The Best American Poetry

Lawrence Joseph on "The Great Modern City"

<<<
The Observer and the poet Lawrence Joseph, two Detroiters living in New York, were talking in a café in Battery Park City.

“You asked me about the connection between Detroit and New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “Detroit is the great modern city. And it becomes metaphorically the great industrial city. Céline writes about two cities when he comes to America in Journey to the End of the Night: New York and Detroit. Why? In 1932, when he writes perhaps the first great international novel of the 20th century, why does he choose New York and Detroit? What are your central metaphors internationally in 1932, when you’re going into a Depression? The center of the United States was Detroit and New York.” He slapped the table. “And I’m aware of that. Is Detroit still the center? It doesn’t matter. Detroiters will tell you that it is. And the world seems to think it’s pretty important.”
>>>
For the rest of this New York Observer interview, click here.
From the archive, first posted September 28, 2011.

Poet Spotlight: Kelly Weber [by Emma Bolden]

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

"Brilliant & bright": A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Kristina Marie Darling:  You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art.  How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?   

Hasanthika Sirisena:  I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. 

KMD:  Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.   

HS:  Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic.  I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. 

But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is.  How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.  

Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.  

KMD:  I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you.  What made it memorable?   

HS:  Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel. 

Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)  

KMD:  What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?   

Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly 

Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl 

Kristina Marie Darling:  The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing.  What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?  

Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.  

There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist.  What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? 

JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. 

Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.  

KMD:  Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.  

JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the 

wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.

In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language. 

KMD:  What can poets learn from visual artists?  

JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.   

Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.

KMD:  In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves.  Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry? 

JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.

Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void. 

KMD:  What else are you working on?  What can readers look forward to?

Poet Spotlight: Cynthia Dewi Oka [by Wendy Chen]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen".--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly  

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.

 

Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?

Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period. 

WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer? 

CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns. 

WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’? 

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 4 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

AR: How did you become a poet? What is your process?

DD: First, of course, I was named after a poet. The Commedia played an important role in my family history. My great grandfather brought a copy of it with him when he came to America from Sicily. Poetry was a constant, if muted, presence throughout my childhood. My grandmother loved Frost and Sandberg and Millay. I she would occasionally recite the poems she’d memorized in grade school (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fog,” “First Fig”). My father, who was a postal worker, loved Emily Dickinson, so her books were always around, and I read her at an early age. We also had The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote (I remember reading the poems in the preface to the novel at an early age), The Aeneid, El Cid. My mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and then a secretary when I was growing up, was a great reader too. Both of my parents were extremely religious Roman Catholics (my mother converted from Southern Baptist to Catholic), so there was the poetry of the Bible as well, especially The Book of Job, The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, The Song of Songs. 

I’ve always loved reading, and from grade school on I kept a journal. When I was eighteen, I read Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. That trio of poets made me want to write poetry. I continued to write because I fell so in love with poetry in all its varied forms, and writing it helped me (continues to help me) to be a better reader of it. My writing life will always be subordinate to my reading life.

My process varies from poem to poem, but for the most part now, I come up with an idea, a phrase, a title for
a poem and when I have time, I sit down and write a draft. For most poems, a draft will take about two hours to write and I’m reading aloud and revising as I write. Sometimes, I might begin a poem during my lunch break (I work as a high school English teacher) and then finish it after the last bell rings and before I pick up my daughter from daycare. Then, I might go back to it after the children are asleep or in the morning before work. Usually, I take a poem as far as I can within a few days, reading it aloud and revising it as necessary. Then, I set it aside, and either send it out to magazines or just let it breathe in a word document (I mostly write on the computer). Sometimes, there might be minor revisions from that point until it is published in a book. And even after that, there are lingering questions. For example, in the poem that starts this interview, I’m not happy with the rhythm of the line: “my dear little one. Teach me what the fire.” I think it might be better to change the sentence structure of the poem so that the line reads: “Teach me, my dear little one, what the fire…” If I’m ever lucky enough to have a Selected or Collected poems, I might make that change, but I’m also aware of many poets (Auden comes to mind) who tinkered too much with old poems. I’m no Auden, of course, but I understand the impulse toward endless refinement, and how corrosive that impulse can be.

AR: Your poems take on various forms. Which forms are you most comfortable working with? Do you choose form before writing the poem, or does the poem dictate the form?

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

NA: Thanks for your kind words! I am blushing! Can you give an example of your stanzaic nonce pattern poems?

DD: It’s a fancy way of describing seven syllable per line, five line stanzas, written in a recurring zigzag pattern. Here’s a few stanza from MIDWHISTLE, where I’m invoking William Heyen and ruminating on his Whitmanian and Dickinsonian pedigree:

Sing for us, the dragonfly
            in the arc of an anthem,
the bumblebee zigzagging
                         the sidelines of an empire.
            I praise your Lord Dragonfly,

Bill, & praise the ambition
            it must take to un-Amherst
a clover & a bee from
                       the funerals in a brain,
            from the prairie and its yawp.

NA: I am so impressed. You are a master of many forms!

DD: I don’t think I’ve mastered many forms, but I have certainly tried to (with varying degrees of success). I’ve written hundreds of failed villanelles, thousands of botched haiku, fifty or so unremarkable sestinas, and a rusty old red wheelbarrow  full of ballads, triolets, rondeaus, bops, kwansabas, pantoums, haibun, ghazals, abecedarians, and so on. I have one sestina in Lullaby, and one kwansaba suite and one abecedarian in my second book, but I haven’t mastered any of those forms. Nevertheless, I enjoy working in those forms, especially when I’m thinking about a poem that I love written in that form. It’s so impressive to me when a contemporary poet writes in one of these inherited forms in a way that expands the structure and strengthens the tradition. I think with wonder and admiration of how a poem like Tim Seibles’s “All the Time Blues Villanelle” can go toe to toe with “The Waking” and “One Art” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”

Sometimes, I choose the form before writing the poem. That approach doesn’t often result in a poem I’m willing to send out into the world. I’ll write a sestina, but it will feel forced or academic or less immediately resonant than I want it to be or it’s just not making sense in the way I’d like it to make sense, so I’ll set it aside and never think of it again. Most often though, the form will suggest itself organically as I’m writing. At some point, maybe even within the first few words, I’ll see that this poem wants to effloresce into a sonnet, or this is a prose poem, or this demands quatrains. Then, I will work toward the form by accretion and improvisation and revision-in-the-moment.

My three books of poetry also use form as an organizing principle. Sonnets thread through the books as do prose poems and other poetic structures in much the same way that themes and tropes thread the collections, providing order amid a species of repetition.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews’ lucky numbers are nine and seven. Nine, she says, is navy blue. Seven is red, Victory Red, like her mother’s lipstick when she was a child.

On No Tokens, with Hannah Beresford [by Lauren Hilger]

A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford

 

Lauren Hilger: What is your earliest memory of working with NT poems? 

 

Hannah Beresford: My first submission period with NT, I printed all of the submissions. It was so extra. T Kira literally said, “This is so extra.” What experience I had of an editorial nature was in workshops, and I’d only been in workshops where we distributed hard copies and marked them up by hand. I didn’t know how to get in that mode, to really sink into a poem, through a computer screen. I still feel that way, but am learning restraint. 

 

I am often surprised by how much being an editor–getting behind the scenes of submittable–does not buffer me from the anxiety of submitting, even despite my better judgment. There is so much work we love and have to pass on. Every journal says that, but it really is true! And yet, when those rejects come in my inbox, I lose that context–I feel small again. Does being an editor help you field the trials of being a poet? And if so, help, tell me how!

 

LH: Hah! I have a perverse love for the admin of submitting. I try to maintain the same amount of submissions out at any time. I'm always shocked to receive a personal note or nice rejection, though. It's the moment that breaks (with a human chord) the robotic process I want it to be.

LH: How do you feel about the old adage that one has to read the lit mag before submitting?

 

HB: Sure! In a yes or no sense. Is it a venue for my work, or maybe not so much? If you’re unsure, what have you to lose (unless they charge submission fees)? But, I wouldn’t advise writing toward an aesthetic with a particular venue in mind.

 

LH: I’m wondering, how do you recognize in your own reading that you are gravitating toward a poem? 

 

HB: This is usually a sensory response. My reading or mind’s eye is saturated by a color. That leaves the most lasting impression on me. Then, I experience the poem and its color in a tactile or corporeal way. The metronomic organs have a lot to do with how I experience creative work. Breath, heart rate. And secondarily, the reactive organs. A poem that stays in my mind hasn’t transcended for me. I had a student who would yell “goosies!” when she loved a poem in workshop. We talk about that a lot—whatever you call it. Goosebumps, most often. I don’t know what it is from a scientific standpoint, but when I feel that, I think it’s a response without an outlet. Maybe because it’s a response to something imaginary, or maybe because it’s a response that feels indeterminable, unresolvable. Empathy is unresolvable. Anxiety, fear, desire. Poetry is corporeal, at its genesis, poetry is an art form of and through the body. We experience it mostly on the page now. Maybe I like a poem that knows its roots are in bodies. For a moment it activates and occupies me from some ancient lineage. I’m a grounding rod, and then it’s gone again. Then, right there, is a particular weightlessness. Maybe the relief of feeling hyper-embodied registers like an instant disembodiment. The poem is super-humanizing, then exalting. Yeah, goosies!

 

LH: How soon do you know a piece is asking for you to take it seriously? 

 

HB: In short, it’s a matter of subversion. When a piece continually defies my expectation, I feel most provided for. I hardly ever want to know where I’m going. I want to surrender to the lead, but predictabilities will keep me engaging with the work in a mechanical way. I don’t think a reader can help that; when you see tracks, you follow them. When I feel sure that I can’t get where the piece is going any faster than it will take me there, I’ll resign to the line, or the word, or the page. I want to be humbled, to feel overthrown. 

[No Tokens Issue 9 Cover: Erika Diehl, 2018, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, shot with a Fuji x100]

 

HB: What is a first poem that moved you, and how has your reception changed over the years? 

 

LH:  Bruce Weigl’s "What Saves Us" felt like it had slipped some message under the door for me. As a Catholic kid reading this poem, I kind of fell asleep midway through and thought "yea yea yea okay I know where we're going with this." The end then knocked me out. It still does, in fact, I never remember the end when I bring this poem to mind. I remember the girl, her skirt, the religiosity, but I forget what made me love it: that spooky, unanswerable end!

 

Tell me, how does working as an editor across genre and collections aid in your curating of individual poems as units?

 

HB: I know it isn’t fashionable to prescribe to genre, and I get that. I’m on board. I don’t think there are genre specific limitations. But it would be untrue to say that there are not strengths specific to the differences between how I experience most poems and most prose. (Here, I am permitting an assumption that, more often than not, a prose work exceeds a poetical work in length or volume or time attended to it, per unit.) For example: I love a poem that knows where its ground is but levitates above it. I love that tension, I love that defiance. There is definition, a contour, in the refusal to anchor. To what extent is that kind of suspension above, or resistance to, a grounding plane sustainable in book-length prose? I won’t answer that question. I don’t know! Anything can be done. So, to your question, the more I read and edit and learn across genres, the more I look at a poem and think: here’s an opportunity! I can be pressed to spend more time in this, I can be asked more easily to re-read, I can have more questions in the end. I’m here for it—give me stratums, and coding, and metaphor, give me words to learn and research to be done. A treasure hunt, a Russian doll, the onion—all the clichés. Someone has committed, there’s time to be spent!

 

As an addendum here, it would be negligent to disregard sonics. To me, the sonic quality of a piece overlays or underpins any and every other decision the writer makes. It is a constant accompaniment. It informs everything, but it precludes nothing. Should prose by its nature, regardless of volume or length, be held to any lesser standard of intentionality of sonics than poetry is? Intentionality is key. Should all prose be harmonious, undulating, lyrical, sonorous, or hypotactic? Should all poetry? I want to feel assured that the sonics of a work were a choice; purposeful. Discordance can inform or reinforce meaning or character. Redundancy, imbalance—too. And sometimes, yes, musicality is affecting.

HB: You and I have talked a lot over the years about poetry’s reception in the popular-ish culture. This AWP we talked more specifically about poetry’s reception in the literary culture. If you could speak to any one misconception or have any one thing known about poetry–whether to the greater public, or even amongst writers–what would it be?

 

LH: Poetry threatens everything I think I know sometimes too! And that's okay! Something I say at the beginning of every new class I teach is "you don't have to apologize for not knowing anything about poetry, not being a poet, or hating poetry. You don't have to apologize for being a poet. There is no difference! We're all encountering it together!"

 

How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed? 

 

HB: Maybe it is not so much that we have changed, but our opportunities have broadened. In the beginning, I felt a strong sense of joining the collective of a brilliant masthead. Of course, that is still true—the honor of my life. But more and more, I see NT becoming something of its own as well. More folks have heard of NT and so our slush is more and more dynamic and, honestly, stacked. It’s hit after hit. Our reach as a journal exceeds our individual orbits more and more. There are so many talented people out there. I feel lucky that NT is on the radar of all of our submitters, and more of them every year.

 

What did you expect when you came on board with NT at its very inception? What did NT mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?

 

LH: I met our founding EIC T Kira at MacDowell and first heard about the magazine over breakfast one morning. After I was offered the position, I remember hoping she'd trust me and that I could do a good job. Almost a decade in, I still want to just do as much as I can. Learning from and connecting with contributors means everything to me. 

 

What is your hope for NT's future?

 

HB: I love the young writers and poets prizes so much. I feel like that’s where my heart is. The young poets blew us away! I’d love to see NT grow more on a community level; programming and initiatives that extend beyond the literary world. An inclusive point of accessibility for reading and writing.

[No Tokens cakes along with Poetry Co-Editors Lauren Hilger & Hannah Beresford]

 

On Reverence [by Lauren Hilger]

[a conversation with short story writer and playwright, Abuchi Modilim]

LH: I’ve been thinking about reverence and how to define it for myself. What makes you reverent of some writers (beyond just admiring their work?)

AM: I think reverence should be a personal thing. I revere writers who support emerging writers. I revere writers with great personalities too but the former is what I find most interesting. 

LH: The writers I revere most, I feel like are excavating me from something very dull that keeps me from really seeing. Sometimes that dullness is just getting wrapped up in the day – a lot ushers past me unobserved. If I give myself ten minutes to read a hero, I notice how much I’m ignoring! 

[Esiaba Irobi]

AM: "How much I'm ignoring." It is the phrase. No writer is completely free of this. When I’m not writing, I go back to E. C. Osondu and Wole Soyinka. I like how E.C. Osondu writes. Effortlessly. His writing screams freedom. I read Chigozie Obioma, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Esiaba Irobi, I can't exhaust the names. But undoubtedly, I have read E. C. Osondu more. Wole Soyinka's play 'The Lion And The Jewel' taught me the craft of playwriting. His characters are real. The originality of his poetic dialogue is incomparable. Who are the writers you go back to?

[Lauren, with her copy]

LH: Right now we’re back with Pizarnik, Tranströmer, and Zbigniew Herbert. Do you think you write for the kind of reader you are? 

[Pizarnik's books are treasures]

AM: I write what I would love to read. And I don't have specific readers in mind when I am writing. Writing a good story or play is my foremost obligation when I sit to write. I focus on the form, and not intention. You write for your kind of readers? 

LH: I think I’m writing with the idea of telling a secret, whoever is receiving that is beyond me. What do you find mysterious or unknowable about your own work? Does that change per genre you’re working in?

AM: This question reminded me about the writing workshop facilitated by J.K Anowe at the University of Nigeria. He had asked us to study our writing to find out the spectacular thing about it that we don't know. It was that day that I discovered that I often have a weird character in my writing. I was surprised. I was never aware until after that workshop. And this does not change per genre. You would see this character in my short stories and plays. 

LH: Do you tend to consider your audience as your contemporaries, or do you think about the future? 

AM: First, I consider my contemporaries. I also think about how my work would carry on into the future but I don't let it bother me. Great works would live after the writer is gone. It is not the writer who decides that. The works of William Shakespeare who died in 1616 are still being taught in universities around the world. I use him for this example because of the era in which he wrote. I am sure he was not writing for us then but we are reading him today. 

[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]

 

LH: How did your genres come to you?

AM: The genres I now write short stories and plays came naturally to me. I didn't force them. I wrote poems in my early days of writing. I stopped writing poems to focus on short stories and plays. I don't chew my fingers when I sit and face the screen of my laptop to write a short story or play. And I am currently working on a full-length play that will be published in 2023. Although now, I write poems once in a while and luckily for me good journals accept them. I had entered for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 and made the semi-finalist list. 

I think the literary writer is first a poet. It doesn't matter if they are writing poetry or not. Whichever language the writer chooses to write with, reflects poetry. Have you written other genres before? 

LH: I started as a fiction writer and took a long time to admit I was a poet. I was most afraid and most affected by poetry. There’s no turning around now though, I want to stay here.

Abuchi Modilim is an Igbo-born storyteller and playwright. He is the winner of the 2021 Arojah Students Playwriting Prize. And the curator of Enyo: An Anthology of Contemporary African Plays. His writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, Jellyfish Review, Kalahari Review, Abandon Journal, Samjoko Magazine, and is forthcoming in Native Skin, the State University of New York Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Currently, he is studying English and literary studies with a minor in Theatre and film studies, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 3 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: You said in the first part of this interview series that you collaborate with your wife on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. And that you two have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I’d love to see a sample of what that exhibit looks like?

DD: In our most recent exhibit, which was funded by a grant from the Poetry Foundation, we gave poems to
local artists and had the artists paint, sculpt, or collage a response to the poetry. The poets featured were you, David Lehman, Richard Blanco, Eloisa Amezcua, Christine Kitano, Nicole Santalucia, H.L. Hix, William Heyen, María Isabel Álvarez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Christian Teresi, Leah Umansky, Nicole Santalucia, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, and a few others. My wife also made broadsides of the poem and artwork. We had local elementary school children respond to lines from the poems, as well, and we hung their crayoned responses in the children’s gallery, which is attached to the main gallery at Tioga Arts Council. Posted on the right is Richard Blanco’s “Cloud Anthem” from his most recent collection. The collage/painting was done by the artist, Andrea Kelleher. 

 

NA: You collaborate with other poets, recently with Nicole Santalucia on a collection of Ashbery poems. And I heard that this book, Generations, inspired you to write a long poem in response to William Heyen. I wondered if you could talk a little about those projects and/or poems?

DD: Nicole and I have been collaborating on our Ashbery book for over two years now; the book is a series of epistolary prose poems addressed to John Ashbery. The poems began as letters to each other mediated by the figure of John Ashbery. I’m not sure what the final shape of this project will be, but I’ve enjoyed working on it with Nicole, who is such a dear friend and such a wonderful poet. I feel that I’m always learning from her, and she’s so funny, in her work and in real life. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend (and her wife Deanna Dorangrichia, who is an amazing artist). These friendships were given to me by poetry.

I also wrote a long poem titled MIDWHISTLE, written in stepped septasyllabic cinquains and addressed to Bill Heyen and to my son, Dante Jr., who was unborn when I wrote it. I think it’s safe to say this is the first long poem written simultaneously to an octogenarian and to a fetus.

I’ve always wanted to write a long poem. As an undergraduate I read and admired A.R. Ammons’s Garbage and Tape for the Turn of the Year, Williams’s Paterson, and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I’ve tried on many occasions to write my way into a book-length poem, but I could never find a way. Then, I read David Lehman’s Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and reading that book started me thinking of the long poem again. Reading Bill Heyen’s long poem, To William Merwin (Mammoth Books, 2007), along with the impending birth of my son and my deep engagement with Heyen’s oeuvre, precipitated the initial outpouring, which became MIDWHISTLE.  

Thanks to Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace, the University of Wisconsin Press picked up MIDWHISTLE and it will come out in spring 2023 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. I’m excited to see this book come into the world along with the other collections that will be published in the series during 2022-2023: American Sex Tape by Jameka Williams, Shopping or The End of Time by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Betsy Sholl’s As if a Song Could Save You, Joshua Burton’s Grace Engine, and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl.

 

NA: A lot of poets have a favorite poem to read from their books. Maybe I should call it—their favorite read-aloud poem. Do you have one from this book? Or maybe just a poem to close with here? With a short opening commentary on how it came to be?

DD: I like this one. The title is a gentle half-parody of those long expository James Wright titles that I love (and that he modelled on Li Bai’s titles). The title does describe the genesis of the poem. I had been reading the Merwin translations and watching a television show about the arctic expedition and this poem came from there. The diastole and systole of this poem expresses everything I want to say, and keep trying to say, and haven’t quite figured out how to say, in all my poems.

Poem for My Two-Year-Old Daughter After Reading W.S. Merwin’s Translations of Musō Soseki and Spending a Few Hours Meditating on the Ill-Fated 1845 British Arctic Expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror

I’ve also made friends with wisteria
and the cattail light of morning. Come sleep
inside a bottled ship’s rigging. Be glad
you’re loved without longitude, forever.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

Adrian Matejka Named POETRY Magazine's New Editor

Adrian Matejka has been named editor of POETRY magazine. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was named Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018–19

 Here's the official announcement: 

Back in 2014, we posted Erin Belieu's conversation with Adrian:

Interviews with Poets--Day 3--Adrian Matejka (by Erin Belieu)

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

from the archive; first posted September 10, 2014

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

"On Helen Vendler" ("she's good on subjunctives") [by David Shapiro]

In the spirited commentary inspired by Katha Pollitt's post, "Complain, Complain: Poems About Writing Poetry" [when we posted it in 2009],  David Shapiro wrote, "Since I almost never agree with her, I want to say I utterly agreed with Helen V once when she said poets when they write about poetry aren't doing something strange or self-reflexive, because for them poetry is their life."

To which Judy Prince asked: "Has Helen Vendler said anything else that you liked?" David considered saying nothing but then dashed off this appraisal of the venerable Harvard professor:
<<
On Helen Vendler

I could take the fifth. I'm tilted -- she reviewed Ron P[adgett's] and my anthology of New York Poets and announced that we were cheerful Chaucerians. Pas mal.

She somewhere wrote, and I heard in a lecture, that Howard Nemerov, old friend and poor poet, was more philosophical than Frank O'Hara, who was a child when he thought ("like Byron," one of the great wits of his century.)  Anyway, she thought my book "To an Idea" about my mother's early death was just words connected to other words and forthrightly remarked that she had a hard time with comedy, satire, surrealism.

Koch said to me: What's left? Rational Tragedy? Cato by Addison?

I don't believe that Shakespeare's sonnets have the key words that she finds.

Paranomasia, yes, but no secret rules.

Yes, I do like a sentence in her long poems of Stevens where she says something like: the blackbirds are forms of language. And she's good on subjunctives.

Her contemporary taste is that of an amateur.

I told my class once that if they simply turned every negative to a positive in her [writing] and vice versa they would come up with some interesting assertions.

Almost every poet she likes today is mediocre. She is best on Herbert and Keats.

"A Wall" is a poem of mine about her or around. She deposed Delmore S[chwartz] in a crank's way. And said his best poems were only one page long. She should stick to the one page Odes of Keats. She is a decent "reader" when the material is not so fresh as to be difficult or new (she doesn't seem to have the French tradition at her fingertips, unfortunately) or even revolutionary. She told me she was always liking Ashbery's poetry, but he himself used to say to me how wonderful it was that she changed her mind [from her initial disapproval]. She also has no sense of Joyce, Lawrence, Hardy and the prose tradition. No sense of the Chinese, Russian, German or other traditions. Not a professional musician, she can't discriminate  the "science of sound." She has discovered no one and she is not a great "scholar" in the line of Jakobson.

I also believe she has no sense of the theater and the poetics of Shakespeare or Chekhov or the Greeks. She IS enthusiastic about well-known poets and Jorie G. and Heaney, a Nobel Prize winner, and other honored poets. She may have a vivid politics, but I have heard nothing publicly about that. She is not a "public intellectual." Like the crank Logan, she is too proud of her style and opinions. She is, I would add, nothing but opinions and a smooth stylist of the old school. No sense of social thickness, except in some early essays on A. Rich. Still hasn't written on Koch or any of the more radical poets. She does smooth out Ashbery and sees his topoi, but she probably doesn't read Roussel fluently or Rimbaud, great influences on John A. Imagine her thoughts on the late Merce Cunningham or on John Cage!

-- David Shapiro
>>
from the archive; August 9, 2009

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano Part 2 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: Your recent book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a triptych, or one of three books under one cover.  How do you like being published alongside Harvey Hix and William Heyen?  

DD: I love it. Etruscan Press does such high-quality publishing work. Their books are beautifully made and thoughtfully chosen. The support of Phil Brady and Bob Mooney has meant more to me than I can properly articulate. The dedicated staff at the press are paragons of professionalism, especially Pamela Turchin and Bill Schneider, who organize and run much of the daily operations. 

It’s an honor to have my book joined to the books of Harvey Hix and William Heyen. I hope that more publishers follow this tripartite publishing model. Heyen and Hix are poets I deeply admire, both for their bodies of work and for how they have constructed their lives in poetry. Both men embody a poetic stance I aspire to emulate: engaged, attentive, protean, ambitious, empathetic, and endlessly curious.

Harvey’s book How It Is that We continues his interrogation and deconstruction of the sonnet form, while nimbly moving among the detritus of 21^st century discourses, texts, and personae. Reading it is like looking at starlight through a field of orbiting wreckage. I feel adrift and then suddenly I’m jolted into a new way of seeing.

Bill Heyen’s The Nazi Patrol continues his project of bearing witness to the Shoah through the poison orchards of the present. Here, he employs his single-line couplets to great effect. There’s something so compulsively readable in this collection, a raw velocity that feels like a kind of falling.

Harvey and Bill have written enough for five or six lifetimes between the two of them. The amazing thing to me about the prodigious output of both men is the exceedingly high quality of the work.

If you are reading this conversation and you haven’t read Hix, I’d suggest my favorite books by him: Rain Inscription (Etuscan Press, 2017) and Perfect Hell (Gibbs Smith, 1996). I’d also suggest his remarkable translation of the Gospels and Christian apocrypha, The Gospel according to H.L. Hix (Broadstone Books, 2020).

I’d recommend Heyen’s Shoah Train (Etruscan Press, 2003) and The Cabin: Journal 1968-1984 (H_NGM_N BKS, 2012). Heyen’s journals are an incredible document. I think Phil Brady described them as the work of a 20^th century Samuel Pepys. In one entry, Heyen will be having a martini with Anne Sexton. In the next, he’ll be wondering if the garbagemen took his golfclubs. He chronicles all the important events of his family life, and of his life in poetry, against the backdrop of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and on and on.   

AR: I recently listened to your conversation with Dr. Philip Brady about the collaborative project Sign and Breath. You read an incredible poem, “My Favorite Things,” which you had just written the day before. It made me curious to know where you find your inspiration? Do you strike proverbial gold with most of the poems you write?

DD: I find inspiration from my daily life, from my family, from my friends, from my memories, from things that I see when I’m walking the dog, from my job, from music, from movies and television, from art, and, most of all, from my reading life.

I’ve spent many years writing and reading poetry daily. Now, I write now when the mood strikes me and when circumstances permit. Like most poets, I have left years and years and thousands and thousands of bad poems in my wake. I think of all the marble composition notebooks, floppy disks, and old laptops full of my embarrassingly bad poems gone to rest in some landfill somewhere. I am grateful for all those years of woodshedding that brought me to where I am today. Still, I go through periods where nothing that I write works out the way I’d hoped, but I never feel frustrated. Writing is always a joy and a pleasure and a privilege that I don’t take for granted. I am ambitious with my poetry. I want to write great poetry, but for me it’s not so much about striking gold. It’s more about living a life of poetry. At the end of the preface for Generations, Phil Brady quotes a letter from Harvey Hix that reads: “To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense: live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.” To live by poetry. That’s all I want.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews grew up in a cardboard box, painted red and white to look like a typical brick house in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 1 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: Your latest book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, is part of a mini-anthology, featuring three books under one cover, called Generations, and published by Etruscan Press.

I thought we should start with the title poem, which I love.

DD: Thank you Nin and Amanda. I’m grateful to be able to have this conversation with you both. Generations also features The Nazi Patrol by William Heyen and How It Is that We by H.L. Hix. Here’s my title poem, which is the last poem in Lullaby with Incendiary Device:

Lullaby with Incendiary Device, Breached Hull, & Oil Slick

Before you were born, I dreamed you
into each cadence I would ever hear.
You board a paper boat and cross the sea.
One note of bluebird’s orison endures.
I love you so much the schooners inside
my heart keep crashing into each other
and capsizing, but, at least, they aren’t
all sunk yet, and no sailors have drowned
so far. What I mean by this is simple:
stay close always. Teach me to crayon fire.
Better yet, teach me the crazy hairstyles
of fire burning on the water’s surface,
my dear little one. Teach me what the fire
looks like from the underside of a wave.

AR: Many poems in Lullaby with Incendiary Device are about your children. Did becoming a parent change your poetry? If so, how?

DD: I have a four-year-old daughter (Luciana, who we call “Chi Chi”) and a seven-month-old son (Dante Jr.). Lullaby was written in the first two years of my daughter’s life. It’s really her book.

Becoming a father changed me and changed my life in innumerable subtle and immense ways; inevitably, then, parenthood changed my poetry. Parenthood, like poetry, reorients, intensifies, and recalibrates one’s attention. Parenthood turns you toward another, in much the same way that poetry does, or ideally, should. For me, poetry has always involved an interiority turned to face the world, an act of opening up, which involves a shedding of ego (breaking the mind forged manacles of Blake’s Urizen, echoing E.M. Forster’s injunction: “Only Connect”). Poetry and parenthood both involve what Seamus Heaney called a kind of “earned communion.” Both involve attention directed outward. There’s the shared duende of poetry and parenthood too: the knowledge of our own mortality in every diaper change and volta and skinned knee and spondee and snuggle and heroic couplet rocking you from blue hour to blue hour.

On a more practical level, parenthood changed the way my life was organized. My life now revolves around the schedules, needs, and wants of our little ones. I’ve had to dial back some of the poetry-related things I love doing like writing book reviews, but I still find time to read and to write and to engage with other poets living and dead.

My daughter and I have begun writing poetry together and my wife and I read the children poetry in addition to books like The Runaway Bunny and The Giving Tree and Dragons Love Tacos. My wife and I also collaborate on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. We have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I run a reading series. We are developing community workshops and we’re working on a poetry trail (a series of signposts with poetry displayed on them throughout the county). My children are a part of all these endeavors from planning stages to execution; they’ve both attended many local poetry-related events since the time they were in utero.

For me, the goal is that poetry be a constant part of my daily, ordinary, unromantic, middle class, suburban life, and that that life be a constant part of my poetry. The older I get, the less difference I feel between the poems I read and reread and memorize and dwell in, and my actual, seemingly boring, quotidian life.

Also, on a practical level, parenthood gave me a new set of experiences to write about. You don’t really know what fatherhood is until you live it yourself, what it’s like to be in the room when your child is born, what you feel when you hold your son or daughter for the first time, what it’s like to see them take their first steps, how they acquire language and relate to the world, what it’s like to be sleep-deprived and wakened in the middle of the night to clean up vomit off a beanbag chair and yet to feel happy about it, what it’s like to live daily in close proximity to the mind of a toddler. These are such intense, piquant, inestimably valuable experiences. And these experiences connect you, more deeply, to the great round of the human condition as it has unfolded for millennia.

Lastly, I’ve come to see my writing as a bequest for my children. I hope that my poetry means something to them when they grow up: that they have this series of artifacts from my time on earth, that they might see my work as a chronicle of the joys, pains, enthusiasms, struggles, desires, and perplexities of a lifetime. Ultimately, I pray that having access to these records of my interior life will help them through their own difficulties. If nothing else, I hope they see repeated over and over and over again, in every line, how much I love them and their mother, and how grateful I am for this life. 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews is harvesting the winter lettuce in her garden today. 

Part II: A Conversation with Poet and the Editor of Etruscan Press, Philip Brady [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: As an Etruscan poet, I have been asked many times: What are the markings of an Etruscan poet? Do you think I should submit to Etruscan? How should I answer?  In other words, people want to know what Philip Brady looks for in a manuscript.

I'm grateful for and humbled by the number and quality of the manuscripts I see. While I may not be able to publish them, I still profit from having a birds-eye view of the literary landscape.
I've learned a lot from the experience. I've learned for instance, that I don't belong to a school. I respond to neo-formalist and post-structuralist poetry, non-narrative and plot-driven prose.   Something indefinable in the diction, syntax, voice, structure, authority or tone of a work gets my attention. The response is visceral. I'm drawn in, and soon I've shifted from the posture of editor, pencil twitching in the corner of my mouth, to reader, delighting in the next surprise. You can feel it in the first lines or sentences. It's a pulse, an electric charge—an awareness of form and dimension, perhaps; an awareness of play. No matter how serious and dark the subject matter, certain works emit light: "gaiety" in the old sense of the word. As Yeats has it, "All things fall and are built again/ And those that build them again are gay."

We want to provide a platform for that kind of writing across traditional genres, writing with heart and seasoning.   We feature work which emerges out of a sense that genre isn’t bound by a set of conventions but is instead a manifestation of a human impulse. There is an impulse to sing, an impulse to regale, an impulse to explain. Yes, genre solidifies into tradition. But the best work—the most new and most ancient—still thrums with that primal impulse. "Form in dread of power," as Emerson puts it. We look for work that carries the tradition but emerges from the source.

So, as the conductor says tapping his baton, "More brilliance, please."

AR: What is your favorite part of the editing process?   

Making the phone call to tell a new author we’ve accepted their manuscript.  

AR: And the best part of being an editor?

I just got off the phone with Laurie Jean, author of Crave: Sojourn of a Hungry Soul, and Laurie told me she had accepted a position as Dean of Studies at Susquehanna University. Her book (along with her experience, charisma, and leadership) was part of what made that possible. I want to receive more phone calls like that.

AR: What are the most inspiring, interesting, or remarkable situations you've experienced since starting Etruscan? 

 When Bob Mooney and I conceived Etruscan, we thought we would begin with a small book of poems and grow as we learned. Then 9/11 happened. Bill Heyen, eminent poet and towering anthologist, proposed a book called “September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond.” He wanted to capture America’s first reaction to the tragedy. But Etruscan didn’t, so to speak, exist. We had no distributor or designer or marketers or deal-cutters or editors. We knew about publishing the way foodies know about restaurants: we knew what we liked. But we told Bill OK and he buttonholed 127 writers including John Updike and Erica Jong and Lucille Clifton and Robert Pinsky and he even made up a few writers like Edwina Seaver and Rose Carmine Smith with a wink to Joyce Carol Oates.

            Then we contacted a pro named Tom Woll who had made his bones at Vanguard with Dr. Seuss back in the days of three martini lunches, and I met Tom halfway between Yonkers and Providence at a bagel shop on Rte 17 and Tom hooked us up with Mortimer Mint, a Dickensian refugee who made his fortune distributing the Guinness Book of World Records, and Morty sold ten thousand copies and we thought publishing was a cinch and then 8000 copies came back—we didn’t know about returns. That was our baptism into publishing.

NA: Lately you have been publishing books that are triptychs, or three poets under one cover. Could you talk about that?

The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. 

Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus, boosting sales and increasing circulation.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along Robert Miltner, a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. Fortunately, all three authors enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the chronic problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, fashioning “centos” from one another’s work to weave between the volumes, and doing a post-Trio interview included in the book.

So, the next step was to actually solicit a tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, an up-and-coming Etruscan, Dante Di Stefano, recently submitted a book to Etruscan. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought. Heyen is 81 years old; Hix is 60, and Dante is 42: so, Etruscan Generations.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems to be connected in some way. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self  all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

An Interview with Amanda Rabaduex, Poet and Intern for Etruscan Press [by Nin Andrews]

I’ve had the good fortune of being published by a few different presses, and while I am enormously grateful to all of them, I have found some easier to work with than others. Etruscan Press is one of my all-time favorites. The process of taking a collection of poems from manuscript to book with this press was a pure pleasure. I’ve been so impressed by all their editors including their managing editor, Bill Schneider, and their production editor, Pamela Turchin, as well as their interns, especially Amanda Rabaduex, whom I met on  Zoom.  It’s been so long since I entered the poetry scene, I began to wonder, What is it like for poets like Amanda who are just getting started today?  How do they navigate the online literary scene?  And what is it like to be an integral part of Etruscan Press?  

NA: Why poetry? 

AR: This is honestly a question I've asked myself for quite some time. I worked as a Russian linguist and paralegal in the Air Force straight out of high school. When I separated, I planned on going into law, but I kept feeling a pull towards words, so I switched my degree from pre-law to English. I was enamored with etymology first, and then poetry. It felt like a very natural evolution. In etymology one learns how much history is carried in a word. Each word is special in its own way, and poetry, in my opinion, is the best way to showcase words. It is the art form for word lovers. For a while I was simply a reader of poetry. What really pushed me to write poems was the death of my grandmother, with whom I was extremely close.  After she passed away, writing poetry became very grounding for me. It became a way to process the human experience. Prose demands order from words, but poetry is comfortable letting words sit in space. Letting them ruminate alone like a question waiting for an answer, which is what I feel life is - a question. In this way, poetry reflects life. I keep thinking of a recent episode of the Untenured Tracks podcast, where poet (and my mentor) Dr. Phil Brady compared prose to poetry:

Our lives do not correspond to this fanciful completion that is represented by sentences, which is, of course, why we love sentences, why we love novels, because it gives us what we can’t have. Poetry, I think, gives us what we do have, which is the sense of fragmentation and incompletion.

Once I witnessed how even the end of a life – or maybe especially the end  – leaves a sense of incompletion, poetry is the only thing which helps me with this sort of existential fog I am trying to sift through.

NA: Does working for Etruscan Press change how you read poetry books? Or how you think about writing poetry?   What is the most important thing you’ve learned there?

AR: I think my experience with Etruscan Press, in addition to working as a reader and an editor for other publications, has given me the notion that getting poems published is a bit like winning the lottery for a newer poet. There are so many poets writing and submitting great poetry right now that a poem or manuscript has to come in at just the right time and get seen by the right readers and editors to have a chance of being accepted for publication. The poet must hone their craft to the best of their ability, but they also need a little luck once they send their words out into the world. To be honest, it is sometimes intimidating for a person, like me, who is beginning to establish themselves as a poet. As a reader, however, it gives me even more respect for the books that I read.

NA: I’m showing my age with this question, but I’d love to know how you started publishing? How do you navigate the online poetry world? And select journals, esp. online journals, to submit to?

AR: I wrote poetry for a long time before I considered sending anything out. By the time I felt comfortable
submitting work, the website Submittable was up and running. This is a great tool for both journals and writers in one way because it makes sharing work so much more accessible. The problem for newer writers, which I am embarrassed to admit was also my situation, is that many send work to journals without reading or vetting them. Only in the past couple years have I realized how many publications are out there. At first, I was simply excited to see a call for submissions, so I'd send my work nearly anywhere.  I changed my approach after I had a bad experience with a little online publication who accepted a piece of mine but never ended up publishing it or responding to my messages. After this, I wanted to learn more about which journals were trustworthy and to be more purposeful about where I send my work. I subscribed to many journals. Now when I am sending work out, it is to places which inspire me in some way. I also ensure they publish poems which are aesthetically similar to mine so that I am not wasting my time or the editors' time. I sometimes wonder if the new system for submissions might affect the trajectory of poetry or create a new movement. In a system where so many more are submitting their work, does a poem have to be edgier or more experimental to garner attention?

NA: I had similar experiences. Ugh. Usually it's just that the poems never came back. I'd wonder how long I was supposed to wait. When I started writing, I was heavily influenced by four writers: Henri Michaux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yannis Ritsos, and David Lehman. There have been many others of course, but those were the first to shape and inspire me as a writer and a prose poet. I’m wondering if you could name three or four writers who have been important to you.   

AR: I consider a person's spatial gaze as inexorable from how they move and create in this world, so I have a difficult time narrowing it down. When I'm thinking about this question, I think of those who have influenced my perception of words as an art form as well as those who influence the style and themes in my poetry – the latter of these is a rotating door, as I'm still experimenting and honing my style. I don't feel I have a signature writing style, quite yet. If I consider the poets who have been the most foundational for me, the first person who comes to mind is Gertrude Stein. I'm heavily influenced by Modernist writers and artists, as this was the movement I focused on in my grad studies when I was earning my M.A. in English, but Stein was the person who made the concept of language as an art form very apparent and accessible for me. Her writing made me question the reality of language and the weight that signifiers carry. I can return to Tender Buttons and it means something different each time I read it, which makes the words feel both meaningless and magical all at once. I love the paradox because it reflects how I feel about life. Sylvia Plath is another poet who was foundational to me as a writer. When I began seriously writing poems, I was already a wife and a mother, and I don't think I would have felt brave enough to become a writer at this stage in my life without reading and being inspired by Plath's work. I am always looking to her use of metaphor when I write. Another important poet is Jane Hirshfield. I had been reading Ram Dass and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali around the time I first read Hirshfield. The quiet contemplative quality of her poetry echoed the space I was in at the time, and Hirshfield is the poet who guided me, in a sense, into contemporary poetry. She showed me that words can feel both gentle and powerful, that they can create a stillness and introspection, yet be enormously moving to the reader. I try to embrace that same spirit every time I sit down to write.

NA: How do you navigate the online literary scene? Are you active on social media platforms? If so, which do you think is best for poets?

AR: I started my Twitter account during the pandemic after noticing how many poets and journals post on that platform. It has been a great place to read poems that I would have never come across otherwise, and I also like seeing the call for submissions from journals. I am an introvert, though, so I'm not especially comfortable posting a lot. I actually keep my profiles on other platforms private because of this. I consider Twitter, in particular, as a place to network with other writers, and as a place to find inspiration. I often step away for days at a time, though, as there is such a multitude of voices online that it can become overwhelming. I just learned a new word last week – infoglut – a combination of 'information' and 'gluttony,' which someone came up with to describe the type of overload we can experience now thanks to the internet. I want to avoid infoglut and burning out on information. As with many other facets of life, I'm trying to find balance.

NA: I’ve been lucky to have been published by a lot of different presses over the years, most recently Etruscan Press, which feels like a community. But I don’t really know how it works. What do you do for the press?

AR: It really is a community – I am glad you feel that way, too! Everyone there creates such a welcoming space and I feel very lucky to contribute in any way I can. I've drafted two study guides for forthcoming titles which educators will be able to use in the classroom as part of Etruscan's Outreach Program. I've assisted with quality control of their new website, and I've been contributing to their social media initiative with posts, and I've learned some graphic design skills to help with this.  I enjoy how multi-faceted the role has been. What I've enjoyed the most is learning how a book starts as a project of the writer, becomes a project of the press, and then ultimately belongs to the readers. And Etruscan keeps both the writer and the reader in mind as they are producing new works. They are like a bridge between the two. Seeing this process in action has somewhat demystified the publishing process for me, while also instilling a tremendous amount of respect for all of the work that goes into making a book a tangible thing.

NA: What poet (s) are you currently reading?

AR: The first that comes to mind is C.T. Salazar – I just wrote a review on his first full length collection – Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking. I love how he uses sound and space. Some other poets I've loved reading recently are Dante DiStefano, Arthur Sze, Marianne Boruch, and D.S. Waldman. On any given day I usually have multiple books in my purse or multiple sites pulled up on my computer. I try to read as much as I can. I'm waiting for Ocean Vuong's Time is a Mother to arrive in the mail. Vuong is an absolute master with words – I feel like he will go down as one of the greatest poets of my generation.

NA: I think you described yourself as a baby poet, but I’ve really admired what I’ve seen of your work.  Maybe we can end with a poem?

AR: I did! I called myself a toddler in the world of poetry because I feel like I'm still finding my footing. Thank you so much for your kind words about my work, Nin.

Here is a poem which first appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, which I wrote after reading Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, which has facts about trees like how they make a noise imperceptible to our hearing when faced with a drought, or how mycelium creates a complex network and survival mechanism, of sorts, for trees. So much happens underground – it is incredible.

                                            trees scream ultrasonic when thirsty

                                                      If you are the eight minutes before we know the
                                                      sun has exploded
                                                      I am the last scent of a daydream

winter, want, water, seeds
world's largest organism – 4 mile fungus
it all begins underground

down there the sun is a rumor
I sit next to carved stone
whisper to my grandmother how it is up here

hotter now, burns blister quickly
miles away out my window
mountains on fire

sometimes bruised purple
is how songs are written
how we let ourselves sing

let ourselves believe
since she died
I've been waiting to be buried

I've been listening for the sound of trees 
vibration starts in roots
works its way up

I thought I heard them once
they said they would drink the bones 
if they could

 

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator, and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current poetry editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smokey Mountains.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020. Her picture appears on the top left and bottom right.

from Ten Questions for Dara Barrois / Dixon [formerly Dara Wier]

from Poets & Writers, 4.5.22

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), whose poetry collection Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina is out today from Wave Books. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009).  She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.

Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina.  

1. How long did it take you to write Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina?
   It’s usual for me to be writing more than one book at a time; my guess is Anna’s book unfolded over the course of around five to seven years start to finish. When I write a poem I’m not necessarily thinking of it as a poem for a certain book unless I’m working in a form (e.g. Reverse Rapture’s nine-line, nine-stanza poems; in progress since 2020, something I’m calling Is a Citroen Xsara Braque even imaginable? half-sonnet, half-prose); most of things take shape as they go along, because of what’s happening in the world and in my life, in others’ lives at the time. In fact I’m afraid if I self-consciously try to write a poem to fit a certain book I’m going to fail miserably.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
   Oh, god. It’s all challenging. Maybe I’d say—challenge came when trying to see the book’s title. I like how titles can do so much. They can set a tone, suggest a scene, take care of a situation, jumpstart something, imply alternatives. The place they hold is a powerful place, isolated up there all by themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
   1955–1967: everywhere, all the time, second nature, main preoccupation, unconsciously; I especially liked a cedar-lined closet with a typewriter stored on its floor, and a spot on the Mississippi River I thought of as my place to be at home.

Paul Auster on Stephen Crane (and Creative Writing)

fromThe Guardian (2 October 2021), an interview with Paul Auster about his new book on Stephen Crane, the novelist and poet.

Why did you choose to write about Stephen Crane?
I read him early, as a high-school student, as many of us did back then. The Red Badge of Courage was required reading for most high-school students. But then I lost contact with Crane and hadn’t thought about him too much. After I finished 4321, I was really exhausted and knew that I wouldn’t be able to write for some time so I took several months off to regroup. During that time, I read a lot of things that I had been meaning to read all my life. I started reading Crane again. The first thing I read was The Monster, which I’d never even heard of. I was so overpowered by its brilliance - it took me by storm and I was shocked at how good and deep and resonant it was. That inspired me to read everything else he’d written. My admiration kept growing. By the time I was done with his work I started investigating his life and realised how deeply fascinating that was. Finally, I decided to write a short appreciation of Crane.

Short?
That was my plan: 150 or 200 pages. Then one thing led to another and it turned into this new member of the Rocky Mountain chain. It’s an enormous book, I know. For a life that was that short, it’s pretty strange that I should have written so much. But it’s not just a biography, it’s also a reading of his work: it’s about evenly split between the two.

It’s a book that teaches us how to love Crane. Do you recognise yourself as a teacher?
I taught for five years at Princeton. These were writing workshops. I had a horror of them. Five years of teaching and I still have a horror of creative writing. Either you have an imagination or you don’t; either you have a feel for language or you don’t. I did have the feeling that I was an old man talking to younger people in this book. Not in a classroom, but around a dinner table and sharing my insight and enthusiasm for this writer and his work.

It feels like you admire Crane partly for how seriously he takes writing.
It’s the only way I understand writing. It’s certainly the way I’ve been all my life and it’s how every other writer I admire is – a kind of monomaniac. I’m not sure how you can make any art if you don’t treat it very seriously, if you’re not obsessed with doing it better each time.

Crane was very poor. Do we need to suffer for our art?
In order to unleash good work, there has to be something in you that feels out of balance. It doesn’t have to be financial distress - it could be emotional or amorous. Whatever the source is, the thing that has shaken life up for you, it’s distress that generates art.

Which book would you give to a 12-year-old?
I think I would give that 12-year-old Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This person would be old enough to read it without the filter of a parent and to understand how wonderful and imaginative and absolutely crazy it is. The main thing about giving books to young people is that you really need to show them the sheer joy of reading, the pleasure it can bring you. Nothing too heavy. Books that are effervescent – that’s what creates a love of reading. If I were to give a 15-year-old a book, I’d give them Candide. That’s when I read it and it changed my life. I laughed, I was shocked and I was inspired by it. That’s what a great book can do when you’re young.

A Conversation with Poet and Editor, Philip Brady [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

Philip Brady is a poet, professor, and editor whom I've had the good fortune to know in all three of these capacities, and he is someone I always learn from, whether by reading his works or by listening to him talk. In the last two years, while dealing with a very ill son, spending weeks in hospitals, I found myself falling out of love with poetry. But there were a few important exceptions. Philip Brady is one of them--his work is both personal and mysterious, lyrical and beautiful crafted. And his poems speak to me. So, when I began chatting and emailing with the poet and Etruscan intern, Amanda Rabaduex, and discovered we share an admiration for Dr. Brady's work and a curiosity about his practice and process, I decided to put together this two-part interview. 

Carmel 
       by Philip Brady 

Why do we turn away from the eternal?
Robinson Jeffers asked. The Pacific surf,
crashing against the inscape of his skull,
washed off brine and starfish, and left,
turn from the eternal. Frail vowels
spiral into the cerulean sky
so vast it seems almost believable
there is no other we. No turning away.
I am in thrall to the inhuman voice
chanting the mantra beyond silence:
turn eternal. Drown your secret loss.
Let every moment achieve utterance.
Even the stones of Tor House mark the seconds
between the rasping slant rhymes of the ocean. 

AR: Why poetry?

We could talk about the only art that has no native means of apprehension (reading is breathless; listening cannot scan). We could talk about the yaw between lines inviting the unutterable. We could cite political and cultural revolution or say that poetry is the only art where what’s inside gets said, unmediated. We could talk about transgressing against capitalist values: so much genius and effort lavished on artifacts which have so little commerce.

But I want to share something H.L Hix has written—not about what poetry expresses but how it  emerges from a source which warms and illumines.

To live by poetry. Which of course I want to read in more than one sense; live robustly and fully by means of poetry; order one’s life according to values derived from poetry; live in proximity to poetry.

 AR:  Is there a form you feel most comfortable writing? Do you like to experiment?

Writing is not, for me, a comfortable activity. It’s based on a paradox. A. Writing is hard. B. It’s supposed to look easy. As Yeats says, “A line will take us hours maybe / But if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching have been nought.” For this paradoxical state of affairs (A & B) I blame Homer. Before he started to “articulate sweet sounds together” on the page, bards rocked and chanted, feeding the voice, and the voice fed the utterance. Or that’s the way I dream it. But I write crouched over a screen with my eyes watering and sudden beeps from Facebook and my right foot going numb, and everything has to be constructed and verified and revised down to the nub.

As for experimentation, often we think of modes of writing as expressive of a belief system: movements such as post-modernist vs. neo-formalist. They harden into postures, emerging, we assume, from conviction or temperament. But in my life prosody has shifted with age. The young man I was yearned to break out of his body, off the page. Lines jumped and high-stepped and enjambed. Now I am old, I want to hold things together, not “withering into the truth” but gyrating inward, with crazed balance, like a slinky on the fritz.

AR: What was the best advice you were ever given about writing?

I love what Jerome Rothenberg says about writing, “I write those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and for whose existence I feel a deep need.” Rothenberg connects his composition and reading, which makes him a great writer and a great editor.

NA: Did you have any idea what you were getting into when you became an editor?

Before I became an editor, I was a teacher and a reader. But reading manuscripts as an editor is very different from receiving them as a teacher, where your job is to nurture and instruct, or as a reader, where you can appreciate and be instructed. Readers can screen. We peruse the codex: the colophon, the pedigree, the blurbs that confirm value with words like “luminous” and “sublime,” the mysterious or catchy titles: Return to a Room Lit By a Glass of Milk, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, Autonecrophilia, The Book of Orgasms, or What Narcissism Means to Me. By the time we open the book and scan the creamy page with its noble Garamond, we are prepared to give each poem what William Stafford called “a certain kind of attention.”

            These conditions do not prevail in the editor’s office. Editors receive only a brief cover and we must address the draft of the internationally unknown poet without the benefit of context. No book, no reviews, and certainly no rarity. There are thousands. They have no reticence. They come, as Philip Dacey says, “so encumbered.”

            Reading unsolicited manuscripts mars editors. Print is limitless. If you are not an editor, you may have no idea of how many serviceable poems are making their doleful rounds. At conferences or bars or beaches or subway platforms, we editors pass one another and nod in silence, recognizing the vampiric gaze and slow shamble of the endless scroll.

NA: What are you working on now? Could we see a short poem or an excerpt of your new or recent work?  

I have two on-going projects. The first is an anthology, co-edited with Shanta Lee Gander. It’s called Sign & Breath: Voice & the Literary Tradition and will be published by Etruscan in 2023, and I’m delighted that you are contributing, Nin.

Here’s a description:

What is Poetry? If the question brings a sigh or cringe, it may be because myriad attempts at definition all have one thing in common: they divide. If poetry is one thing, it is not another. If it is formal, it is not free; if prophetic, not quotidian; if lineated, not sentenced. And so on.

This new critical anthology, Sign & Breath, takes a different approach. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book regards poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. That faculty precedes any genre, as utterance precedes the alphabet. It striates all verbal and literary art. It is sound beneath text; its rhythms curve time and striate narrative. Its signature is that undefinable quality we call “voice.”

 Sign & Breath is an anthology of artists giving voice. 50 contemporary artists each offer one page that sings in any genre. Contributors represent diverse traditions, from Page and Spoken Word Poetry, to Rap, to prose fiction and memoir, to song lyrics. Following each entry is a discussion by the author about the role of voice in composition and presentation. In addition, the text will link to a virtual platform featuring performance videos and author interviews, to be hosted here.

 This book will contribute to a dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective: poetry as voice.

My other project in progress is a sequence of poems, called Jamb, which uses seven syllable lines to play with the notion that enjambment is a central technique in modern poetry—resisting connection, syntax, and narrative, and opening a place “where lines quaver to appear/ less incomplete and fracture/ assures nothing happens—not/that no thing takes place but that/ Nothing is actually/enacted…”

And here’s a link to recent work.

Philip Brady’s newest book is The Elsewhere: Poems & Poetics (Broadstone, 2021). He is the author of two essay collections, Phantom Signs and By Heart from the University of Tennessee Press; a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians, a memoir, To Prove My Blood, and three previous books of poetry. He has edited a critical book on James Joyce and an anthology of contemporary poetry. 

Brady’s work has received the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press; a ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal; an Ohioana Poetry Award; the Ohio Governor’s Award; six Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council; and Thayer and Newhouse Fellowships from New York State.

Brady has taught at University College Cork, on Semester at Sea, at the University of Ibadan, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer at the National University of Zaire (DRC). Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the MFA faculty of Wilkes University. For more information please visit www.philipbrady.com

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator, and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current poetry editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains. 

Interview with Tzimon Barto: Languages, Poetry and Education [by Lera Auerbach]

 I am always fascinated by people who are masters of more than one profession.  I interviewed Tzimon Barto for the Best American Poetry blog. His passions and knowledge run deep. Tzimon Barto speaks seven languages fluently, reads ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; his love of poetry is contagious, his ideas about education are inspiring.

      

For a taste of Barto's music-making here he is performing Mozart's Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in A major with the SWR Symphonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach.

 

For the Love of Ballet: In conversation with Dana Gioia [by Stacey Lehman]

New York City Ballet rehearsal of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with Edward Villella and George Balanchine, choreography by George Balanchine (New York) The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (photo © Martha Swope)

During a cultural exchange trip to Moscow in October 2007, I discovered that Dana Gioia and I share a love of ballet and of George Balanchine’s choreography in particular. It was fitting that we made this discovery while in the country that gave us Balanchine, Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov among other great dancers.

Dana and my husband David Lehman have known each other since they were young men. They worked together on the 2018 volume of The Best American Poetry. In 2003,  while Dana served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he and David shared the stage at the National Book Festival, where they read favorite American poems to a rapt audience. The trip was memorable for many reasons, chief among them that Dana arranged for David’s mother to join us. She was 88 at the time, and told us that the visit to D.C. and breakfast at the White House was a high point in her life. As a girl she had barely escaped the Nazis, and there she was, with her son, at the White House, thanks to Dana! It was thrilling.

Dana is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, and librettist. You can find out more about him here. I wanted to know more about Dana's experience of ballet. He generously agreed to answer these questions during a recent e-mail exchange.

SL: In his essay “How to Enjoy Ballet” the choreographer George Balanchine writes that “It is strange that many people think ballet is a difficult thing to enjoy. Ballet isn’t any harder to enjoy than a novel, a play, or a poem—it’s as simple to like as a baseball game” and “[we] don’t have to understand [the language of ballet] in detail to enjoy ballet, any more than we have to know about the pigments of the painter or the complex meters of the poet.” Do you agree?

DG: I came to ballet slowly. Although I was immersed in music as a high school and college student, ballet wasn’t part of my formation. I only saw ballet three or four times, always because I was interested in the music being choreographed. Ballet was expensive and felt too genteel for my taste. In the 1960s and 70s, dance in California had a sort of hand-me-down quality—conventional classics safely done mostly by visiting companies.

I started to see ballet regularly only as an adult in New York with my girlfriend and soon-to-be wife. She and a group of friends bought a large block of season tickets at the New York City Ballet. Someone in the group usually cancelled, so I would pick up the spare ticket.

In New York dance had an enormous sense of energy. The art was entirely different from what I had experienced in Los Angeles and San Francisco. During the twenty years I lived in New York there was no question that the NYCB was the preeminent performing arts institution in the city. The greatest choreographer who ever lived had formed an astonishing company to perform his masterpieces. Evenings there were an astonishment.

SL: The dance critic Arlene Croce writes of dance “afterimages,” those visions that remain in the mind’s eye long after exposure to the original. I have many such images of ballet that I can conjure (perhaps the most potent is of Karin von Aroldingen’s “siren” wrapping herself around Mikhail Baryshnikov’s “prodigal” in George Balanchine’s “Prodigal Son”). Which afterimages endure for you?

DG: Speaking of Prodigal Son, I have never forgotten the final moment of that overwhelming ballet. When I watched Mikhail Baryshnikov climb the upright body of his father and then fold himself into his arms as if he were a baby, it brought me to tears.

New York City Ballet production of "The Prodigal Son" with Mikhail Baryshnikov, choreography by George Balanchine (1979) New York Public Library Digital Collection (photo © Martha Swope)

I have many other striking memories for New York City Ballet, especially of Suzanne Farrell. But if I had to pick my favorite moment with any ballerina in that golden age, it would be Helene Alexopoulos as the heartbroken Helena in Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lost in her romantic despair, she dances around what she thinks is a tree, but which is actually the invisible Puck.

SL: Say you find yourself with an extra ticket to the New York City Ballet and you are going to invite a friend who has never seen a ballet to join you. What ballets would be on the ideal program, where in the theater would your seats be, and how would you advise your friend to help him or her overcome their skepticism?

DG: I would pick any of a dozen great Balanchine works based on well-known scores. I feel if the person recognizes the music, it’s easier to understand the dance. A couple of obvious choices would be Serenade, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Concerto Barocco, and Liebeslieder Waltzes. If the person didn’t know that much classical music, I would pick Slaughter on Tenth Avenue or Union Jack.

If I wanted to make the person addicted to ballet for the rest of his or her life,  I would pick Jerome Robbins’s homage to Fred Astaire, I’m Old Fashioned.

I would not start with abstract works set to difficult scores such as Agon or Episodes.

Suzanne Farrell as "the stripper" and Arthur Mitchell as "the hoofer" in George Balanchine's "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (1968) The New York Public Library Digital Collections. (photo © Martha Swope)

SL: What is the ideal audience for ballet?

DG: The actual audience tends to have more women than men because more girls than boys study dance. It helps to know any art from the inside.

At the old New York City Ballet, there was surely an ideal audience for a poet. The audience was full of literary people—much more so than at the Metropolitan Opera across the plaza. During the intermissions, writers would gather around Edward Gorey, occasionally wearing his famous fur coat, who attended every performance. They would critique the performance and gossip. I would talk to Howard Moss, Edward Albee, Samuel Lipman, Richard Howard, Frederick Morgan, Paula Deitz. Sandy McClatchy, and perhaps James Merrill.

SL: Is it true that during your tenure as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-2009) you were able to increase funding for the arts? Were there dance programs that you were especially pleased to support? 

DG: I was able to increase the budget of the NEA every year during my chairmanship. That allowed me to sponsor both the creation of new dance works but also help American dance companies tour. That brought dance to many communities that didn’t have their own groups.

 I had a great Dance director at the agency, Doug Sonntag. Together we worked to increase funding as well as to support a special dance critics institute—an intensive two-week workshop at a major dance festival to train newspaper arts reporter to increase coverage of regional and local companies. I also made sure that a major dancer, choreographer, or company was on the list for each year’s National Medal of Arts. We honored Suzanne Farrell, Twyla Tharp, Tommy Tune, Tina Ramirez, and Cyd Charisse, as well as the Jose Limon and Jacob’s Pillow companies. It is important for America to honor its artists.

I gave several thousand speeches as NEA chairman. The only one that terrified me was when I was asked to speak about the NEA and the City Ballet on the stage of the New York State Theater with the company waiting in the wings about to perform. I felt as if I were profaning a sacred space. I didn’t make a fool of myself, but I have never been happier to get off stage.

----

(Ed note: If you happen to be in NYC at the end of the month, you can catch a performance of Balanchine's "Prodigal Son" and "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" as part of the "Short Stories" program. I'll be there! More information here.)