Dante Di Stefano: In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988 John Ashbery wrote: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” Considering the efflorescence of political poetry right now, and your own background as a union organizer involved in direct political action, could you begin the interview by riffing on Ashbery’s quote and its relevance to the political poetry being written in the Trump Era?
Joe Weil: I think a lot of political poetry preaches to the already converted, but in that sense it is as vital a trope as carpe diem is, or as vital as an elegy for a recently deceased poem might be. That might make political poetry seem dangerously close to a conventional form or rather formula (lots of rhetorical devices including anaphora, lots of listing and enumerating, the use of invective, the inserting of a We and a Them, and so on). But when Political poetry fails, like when most poetry fails, it fails in the way its puts lines and nouns and verbs together. It does not fail intrinsically because it is political poetry. There is nothing innately wrong or inferior about political poetry. Much of the world’s best poetry is political... Blake’s Chimney Sweeper poem (the one in the Experience section) succeeds both as a political poem, but also as a powerful poem about the suffering of child laborers. Its words are so well chosen and so chilling. It is as great a poem as Goya’s “Saturn Eating his Children” is a painting. Most of the poems we love by the romantics were deeply political. Time has blurred the causes, but left the images and the main ideas of freedom and newness vivid. Political poetry might be considered tacky or obvious, but it surprises me Ashbery didn’t take to it, since he often liked traipsing the thin line between the sublime and the tacky, the lyrical and the obvious (he loved playing with cliché) . One of his poems ends with: “Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulations.” That ominous declaration rings politically true at this moment in time though the poem was written in the 1950’s. Political poetry, when it is good, continues to have many lives and uses. It transcends its moment and exceeds its own cause. Done well, it is both anciently sudden and suddenly ancient. It does not date
DD: In the “Pre-Rambles,” or introductory essays, to the first two issues of Shrew you lay out some guidelines for the magazine. I’m most interested in your idea of a “pre-standard” aesthetic, a concept that I think connects to another idea you’ve written about, a “Eucharistic vision” of poetry and the world. Could you unpack these concepts for us?
JW: If you start with “Standards” you’re already publishing poems that fit a mold. The mold may not be precise or even visible, but it’s there. The editor is imposing his or her “ur” poem on every poem that passes through. In a "pre-standard" idea of publishing, you find people willing to enter. So you find poets rather than poems and you say: Hey buddy, got a poem for me?” The magazine is not based on excluding the many to pick the few. I always thought this was too much like the cool bouncer at a disco saying who can and who can’t get through the door. Most of the time the criteria run along these lines:
Poet A writes a poem about the color blue. It gets rejected. Poet B, a widely known poet writes a poem about Blue, it not only gets accepted, but the editor brags about having Poet B in the mag. Let’s say both were of equal quality: well, then, the true standard was not quality, but hierarchy.
When I started this Shrew, I asked friends whose work I liked to send me something. They sent it and I published it, and I also did the same with the art. “Pre-standard” does not mean an absence of standards. Rather, it means “toward a standard.” You start with people of good faith, friends or at least poets you’ve met under good circumstances, and you ask them to join you. Free play eventually finds the rules, but the rules can never find free play. So, I begin with free play. And yes, it is part of my idea of Eucharistic reality, of being part of a body where all are welcome to enter. It’s strange because, if you give people free play, they start creating their own standards, often far more exciting and interesting standards than you, yourself, would have imposed. I hate snobbery. I think it is the source of all race and class and gender hatred. So death to snobs. But there is something that is a healthy snobbery: you don’t let those who like to play the bouncer at the disco in. They might create a room full of beautiful people, but who knows if that’s really the best room for a party?
DD: Part of what makes Shrew so dynamic and vital is that it champions, both implicitly and explicitly, the overlooked, the broken, and what I’ve heard you call the “motley,” that is, what Hopkins would call “dappled things.” Could you talk a little bit about poetry and all things counter, original, spare, strange?
JW: I love comic poetry, and by that, I mean something different than just Billy Collins. I mean work with the fool’s cap, with the touch of Harlequin, with deep sadness to the comedy so that you know the clown is dancing on the edge of a steep cliff and the banana peels are flying off to meet him and to kill him.. I love poetry, also, that can laugh at itself, that breaks the 4th wall. I also revere poets like Vallejo who I know was the poet equivalent of someone who lived his art so intensely that he became the Shema—as did Emily Dickinson. I know he is not the greatest of all Spanish poets, but my favorite poet in Spanish is Miguel Hernandez, who I first read when I was 18 and everyone in my family was dying. His fierce love and integrity destroyed me—in the best way. He broke me down. I love May Swenson, especially her sex poems. Wanda Coleman is a poet I return to as well as Wallace Stevens, Bob Kaufman, Williams, and Whitman, also Carolyn Kizer, Maggie Nelson. I’m very motley in my tastes. I might read a sonnet by Milton, a sonnet by Wanda Coleman, King Lear, and funny poems by the California poet Ronald Koertge, all in one day. Why not? I like the magazine to go in many different directions. I always liked the idea of motley. When I was very little, I always dyed all my Easter eggs every color so that they came out a sort of sloppy brown, but if you looked close enough, if you put your eyeball right up against the egg, all the colors were still in there, and they were like some beautiful brawl of colors—all swirling around and through each other. I think I’m still that way. The sheer mess of it all delights me.
DD: Maria, tell us about your experience as Guest Editor for Shrew.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Guest Editor, Shrew Issue 10: I Love Shrew because the design of the journal is beautifully clear and clean. I really like the layout and the combination of poetry and art. I love the Pre-Ramble and the way it gives each editor a chance to frame the issue and to contextualize the work chosen. I am thrilled with Shrew’s combination of poetry and art. I think the art opens the poems up to another way of seeing and feeling. For me, I feel uplifted by the combination. In short, Joe Weil’s concept for Shrew is brilliant.
DD: Tommy, what made you want to help Joe Weil develop Shrew?
Tommy Stella, Managing Editor, Shrew: I’ve helped Joe with a few projects in the past and I’ve always enjoyed every single one of them. One day I logged into Facebook and saw a status update that Joe made talking about how tired he was of magazines and how he was going to start his own magazine that celebrates writers and writing, etc etc sic sic sic. I immediately messaged him and asked what he needed.
DD: How is what Shrew is doing different from other journals are doing?
TS: The goal of Shrew is to combine what I’ve learned from working for various online newsletters and social media accounts with Joe’s knowledge of the poetry/magazine world (combined with Colleen Curry’s fantastic design). Our current goal is to make a product that is accessible to poetry initiates and to general readers. The beauty of Shrew is that everything is meticulously designed. We are completely open to every single writer who submits to us. And we mean that.
DD: Colleen, what motivated you to take on the task of designing an online literary magazine?
Colleen Curry, Graphic Designer, Shrew: Joe was my poetry professor in college. When I heard that he was looking to start a digital zine and that nobody had stepped into the role of designer yet, I volunteered. I have a lot of respect for the poems Shrew publishes and strive to showcase them in a way that is unique, timeless, and never takes itself too seriously.
DD: What do you see Shrew as providing that differs from other current online zines?
CC: Shrew is a platform first and a magazine second. It's founded on the idea that poets thrive in a network. All of Shrew’s strength lies in the insight of its contributors and the thought put in by Joe and other guest editors to anthologize a theme, practice, or place and to start a dialogue which can then continue online, sometimes in a future issue.
DD: How, as the designer, would you describe the look of Shrew?
CC: It’s punchy and that’s deliberate; I wanted to approach Shrew as a brand. Publishing is a turbulent industry, always in flux, and the way we consume media is constantly changing. I want Shrew to be able to keep up with that, so everything from the magazine itself to our website and social media is grounded in a few simple, highly adaptable design elements. (Yes, it's a lot of red.)
DD: Joe, you have also published several books by other poets under the imprint of Cat in the Sun Press. Could you talk about that press and the books you’ve published there?
JW: I first published my former student Micah Towery because Micah had been so vital to my life early on at Binghamton University. He had helped set me up with a mic so that I could do my Joe Weil morning poem show which appeared on Facebook and had over 600 members at one time—including the poets Dorothy Laux, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Patricia Smith. Then Micah and my former student Adam Fitzgerald set up THETHEPOETRY.com which was initially a platform for my rants and essays, but which we opened up to many young poets and writers who later became far more famous than I. Micah did so much and I did his book Whale of Desire, which I love. Then, my wife Emily and I asked Micah to come on board and he is really the one who makes the press possible, but we published a book of poetry and art by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, which Emily spent a great deal of time editing, and we did several other books, including a book of essays by Alfred Corn, which Micah edited and put together. We run it this way: I have the book put together, edited and designed, and then it is put on print on demand, and the poet keeps all profits from the book. I don’t get a dime, not even a percentage. So the poet maintains control of his or her art. I think it works best that way. Maria claims it gave her a whole new part time career as a painter because people started buying her paintings when they saw the book. Before this, I was involved in creating Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. I like creating presses and zines, but then I tend to run away after they get established. I like inciting things and then getting out of town before it becomes boring.
DD: You are married to a talented poet, Emily Vogel. How has being married to her changed your relationship with poetry and writing?
JW: I’m a devout malpracticing Catholic. Marrying Emily is my means toward not being damned to hell. It’s my vocation. It’s a sacramental marriage and I know this is going to get me jeers in some quarters, but, hey, it’s the cultural belief of my Irish Catholic ancestors. Before we had kids, Emily and I would wake up, kiss, get dressed, have some breakfast, then go to separate floors of the house we rented and write all day. We’d meet again in the evening, watch a movie, fall asleep and get up to do it all over again. Emily also painted, so there was a lot of paint on the floor. I play piano, guitar and several other instruments. So we were always doing our art. We started doing gigs together and then we also sang and played music with the readings. Eventually, we wrote a book together called West of Home, a book of responsorials, which ended up as a play produced by the Wombat Theater company at KGB Bar in 2013 (or it may have been 2014). We’ve done a lot of interesting things, but now we have two children, both on the autistic spectrum. Their presence in our lives, and our love for them, has re-shaped everything. They broke three of my guitars and I finally decided this was a message from God (I don’t play guitar that much anymore). Emily is a fantastic poet who doesn’t always get involved in my projects. She has her own, including being poetry editor of Ragazine, As for as my relationship to poetry, poetry was always my secret imaginary friend who came from the other side of the universe through the tiny holes in a screen door. Poetry still comes to visit me. Being married to Emily and loving my children has made those visits even more welcomed and necessary. I write more poems about being a father now. Can’t help it. They’re more surreal and more conversationally lyric than my former narrative poems. So I’ve changed, but not on purpose. I don’t know what the changes will amount to yet.
DD: How have your young children changed your understanding of poetry?
JW: I am sixty. I do everything far too late in life. My children arrived when I was 54 and then 55. They are on the spectrum and largely non-verbal. They present challenges that I already experienced by having an older brother who had suffered damage to his brain, had a hemispheral removal that didn’t stop his convulsions, and eventually ended up blind and paralyzed. I like to fool myself that I got a training in love and caretaking from my brother that will help me with my kids, but that’s not so. I have never experienced a love as fierce as I feel for my children. Trying to explain it would be a catastrophic failure. They are going to be six and five and still are not potty trained. I joke and sing and talk to my wife while cleaning the poop from their legs. When Gabriel can’t sleep and is stimming (a term in autism meaning self-soothing movements) I stay up all night and try everything I know to comfort him and help him sleep. Clare has lively conversation with objects and qualities of light, and shadows. She is in a world I wish I could visit, just to love and understand her more. My children have affirmed for me that love is the only impossible thing I will ever accomplish. I love them. I wipe the poop from , the world where people think they understand autism because they watched a movie once. How do you explain that love crushes you into something you never intended, but that’s okay? You can’t. It sounds trite. Everything I say about my children sounds trite. Perhaps someday I will be able to say one thing that seems to me to be absolutely accurate and worth saying.
DD: What is one thing American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?
JW: I think American poetry needs more listeners, people who don’t want to be poets so much as read or go to readings. The trend in all the arts is that everyone in the audience is also in the business. That’s like LA where everyone might have done some acting or knows producers or would-be directors. Maybe this is good and I don’t want it to change too much, but I think, overall, it makes me worry about this all being solipsistic. I think American poetry needs more ways for poets to come up. Right now, there’s the academic MFA, or there’s the spoken word route. Both are limited, and as they gain power, both create false binaries and are too rigid a frame. I began reading in bars. I was spoken word in that sense and still am, but I don’t do the formulas. I don’t read with slam voice or with that slightly fry voice, little question at the end some academics use. There are affectations I’d like to see less of. I’d like to see more ways to succeed, more small grass roots community readings. I’d like to see funds for small readings all through the country and I’d like those funds to be administered by the hosts of series, so a poet who wrote a book could actually go around and get paid—and be a local force. I had an idea for a poetry union with a gauntlet of readings all tied together in a loose affiliation, a sort of circuit. They do it in slam and they do it in academia (but unofficially). The presses could be acknowledged by certain series and their poets sent out to tour for, say, a modest 200 a reading. I’d love to see book carousels at every series with the local mags and latest books and chaps in the carousels. I’m not holding my breath.
DD: I heard you’ve been writing bird poems lately. If the following poets were birds what kind of birds would they be? Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Schuyler, & Joe Salerno.
JW: Wallace Stevens: Plump shrike, wonderful at what he does, but rarified and sometimes cruel.
William Carlos Williams: Sparrow would be too obvious, probably more one of those parrots or canaries that have survived in cold places by living near electric stations and hot boxes.
Gertrude Stein: A noble Ostrich.
Charles Olson: A very grave, but kindly Stork.
Ezra Pound: A parrot in an old Edwardian house crying: “crack, crack! Thy winter winds! Bah!!!”
Emily Dickinson: Definitely a hermit thrush singing from a rare perch on a clothesline at dusk.
Gwendolyn Brooks: A blue jay, someone who loved taking beautiful things to her nest, but could also drop an acorn with great precision from a hundred feet of sky to hit the bullseye of some idiot’s head.
James Schuyler: A beautiful pine warbler. I love his flower poems.
Joe Salerno: Ah, my dear friend Joe. Joe liked boat-tailed grackles. He loved the iridescence in their feathers. He would be a boat-tailed grackle, but one which, if he heard a child crying, would come over and gently begin to sing.
DD: Your friend, the late Joe Salerno, deserves a much wider audience than he has had. That he has had any posthumous audience at all is largely because of your efforts, which involved, among other things, publishing his book, Only Here. Could you discuss his importance to you as a poet and as a friend?
JW: My efforts were certainly not alone. The poet Sander Zulauf did far more of the heavy lifting and Salerno’s family did far more to keep his legacy alive. I help because I loved him, miss him, and I purchased so many copies of his book that I can still give one every year to a student I think will love his work. I helped because he was damned good as a poet and because I loved him, because he may have been the best human being I ever met. As a poet, everyone at the local New Jersey readings became attentive the second he stood up to read. We all loved his poetry. He’d won the Hopwood Award at Michigan, but you’d never know it. He never told anyone about his degrees in philosophy and the workshops he attended at Michigan where he more than held his own with Gregory Orr, Les Josephs and Jane Kenyon. He quit poetry for many years to raise his kids. I met him when he was forty and just getting back into the scene. We became friends naturally and by accident. We always went to readings together and he often drove me there and back because I didn’t always have a car. For months after he died, I could still feel his presence in a car, his denim or his flannel shirt beside me. He left an actual physical life behind him wherever he went. A new poem by Joe was an occasion. Then, the way he listened! He’d quote back lines from poets who were reading for the first time, encourage them, become their mentor in about ten seconds.
DD: I’d like to end with a poem by Joe Salerno, the title poem from Only Here.
Only Here
I wake
Holding the blue piece
Of a dream. And lying still
On the cloudy pillow,
Before the day’s first word
Spreads meaning out over the world,
I let the morning rain
Be all I am.
And in the slender
Stone-colored light, the ordinary
Promises of my life are made again,
Attaching themselves silkenly
Like rain to the window
Or my car glazed like a white rose
In the driveway.
And the dream
Now cold, blows away
Like history, my wife
Stirring beside me, the feathery touch
Of our first child turning
In her widening belly. Downstairs
The kitchen waits. There is nothing
To decide. Everything asleep
Is about to awake, the day
Set like a mighty clock
In the silence.
Opening our eyes,
We lift the world; the universe
Tossed like rain from the tips
Of our lashes. Only here
Our ordinary eyes learn to find eternity—
There is nothing else. The luster
Is the plainness we walk in;
This poverty we rise to
At the end of dreaming—
The sacrament each day
Of our feet touching
The floor.
Joe Weil is an assistant professor at Binghamton University. His reviews, essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He has four full-length collections of poetry; his latest collection of poems is A Night in Duluth, published by NYQ Books. In 2013, he was the recipient of the People's Poetry Award by Partisan Press. Joe Weil co-founded Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. He has since created Cat in the Sun books with his wife Emily Vogel. He is the Editor in Chief of Shrew. Having grown up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Weil now lives in Binghamton with Emily and two small children, Clare and Gabriel.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007). She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010), The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012), The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica, 2013). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.
Tommy Stella is a writer who earned his MA in English from Binghamton University. His recent comic book, I Think It Will Be Okay, is available to read on his website. He is a writer for Need2Know, Daily Pnut, Headlines and Heroes, and The Lunch Read. He also does book PR at Wunderkind PR and is the assistant to author Charles Soule.
Colleen Curry is a New York-based writer as well as a self-taught designer and artist. She is a graduate of Binghamton University.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.
Well-done. Great poet-as-birds section. (I have thought of associating poets with hats.)The opening exchange is superb. I happen to agree with Ashbery regarding political poetry, most defenses of which are lame. The comparison of political poetry to carpe diem is delightful, not merely because unexpected and valuable as a kind of metaphysical conceit. Much (most) political poetry fails because the language is stale, the substance prepackaged, etc. The poems written by soldiers on the front, in danger, are something else entirely -- real experience informs the writing. I am rambling but did want to add one problem, and that has to do with the perceived correctness of the views a political poem may express. Thus there is an additional criterion that the category requires. (With carpe diem poems perhaps should we ask ourselves how effective each may be in achieving its specific goal? Probably not.) But then it's hard to imagine a beautiful poem that happens to be imbued with the ideals of the Third Reich.Lastly, the category itself: is Tennyson's "Ulysses" a political poem? Anyway. . .thanks! -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | December 01, 2018 at 12:53 PM