with the lines: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender. Poetry is redemption from pessimism. Poetry is affirmation in negation, ammunition in the yellow eye of a gun that an allegorical pilgrim will shoot straight into the quiet of Night's frame.” Using these lines as a point of departure, could you begin by talking about the transformative power of poetry?

CM: Every great poem that I’ve read (or any great work of art for the matter) has so deeply engaged me that I have the feeling of being completely separated from myself and fully incorporated into the world of the speaker. I liken it to a religious and mystical out of body experience. I get this way every time I read the work of Theodore Roethke, and hearing him read it work only enhances this experience for me.

RG: I’m especially moved by “Poetry is redemption from pessimism,” as I spent much of my younger days mired in unnecessary negativity. I cannot overstate the vital role poetry played in pulling me out it. I think if I’d had a more passionate introduction to poetry earlier in life, I could have saved myself a lot of self-imposed trouble. Big claim, I know, but I think about reading Joe Bolton for the first time. Up to that point, I’d never read anyone that I found more authentic, more familiar. It seemed to me that he tore himself apart attempting to rend meaning from a world that he either didn’t understand, or that he understood all too well, and so the world didn’t get him. That, of course, I realized was a better evaluation of myself than of his work, and that realization proved to be quite the gut-check, as Bolton killed himself when he was just 28. My redemption from pessimism began with Bolton. That’s the transformative power of poetry.  

DD: How did Arcadia come into being?

CM: Arcadia started as a project of some MFA students at the University of Central Oklahoma. I didn’t start the program until a year after the other guys, and I joined them during production of our second issue. I find it funny that a lot of people, including founding editors, sometimes mistake me as being here from beginning.

RG: Yes, Arcadia began like I expect many lit mags begin: a small group of writers in a program think they have something to add to the literary conversation. And so it was with us. I can’t speak for the others, but I’m not sure I had the confidence at that time to think I had anything to add, I just really wanted to be a part of it.

It was Chase Dearinger’s idea. After a fiction class, he told fellow students what he wanted to do and invited us to participate. I was shy, so I didn’t speak up at the moment, but I hurried home to email him. Man, it’s funny to think about, but I was scared he wouldn’t need me, that my shyness had cost me a spot. I imagined everyone in the class had already bombarded him and filled all these imaginary positions. I don’t know how many classes he solicited, but in the end, only four reached out to him.

DD: Arcadia Press has published two poetry chapbooks, so far, and is soon to publish its third, With Porcupine by Jacob Oet. Could you tell us about this poet and this collection?

CM: I believe Jacob Oet is the next Russell Edson. Oet’s excellent use of dark humor, absurdity, and surrealism—that Edson was so well known for—is presented flawlessly here. It’s a hilarious but thoughtful read. We were very lucky to snag this.

RG: Very lucky. Jacob Oet is a gifted young poet. Reading through, With Porcupine, for the first time, I kept thinking about Wallace Stevens’ comment, “The purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness.” By the end, there was no doubt Jacob is making his contributions. This is one wildly imaginative, funny and cohesive collection of poems that continues to surprise through to the last page.

DD: The first two chapbooks you published, Nicole Santalucia’s Driving Yourself to Jail in July and Sharon Charde’s Incendiary are united by their direct engagement with different forms of personal trauma. What did you find most compelling in these two collections?   

CM: What really struck me about these two collections is that they are so very personal and yet, so universal. It’s very easy for less-skilled poets to dive too far into themselves and completely alienate the reader. These women didn’t do that. They accomplished the difficult task of making their own struggles completely relatable, which shows their great skill.

RG: Nicole’s lasting effect on me is her gritty, late turns. She can really end a poem. I still go back to that collection when I need to remind myself how it’s done. Reminds me a little of Diana Goetsch’s work in that way. Sharon, on the other hand, struck me with her refined way of dealing with grief and longing without ever slipping into maudlin territory.

DD: Oklahoma is the birthplace of John Berryman and N. Scott Momaday. How has living in this state influenced your life as a writer and editor?

CM: I was born here, grew up here, and went to college and grad school here. I haven’t lived anywhere else, so Oklahoma inevitably shows up in all of my literary work. Because of this, I tend to personally favor and enjoy works that feature Oklahoma, the Southwest, or rural areas in general.

RG: Same here. Small town Oklahoma born and bred. When I grew up, there was no writing community that I was aware of. Creative writing/reading wasn’t stressed in school, at home, or the community at large. What was most emphasized was good manners and work ethic, so it took quite a while before I even knew I liked literature. I credit The Doors for that. Thank goodness the internet existed by that time or I may have never read the inciting piece, Oedipus Rex. I bumbled around in my thirties hovering between careers, trying to figure out if I was a writer or not, then I learned UCO had plans to offer the state’s first MFA program. I jumped on it. That gave me my first look at a writing community. Perhaps it was there all along, and I just couldn’t see it. Small towns are pretty insulated.

I think having lived so long in limbo concerning the quality of my own writing drives my desire to foster lasting relationships with those we publish, particularly young writers. It’s refreshing to see them already into it, far better than I was at their age, and then getting to participate in some small way in their growth.

DD: How has your work as an editor and chapbook publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

CM: I’ve had many bouts with writing block, but I find that every time I review a submission, it inspires me to write and gradually helps me out of my rut. Because of this, when I was a poetry editor, I tended to put an intense focus on reading every single submission, because it was not only beneficial for my own writing but also guaranteed each writer received fair consideration.

RG: Reading submissions does have a way of keeping me fresh and ever-critical of my own work. It’s a constant reminder of how every single line and word must move, else the dreaded rejection. It’s also a reminder that good poems are rejected for many reasons beyond whether the work is good enough or not.

I am extremely critical of my own work. As a result, I have to sit on most poems a long time before I consider sending them out. Usually, there must first be a moment when my whole being screams out, “Damn, that’s it, you got it.” This makes me a very critical editor. Other people’s poems must hit me the same way. As a result, our acceptance rate has historically been low. I remember one issue where I found only two poems that I wanted to publish. And I recall this tense half hour reading Nicole Santalucia’s chapbook submission where I could scarcely breathe I was rooting for her so hard to finish as strong as she began. You see it all the time. A great start then the line goes slack. What a rush when it doesn’t.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

CM: The best experience I’ve had so far is working with Jacob Oet on some pieces from With Porcupine. I’m a huge fan of the chapbook, so I had a great time going over some suggestions with him, many of which accepted. Having him accept my suggestions was incredibly motivating in creating my own work, not to mention it was like having one of my favorite bands ask for input on some of their song lyrics.

RG: Monet Thomas. I’ll never forget her. This was about five or six years ago. I was poetry editor, and though we were still learning how to do what we do, we were receiving thousands of submissions by that time. She had sent three poems, her first poetry submission ever I believe. One of the poems, “Another Confession,” was just on the cusp of working. I was sending out dozens of rejections a day, but I kept hers in my queue, until, finally, I rejected the poem. I did, however, take a moment to explain why and then encouraged her to keep working it, which she did. A few months later, she resubmitted the poem. After some back and forth editing, I published it.

What made had this such a beautiful editing experience was that, as a writer, I knew how encouraging it could be to receive ink from an editor. That’s why I took the time to do it in the first place. But I learned very quickly that providing ink doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be received with the same mutual appreciation and admiration that it was written. Ms. Thomas got it. She got it, she ran with it, and it paid off.

Not long after sending her the rejection, a friend of mine called to say she’d been doing a search for Arcadia online and came across a blog entry from Ms. Thomas in which she describes the initial rejection experience from her perspective. She was encouraged, elated. It was inspiring. For years now, when those rare discouraging moments as an editor arise, I pull up that blog. Thank you, Monet.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

CM: The quality of work coming from young people is astounding, and makes me very excited about the future of poetry. We often don’t read cover letters until after we read a piece, so Roy and I were discussing how we were shocked to find out Alex Greenberg, a contributor and featured poet for our newest issue, was only 16. If we have writers in their teens writing such great work, I can’t imagine what they’ll write as they get older.

RG: Couldn’t agree more. It’s always exciting to publish young writers.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

CM: Patience.

We are living in trying times with all of the police brutality, the Flint Water Crisis, The Dakota Pipeline, and a vicious hateful xenophobe is a nominee for President, just to name a few examples. With the current climate, it’s easy for poets to immediately spew angry and emotional responses to cope with the injustices. I think the problem with this heavily emotional type of poetry can actually keep the reader from engaging in the work. The piece can become more about the speaker’s anger rather than the collective anger present in society today. Stephen Dobyns has this wonderful passage in Best Words, Best Order in which he states “the main reason this sense of self damages the poet is that it violates the poet’s relationship with the audience. Instead of audience and poet being in the same boat, the attitude of the poet as hero creates a situation where the poet is in a special boat.”

Like Dobyns, I always felt that that overly emotional and angry poems all but eliminate the reader’s involvement with the piece. If the poet can simply take some time to reflect on an injustice, and present the subject with a newfound perspective, the piece could become more successful by actually incorporating the reader. 

RG: I can’t believe I’m about to go where I’m about to go, but to me, what American poetry needs is more support from beyond the subculture of poetry and more active efforts from poets to engage with communities outside of poetry. There’s a great article about this online at The Atlantic, by Dana Gioia called, “Can Poetry Matter?” Poets will always read poets. But you know who really needs to read poetry? Everyone. And start them young. I don’t mean have them read a bunch of critical theory designed to help students pass state tests. How is critical theory going to inspire teenagers? I mean the reading of poetry for the pure joy of it. Many teachers agree, but there’s little they can do. They’re judged quantitatively, not on graduating well-rounded, open-minded young adults. The same goes for most of the arts.

I don’t think this answers what you were asking, but I just read the article recently, and it has been on my mind. My primary point is that I think poetry itself needs nothing from us. It will evolve naturally and the geniuses among us will always emerge. You asked earlier about the transformative power of poetry. Well, that power is severely limited if the only ones reading and caring about poetry are poets.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

CM: “Let Us Consider” by Russel Edson. It’s easily his most beautiful work, and I can’t say how much it’s inspired my own poetry.

RG: Oh wow, just one? For a long time I would have said Joe Bolton’s, “The Ohio.” Today, the happy, married me, I think I could chant forever Anita Barrows’ and Joanna Macy’s translation of Rilke’s, “The First Elegy.” “Fling the nothing you are grasping / out into the spaces we breathe.”

DD: The Arcadia Press website has recently been relaunched. Can you tell us about the recent changes?

CM: Since the magazine has evolved and grown so much, we thought our website should, too. We wanted something more professional without betraying our rustic roots. I think the new website accomplishes that.

RG: Yes, now that we have a real handle on who we are in terms of mission and what we want to contribute to the Oklahoma and Great Plains literary scene, a rebrand was in order. We’ve been designing our own websites up to this point. It was time to bring in a professional.

DD: Arcadia Press has also published some excellent fiction chapbooks and some albums of regional music. Can you tell us about these endeavors? Also can you tell us a little bit about the other members of the Arcadia team?

CM: We wanted to distinguish ourselves from other literary magazines. Poetry chapbooks are everywhere, but you don’t see a lot of fiction chapbooks. A lit magazine with a CD is even rarer, but it fits with our goal of showcasing all types of art.

We founded the magazine as students and most of our department editors are students or joined when they were students themselves. Our Editor-in-chief, Chase Dearinger, met Michael Palmer, Chad Abushanab, and John Peery when they were all students at Texas Tech. Alban Fischer has been designing for us since issue 9.1, and we like his work so much that he’s now also our art editor. Ann Glaviano is terrific copy editor and has done invaluable work for us with our grant proposals. If you need either of these, I suggest you check her out. And of course, there’s Benjamin Reed.

RG: Our history with Ben goes back to 2011 when we published his fine story, “King of the Apes.” As soon as we decided to incorporate guest editors into our scheme, he was first guy we thought of. He was great to work with, and he assembled an exceptional issue, so when we had an opening for a fiction editor, we offered it to him. He graciously accepted and has been killing it ever since.

And Corey’s right on the money concerning Ann and Alban. The addition of these two has instantly leveled up our game in terms of professionalism. Besides ensuring clean copy, Ann also streamlined our editing processes and was instrumental in giving shape to our new mission. And Alban’s design aesthetic never fails surprise me. Just stunning work.

I’m really happy with all our recent additions to Arcadia. We’ve found some really talented, passionate editors, all of them. Michael, for instance, over the last year, has taken the nonfiction department from the fringe to battling for the forefront. His selections for the current issue blew me away. Chad hasn’t been poetry editor long, but he’s already bringing a lot to the table. His selection for winner of the Dead Bison Editor’s Prize in poetry was splendid. He has a keen eye for craft. And our music editor, John is a godsend. I don’t know how we ever put together an album without him. I loved what he did with the Roanoke album.

DD: Arcadia’s Issue 10.1, published in spring 2016, featured Ito Romo as the guest editor. The issue was titled, The New [email protected] Please tell us about this excellent issue.

CM: Being a Chicano myself, it was wonderful to have an entire issue devoted to my culture, and to expose our readers to this culture through such talented writers and Vincent Valdez’s mesmerizing art. We had the pleasure of meeting most of these writers in person at our launch reading for the issue, and my signed copy of 10.1 is one of my dearest possessions. I’m also convinced there’s no nicer and talented guy on earth than Ito Romo.

RG: Man, it was an excellent issue wasn’t it? And beautiful, too. It’s no accident that it’s our bestselling issue to date. Over the last couple of years, we’ve come to realize that we haven’t been doing enough to seek out and provide space for marginalized voices.

Enter Ito. This is a guy you can’t find enough good words to describe how amazing he is. Talented, humble, big-hearted, absolutely the most entertaining reader of his own work I’ve ever heard. And his writing. If you haven’t read his book of short stories, The Border is Burning, you should. It’ll destroy you. Just when you think he can’t hurt you further, the next story will. But what really makes his writing so appealing isn’t the grit, the devastation, or even the humanity he never fails eek out of the darkness. It’s his authenticity, so clear and pristine it affects every word, every image, and that’s the editorial focus he brought to the issue.

He selected just four writers and one visual artist to fill out his vision, which, given that the magazine is 100 pages, functions almost like mini-chapbooks for the contributors. We wound up with a stark, gorgeous black and white collection of brilliant work that pops with more arresting visual art than anything else we’ve produced. I also appreciate that Ito included not only Texas luminaries Sarah Cortez, Tim Z. Hernandez, Octavio Quintanilla, and Vincent Valdez, but he also incorporated work from new writer, Luke Neftali Villafranca. In Ito’s intro, he writes:

“I wanted to put together a group of artists who, with their art, be it visual or literary, tell a story honestly and beautifully—those were my only criteria. I’ve chosen a group of Mexican American artists who have recreated for us, with images and words, the current strange and dark malaise of the invisible, of the forgotten.

It is a new social realism, a mestizaje of artistic form and commentary that takes from the old as well as from the contemporary to forge an original voice that imagines for us that which we can no longer imagine, or choose not to—a world whose painful and miserable realness distracts us, shakes us, wakes us from our somnambulistic media dream.

[These artists] shatter the many levels of the American illusion of stereotype and fetishization with unmatched artistic skill, and most importantly, because they demand we recognize the human dignity of the people in their work, I call them the New [email protected]

I hope they make your heart beat faster. I hope they make you feel again.”

Ito Romo accomplished his goal.

DD: What does the future hold in store for Arcadia Press?

CM: We’re currently working on an online feature called Dead Bison where we highlight art and literature from marginalized communities in the Great Plains region. We hope to have the first installment out sometime late this year or early next year.

RG: Last year we partnered with the downtown location of the OKC Metro Library System, OKC Red Earth MFA, and the Oklahoma Arts Council to organize the first OKC LitFest, which, like Dead Bison, plays an integral role in our new mission: to cultivate and promote the voices of the Great Plains through the development of Oklahoma City as a celebrated center for literary arts.

We’re working hard to expand our partnerships this year to help us accomplish this task.

DD: Could you leave us with a favorite poem from Arcadia’s archives?

CM: This piece from volume 6 always make me smile.

            Orange County Cartoons
            By John F. Buckley

            The Happiest Place on Earth
            contains no legal abortion clinics,
            so Mickey had to drive Minnie over
            to the breakfast-cereal cartoon-mascot ghetto,
            where the Kellogg’s Raisin Bran sun
            carved out two scoops of baby, its instruments
            shining red in its never-dawn rays.
            After the procedure, two twittering bluebird
            nurses tried to criss-cross comical white band-aids
            across her sore black patootie,
            but Minnie peeled them off.
            No one back home must suspect.

            The mice ran into Dig’em Frog in the parking lot,
            rubbing the insides of his elbows,
            blocking the shortest route to their jalopy,
            croaking for more Smacks, a little sugar,
            a little honey,
            a little puffed wheat.
            Were they holding?
            Could they help an amphibian out?
            Mickey peeled off a ten and avoided eye contact.
            Then another twenty for the frog to forget he had seen them.

            Once back in the car, they locked
            the doors, rolled up the windows,
            and drove in near-silence back to Anaheim,
            speaking only in falsettos to negotiate
            what to order from Zankou Chicken.
            They decided on shawarma,
            but Minnie broke into squeaky sobs
            when the cook started carving slices
            off the meat rotating on the spit.
            Maybe it was time to give vegetarianism another try,
            just for a while.

RG: I always loved this one by Johnathon Williams:

            Sawdust

            The whole world took to dwindling,
            that summer my father bought the saw –
            the black pines sapless, moaning
            in the wind, the apple tree blighted,
            its fallen fruit pockmarked by crows,
            their delicate, Y-shaped feet.

            We watched from the porch
            as fireflies lighted lost in the ghost wheat.
            The barn door glowed like the ambulance bay
            at the county ER, hot steel
            screaming through the tender boards,
            each pallet still warm from the kiln.

            Months later, the banks began to call,
            my father’s credit exhausted at Sears
            and every other store, and he slumped
            over the dinner table, blinking sawdust
            into a plate of black-eyed peas.
            No one spoke. The phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

Roy Giles’ poetry and fiction have appeared in Eclectica, Eclectica Magazine 20th Anniversary Fiction Anthology, Ninth Letter, C4 Fiction Anthology, among others. His critical essays in theater won him a fellowship to the National Critics Institute at the Kennedy Center, and he has had several plays produced regionally. He currently serves as senior editor for Arcadia. 

 

 

Corey Don Mingura received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Oklahoma in May 2011. His works of fiction and poetry have appeared in The Acentos Review, The Writing Disorder, Westview, Eclectica, Midwestern Gothic, and The Oklahoma Review, among many others. He currently serves as Managing Editor of Arcadia. Mingura is a Mexican-American native of Hollis, Oklahoma and currently resides in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York. He is the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

"One Hundred Autobiographies": A brief preview [by David Lehman]

<<<

David Lehman, poet and columnist for our website, is writing a book about his cancer diagnosis and recovery. “In a way, the book has the logic of a poem,” he says. “But the illness and the treatments are really a springboard for memory, dream, fantasy, invention—all the ways we try to escape—and for taking stock of your life and the ultimate questions that face you when you take seriously the fact that you may die sooner than you thought.” The following passage is from Lehman’s manuscript in progress.

>>>

Click here to read the excerpt as posted on the website of The American Scholar, home of and host of "Next Line, Please" among many other notable  weekly features.

The origins of bus lateness [by Paul Tracy Danison]

Recursive quality of troublesome Concomitant Reality again spotted at Pyrénées crossing

The origination battered-truck where the world snarl standing wave daily begins. Blame the worried guy if you will. Buy him a better hair pomade if it pleases. Find him a bigger and less-nervous female companion on a upscale dating site. Stop your ears against the baby’s squall, turn your head away, your eyes ceiling-ward. But though it’s just a bratty kick under the table, it’s all gonna happen. Poetically speaking.

Standing Waves.

Since they make a kaleidoscope of our otherwise only apparent dull perception of the world around, we all know all about those. Even in Paris, Left Bank, late afternoon.

Karine cares nothing for Standing Waves. She makes it known with a pout backed-up with a viper-fast foot.  

But, although also kicked under the table with a patent-leather shoe, which is in no way a fit for Cinderella, Fifi, who is, after all, Karine’s blood-sister and raised in the same cultural pigsty, Fifi, she cares for Standing Waves.

She raises her long-stemmed beer glass to within a millimeter of my nose and cries,

“Trace! Here is to la physique quantique!”

“Damn our eyes,” I reply, and rashly kiss the tip of her pugnacious little nose with a drop of the chilly dew on the elongated barrel of my own long-stemmed beer glass.

We drink the dregs. Mmmm.

Karine frowns largely and thins her lips, raises her eyes ceiling-wards, hands motionless but tense on the table’s probability horizon.

This sisterly contrast, I think, certainly says something to me about Standing Waves, perhaps, even, as Fifi suggests in her toast, about quantum physics.

For instance, just as, quantically-speaking, I am myself as dead as I’ll ever be, my dear Fifi and Karine my love are sisters as sisterly as they’ll ever be, no matter how the probability horizon resolves; ditto my love, hers, mine & hers, love as lost now as loving will ever be.

Who can know what can be said at any given time about anything?

Just so with the evils of the world. I have very little experience of ‘em; I know 'em only at a distance.

I can't say much about the origins of the evils of the world because I can’t even pretend to know much. This is proved by my inability to know whether Karine or Fifi are sisters or only as sisterly-as they ever will be. Or even if Fifi’s toast was mockery or her sister through my agency or even if it was sisterly or ill-meant.

So, unfortunately, just as my father once cheerily prophesied before a particularly good spanking, it will ever be out of my power to profit from anybody’s credulity, let alone the consequent disarray, disillusion and despair – which is where the cream is: no documentary videos, no hefty explicatory books, no early-morning TV pleas for financial help, no populist presidential bids.

I’m not saying here that I don’t think Standing Waves are involved in the world’s evils or that the wreckage littering the Probability Horizon is not chock-full of morally useful answers for the Perplexed.

No.

I am saying that I can only talk about the quantics of the Traffic Snarl. Not hefty and easily documented and certainly not an effective talking point in a suburban barroom, the Standing Wave involved in the traffic snarl is, however, eminently with my reach, as are the true origin and agencies of it.

This is because I am very nearly near enough to the originating Traffic Snarl Standing Wave (TSSW) that I could very well be its personal mechanic or uncle.

The TSSW pushes off from the intersection of the rues de Menilmontant and des Pyrénées, every Earth revolution, except Satudays and Sundays, as regularly as an eclipse.

First, factors and agents.

A worried-looking guy, aided by the silent but fervent prayers of his preternaturally tiny female companion (who has a small baby clutched against her breast) hesitantly advances his battered truck leftward into the intersection just as the lights turn.

At this point, the Right-Hand Priority Standing Wave (RHPSW), washes over the truck and the baby starts to cry, also convulsively wetting itself.

The worried-looking battered-truck driver is momentarily unmanned by an unintelligible curse from just beneath his window. It is a thin, dry, bleach-blonde Change Agent who suddenly realizes that her Probability Wave must reckon with a Dense Discontinuity now developing within the worried guy’s Reality Continuum, manifested on the Euclidean plane by the unmoving battered-truck.

An inertial lull worthy of the seconds before the Big Bang grips the different probable Wave Agents as all realize that all possible Probability Configurations must and shall resolve in a context of a remarkably narrow fractal hillcrest, manual transmissions and a previously-established Saturation Inertia Continuum (SIC).

Thus, the lead-up to the Quantic Event known as The Traffic Snarl that will make the tour of the earth in the following 24 hours. It will bring you, me, Hillary Clinton and, yes, even the egregious Donald Trump, as well as a cast of better than six billion anonymous change agents, into actions involving a series of interesting probabilities with which to grace the day. As follows:

Compare, in the context of quantic lead-up, if you will, the elegant simplicity of Karine’s motionless hands upon the table as she stares ceiling-wards:

Don’t be fooled. In both equations, at this point, probabilities are just bubbling toward a Reality Continuum Resolution (RCR).

The Traffic Snarl, however, introduces certain complicating factors that enable it to break out of the Personal Tragedy Probability Category and go viral.  

Acting only, of course, as a purely unconscious agent of the Tardy Guilt Standing Wave (TGSW), which took shape in Jerusalem in an earlier Earth revolution, I arrive personally on the scene.

The personal involvement is key.

I see the bus. As the crow flies, it is less than a minute off.

Twisting my head, I see the TGSW crash into a Concomitant Reality Juncture (CRJ), bleakening the faces of pre-resigned probable bus rider Change Agents either crowded into the shelter or increasingly wet.

Snapping my head back toward the waiting probability agents, one of the ubiquitous random Something Needs to Happen Probability Waves (SNHPW) washes over me and into the cab of the truck, waking both driver and infant.

With the flatus of a Primary Agent of an invigorated TSSW, and as prelude to a three-point turn, the worried man begins backing downhill.

The preternaturally small female companion says something small but extremely tart. Three tall bareheaded guys with cheap simulated leather jackets briskly march off under the drumming rain, knocking down a little boy in their haste, earning an angry shout to their receding backs from a powerless Dad.

The bus recedes 10 minutes over the Probability Horizon as agents all along the limb of the rue des Pyrénées slow, then stop, their vehicles.

The TSSW ripples and shimmers westward, fixing the day’s Concomitant Reality (CR), thus:

Which all goes to prove - if not that the Traffic Snarl Standing Wave is at the origin of the whole existential mess and that it and every other misery starts with my habitual guilty tardiness to the scene - that it is far, far better to stop for a cup of coffee than to be in the cab of a truck with a preternaturally tiny female companion likely the mother of your helpless child at the precisely right wrong time of day.

(Cor)respond(ences): On Collaboration & the Material Artifact [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Over the course of several months, I had the great privilege of corresponding with Virginia Konchan via post.  At the time, I was traveling from one literary arts fellowship to the next, and Virginia had just moved from Chicago to Montreal.  Our epistolary correspondence was in some ways, an attempt to trace our movements in space and time.  The various postcards and letterhead that we chose became a ledger, onto which geography was subtly and indelibly inscribed.   Our epistolary practice also became a way of tracing the relationship between voice, body, and material artifact.  The shape of each postcard, and each envelope, inevitably dictated how much could be said, and exactly how that sentiment was conveyed.  Writing letters became an exercise in constraint, an opening of possibilities by narrowing the field of potential inquiry.  

All too often, collaboration remains purely in the realm of the textual, and this is largely a result of the digitized cultural landscape that we inhabit.  For me, this correspondence represented a return voyage from a place where technology is always present.  Even more importantly, the physicality of correspondence prompted me to attend to aspects of writing that are often forgotten when inhabiting a more digitized rhetorical space.  Certainly, my hand was unpracticed at writing letters. But as our correspondence began to unfold, writing (and thought itself) were nonetheless revealed as embodied endeavors.  The made thing, whether a poem, a letter, or the wax seal on an envelope, became as a projection of the body, an artifact of one's movement through a place that is now inhabited more fully and mindfully.  

It is truly a delight to close with a selection of letters....

 

“It takes great skill to make it seem natural”: On Collaboration & Teaching [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the great privilege of leading workshops for former Poet Laureate of Alabama and small press publisher extraordinaire Sue Brannan Walker, gifted visual artist and writer Margaret Watson, and Leonard Temme, one of the most insightful and adventurous poets I’ve encountered in my teaching career. At first, we workshopped poems written by each writer as an individual practitioner. What a surprise, delight, and gift to discover one day that all three students in the workshop had embarked on a collaborative manuscript. As we began discussing sections of the collaboration instead of single author poems, I noticed that collaboration made possible so much more within the setting of the classroom. Not only were we thinking about one another’s poems, but also, we were thinking about our own work in relation to the other. Collaboration became an exercise in listening and in empathy. To see compassion, gratitude, and understanding conveyed not only through words, but through the smallest technical choices in a poem is one of the most beautiful things I’ve witnessed as an educator: a true confluence of the affective and analytical faculties. I’m grateful to the students from this workshop for reminding me of this: to write is to participate in a community. Sue, Margaret, and Leonard have been kind enough to share process notes, which I hope will serve as a resource to arts educators considering collaboration in a classroom setting. It is an honor and a delight to share a selection from this manuscript in process here as well. Happy autumn, and enjoy!

—Kristina Marie Darling

 

Process Notes

from Leonard Temme:

Our collaboration grew from a workshop with Kristina who introduced us to collaborative poetry with several readings and the assignment that we collaborate on a poem. That assignment produced a flurry of emails and a three-way phone call connecting Alabama, Florida, and Maine. By the time the conversation was over, Margaret, Sue and I had agreed on a topic and process. We each started a poem, contributed round-robin to the three poems with the originator doing the final edit. So our first awkward collaboration produced three related poems. Collaborating has made me very aware of process and product, and the inseparability of the two. Every contribution, word, line, or stanza, is an surprise gift. I am thrilled to see the pieces grow. I have to assimilate and build on what Sue and Margaret write, making their work my own, while respecting the integrity of the process, the emerging product, and the individual identity of the three of us. Our collaboration is leading me to take greater risks, to become freer and more imaginative. I feel we are in a playground, park, field, forest, beach, funhouse; the paper can be anything, and we are learning that power of metamorphosis from each other, with Kristina’s wisdom, experience and knowledge guiding our freedom to experiment. The readings also provide examples and patterns, and are also freeing. They are invitations to take greater risks. I have immense respect for Sue and Margaret and am honored to be in their company. Collaboration requires that I constantly trust, relinquish control, be open to surprise, and contribute to the process while being willing to risk and be foolish. Courtesy and respect are fundamental; they are a matter of will and behavior. Trust is gradual; it can’t be forced but grows with experience and understanding. Collaboration is fun; I love it. I have a sense of breaking shackles and emerging from self-imposed constraints Actually, in a real sense, every aspect of my life is in some way a collaboration.

from Margaret Watson:

Collaborations lift boundaries. Accidents become the essence. An emotional potential explores the infinity of creativity. Is it sublime?   Oh no! Gazing at stars, one misses some, but the subjective feeling goes beyond all sensibility.   It’s an emotional charge, a short cut. The form becomes a universe with fresh ideas and burgeoning roots. Individuals are ineffable, voracious, though together concepts bud, words become cavities with disquieting epiphanies. Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kristina has depicted a new globe without borders or coast lines, or ports. When these forms exhaust, new ones begin. It becomes endless no matter how dissimilar as we comply with contextual pressure, there is a goal whatever constraints involved in the poetic techniques applied. What matters is the rhythmic surrender to join the accumulation of words, where the pleasure is indistinguishable from the form it has been given. A freedom to be chaotic and imagine the randomness of others. Yes, mysterious, undeniably illuminating, Kristina’s gift is the independence to explore and configure new rules, new ideas, new molds. With her astute guidance and reading lists, we have flown high, not even sky being the limit. For me, in particular, this collaboration has summoned the nerve to liberate the past and build new field notes with an added sense of versatility, exploration, and verve. Elizabeth Bishop said Writing poetry is an unnatural act.   It takes great skill to make it seem natural. I applaud my partners, Sue and Leonard to make it contagious, exhilarating, and a loveable “act”.

from Sue Brannan Walker:

This particular segment of an abecedarian would not have happened had it not been for a workshop on collaboration with Kristina Maria Darling. I had only written solo, so writing with another person – and with three people in particular – was a new and daunting experience. It meant giving up a personal ethos and adopting a new mindset. Leonard Temme and Margaret Watson became, to borrow Carson McCullers’ words, “the we of me” along with Kristina who was reading and commenting on our work. Our collaboration made us each better writers as we were stimulated by what we were each doing. In addition to our email exchanges, we had three-way telephone conversations that were most helpful in clarifying our mutual understanding of our abecedarian process. The reading list is, to me, basic when it comes to understanding collaborative writing. We read specific texts that focused on “Collaboration as Improvisation,” Epistolary Collaboration,” Collaboration Across Disciplines,” “Collaboration & Constrain-Based Writing,” “Collaboration Across time & Geography,” and “Publishing & Promoting Collaborative Work.” Writing collaboratively has made me more aware of audience. Even if I am writing alone, my work may be, in itself, a collaboration – perhaps with my subject, who may be James Joyce or Margaret Mead. I have become addicted to writing collaboratively, so this current work in progress will not be my last. What I loved most was the element of surprise – both in terms of what I could come up with but also being amazed by what Margaret and Leonard were writing and what Kristina would suggest when reading our abecedarian.

It is truly a delight to end with an excerpt from Sue, Leonard, and Margaret's collaborative abecedarian manuscript...

a.

Ares, Aphrodite’s sometime lover, god of war; Ares, ancient awful horror; Ares, fathered Phobos – fear, fathered Deimos – terror, fathered Eros – Eros; Ares, who has still always lived – never died – vibrant in the hearts of man, vibrant in the ancient, modern worshiped passioned battle lust of war as blood bathing ancient modern grieving Aleppo, its anguished cry cried in the rising chorus of Ares ascending, ascending, ascending, voices shouting around the world.
b.

” ̇ǝɹoq-ʎllnq ɔıdooq noʎ ̇ɹǝppoɟɯnq noʎ ¡sılodoqooq ɯoɹɟ ǝʇɐqpǝǝɹq noʎ ;ʎoq 'sƃnqpǝq puɐ sǝlʇǝǝq”

c.

At the Cake counter, I encountered Colombo not Columbus but preferred Captain James Cook who in his worldly travels succumbed to syphilis caught among the natives. Hidden from the public as shameful, but I have his death certificate lodged in a Dutch cabinet in my music room. Bound in leather, scratched from wear, with the inside covers marbled orange. Strange though...a slit appears as in a Fontana canvas, slashed. A sudden slash suspended in time between waiting and observing. “Cut out the cause of death.” And then those pearls, collected. Probably saved for Coco Chanel as she sashayed around Paris casting women in white and gold, braids of black, drinking gin, and mix-ing with the Nazi crowd undercover. I suppose Cupid should shoot poisoned arrows now or Confucius should teach a simpler life. Why? Now Colin (as in Powell) explains about privacy and emails as our cables obliterate culture swiftly filed with consumers, as if the moon tipped over and left silver entrails in its wake like the Mayan god, Cabrakan ruling the mountains and earthquakes or Coyopa, god of thunder. This is what happens when something shuffles overheard and the bewildered wander among the C’s, still to encounter Catherine de Medici or the new English Princess Charlotte. And as I nibble my carrot cupcake, I remember Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar or even Al Capone to be brief or actually actual then another life then another, as it cobbles along the way with a heap of shoes cluttering civilization.

d.

Don’t imagine the Dutch cabinet demands distance, with its details of scratched doors half-hanging from their hinges & its drawers stuffed with death certificate substitutes for lost memories or broken hopes or a period full-stopping some life sentence, as a dystopic microcosm; no, all forms of dream work, day or night, deliver their own dilemmas until they discover their own delights.

e,

Cupid’s First Kiss: What Do You Think?

Say Cupid.
Say amour;
Say psychic, psychology, passion,
body and bum.
Say woman and man; say painting; say art.

Do you smooch your dog? Your cat?

smacksmacksmack

Say myth.
Say passion and first kiss.
Oft you may think you can’t do without a particular man or woman
but you can.
Immortal ardor –
both day and night?
Not hardly.

Immortal ardor? Whoa now!

Say Lipogram.

"The World Splits Open Twice as Wide": Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade on Collaboration [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade have published collaborative essays in Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Cincinnati Review, Connotation Press, Green Mountains Review, Nimrod, No Tokens, Passages North, poemmemoirstory, Prairie Schooner, Quarter After Eight, The St. Ann’s Review, and StoryQuarterly.

Denise Duhamel is the author, most recently, of Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Mille et un Sentiments (Firewheel, 2005) and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she was the guest editor is for The Best American Poetry 2013.

Julie Marie Wade is the author, most recently of When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014) and Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Bywater Books, 2014; Colgate University Press, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. Her other books include Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), Small Fires: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), Catechism: A Love Story (Noctuary Press, 2016) and SIX: Poems (Red Hen Press, 2016), winner of the AROHO/ To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. She has received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

Duhamel and Wade teach in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Their first jointly written essay collection, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, will be published in January 2018 by Wild Patience Books.

I recently had a chance to ask Julie and Denise a few questions about their writing practice, co-authored texts as social justice, and their forthcoming collection of prose collaborations.  

KMD: How did your collaboration begin? 

JMW: In the summer of 2013, I was reading a book I love by Amy Krouse Rosenthal called Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. In the book, Rosenthal invites readers to tell her something new about the moon—and to send their moon musings to her directly! Rosenthal’s project is quite collaborative between writer and reader all the way through, come to think of it, and entirely whimsical.

I knew that Denise feels about the moon much the way that I do—always seeking new ways to describe it, to capture the lunar mystery and wonder without defaulting to cliché. So I asked if she wanted to write in response to Rosenthal’s prompt. What I meant was: do you want to write your own moon-musing poem, and I’ll write mine, and then we can send them to her? But Denise, a seasoned collaborator, sent me a first line: “If the Earth is a hotel room and humans are the rockers who trashed it…” In her signature, whimsical way, she wrote—Your turn—and that’s when I realized she meant for us to write one moon-musing poem together!

The result of our line-by-line collaboration was ultimately published by Green Mountains Review (http://greenmountainsreview.com/why-the-moon-matters/), but Denise and I realized almost immediately, I think, that we had started something we didn’t want to stop. The first collaboration was a prose poem, very compressed by design, but soon—and quite naturally—our work began to evolve, stretching in both length and form.

DD: I had always wanted to write nonfiction, creative nonfiction in particular, but I had used so much of my own life’s raw material in poetry that I felt I had little to say. Even though I had read nonfiction essays, I had always envisioned any memoir I had in me as a sustained, chapter-by-chapter, linear account. Prose in general baffles me—and I am the creator of three failed/unpublished novels. But when Julie asked me if I ever considered writing nonfiction, I blurted, “I’d write it if I could write it with you!” And it has been one of the most gratifying artistic ventures of my life.

Julie was born the year I graduated high school so I love writing with her about how feminism shaped our different experiences. She has been a great teacher! She doesn’t teach me in a formal classroom way (though she is a great professor) but rather through her example and her writing, especially, of course. I am indeed a seasoned collaborator, and I had no command of traditionally formal poetry until I started writing sonnets with Maureen Seaton. Julie has given me a much stronger sense of creative nonfiction and what it can do! I am so glad that I misread her email about the moon prompt. That lucky “misreading” on my part has opened up a whole new way of deepening my and Julie’s friendship. A lot of trust is required for collaboration to work. And I trust her implicitly as a person and as a writer.

 

KMD: Describe the mechanics of your collaboration. How did you exchange drafts? How much would each writer contribute at a given time?  

DD: We have approached various essays in various ways. Most are written in alternate chunks/paragraphs on a particular subject or word. We started with very basic titles, like primary colors, and then each of us would alternate meditative paragraphs to which the other would respond. A few paragraphs are written sentence by sentence in similar fashion to “Why the Moon Matters.” Some of the essays have subtitles or sections. We have also used “drabble” techniques in which we each write the exact number of words back and forth about a certain topic. We have also created an essay in the form of a glossary.

 

KMD: You both came to this collaboration as accomplished poets, with multiple single-author volumes already published. With that in mind, I’d love to hear more about what drew you to prose as a structure for project. What did the lyric essay form make possible within your collaborative writing practice?

JMW: I’m a long-time admirer of the collaborative poetry canon of Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton as well as the lucky reviewer of Caprice, their recent volume of collected and new poems (http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/11/05/caprice-collected-uncollected-and-new-collaborations-by-denise-duhamel-and-maureen-seaton/). But as much as I appreciate collaborations as a reader, I never thought of myself as a collaborative writer until Denise invited me to write with her. I confided in her that I had never collaborated with anyone before but was intrigued by the possibility, and Denise confided in me that she had always been intrigued by the possibility of writing prose. Since I have a long history writing prose, and Denise has a long history collaborating with other poets, our collaborative prose became a way for each of us to grow our writing by trying something new, but at the same time, we each bring an element of prior know-how to the enterprise.

Of all the forms that prose can take, the lyric essay seems the most natural extension of the poetic impulse. Like poetry, lyric essays tend to rely on language chosen for its cadence and aural qualities. They also tend to be propelled by associative leaps and thematic recursions rather than causal narratives. As poets, Denise and I both love to zoom in close to individual words or concepts and circle around them, peeling back layer after layer of associations. Early on, we began writing about colors and created a series of lyric essays, including “White,” “Pink,” “Red, “Blue,” “Green,” and “Black,” that explore personal, historical, and pop cultural associations with each of these colors. Later, we wrote an essay called “The Unrhymables,” which includes braided meditations on twelve, unrhymable words in the English language. (https://nimrod.utulsa.edu/archive/reimagined/DuhamelWade.pdf) This is, in fact, the title essay of our first collaborative book forthcoming in 2018 with the newly formed Wild Patience Books of which Julie R. Enszer is the editor!

Now we’re writing a series of essays that use numbers in their titles, like “10 Ways to Get Her,” “13 Superstitions,” and “31 Favors,” both to indicate the number of segments that comprise the essay and to comment upon its themes. The most capacious of these to date is “50 States,” which we hope is a timely meditation on our national zeitgeist.

DD: The lyric essay is also a manageable form for two busy writers and teachers. Because it is so elastic and malleable, we have been able to include not only life experiences but also what we have drawn from our latest reading. Some of Julie’s paragraphs have given me ideas to research in order to respond. The lyric essay feels like buying a ticket at the airport but leaving the destination blank. It is impossible to know where you’ll go, but you do know you are up for adventure.

 

KMD: In Saints of Hysteria, the Denise’s wonderful co-authored introduction describes collaboration as a way of fostering a shared feminist consciousness among women. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the relationship between collaborative writing and social justice. What unique possibilities does collaboration offer for dialogue and understanding within the writing community and beyond its boundaries?

DD: Collaborative writing is ideal for social justice work because it is implicit that the two women writing are nodding to each other to say “me too.” It is revolutionary, in my biased opinion, in creating a dialogue where differences ultimately don’t wind up being that different—that suffering and joy and frustration and bliss join women together. Julie and I are writing from different childhood geographies, class backgrounds, and sexual orientations, yet our voices seem to be one at many points in our work. Though we are also almost a generation apart in terms of age, our experiences reverberate with one another on the page.

JMW: I couldn’t agree more! One of my favorite of our collaborations to date—the glossary Denise mentioned above—is an assemblage of annotations for every woman and girl Denise and I referenced in our first book-length collection of essays, The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose. These include women and girls from our personal lives as well as public figures, both historical and contemporary, as well as fictional characters. As I recall, the glossary was Denise’s idea, but it became our collective way of honoring dozens and dozens of female family, friends, and role models, some explicitly feminist and others not. Together Denise and I were able to shine a literary spotlight on so many of the female figures who have inspired us. Just the act of naming and describing more than a hundred women in a row—giving so many women “center-stage” in a culture where women are most often still defined by their relationships to men or left “off-stage” all together—feels like an act of feminist consciousness-raising to me. I hope we reach all kinds of readers with our collaborative work, but in particular, I hope we can inspire a new generation of young people not to be afraid of feminism, not to believe the stigmas and stereotypes attached to the word. Remember when Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” With Denise and me, two women are telling the truth about their lives in conversation with each other. I hope this means the world splits open twice as wide.     

 

KMD: You’re also accomplished as teachers of creative writing, serving as mentors within the writing community. Do you ever have your students collaborate in the classroom? As educators, how do you approach collaboration ethics (i.e., teaching students how to be mindful and gracious collaborators)?

JMW: In my Introduction to Creative Writing class, I actually teach a collaborative poem from Saints of Hysteria called “82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed,” co-written by Denise and 16 of her former students from a graduate seminar she offered at Florida International University in the early new millennium. It’s an exemplary list poem, perfect for illustrating how powerful two words—“I fear”—can become when used as a lyric refrain. (This is also the poem I use to introduce anaphora into my students’ developing literary lexicons.) I invite my students to write their own “I fear” poems as a personal inventory and emulation but also to participate in a series of exquisite corpse exercises with their peers.

I’ve only been teaching creative writing courses for a few years, so I’m sure Denise has much more insight to offer here, but so far I’ve used in-class collaborating as a way to help my beginning students overcome their inner critics and combat the fear of “having nothing to write about.” So often I’m astonished (in the best sense of the word) by what a group of new writers are able to compose together just by passing a piece of paper back and forth among them and each writing in response to a portion of each other’s words for a limited amount of time—typically one or two minutes. When the students read aloud the entire poem they have generated, they’re frequently both surprised by what they learn about each other and themselves and also proud of what they didn’t know they had to say. Collaboration in my classroom has turned out to be the ultimate icebreaker to the workshop environment as well as the first time many students shed their literary inhibitions on the page.

DD: I’ve taught entire courses on collaboration and collage, and “82 Reasons Not to Get Out of Bed” is from a Form and Theory class in the fall of 2001. Our entire class wrote it the first day back after 9/11 when we were all on edge, some of the students having family in New York City. Collaboration is indeed a great icebreaker for the first or second meeting of any class as it helps writers to get away from the small self and into the larger self. So many writers want to “stick to the facts, ma’am” in their poems, and collaboration introduces the idea that a poem is going to want to go where it wants to go and that trying to impose a strict adherence to the way things happen can sometimes be a hindrance, that language and sound may take a poem in a completely new direction, that the “I” does not always have to be a date and time log of events. In addition, collaboration allows for surprise and mayhem, and who doesn’t want that in a poem or any piece of writing?

I have had given my students “cheat sheets” of pantoums, villanelles, and sestinas, and they collaborate a line at a time and are always amazed at how fun these poems are to write. I stress it is important to set ground rules with each other—I usually put them in place—so that a poet is not bullied by her collaborator. Sometimes people can get carried away and write two or three lines in a row instead of one, so I make sure that doesn’t happen. If the collaborators want to revise once the poem’s first draft is done, they are only allowed to revise their own lines with the permission of the other. This is really good practice for workshop etiquette down the line.

It is an honor and a delight to end with a selection of new prose collaborations....

 

An excerpt from “50 States”

A collaborative essay by Denise Duhamel & Julie Marie Wade

*

Alabama

The song has such easy allure, ideal for riding on the spin bike or singing along in the car. Gavin DeGraw and I have pedaled imaginary mountain passes and sped down winding highways crooning, “Hey West Virginia, Hey North Dakota, I think I love you, but don’t even know you!” We’ve sung the same to Massachusetts, Minnesota, Carolina, Oklahoma—though all are places I know, places I’ve been before. Then, the chorus turns the corner a little too fast, and we’re skidding toward “Hey Alabama…” I think I know something about Selma and Birmingham, Sena Naslund’s Four Spirits and the Civil Rights Institute. One of the best students I’ve ever had hails from the Heart of Dixie. At a reading, she said, “I’m from ‘Bama, and as you may know, we’ve had a little racism there.” We laughed. We were sad. She lifted us up with poems from her Magic City Gospel. I’m too old now, and not near enough naïve, to believe that racism keeps a single home address. I think I know something about the Tuskegee Airmen and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but I also know it’s not enough. I remember my first essay in school on Rosa Parks: “Someday I hope to have such courage.” In “Red Dirt Girl,” Emmylou Harris sings how the stars fell on Alabama—where there is such beauty and longing, so much hatred of difference and change. Now I am too old not to see how the stars fall on all of us. 

Florida

I look out my window to the sea. For fifteen years I’ve wanted an ocean view, and now I finally have one. But on stormy days the white waves seem to crash too close to my window. Everyone agrees South Florida is sinking, the limestone below so porous not even a seawall can save us. Saltwater puddles appear in a park, startled fish circling their new small home. Something called a super moon floods the side streets, even though there hasn’t been a drop of rain. I keep rubber boots in my Honda’s back seat, sneakers in my office for overflowing parking lots. Yellow plastic ponchos. Umbrellas. Money in the freezer in case of a hurricane, in case the ATMs and credit card machines are down. The rest of the country blames us—our crazy politics and love of suntans, our reckless drivers and overdevelopment. I always thought Florida would be a great place to retire, but now I think South Florida and I have roughly the same life expectancy. You may have heard of senicide or geronticide, the Inuit practice of leaving an elderly person on a chunk of ice to float away and die. The last such known person was put to death this way in 1939. Now there are fewer ice chunks near the North Pole, the glaciers melting. I imagine all of Florida’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities filling with water, the beeping of life-maintaining machines drowned in salt. I think of my Florida town lovingly, like a spouse, hoping I die first.

Minnesota

“I came to Minneapolis because of the cold. I figured if I was frozen I’d keep better,” Rhoda tells her best friend on the popular 1970s sitcom. Though I wasn’t born until two years after The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s end, I found everything I’d ever need in syndication: Mary’s couch that folded out into a bed (mine was scratchy brown and came from my roommate’s brother…), Rhoda’s beaded curtain (mine came from Pier One Imports and consequently, was lacking a little funk…), and of course the headscarves. My mother had a drawer from which I pilfered, colorful leftovers from her own ‘70s life. Opening it was like reaching inside a magician’s sleeve and giving an artful tug. But you see, I didn’t care how warm or cold it was. I wanted to go to Minneapolis to become someone else, to recast myself as a straight mid-Western girl with natural fashion sense or a witty ne’er-do-well fleeing bad romance in the Bronx—I just hadn’t decided which. Later, well into our thirties, I traveled with my partner to the North Star State. It was April, it was snowing, I was recovering from a broken leg. The travel guide said, “Minneapolis is a top-ten city for lesbians.” The concierge said, “The Mary Richards’ house is 5 miles away, mostly uphill. Wouldn’t you rather see the statue instead?” We bundled up. I wore an ankle brace. We took small steps and breathed the crisp air. We made it after all.

 

 

New York

The first time I visited I was five. My father says I told him, “I am going to grow up and live here one day!” He couldn’t understand why his child was drawn to subways that smelled like piss, to trashcans overflowing with rotting food. We went to the Empire State building where my mom had a panic attack—too many people—and we left before I could use the silver viewfinder, bigger than my head with its two owl-like eye holes. I had a red toy viewfinder at home but there were no pictures of Central Park or the Brooklyn Bridge inside. I wonder, if we’d stayed atop that skyscraper, if my curiosity would have been satiated. Instead, I went back to live in New York City in one of the worst possible neighborhoods my twenties. I was part of the slow gentrification of Alphabet City where a homeless man once chased me down the street trying to urinate on me. Another time I couldn’t open the building’s front door, a dead body on the stoop blocking it. I greased my fire escape with Crisco after my apartment was robbed and I shivered in the cold because the thieves had even taken my blankets—maybe to wrap up my TV? A few nights later I heard someone—a crack addict, perhaps—thud to the vacant lot my window faced. I should have felt a little bad. He could have broken a bone falling from my slippery railings. I was a poet by this time, after all. But instead I wrote a sonnet, feeling victorious.

Washington

The mountains are memorable, of course, as are the apples and rhododendrons, both plump and red, as is the soft refrain of the rain. From our breakfast table, we watched ferry boats crossing Puget Sound. Beyond them lay the islands, which I learned to name: Vashon, Blake, Southworth, Bainbridge. There were others I would visit someday. Beyond these, the Olympic peaks rose unimpeachable as a painting. This was before I knew how white our green world was, before I recognized just how privileged our view. It was not a manor exactly, but I had been to the up-and-coming born, the only daughter of two-car suburbanites whose means extended even to lessons at the Fiorini Ski School on weekends. Those mornings we dressed in the dark, parkas and bibs, moon boots and mittens, then drove east toward the blinkered sun, sometimes with chains on our tires. At Snoqualmie Pass, how I loved riding the blue chair lift to the intermediate slope, then hunching low and picking up speed, leaving my ski-mates behind in a cloud of powder. Beauty was a given of that place, as was grace—a landscape I was expected to mirror and embody. This was before I understood about manifest destiny or the dreams my parents hoped to manifest in me. “Just look at this place,” my father said, like a prophet in pom-pom cap atop a mountain. “They had to cross the whole country to find paradise. No one in his right mind would ever leave.”

                                                                       Wyoming

I spoke at a Women’s Conference in Laramie in 1997, then read at Second Story Books, a former brothel where upstairs you could see the small rooms where the women were paid $2 or $5 per session according to the clerk. Brothels were apparently popular in Laramie, the last of which held on until the 1960s. It was hard not to think of the degradation of the women who worked there. In 1804, a person who wished to remain anonymous wrote a column for Sporting Magazine—“Prostitutes have very improperly been styled as women of pleasure; they are women of pain, of sorrow, of grief...” Some of the women poets in 1997 tried to make whore jokes, but it was hard to get a laugh. I chimed in—“How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb? I don’t know, but it’s not funny!” Our host took us the next day on a hike through the Snowy Range Mountains where, at sunset, the clouds turned pink. Then, a year later, Matthew Shepard was beaten and tortured in Laramie, tied to a fence by his killers and mistaken for a scarecrow by a bicyclist. Upon closer look, the Good Samaritan saw Shepard’s face completely covered in blood except for a small patch cleansed by tears. Who has not, in a moment of lust, followed danger into a dark wood? Who has not wanted to be loved? I couldn’t help think of my time in Laramie, that beautiful place, the small dark rooms of pain, empty now of people but still on display.

"Bob Dylan: Oracle and Iconoclast" [by David Lehman]

No sooner was it announced last month that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize in Literature than the fighting began. Enthusiasts cited the way Mr. Dylan has entered and modified the culture. How his phrases linger in the air. The times they are a-changin’. There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden. You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. He not busy being born is busy dying.

But the cries of dismay were predictable if only because the poetry community is marked by bile and resentment. Any American poet—even our grand old master Richard Wilbur, now 95—would get his share of Bronx cheers if he were to win the Nobel. It was said of Mr. Dylan that he didn’t need the prize, that he is yet another old white guy, that he is arrogant, that he composes songs not poems.

Purists would say that what he writes are lyrics, which depend on their musical setting for coherence and are inextricably bound up with their performance. I would counter that the best of Mr. Dylan’s songs work on the page, not only because of their originality but equally because they constitute the autobiography of a personality that is rebellious, ornery, intense and remarkably attuned to our rapidly shifting zeitgeist.

Along comes “Bob Dylan: The Lyrics 1961-2012” to help us to adjudicate. Released today in unquestionably the most fortuitous publication timing in memory, the book contains all of Mr. Dylan’s songs, organized album by album from his eponymous 1962 debut to his most recent efforts, “Together Through Life” (2009) and “Tempest” (2012). The transcendent period was the stretch between 1964 and 1967—the period of “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Desolation Row,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Just Like a Woman” and “All Along the Watchtower.”

The collected lyrics make the primary case for Mr. Dylan’s achievement. But “Chronicles” (2004), the first volume of Mr. Dylan’s projected three-volume memoirs, offers a valuable window into the writer’s brain. .

“Truth was the last thing on my mind, and even if there was such a thing, I didn’t want it in my house,” he wrote of trying to compose songs. “Oedipus went looking for the truth and when he found it, it ruined him. It was a cruel horror of a joke. So much for the truth. I was gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth and what you heard depended on which side you were standing. If I ever did stumble on any truth, I was gonna sit on it and keep it down.”

 

Not for nothing did he discard his birth name (Zimmerman) in favor of the first name of the wild Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. A natural surrealist, Mr. Dylan is a put-on artist, a joker, enigmatic, elusive and full of belligerence. “Maggie’s Farm” (1965), for instance, elevates “I quit” into poetry: He “hands you a nick­el, / He hands you a dime, / He asks you with a grin / If you’re havin’ a good time, / Then he fines you every time you slam the door / I ain’t gonna work for Maggie’s brother no more.”

And then there’s the ire hurled at a false friend in 1965’s “Positively 4th Street”:

I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you

Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you.

Note the artful simplicity in these, the song’s final stanzas. The lines consist almost exclusively of monosyllables. The meter is iambic with anapests to keep the flow going and spondees to bring the thought to a halt. The repetition of lines reflects the influence not only of the blues but also of traditional song.

Usually when I discuss Bob Dylan as a poet I point to his ­visionary songs. “Desolation Row” (1965), which I selected for inclusion in “The Oxford Book of American Poetry,” is terrific in its phantasmagoria:

The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
‘Which side are you on?’
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow.

Another fine example is the title song of “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965), which begins with God and Abraham mixing it up in Genesis 22: “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’ / Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ ”

But you could as easily make the case on the basis of his powers of rhetoric. His gift is oracular. Some of his strongest lines are infused with the spirit of protest: “How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?” Others verge on heartbreak: “It don’t even matter to me where you’re wakin’ up tomorrow / But mama, you’re just on my mind.”

With its rapid-fire patter, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (1965) prefigures the spoken-word and performance poetry of so much recent music: “Johnny’s in the basement / Mixing up the medicine / I’m on the pavement / Thinking about the government / The man in the trench coat / Badge out, laid off / Says he’s got a bad cough / Wants to get it paid off.” The rhymes in “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) or “I Want You” (1966) show there’s a lot of life left in that venerable device.

In 1880, Matthew Arnold introduced the concept of “touchstones” into the study of poetry, for exemplary lines that imprint themselves on the mind. It is a criterion the author of “Visions of Johanna” (1966) meets: “The ghost of ’lectricity howls in the bones of her face.” With or without music, that line sings. Only a true poet could have written it.

from the Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2016

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When The Poem Belongs to Everyone: An Editors' Roundtable on Publishing Collaborative Poetry [by Kristina Marie Darling]

The following editors have been kind enough to offer insights about the review process for collaborative poetry submissions, as well as the unique challenges and opportunities associated with publishing collaborative poetry...

Tony Trigilio, author of Inside the Walls of My Own House:  The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) Book 2, among many other collections of poetry and criticism, and Editor-at-Large for The Columbia Poetry Review.  

Christopher Kondrich, author of Contrapuntal, former editor at Denver Quarterly and current Senior Poetry Editor at Tupelo Quarterly.  

Justin Lawrence Daugherty, editor of Jellyfish Highway Press and Prose Editor for New South.  

_______________________________________________________________________________

KMD:  How does the review process differ (if at all) for collaborative poems vs. single-author poems?

TT: The review process for collaborative poems is the same, for me, as it is for single-author poems. As an editor, I try to determine what the poem is attempting to do, and then I evaluate whether I think it does this well enough to include it in the magazine. I have to add, though, as a person who’s drawn to artistic collaborations, I get an extra thrill when a collaborative piece makes it into the magazine. As writers, we don’t undertake collaborative projects as much as artists in other fields do, and because of this, I try to do all I can to make collaborative work visible.  

CK: It doesn’t change. When submissions arrive, either single-or-collaboratively authored, cover letters are shuffled to the very back of the batch. So, at Denver Quarterly, we never knew a poem’s authorial origins, and I really liked that process. I found it to be more intimate, in a way, to greet poems without mediation. At times, while reading, I could sense the presence of more than one voice. Sometimes that resulted in the discovery of collaborative work. Sometimes not. Through this process, where the voices, presences and authors of a poem only occasionally aligned, I came to see the division between collaborators as more and more porous. And, I think I can speak for my former Denver Quarterly editors, that collaborative work was something we found really compelling, as we did other kinds of hybrid work.

JLD: I’m not sure that the process changes at all. I’m meeting the work where it’s at and where it’s trying to be and investigate the work from there. I suppose one unique concern is in the blending of voices. Are they writers working together well, if the distinctions are noticeable? I also am especially excited with the submission of collaborative works and wish I’d see more of them.

KMD:  Does your definition of collaboration encompass work by writers and visual artists, writers and composers, or collaborative teams working in emerging genres?  Relatedly, can you speak about the decision to narrow your definition of collaboration, if applicable?

TT: It's all collaboration to me. I come from a background as a musician, writing music and playing professionally in bands when I was younger, and now doing the same as a serious hobby. In bands, you see the results palpably—and hear the results loudly—when you’ve negotiated and compromised and essentially collaged everyone’s strengths into the tapestry that is the song. For me, the same principle applies for collaborative writing or collaborations between writers and composers or writers and visual artists. I also see working with an editor as a collaborative act—the editor is another set of eyes and ears who can give you valuable feedback you can’t always get from the voices in your head. Even my own singular pieces of writing are “collaborative” if you consider that I pass along drafts of new poems to my closest poet-friends for their feedback. I can point to almost every poem of mine and show where it benefited from something added or subtracted by a friend in a critique group—and this, for me, makes the seemingly solitary process of compositing a single-author text a collaborative act.

CK: Absolutely. I think predetermining or pre-defining collaborative work as between like writers or artists has to be detrimental, in some way, to the kind of spirit, intention, practice, process and exploration of collaborative work that makes it so exciting. I also think collaborative work doesn’t necessarily need to be equal in the amount of contribution. One of my favorite poems, Peter Gizzi’s “Beginning with a Line by Simone Weil,” is collaborative, I think, even though it’s almost completely his language. Then there’s Lauren Haldeman’s video poems, a few of which were in an issue of Tupelo Quarterly last year. She wrote, illustrated, produced, composed and filmed each piece in a way that is self-collaborative. Gizzi and Haldeman have expanded my understanding of what collaborative art is, so I’m always interested in whatever new manifestation/variation on the collaborative comes my way from writers and artists across all genres and media.  

JLD: I think the collaborative work is a malleable, shifting thing. As with what has been said, collaborations work on a variety of levels. In a novel-in-progress, I borrow a first line from Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins. This is collaboration, in a sense. I’m also finishing a book with Jill Talbot and our process is collaboration, but it’s also a call-and-response. We write sections separately and in response to each other. Sometimes, we’ve only decided on a focus or a theme and we work independently. But, when we start the response, there is always a collaborative blending. I am writing to Jill and there’s a way the styles sort of meet each other at a specific place.

KMD:  From a publisher’s perspective, what are the advantages of publishing collaborative work?

TT: You’re communicating to the reader that this text was the product of an explicit dialogic exchange among artists. It puts the collaborative work in a different space—gives it a different textual/vocal/performative register for readers to respond to. When I read collaborative work, I hear it spoken or performed in my head in multiple voices, even if it is supposed to read on the page as a fictive single voice.