[N.B. The following interview with editor, Alexander Pepple, and poet, Susan de Sola, was conducted by Dante Di Stefano.]
Alexander, could you say a few words about Susan de Sola’s new collection Frozen Charlotte?
Alexander Pepple: Susan is someone I was quite familiar with, a long while earlier, through her participation at Eratosphere—Able Muse’s online literary workshop—where I was always impressed with the quality of the poems she posted, and her incisive critiques, not to mention the stream of accolades and publication credits she continued to garner. Along the way, she also became a fine assistant poetry editor at the literary journal, Able Muse, print edition. Even with that level of acquaintance of her and her craft, I was stunned by the range of talent she displayed in the Frozen Charlotte manuscript when she eventually submitted it to the press. It’s a richly diverse collection of the serious and the light, the personal and the universal, of landscapes and people and animals, of heartbreak and ecstasy, of the sensual and the tragic. And I could on. One of the astounding aspects of the book is how well she was able to fuse all these elements into a cohesive and engaging wholeness—in the progression, the tension, the surprises, and the fun. And I haven’t even broached the technical prowess on display in the many poetic styles from free verse to blank verse, to sonnets, shape poems, ghazals, list poems, nonce forms, and more. It’s gratifying that several reviewers from journals such as Agni (“Lucidity unites the book’s poems”), Light (“This book will change with the light each time you read it. There is humor in the monumentally sad poems and pointed meaning in the funny ones”), Art Fuse (“In Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola provides readers with enough aesthetic pleasure and thoughtful commentary about today’s world to remind us of just how good—and necessary—poetry can be”), and other reviews have recognized and praised elements of Frozen Charlotte that won me over in accepting and publishing it. Frozen Charlotte not only enchants and enlightens, but also entertains.
Susan de Sola
Susan, how has living in Europe affected your poetry (besides proving the setting for several of the poems in Frozen Charlotte)?
Susan de Sola: Living abroad alters your perception of America. The changes seem more startling—you are removed from the gradualism of everyday life. You miss out on local action, and also local political satire and its therapeutic effects. I find myself writing and publishing topical verse in response to events at home. Daily life in the medium of another language changes your relationship to English. It estranges and intensifies it. But not hearing your native language also impedes certain avenues of memory. Sometimes I encounter a word I haven’t heard used in many years, and it fairly resounds in my ears. “gubernatorial, tush, deciduous”… to just name a few.
In this collection, you have a beautiful poem about North by Northwest, another about Bringing Up Baby, and a third that references Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby while discussing the early twentieth century Jewish American immigrant experience. How has cinema influenced you as a poet?
Susan de Sola: Cinema is hard to write about. It has the stillness and completion of something finished, but literally “moves.” How do you write about a story in motion? Can you assume your reader knows it? I’m intrigued by the disjunction between the sets of ideals promulgated by early Hollywood and the realities off-set, and also by how a medium may be so central and accessible, and yet so evanescent—much of its early history is already forgotten. I’ve recently written a number of poems about this, the group provisionally titled, “Messy Lives.”
Many of your poems unfold in dialogue with the work of poets and artists, ranging from Vermeer to Delmore Schwartz.
Susan de Sola: The best poems, paintings and pieces of music keep their mysteries, you never get to the end of them, and yet, they are touching remnants of something deeply human that has vanished. A poem may converse with them—or try to. It’s a conversation between the past and the present, and the present and the future. Animals (who don’t make art as humans do) also figure in a great many poems. I love animals and am fascinated by them, and by the often absurd encounters of the human and the animal. In this book, whales, crickets, Bactrians and piglets, among others, have their poems.
Images of stasis recur throughout the collection. The title poem invokes a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational. There are also many gestures toward a stillness beyond stasis scattered throughout Frozen Charlotte. It occurred to my while reading your poem, “The Cornell Boxes” that there was a metapoetics revolving around immobility at the center of this book; the poet might be “a carpenter of glass, an architect of stasis.” However, the stasis is gestational; eventually, something will bloom or explode from the motionless. You might similarly see the poet as a collector of “loot stolen from random scavenges, feverish clippings, flat taxonomies of / birds and beings…” Do you see poems as Cornell boxes? Could you riff a bit on this idea?
Susan de Sola: When I first discovered the nineteenth-century Frozen Charlotte ballads and lore, I was haunted by the doll which later became associated with her frozen corpse. Our relationship to death is so different today. The doll speaks the poem through me and I myself still find the poem unnerving. So, I think some of my impulse is historical. What was the past? Or pasts, as the collection is wide-ranging. But the past, although it seems immobile, doesn’t stay put—as you formulate so well: “something will bloom or explode.”
Sometimes the explosion is comic, sometimes tragic, and most often, some amalgam of the two. Another thing that might be part of the “poet as a collector” is variety. I love the idea of a poem as a Cornell box. Frozen Charlotte has a great variety of subjects, modes and styles. A poem itself is not static but it is generally a small structure. It is read in time, and it is at every turn in some way anticipating its imminent end. Perhaps this is another counterpart to “a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational.”
“Shrine for 16” uses the structure of Jubilate Agno as it describes a collection of objects on a teenage boy’s bureau. Can you discuss the importance of Christopher Smart to you? Who are some other poets whose work you love most?
Susan de Sola: I think, like many, I am drawn to Smart because there is a great deal of wit and quotidian matter in his poetry alongside great spirituality. A cat, in all its marvelous and familiar wonder, is sketched in the majestic rhythms of the King James Bible. When I contemplated a 16 year old boy’s (my son’s) collection of treasures, I wrote about contemporary objects, but I can see that “Shrine for 16” is touched with similarly elevated but affectionate cadences: “For he has scattered a profusion of pot pipes… For his key ring bears the ancient profile of the Playboy bunny... For he waxes manly and grows boyish./For he grows.”
The writers I love most include the James Joyce of Ulysses, about which I’ve published several essays. It’s a novel, but one unmatched in its exploratory, concentrated language; its sounding of depths with humor. The poets I most often return to are Milton, Herrick, Dickinson, Yeats, Brodsky, Rilke, and the singular Marianne Moore. And I love writing that straddles the comic and the tragic—Shakespeare above all.
Susan, can you give us a poem from Frozen Charlotte to end this portion of the interview?
Susan de Sola: This is a love poem, and it flowed out nearly complete, but at the time I had read recently John Berger’s assertions in Ways of Looking that a central male nude has been fairly unthinkable in Western art, which favors the male spectator or gaze and the female object. He wrote that if we tried to imagine classic female nudes (by say, Titian or Manet) replaced by a central nude male figure, the results would do violence not to the paintings but to our assumptions. I think perhaps I wanted to take up the challenge. There are very few poems, too, that praise and make central the nude male body.
Blind, She Considers Her Lover
Six blind Indians felt the elephant
and made of it six entities.
So is my love, for in the dark,
where half a marriage is spent,
you are many.
First there is that silky fringe
of frontward falling hair—
you are a horse, fetchingly groomed.
You shake your head and your forelock falls
forward, steed.
Then there are your collarbones which roll,
like the bone of shells rolled by water
collected in pebbles and driftwood and weed—
you are shells on a beach,
resting in kelp-hollows.
Then the smooth skin of your back
and chest, it sings with softness.
You are bolts and drapes of some rich fabric,
organic weave of silk to velvet—
yes, you are a draper’s treasure.
Lower, there is warmth, and coils, springs;
countless corkscrews of millimeter breadth.
I would guess a fine steel wool,
its gauge innumerable zeros.
The legs are sturdy, lightly forested,
surely they are lichened logs.
Yet between the moss and the steel,
the strangest skin, unlike any other,
stretched, nerve-rich, another color.
Even if I were a blind Indian I’d know it;
it is itself, it is not like another.
Alexander, how did Able Muse Press come into being?
Alexander Pepple: I’d say that moving the first incarnation of the literary journal, Able Muse—a review of poetry, prose, and art, from an online-only publication to a print format with online excerpts, was a primary catalyst for Able Muse Press coming into being. The literary journal, which had been hitherto an online-only journal, released the Volta Issue, Number 9, in summer 2010. That issue was a significant milestone as the very last online edition. From there, we embarked on the challenge of moving the journal to print. Indeed, we were sort of going against the grain since there was more of a mass exodus at the time: with several print journals, both the lesser known and the popular, turning off their printers and moving their releases to online only.
Essentially, the press started with two critical titles, released near concurrently: the inaugural issue of Able Muse, print edition, in winter 2010; and the Able Muse Anthology (with a long subtitle of best of the poetry, fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry translation, art & photography, reflecting what is encompassed in a typical issue of Able Muse). Right after, we released poetry collections from two wonderful poets: Catherine Chandler with Lines of Flight and Wendy Videlock with Nevertheless. And the rest just took off from there.
What is the relationship between the press, the literary journal, and the online community of Eratosphere and related blogs?
Alex Pepple: Eratosphere and the literary journal have a close history based on a shared raison d’être. At the time, there was a dearth of journals accepting and publishing metrical poetry and a plethora of those committed to free verse only. This was a time when I was participating rather actively in online literary discussion forums. Given that state of affairs, I wanted to provide some outlet and hope to the metrical poets, by somehow counterbalancing that trend with an avenue that primarily focused on metrical poetry. However, I decided that we should still be careful to welcome the outstanding free verse submitted, since I did not want to reflect the reverse of the then prevailing status quo. In those days—late 1999 to early 2000—personal websites were not as commonplace as they are now. One had to essentially design them from scratch or through a website design company, which was, more often than not, tasking in time and skill, not to mention financially. There was none of today’s proliferation of appliance-style click-and-publish free web services for the masses such as Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress and the like. However, I did have an advantage—the technical knowhow and the facility with website creation. Thus, I was able to construct fairly quickly a forum website that stood out from most of the offering of the time in its aesthetics, ease of use, and convenience. With that, Eratosphere came into being, rapidly attracting a good number of members. Right after, I leveraged the work I’d done toward releasing Eratosphere, and the result was the Able Muse website, primed and ready for the release of the first online edition, Able Muse, Première Issue, autumn 1999.
There has been a shift in the literary landscape since that early history of Able Muse and Eratosphere, given that most journals out there now do allow metrical poetry to some degree . . . at least infrequently. I’d like to think that Able Muse has had a hand in encouraging that openness, both in terms of providing a platform for some of the best metrical poetry written today, and in terms of heightening the craft in that arena through the Eratosphere online literary workshop. The high selectivity of the material published at the literary journal, some of which was occasionally plucked from Eratosphere, has also raised expectations for the quality of metrical work in general, one hopes. The high level of the metrical poetry published in Able Muse is evidenced in the fact the poems from the journal have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology series, in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, the Writer’s Almanac, and other popular venues.
The Able Muse annual contests encompass the journal and the press in that the winners of the Able Muse Write Prize for poetry and fiction, in addition to the contest’s monetary prize, also earn publication by the journal; and the winner of the Able Muse Book Award likewise achieves publication of their manuscript by the press in addition to the contest’s monetary award.
Some of it may sound confusing, but remember, if you mistakenly send communication intended for one of our entities to any of the others, we’ll slip it in the correct slot for you without your having to intervene or make any self-corrections.
Tell us about the Able Muse back catalog. What do Able Muse books have in common?
Alexander Pepple: Our catalog contains mostly poetry collections, a few fiction collections, and fewer novels. I should add that there’s also Word Galaxy Press now, which is an imprint of Able Muse Press. It’s more flexible in terms of the styles and the execution of the poetry and fiction accepted there versus at Able Muse Press proper, which is more stringent in its requirements. There’s our bigger list of more or less regular poetry collections—such as the posthumous poetry collection Character Shoes from Kate Light and that of the late British poet Margaret Ann Griffiths, Grasshopper, and the recent poetry collections: Indigenous by Jennifer Reeser, And After All by Rhina P. Espaillat, The Cupped Field (winner of the 2018 Able Muse Book Award) by Deirdre O’Connor, Time Is Always Now by Rebecca Starks (a finalist in the 2018 Able Muse Book Award), Saint Worm by Hailey Leithauser, and more.
We also have a smaller set of rather unique collections, illustrated and otherwise. These include a collection of poems by Ed Shacklee illustrated by Russ Spitkovsky (The Blind Loon: A Bestiary), a self-illustrated poetry collection by Wendy Videlock (The Dark Gnu and Other Poems), a collection of carmina figurata from Jan D. Hodge (Taking Shape: Carmina Figurata); there’s a book of selected poems from Emily Grosholz (The Stars of Earth, through Word Galaxy Press); there are fiction collections from Hollis Seamon (Corporeality: Stories), from William Baer (Times Square and Other Stories), and from A.G. Harmon (Some Bore Gifts: Stories); we have a novel series from William Baer (New Jersey Noir); and there are books of translation of classic poetry by John Ridland: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Modern English Translation and Pearl: A New Verse Translation in Modern English, both originally in Middle English by the anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain Poet; and I'm particularly proud of our anthology of translations, which was in the form of a special translation issue of the literary journal, guest-edited by acclaimed poet and translator Charles Martin: Able Muse, Translation Anthology Issue, Summer 2014 (No. 17—Print Edition). And there’s the book that started it all in 2010, the Able Muse Anthology.
Yes, we do have a diverse collection of books, but they have commonality in the exacting copyediting standards, for which we’ve been commended by several knowing readers, and for which the press itself has been honored with awards. There is also consistency in the high level of design for our books, made manifest in the high-impact book covers with a minimal-style presentation, as well as a consistent look of the interior, cutting down on frill and clutter for an engaging read with minimal distraction.
Another commonality for our books is that we’re not only highly selective about the manuscripts that we choose to publish—and thus, end up only publishing the very small number of books that meet our standards—but we also lavish much attention on their copyediting and design, resulting in books of a quality comparable to or better than those of any press out there, large or small. Hence, in just in a few years of operation, Able Muse Press has garnered some impressive recognition, including the following: One of the only two books we published in the first year was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and the other was shortlisted for the Poet’s Prize. Since then, our books have won the following honors: the Gold Medal for the Independent Publisher Outstanding Book Award, the Peace Corps Writers Best Book Award; finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award (multiple times); shortlist for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Alex Award; finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ Best Book of the Year; shortlist for the Canada Council for the Arts’ Governor General’s Literary Awards; shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize; Honorable Mention for the Posner Poetry Book Award; Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, which included an award to the press itself for excellence in editing, printing and publishing. All of the above are in addition to placing at least two books yearly in the West Chester Poetry Conference First Book Panel, and garnering several positive reviews or placements in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac, Library Journal, Foreword Reviews and many more. In other words, the press might be small in size, but not in its accomplishment and that of the poets and writers it chooses to publish.
Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from Able Muse Press.
Alexander Pepple: There is Book Two of William Baer’s New Jersey Noir novel series coming out in the next few weeks (late December 2019 to early January 2020). We’re really excited about this second release of the series, as are the fans and readers who enjoyed Book One and are eagerly awaiting the sequel. Of the first book, the five-star review from Foreword Reviews says: “New Jersey Noir introduces an ultracool hometown detective from Paterson, set perfectly in his well-detailed locales. The writing is crisp, sarcastic, wryly funny, steeped in New Jersey lore and anecdotes that add great historical and cultural dimensions to its mystery.” There are the poetry collections In Code by Maryann Corbett and Sally Thomas’s Motherland—a finalist in last year’s Able Muse Book Award contest. This is a collection sparkling with spirituality, moments of transformation, and memorable scenes from the commonplace and everyday life. There are also two notable forthcoming titles from our Word Galaxy Press imprint. The first is Spooky Action at a Distance by David Alpaugh, a collection of double-title poems. Kathleen Lynch says, it “offers readers a cornucopia of delights, complications, and some truly moving insights—all in an intriguing new form of his own invention. Alpaugh’s double-title form shows how two titles can be separate, like two photons miles apart, yet ‘entangled’ in meaning.” The second book from Word Galaxy is one of captivating drawings by James Kochalka, beautifully versified by Sydney Lea—The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy. Also planned for release in the near future are the posthumous collections Selected Poems and The Rule That Liberates: An Expanded Edition—Selected Essays, both by Richard Moore; and Progressions of the Mind, a posthumous collection of poems by David Berman.
Alexander Pepple founded and edits Able Muse and Able Muse Press, and also founded and directs the Eratosphere online worskshop. His poetry and prose have been or will be published in Barrow Street, River Styx, American Arts Quarterly, Light, Think Journal, Euphony, Per Contra, La Petite Zine, San Pedro River Review and elsewhere. He edited the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).
Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press) is her first collection. Her poems have appeared widely, in journals such as The Hudson Review, PN Review and The Dark Horse, and in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2018. The 2018 winner of the Frost Farm Prize, she has also been a finalist for the Autumn House (withdrawn) and Morton Marr poetry prizes, and is a past winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She is a faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference, where she has also been a Poet in Residence, and is Assistant Poetry Editor at Able Muse. She will be a featured poet at the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival.
Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016).
