The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Green Writers Press—Dede Cummings, James Crews, & GWP authors/poets

Dante Di Stefano: How did Green Writers Press come into being?

James Crews: Green Writers Press, an independent, Vermont-based publishing company, founded on Earth Day in 2014, is dedicated to spreading environmental awareness and social justice by publishing authors who promulgate messages of hope and renewal through place-based writing and environmental activism. Former Little, Brown book designer, Dede Cummings, founded the press out of her home office in southern Vermont with the mission to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups and social justice organizations. Our list has expanded significantly, publishing such authors as Julia Alvarez, David Budbill, Chard deNiord, John Elder, Dr. M Jackson, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, and Clarence Major.

DD: Can you talk a bit about the “localvore” approach of the press, combining environmental activism with the work of publishing?

Dede Cummings: One reason we started Green Writers Press was to print our books sustainably, and use eBooks and audiobooks to reduce our fossil fuel use. We are excited to be publishing our own authors, and we welcome your support to help us spread the word. In today’s world of social media and online transactions, here are GWP, we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object, into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and eBook publishing.

Our vision is that, collectively, our printed and eBooks will become a chorus of voices of writers and readers, artists and photographers, who care about the fate of the earth and want to do something about it. Though we believe our books will be interesting to Vermont residents, Green Writers Press has national distribution and we hope to have a broad reach and impact. Our voices need to be heard, which is why we refer to our press as a global press. We are—we all are connected on this planet we love. It is our hope that we can create a community around our press and the books we publish.

DD: Using the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry as a point of departure, could you talk a bit about the poetic significance of Vermont? How has this place influenced you as a poet and editor? What, if anything, links Vermont poets as widely disparate as Major Jackson and the late Ruth Stone, for example?

From editor and former Vermont state poet laureate, Sydney Lea: While even as I make one, I myself feel somewhat impelled to challenge any generality regarding so wide-ranging a group of poets as those in our anthology.  Indeed, the “Vermontiness” of this collection may reside particularly in its non-homogeneity. Our little state has a rightful reputation for orneriness and individualism, and I think those qualities prevail first to last here. Yes, there is often among our authors a strong sense of place, but not always. There is often, but not always, a vivid consciousness of the seasons. I could go on, but what really abides in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Second Edition is the autonomous voice. No one poet here would be mistaken for another. I find that bracing and gratifying.

From editor and Vermont state poet laureate, Chard DeNiord: While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in [this anthology] claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich legacy of the state's poetic tradition. In addition to this, I would add that Vermont's legacy of fierce independence, self-reliance, and ingenuity, from its earliest settlers to its present citizens, continues to typify not only Vermonters, but its best poetry. Like its farmers, inventors, loggers, and sugarers, Vermont poets enjoy memorializing their state's stunning landscape and rugged character. Vermont is both a liberal and conservative state, pulling two ways at once just as a good poem does. One of the qualities that endures as a bittersweet yet alluring theme in much of Vermont poetry is its ironic double nature as an archetypal paradise and formidable wilderness. This seeming contradiction provides the perfect prescription for sublime poetry where the landscape intersects with Vermont's poets' lives in memorable ways, as in Robert Frost's "Home Burial," Hayden Carruth's "Emergency Haying," Ruth Stone's "Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Laundry," Major Jackson's "Enchanters of Addison County," Louise Gluck's "Burning Leaves," Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," Mary Ruefle's "Jewelweed," Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Headwaters," "David Budbill's "Sometimes," Julia Alvarez's "Homecoming," "Sydney Lea's "Dubber's Cur," and "Leland Kinsey's "Surviving Bulls." The rugged life-style that has typified the lives of so many Vermonters over the past three centuries, as well as the mystical Green Mountains,  continue to find their way into Vermont's contemporary poetry, as evidence by the more than 100 strong poets who fill this volume.

DD: Vermont Exit Ramps II puts the poetry of Neil Shepard into conversation with the photography of Anthony Reczek in interesting ways. What is the most notable aspect of this dialogue for you?

From Vermont Exit Ramps II photographer, Tony Reczek: Tamra Higgins, one of the founders (with Mary Jane Dickerson) of Sundog Poetry, in her wonderful introductory remarks at the Vermont Exit Ramps II Book Launch, said: “How fortunate we are to have the long-lasting friendship between Tony and Neil transubstantiated into this book!” 

That’s probably the most notable aspect of the VER II “dialogue” for me, how in many ways the book is a continuation of a conversation started some five decades ago, when we first began rambling around the Vermont countryside.  VER II carries on that same conversation, but our instruments have changed, and the riffs have a greater complexity and nuance.  But the conversation – no, the song – still emerges from that shared sense of wonder first encountered those many years ago.  We just keep riffing on it.

From Vermont Exit Ramps II poet, Neil Shepard: I agree with everything Tony and Tamra say:  how VERII transmutes a remarkable friendship spent rambling around Vermont for the past forty or fifty years into this crystallized series of poems and photographs that record the changing nature of the pastoral landscape.  

Most of the poems are what we’d call post-pastoral – they examine the flashpoints and tensions between natural and the human-built landscapes – whereas the photographs offer a mix of modes, sometimes casting backward to traditional pastoral images, and sometimes capturing the what-is of contemporary post pastoral Vermont. So, in this dialogue between old friends, sometimes the photographic images reinforce the poems, and sometimes they clash with the written word, But overall, what’s most remarkable to me, in addition to our ongoing friendship, is how two artists (poet and photographer) demonstrate their love and attachment to the Vermont landscape, which they both record and interrogate through the word and the photographic image.

DD: Tell us about some of the other books in your catalog. What elements link Green Writers Press poetry collections?

DC: Green Writers Press is proud to offer some stunning poetry books in our catalog. We are looking for new and emerging poets that write about the earth and our place in nature and the built environment, poets who give voice to those who are marginalized in our society, and established poets who want to publish with us and enjoy the benefits of working collaboratively. Green Writers signed the new poetry collection by Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, and we are thrilled to work with such a notable American poet as Pack. We also recently published Dirt and Honey, by Rachel Vasquez Gilliland, an emerging Mexican-American poet and feminist. Another upcoming book is titled Time Inside, by Vermont poet Gary Margolis, about his work with maximum security prison inmates. Last, but not least, GWP just published A Bouquet of Daisies, by seventeen-year-old poet, Megan Alice, with proceeds benefitting the Planned Parenthood Federation. We strive for a diverse chorus of poetic voices and our literary magazine, The Hopper, also awards a poetry prize, now in its third year. Winners include John Saad in 2016, Ralph Black in 2017, and our 2018 winner, Charity Gingerich. Our poetry editors are James Crews, Anna Mullen, Ellie Rogers, Emma Irving, Dede Cummings, and Caroline Shea.

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

JC: We have a bias for poetry that is accessible to as large an audience as possible, and because we are an independent press run almost entirely by women, we also believe that more female and transgender voices are needed in American poetry to give voice to those who have been kept quiet for too long. But as an environmentally-minded publisher, we hold close to Robert Bly's idea of "shared consciousness" with the natural world — an outlook long held by Native Americans before us. This idea puts forth that elements of the natural world are just as intelligent and conscious as humans (if not more so), and perhaps the current environmental crisis would not be so dire if more people saw the world in this way. We need more American poetry that acknowledges our essential interconnectedness as a planet and as a human species. To paraphrase the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, we'd like to see more poetry that awakens us from the illusion of our separateness. 

DD: What does the future hold for poetry at Green Writers Press? 

JC: Because our publisher is an award-winning poet in her own right, we give a lot of attention to publishing and promoting our poetry catalog. To that end, you can expect to see several new collections which showcase diverse American voices, and which unflinchingly tackle the environmental crisis. You can also look for anthologies that are in and of themselves forms of resistance against the prevailing fear and outrage infecting our politics and our country as a whole. For instance, we'll be publishing an anthology edited by our poetry editor, James Crews, called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, with a lovely preface by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

DD: You recently published Landscapes with Donkey by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (translated by Ellen Skowronski-Polito). Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

DC: Winner of the 2016 ASLE Translation Grant to support the cross-cultural sharing of ecoliterature, translator Ellen Skowronski-Polito presents Marrero Henríquez’s poetry and vision to an English-speaking audience. In Landscapes with Donkey / Paisajes con burro, Spanish poet José Manuel Marrero Henríquez follows a gentle, gray donkey on his travels through the hillsides of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located off the western coast of Africa. Wise and thoughtful, the pensive quadruped, a “doctor of the earth,” studies the limits of ground and sky  with the unique perspicuity of a donkey’s gaze. On a journey far beyond the pasture’s horizon, the donkey, humblest of poets, takes flight to the Americas, Asia and Africa and unravels the mysteries of this transcendentally beautiful and profoundly life-giving planet we call home.

José Manuel Marrero Henríquez is a poet, writer, essayist, and tenured professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He has published extensively on literary landscapes and on a variety of topics of Spanish and Latin American literatures. He has served on the advisory board of EASLCE (2010-2014) and is a member of the advisory board of Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. He has recently edited Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts (Franklin Institute, 2016) and is co-editor of Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el siglo de la gran prueba (Catarata, 2018). Paisajes con burro, his latest book of poems, was awarded a 2016 ASLE translation grant, and has been published as Landscapes with Donkey under the translation of Ellen Skowronski-Polito (Green Writers Press, 2018). His most recent endeavor of a Poetics of Breathing, a general ecocritical theory, resonates within his creative writing and advocacy of environmental issues.

A sample poem, the first one in the book, in Spanish and in English:

            La pezuña raspa el suelo
            para enterrar el punto
            que a su interrogación falta
            y el sol fortalecido esfuma
            la energía encarnada en el campo.

            No queda humedad en las cosas
            y se evapora la vida
            para siempre.

            No hay voces, niños,
            águilas, culebras,
            ni siquiera buitres,
            o ruiseñores.

            Dormitan en los libros.

            Terco, seco el páramo
            y azul el cielo, el burro
            escarba su pregunta
            en el suelo.

——-

            The hoof scrapes the ground
            to bury the point
            that lacks its question
            and the strengthened sun blurs
            the energy embodied in the field.

            Things lose their moisture
            and life evaporates
            forever.

            There are no voices, children,
            eagles, snakes,
            not even vultures,
            or nightingales.

            They doze in books.

            The páramo dry
            and the sky blue, the stubborn donkey
            scratches his question
            in the ground.

---

Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English, and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her seconds poetry collection, The Meeting Place, is due out in May 2018 from Salmon Poetry in Ireland, and she is at work on a collection of stories called Spin Cycle. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede is a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in West Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, newly installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.

James Crews is an up-and-coming poetry editor and poet himself, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in creative writing / poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column and grew to love the Great Plains. He now lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles from the Robert Frost Stone House.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Interview with Tony Towle [by Jess Matuozzi]

[Guest Author Note:  Thank you to Jess and Tony for this fascinating interview and to Hanging Loose Press for permission to reproduce the poems discussed in it!]

JM: Your poetry taps out a wry tango with history; you’ve looked at it, through it, over it, beyond it, within it, and around it, describing the historical perspective of the backward-glancing present as “the cartoon with the one perennial frame.” And so we’re here to speak of poetry’s intersection with history, personal and collective.  

Let’s start with the former. How has your writing process changed with age? I’m not referring to changes in style, like your shift from pop collage to a more conversational mode, but rather, to changes in the way you experience the writing process. 

TT: My first thought is: how can aging not have changed my writing process (along with everything else!)? But when I try to figure out what those changes have actually been, I draw a blank. If the “writing process” is the manner in which the poems are made, regardless of individual content or style, I think I have to say that there hasn’t been perceptible (perceptible to me, anyway) change since I got going in the early ‘60s. Perhaps I mistake what you are getting at. Feel free to steer me onto the right track! 

 

JM: I’m afraid I only have directions to the wrong track. It’s located at the intersection of poetry and history in the broadest sense: that is, at the site where poetry catalyzes cultural shifts that can, ultimately, be historical in their import. I’ve always seen your poems as being quietly countercultural — “The City in the Throes of Despair,” for example, crashes the ethos of “accomplishment” against the sort of openness that allows for “beauty to interrupt constantly.” Do you see your poems as countercultural? 

 

TT:  The poem you refer to was written in 1967, when the “real” counterculture (politics and sociology more than poetry) was well on its way to being a force in national life; but my work had nothing to do with that, nor was I personally very much a part of it, although I knew many poets who were. I’m not so much countercultural as a classic outsider, whose work is perhaps quietly subversive. Part of the subversion can be a free-wheeling parody of conventional thinking, with an insistence on being gratuitous, stubbornly irrelevant  to “normal” society and daily reality. The poem in question is surreal and absurdist, with satiric reference to Robert Moses, real estate developer Samuel Lefrak, and the Borough of Queens (where I grew up).  I write different kinds of poems, so one could find examples that are other than what I have just described. But I would maintain that I’m a subversive outsider rather than a counterculturalist, which usually implies an agenda beyond poetry itself.

 

JM: This differentiation you’ve made between the countercultural and the subversive is very useful; it offers a clearer vocabulary for discussing poetry’s role(s) in the public sphere. Now you’ve got me thinking about the value of anchoring subversion in a rich array of historical references, as you do in recent poems like “Misprision” and “Five Days in June.” When you find yourself animated by the mischievous impulse to pen something “gratuitous” or “stubbornly irrelevant” to conventional society, what historical period do you find most compelling to engage with, and why?   

 

TT:  It’s really whatever comes across my radar and suddenly seems right for inclusion in a particular poem. I’ve read enough history — starting in earnest at the age of eight — so that the material exists in my head as a kind of repertory. But the historical aspect may not be the primary motivation for the poem. “Misprision” — an archaic word for misunderstanding (among other meanings) — is about double entendres, a couple of them rather pornographic (Sappho’s original tongue, indeed!); the whole is made ambiguous by a naïve narrator going through a series of misprisions. Ambiguity is a prime feature of the subversive, at least my version of it. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity in poetry, and with art in general, but the average person is not. (The meaning should be clear, damn it!) Irony is another feature, and irony is often ambiguous. “Five Days in June” starts out as a lampoon of the clichéd and ubiquitous “Today,” used as an introductory phrase carrying bogus authority for a point that is not in the least proven: Today,  Americans are less inclined . . . Today, women prefer . . . This has annoyed me enough over time so that a couple of years ago I found myself composing this short poem that I think ridicules the device but is entertaining beyond that. So I don’t know if this poem is really “historical” — though it does reference the Ottoman Empire — since what could be less historical than Today? 

In any event, in both these poems it is aspects of language that drive the car, with historical references, among other items, along for the ride. In general, I’m pretty eclectic. In my book Winter Journey, there are mentions and scenarios that include the storm god Teshub, medieval Baghdad, the Mongols, Plutarch, the Battle of Kursk, Catherine the Great, John Calvin, Samuel Barber, John Clare, Val Lewton, Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, Genghis Khan, Ogodei Khan, En-Hedu-Ana, Sargon of Akkad, the Sumerians, Phoenicia, Elijah, Ahab, Jezebel, Genghis Khan again, Parthia, Sappho, Charles VIII of France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Sassanians.  

 

JM: I remain curious about what drives your propensity for more distant historical allusions. So I’ll conclude by asking you this: if you were to embark upon a sustained poetic foray into the life of some figure from the more distant past, who would you choose?  

I don’t think my sensibility is suited to do a long-poem biographical treatment of one individual, à la Robert Browning, or Byron — or my late friend and colleague Paul Violi, who was wonderfully adept at creating extended studies of historical figures (or invented ones, for that matter!).  I wouldn’t be able to sustain it, and it would end up as something else. As to a propensity for distant historical allusions, that began long before I started writing poetry. I think it had to do with escape. I often found (find) the present limited and unsatisfying. History has always given me somewhere else to go.

 

*    *    *

The City in the Throes of Despair

 

The great worm of the north, in whose footsteps we tread,

eludes us with a thousand lightnings.

However the bus, the nourishment of the city, pulls in,

and nothing has been accomplished though beauty

interrupts constantly, interpolating a row of moments

like a pink balustrade basking in the sun.

 

The buses and planes go forward in clouds of yeast and salt,

lurching over the pipes and turbines of the city

as Wyoming would slide down the coast of Norway

and I look from the plane as from the vantage point of a roof

to see the Lefrak Building shielding my eyes from Manhattan.

Lefrak, whose first name has escaped me —  like Catherine

the Great's last — into the wild blue,

but who with Moses, whose first name is an anticlimax,

has left us the Queens of today and tomorrow.

 

We surprise the great worm in the frozen waste of his sleep.

Our magic ax and feather do their work

and the monster lies helpless in scattered and giggling pieces.

The five boroughs are safe and rainbows arch over the brick,

bright birds with their pinions are free to range once more,

but in whose colorful wake our hurtling plane seems spiritless,

planning to touch only Chicago and perhaps Detroit,

with a landing in the meantime however subtle meaning an emergency,

with no one congenial until reaching the ground, parachutes billowing,

and relaxing on the train back to New York, the parachute as a souvenir.

 

Tony Towle, 1967

from The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000

(Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

 

 

Misprision

 

someone said Sappho could be understood

only through her original tongue

and I said I didn’t think so

as educational as that would probably be

 

someone wrote that Charles VIII

entered France in the 1490’s

and I said to myself: I don’t think so

he was born many years before that

but he did penetrate Italy in 1494

as far as Naples, and didn’t withdraw

for an entire year, which seems extraordinary

by today’s standards

but he finally lost virility and everything else

by hitting his head on a doorway in 1498

 

someone wrote that gardening was a literature 

in which scholars nibbled at the edges 

of what appeared to be an insurmountable edifice

and I thought: that makes perfect sense,

nibbling is an authentic scholarly pursuit

and eventually the edifice will get lower

and can be surmounted

 

somebody said that cretins painted murals

and got out of labyrinths but that seems unlikely

and someone wrote to say it’s time for a poetry museum

but I don’t understand how anyone could possibly know that

and isn’t that what our books are already

glassless vitrines 

where you’re allowed to run your fingers over the art

or nibble on the implications

or loiter in the white passageways between the lines

hoping to meet the lenders to the exhibition

 

Tony Towle,  2004

from Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, 2008

 

Five Days in June

 

Today, the most overused introductory is Today,.

 

Today, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.

 

Today will be yesterday tomorrow, and it will be clear

that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

 

Today, I will put ten dollars on Pigs in Moonlight, take my winnings

and disappear into the Ottoman Empire.

 

Today, the Ottoman Empire is a furniture store on Queens Boulevard.

 

Tony Towle, 2015

from Noir: Poems 2008-2017, Hanging Loose Press, 2017

*    *    *

[Tony Towle, a quintessential poet of the New York School and the city of New York itself, is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Hanging Loose Press, 2001).  His most recent collection is Noir: Poems 2008-2017 (Hanging Loose Press, 2017).]

[Jess Matuozzi received her PhD in English and African American Studies from Yale University in 2016. She is currently a fire dancer, primate conservation activist, and English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.] 

 

John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan.  It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's high school…  Special thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin Jamail]

Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge.  Ashbery’s playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise, contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations.  Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run.  Many years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor, John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my first year at Trinity.  John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain.  He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.

Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:      

Student: How do you get inspired?

Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait.  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.

Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?

Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens.  I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses.  I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns.  I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school.  The population was something like 8,957,000.  She had the most population of any of the cities.

Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?

Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet.  I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually.  It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer.  Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter.  I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint.  I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.

Student: What poets inspired you the most when you were younger

Ashbery: Actually the first modern poet in that anthology.  It was all strange to me as it probably is for anyone who encounters modern poetry, asking “What is this?”  “It doesn’t make any sense!”  But then I began to like that.  Some of the poets I liked actually made a lot of sense but I was still too inexperienced to realize this.  My favorite one was W.H. Auden, who you wouldn’t think today would give readers that much difficulty; partly because his later poetry was much more uncomplicated and straightforward.  But he hadn’t written his later poetry yet.  His earlier poetry is rather obscure and puzzling.  I became very attracted by his way of using different tones and styles, like vernacular of various kinds, and prosy journalism, and all of these mashed together in the same poem.          

Student: What inspired your poem “Some Trees”?

Ashbery: The poem “Some Trees” was inspired by falling in love and also by reading the poetry of Marianne Moore, which I was reading a lot of at the time.  I think that there’s an influence in that poem of Marianne Moore’s, certainly the half-rhymes that she used a lot. 

Student: Do you write with the intention of getting at a deeper meaning?

Ashbery: Deeper than what?  I write with the intention of expressing a meaning that I couldn’t put into words until I’ve done so by writing it in the poem.  

Student: Do your poems just come to you or do you sit down thinking I’m going to write a poem now?

Ashbery: Yeah I guess I sit down thinking, or hoping, “I’m going to write a poem now.”*

Student: Do you disagree with the critical interpretations of your poems?

Ashbery: Yes, always, including the favorable ones.     

Student: Do you understand your own work?

Ashbery: No—but as I said, that’s why I write it, hoping that I’ll be able to understand it eventually.*

Student: Does other art inspire your poems?

Ashbery: Certainly painting and music, especially music.  I listen to music when I’m writing.  I think if I had known how to do it I probably would have written music instead of poetry.  What’s interesting is that it’s a linear experience in time as is a poem.  You have to stay with it until the end to know what it’s all about, whereas a painting you can look at and say, “O yeah, I got that.”  The time that is built into the experience for me is very much something that the poetry is about, too.  It’s the universal subject.  My poetry often reflects my past, childhood, and so forth.  The temporal quality of poetry is why I switched from painting to writing poetry.  But I look at a lot of art, too.  I worked as an art critic for a long time and had to force myself to really look at something so I’d remember when I sat down to write about it what I had seen.  That was a very valuable experience.  One thing that’s the hardest to do is give your attention to anything.  By painfully forcing myself I learned a valuable lesson.              

Student: If you could bring five items to a deserted island what would you bring?

Ashbery: Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.   

Student: If you weren’t a famous poet what other work could you imagine yourself doing?

Ashbery: I can’t imagine myself doing any work.  I don’t think poetry counts.  I would like to have been able to do other things, like writing music, as I just mentioned, or writing novels, which people would then actually read.  But it’s very difficult to write a novel, whereas it’s easy to write poetry, provided that you’re a poet.  I’m always amazed at performative art, like a violinist who plays an incredible concerto.  Of course, it’s easy for him because that’s what he does.  It wouldn’t be easy for me.

Student: Do poets have a responsibility to be political?

Ashbery: I think people have a responsibility to be political.  I don’t think that poets have a responsibility to write political poetry, because I think any poetry is political in the sense that it makes you reflect on life, and feel glad you’re alive if it’s a good poem, and it makes you want to act in various capacities from love or militant philosophy and experience different forms of your life.  I don’t like political poetry because I invariably agree with the message in it and don’t have to be reminded of it.  

"The End of the Evening" by Kenneth Koch with Reflections by Katherine Koch [by Justin Jamail]

[Guest Author Note: I recently had the pleasure of coming across The End of the Evening - a board game created by Kenneth Koch - at the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection.  What follows are reproductions of the game, courtesy of the New York Public Library and the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, and reflections by Kenneth Koch's daughter Katherine.]

JJ: So this object is amazing and brings to mind so much of the excitement of being around your father.  I am thinking most especially of the combination of inspired zaniness and extraordinary learnedness that one experienced with him (and also reading his poetry!).  Did you ever actually play The End of the Evening -- what was it like?  What were the rules?  Who won?  This is three (maybe four) questions!

Katherine Koch: I was my father’s eleven-year-old test subject for The End of the Evening. He wanted it to exist as a real, playable game with the satisfaction and fun of games, the surprise and uncertainty that can come out of a very simple structure.

My father always loved and was confident about trying new things, new forms, new ways to find an audience to surprise and exhilarate them. This was 1967, an exhilarating moment in our culture, very much so in New York City. All kinds of social and generational barriers were being broken down and all kinds of money started being available for projects in the arts, the wilder the better. So, the idea of making and finding a market for poetic board games—he wanted to do more than one—seemed possible—why not?

As with many different forms he tried out, he wanted to subvert it at the same time as he followed its rules. He loved making up palindromes, for instance, but only if they were ridiculous and required an equally ridiculous backstory. At one point he felt he’d successfully “destroyed” the palindrome when he came up with things like, “Anna Anna Anna Otto Hannah Otto Anna Anna Anna.”

One subversive thing he does in The End of the Evening is he tricks the player. I’m not sure this would have gone over so well if it had been played as a real game: if you land on the square “HOPELESS NEUROSIS—advance 8 spaces,” you land on DIE, and are out of the game. After the first time you played this wouldn’t be much fun. The Old Age section of the board consists of four squares that say DIE, one square that says “LIVE—Move backwards one roll,” and one square that says “LIVE IN ITALY CROSS BRIDGE GO TO COMINCIA.” It’s kind of funny and means that old age is almost impossible to navigate, but it’s unfair if you’re actually playing the game. 

On the other hand, if you land on PSYCHOANALYSIS and have to go back 18 spaces, you end up back in childhood, back at the square called SLEEP. This is witty and more fun, since you get the chance to keep playing. 

As an eleven year-old I played board games all the time; my friends and I had played them since we were little, starting with the great Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, moving on to Monopoly, The Game of Life, Clue. My father and I had played board games and card games in the evenings after dinner for years—giving my mother some time off after working a full-time job and cooking dinner.  He was a great and keenly competitive lover of almost any kind of game, games of skill and games of chance, board games, card games, games like tennis, baseball, bowling, ping pong, gambling at casinos. He loved magic, the magic of cards and coincidence.

So one evening in the winter of 1967 my father sat me down at the dining room table with this piece of paper on which he’d started a game not unlike Life or Monopoly in the sense of showing the course of a life in sections from childhood to old age. Instead of moving through events like starting a family, getting a mortgage, buying property, going to jail—it showed stages of life not unlike the stages of my father’s life! The life of a poet—there were squares like WRITE A POEM, THE UNIVERSITY, GO TO ITALY, LITERARY REPUTATION, PSYCHOANALYSIS,  and MAKE LOVE.

I am not sure why he thought Kenneth Koch’s life story and dreams would be interesting to a game-playing public, but he had vast confidence that what he loved and found funny would appeal to a wide audience.  Besides, he did include the simple universal stages of babyhood—EAT, CRY, NAP, PLAY—followed immediately by DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING, then, as adolescence begins, THE BEACH. Of course, the beach. ADOLESCENT PIMPLES, one of my favorite squares as an 11 year-old (before I myself fell victim to them), came right after THE BEACH.

As my father began showing me The End of the Evening, I thought it was hilarious, and also moving, even when I didn’t understand what was going on. The themes were very Kenneth Koch: Italy, psychoanalysis, literary reputation, love; the strangeness was, too—the last squares being different stages of the evening. That bit of sehnsucht, yearning for the sublime.

He appreciated my appreciation. We laughed a lot while he pointed out various squares and lovable juxtapositions (KISS ME followed by WRITE A POEM INSPIRED BY ITALY), his sometimes abrupt sense of humor (GIVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, then OBTAIN POWER, then BUY SAILBOAT AND GO TO MEDITERRANEAN)  but he also wanted to get down to business: how to make the game fun to play. Because it’s one thing to look at the board appreciatively, another thing to step into the dance.

So, a few times, we started out at START, throwing a die to advance along the squares, and using counters, probably pennies. He liked pennies, symbolic in his childhood of the magic of money and magic tricks. It was fun to play, but my father the strategist wanted to make it make sense all together: the events at the different stages of life; and the squares where you follow special instructions; and the bridges between life and Italy, between Italy and Evening; and does the final square, “The End of the Evening—victory” give the winner enough strange poetic joy?

He also needed my help as an artistic and visually precise kid to make the final, central section of five squares, Evening. I measured and drew the squares with a ruler, and that’s my handwriting.

I liked the game, partly because I adored my father, and it was an interesting and puzzling variation on the games I’d played all my life. He kept changing it around after we’d played it a few times: you can see how he made the decision to replace the instructions in about five squares with “EAT.” I don’t know if you were supposed to literally eat something if you landed in those squares or if it’s merely descriptive, as MUMPS and COLISEUM—FALL ASLEEP are. He also added complexities involving THE MEDITERRANEAN and GREECE which didn’t quite get integrated into the game.

Oddly, he signed and dated it: at the lower right, it says “Finished March 30, 1967 K.K.” I guess it was complete for him as a work of art, though it never quite came to life as a game—which is just as well! Better to devote his psyche to poetry than to figuring out how to make a board game work.

JJ:  I am of course struck by the "life within a life" -- I mean the Italian life -- that seems to be going on in the inner loop in this game.  What was it about Italy that appealed in this way, do you think?  Was it Italy itself or your father's particular experiences there or both? (surely both! but how?)

Katherine Koch: As you see, Italy is super important to the game: you can only get there by narrowly escaping death from old age, and the only way to win, to reach Evening, is to go through Italy.

You’re right that it must be both the qualities of Italy itself and my father’s own experiences there that gave him the idea to make Italy into a kind of paradise within the game.

I think he felt an intense kind of longing, nostalgia, for the beauty and peace of Italy because it was where he’d had some of the happiest times of his life, times that were cut short by a tragedy. 

He and my mother lived there, mainly in Rome, on their year-long honeymoon, and that’s where I was born. After a year or so back in New York City, we took an ocean liner to Florence, where my mother had gotten a Fulbright to study Italian literature. My parents both talked about the months in Florence as a kind of lost eden. My mother had gotten pregnant shortly after starting classes there and was delighted at the prospect of a having a second baby. Meanwhile the three of us would do things like take walks together in the countryside beyond our house on the other side of the Arno—at age two I always wanted to go further and further, and would have to be carried home. Years later, back in Florence, my father burst into tears showing me the gate we would go through as we started out on our walks.

When she was six months pregnant, in April 1958, my mother suffered an almost fatal miscarriage. She would have died if my father hadn’t raced all over Florence begging for blood for transfusions—her blood type was fairly rare, it was Rh negative; and it was Easter week, when most businesses were closed. 

We went back to busy, gray New York as soon as we could, and my parents’ marriage was never the same afterwards, to hear them tell it.

So that is the serious background to the Italy loop of the game, the very Kenneth way in which he wove sadness and loss into sweetness, silliness, and, lest we forget, into The End of the Evening—VICTORY.

Meet the Press: Canarium Books—A Conversation with Joshua Edwards

Dante Di Stefano: Kenneth Koch, adding to the famous adage by Wallace Stevens, said: “Not only is all poetry experimental, but all that is truly experimental is poetry.” When I think about the work Canarium Books has published I think of this Koch quote. Can you begin by discussing the Canarium catalog along the lines of the experimental (the surprising, the anti-quotidian, the unorthodox)?

Joshua Edwards: I don’t trust anything poets say, but I like the way Koch’s adage sounds! U.S. poetry’s standard metric of experimentalism has a lot to do with syntactical disruption, fragmentation, and the deployment of philosophy and its problems, and I think many of our books fit the bill, but newness isn’t what we’re most interested in as editors. We certainly do our best to publish work that challenges modes of inquiry, explores how language can be used, wonders what’s worthy of attention and obsession, and reimagines forms, but mostly we’re looking for unique visions and interesting thinking.

DD: How did Canarium Books come into being?

JE: I guess you might say it was an experiment. A year or so after graduating from college I had the idea to start a journal, mostly as a way to educate myself about poetry, and through poetry, about the world. I had no idea what I was doing and no money, but I was fortunate to find funding and to cross paths with a few great young poets in Oregon, and with their help The Canary was born. That lasted six years, until we decided to transform the journal into a press ten years ago. At that time I was graduating from an MFA program at University of Michigan, and I pitched an idea to the program for a collaboration, whereby they’d help with printing costs and interested students could help out as readers and managing editors. Miraculously it all worked out. The first two books published were Union! by Ish Klein and Tod Marshall’s The Tangled Line, and we’ve recently published our 26^th and 27^th.

DD: Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book is such an amazing book. Not only does Buffam succeed in taking an ancient form and rendering it in a vividly contemporary way, she’s composed a hybrid text, which is exceedingly complex and, yet, easily accessible. She winds up writing a book that is a serious contemplation on motherhood in the digital age, and at the same time its one of the funniest books in recent memory. What do you find most notable about this book?

JE: I find all the characteristics you mention to be notable, but for me it’s the consciousness at the center of A Pillow Book that makes it so powerful. Suzanne is incredibly funny, and I think she has a profound understanding of the relationship between humor and its dark or difficult sources. There’s a kind of electricity that runs through all of her books that holds everything together while also creating moments that jump off the page. But I’m skirting your question. I guess my answer would be that I find the sharp, sustained portrayal of restlessness to be my favorite aspect of A Pillow Book.

DD: What does American poetry need more of, in your opinion? Less of?

JE: The young poets who are starting presses and doing all sorts of great stuff right now are really inspiring, and I think they can answer this question better than me, but I’ll offer my cranky answer nonetheless: What poets in America and all people everywhere need is health care, safety, and affordable lives, but speaking specifically about poets in this country, they need more freedom and less nationalism and “culture.” About 80 years ago somebody (Herman Bonnert or Frank Zacone or Henry Maar or someone without a good publicist) had the idea to twist a balloon into a recognizable animal shape. Whatever made that first balloon animal happen—be it the chance encounter of a clown and a giraffe at balloon factory or a person’s desire to make a child laugh at a birthday party—is for me the poetic moment, when imagination brings something surprising into the world. (Take that, Koch and Stevens.) A lot of poetry is the product of a manner of thinking, which trades the classified impulses of creation for a kind of political affect or performance. Wonderful things can still happen in this mode, since language has its own magic and the individual mind is ultimately irrepressible, but it’s hard to make a great work of art with the qualifications of an industry. The overwhelming majority of the poets I know compete with each other for a handful of academic jobs. Teaching is of course an absolutely amazing career and time to write is a miracle, but the industry that has been built up around creative writing is out of control. I think poets need to be very aware of the institutions that support them and the technologies used to disseminate their work.

DD: What is on the horizon for Canarium Books in 2018 and beyond?

JE: Our recently-released 2018 books are giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper and Anne Kawala’s Screwball, which are both super examples of poetic experimentation. 2019 will be slow for us as publishers, since we’re focusing on our current roster of authors and none of them have manuscripts that will be ready this year, so we’re going to take that time to do some other things. We helped our friends at Marfa Book Co. to put on a poetry festival in August 2017 and we’ll likely do that again next summer. We’ve also organized performances by a couple of my favorite songwriters (who I think of as poets with guitars), Mitski and Christopher Owens. I’d like to keep doing that when the occasion arises. In 2020 and beyond, there are a couple of new books by current Canarium folks lined up and a translation or two.

DD: Tell us a bit about Anne Kawala’s Screwball (translated by Kit Schluter).

JE: Screwball is a wild ride. Like John Beer’s Lucinda, it’s a book-length poem or verse novel that changes forms as it goes, and every page offers something unexpected. I won’t go into the plot too much, for fear of ruining some surprises, but I will say that it involves a huntress-gathress, an iceberg, and an adventure that traverses geographies. Anne Kawala is a virtuoso, and this is a book that puts on display her vibrant imagination as well as a multitude of technical talents. Hats off to Kit Schluter for his excellent translation.

DD: You recently published giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

JE: There’s so much going on in AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper that any description I could give of its themes and ideas would be reductive and not do justice to giovanni’s great book, so I’ll just stick with the basics. The book is a collection or gallery of poems, many of which incorporate or are comprised of images (mesostics, illustrations, performance scores, drawings), that explore lives, how we’re perceived, and how we live together, among other things. We’ve got a page at our website with recordings of giovanni reading beautifully from the book, so I’ll end by directing folks there: http://www.canarium.org/recordings

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Joshua Edwards co-edits Canarium Books and works at bookstores in West Texas and Chicago. He’s the author of Castles and Islands, Imperial Nostalgias, and Architecture for Travelers, among other collections; he translated María Baranda’s book-length poem, Ficticia; and his photographic projects have been exhibited at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Rice University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Galveston Artist Residency, the Pensacola Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Information about his work and the reading tour he’s currently on can be found at www.architecturefortravelers.org

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Meet the Press: Jacar Press—A Conversation with Richard Krawiec

Dante Di Stefano: How did Jacar Press come into being?

Richard Krawiec: I've been involved in writing and publishing since forever.  Back in the 70s in Boston, I had a friend who mimeographed sheets of poems and stories in his 3rd floor garret. From that time on I was in love with the small press world.  After my novel Time Sharing was published by Viking Penguin in 1986, I worked in a variety of sites that were mostly excluded, at that time, from literary programming - homeless shelters, women's centers, prisons - including death row, literacy classes, housing communities, drug treatment programs, ESL classes.  I started a non-profit, Voices: A Creative Community, whose mission was to teach writing as a tool of self-empowerment in communities marginalized by the dominant culture, and to help people from those communities develop their writing and teaching skills, and I would then hire them as teachers.  Through Voices I created Jacar Press, and we published a variety of learner-authored texts, including, in 1993, the first anthology of writing by people who were homeless - In Our Own Words. We also published a textbook, An Invitation to Write, which offered ways to set up participatory, learner-centered workshops in alternative sites to adult learners.  I was told by the distributor that it was used in 31 countries and considered a seminal text in the field.  Who knows?

When my wife at the time developed a serious illness, I had to step back for a while and take care of her and my two children.  Other than publishing my own stories, poems, plays and non-fiction pieces, I didn't re-enter the publishing world until the 2000s.  When Obama was elected in 2008 there was much discussion about the need for a stimulus program to jump-start the economy.  I thought, writers could use some help too.  So, I conceived of the idea of a poetry cookbook, an anthology alternating between poems and recipes written by poets and their friends: The Sound of Poets Cooking.  I wanted all the proceeds to go towards providing stipends for writers to teach free community-based workshops.  At first, I tried to give the book away to other publishers, but no one wanted to be so generous with the proceeds.  So, I finally decided to revive Jacar Press. Interestingly, after a brief spurt during which Jacar Press did hire writers to teach workshops at a number of sites, interest in teaching in alternative sites waned so we began to donate our proceeds to activist groups we felt were working for progressive change.

DD: Could you talk about what it means to be “a community-active” literary press? 

RK: We call ourselves a Community-Active press because we don't make any attempt to be profitable, preferring to invest our money in causes we value, while also supporting developing writers by offering free and low-cost writing workshops.  We still offer free workshops, most recently to women in prison, and free writing and theater-based workshops for survivors of sexually assault. But another part of our community active vision is enacted by bringing visiting writers to NC to teach low cost craft workshops - $25 for half a day.  We host an annual event, A Gathering of Poets, bringing some of the top names in poetry, elders and new voices, to NC and we underwrite most of the cost, so poets can, for $100-$125, take 4 craft workshops (and, also, get free breakfast and lunch) from people we'd otherwise never see in this state.  This year, on March 30, 2019, we'll be bringing Marilyn Nelson, Li-Young Lee, Chloe Honum, Kaveh Akbar, Eduardo Corral and Renee Emerson to NC for our Gathering of Poets.  In the past we've had headliners like Lynn Emanuel, Patricia Spears Jones, Dorianne Laux, Rickey Laurentiis, and others.

So we serve the poetry community by offering free outreach workshops, and low-cost workshops. We’re always open to suggestions from writers, any writers. Have a workshop you want to offer to an under-served community?  Pitch us.

Lately we’ve been making a lot of direct donations from book sales.  We gave $1500 to a young woman entering college in D.C. through a scholarship handled by the Urban League.  This Fall we are giving $400 to help cover the costs of books for a writing major, preferably a person of color or non-binary gender.  We have made cash contributions to, among others, the Black Art Futures Fund, Black Lives Matter, ConPRmetidos, Dakota Access Pipeline Fund, Doctors Without Borders, Durham Literacy Council, National Immigration Law Center, Orange County Rape Crisis Center, Raleigh PACT(Police Accountability Community Task Force), Song(LGBTQ activism), Syrian Refugee Relief, Women’s Theater Festival.  Sometimes it's a straight donation.  Sometimes the donations are geared towards paying for someone to attend activist training, or women's theater.  Recently we donated $600 worth of books to an inner-city teen summer program.
 
Lastly, we are 'community-active in supporting the larger poetry and literary press scene by sponsoring the $500 Julie Suk Award for the Best Poetry Book published each year.  We publicize extensively not just the winners, but all the finalists and their presses (as a way to support the independent press scene).  Past winners have been Kaveh Akbar, Monique Ferrell, Rickey Laurentiis, Noel Crook, David Roderick, Susan Elbe.   

DD: What common elements do Jacar Press books share? 

RK: This is a tough one, and I have really tried to think this through.  Our publications are diverse. We publish work by established as well as new writers.  Betty Adcock, Gibbons Ruark, are masters at lyricism, and newcomers like Kelly Michels and Sharon McDermott are getting there.  We publish the “hypnagogic” verse of Jaki Shelton Green (just appointed NC's first African-American Poet Laureate Yay!), rooted in the tradition of Troupe and Shange, as well as younger voices like Monique-Adelle Callahan D, whose work is fed by the community of Cave Canem. What do the finely crafted prose poems of Deborah Bogen have in common with the haiku by women from 6 continents in Wishbone Moon, or the ghazals of Shadab Zeest Hashmi? The delightful and fresh eye Adam Scheffler turns on contemporary America, with the 80+ voices, from teenagers to Pulitzer Prize winners, confronting violence against their communities in Resisting Arrest?   What do Dorianne Laux and Cornelius Eady hold in common?  
 
I think it’s attentiveness to craft, distinct voice, a commitment to writing the best poems they are capable of, and the ambition to write poems that matter.  

DD: Tell us about the literary journal connected with the press: One.

RK: One.  Talk about herding cats.  Ever try to get a majority of 8 editors to agree on a poem?  

Seriously, One has been a joy.  We limit submissions to one poem at a time so that our editors can read, reread, and discuss - as we often do - all the submissions.  We have been fortunate to have received work from people who have won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and MacArthur Genius Awards, but we are just as open to newcomers.  We have a global vision, and have published poems by poets in Nigeria, Ghana, Dubai, Lebanon, Ireland, Turkey, Scotland, Spain, England, India, etc.  We were thrilled when Rasaq Malik, from Nigeria, won an Honorable Mention in the Best of the Net, and honored to have Claudia Emerson win that award. We read until we find 21 poems we reach a consensus on.  We also have a Second Look section where we revisit a master poem each issue.

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

RK: More readers.  The number of people who define as poets seems to outstrip the number who buy poetry books.  

DD: What’s on the horizon for Jacar Press? 

RK: We have never been a regional press.  I see that trend continuing.  This year we are going to host 3 readings in NYC - Aug 22 at KGB Bar, Aug 26 at Bowery Poetry Club, and Nov 9 at Poet's House. We're looking into sponsoring events for our authors in Cleveland and Chicago and Boston. I will personally be travelling to Ireland this Fall, reading in Skerries, and participating in the Bray Literary Festival.  In the past we sponsored Irish editions of a book by Gibbons Ruark, as well as readings in Dublin, and hope to expand on that.  I will also be travelling to France, hosted by my French publishers in readings and conferences in Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse, and I plan on exploring possibilities for Jacar readings and workshops in that country.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a Jacar Press collection? 

RK: I’ve decided to offer here the title poem from the late Kathryn Stripling Byer’s final manuscript, which we plan to publish in early 2019.  The book was originally scheduled to be published by a well-known press, but they were not enthusiastic about publishing it after she died.  Jacar, which had previously published two chapbooks of Kay’s, one in a hand-letter press fine arts edition, believes the book is arguably her best work and we are honored to be chosen to publish it.  This poem was finished a few months before she died from lymphoma on June 5, 2017, and, clearly, she knew what was on her horizon.

        Trawling the Silences

        This end-of-March day, I’d rather watch hawks surf
        the thermals than contemplate what lies ahead.
        Or behind in its wake. In the few hours left, let me keep
        my doubts shut, my windows wide open, their sheer curtains
        billowing.  It’s March, after all, having come in
        a lamb and departing a lioness, stalking my back yard,

        leaving her paw prints alongside the patient ephemerals
        rising again out of leaf litter.  Squirrel corn. Spring beauty.
        The first rue anemone.   Today I would rather
        read field guides, repeating the whimsical names
        of our niche-dwelling mussels about to be wiped out by backhoes
        and bulldozers.  Pimpleback, Snuffbucket.  Monkeyface
        Pearlymussel.  Don’t let their names be forgotten,I’d pray
        if I prayed, though just naming a thing is a prayer,
        wrote Simone Weil, turning her face to the almighty
        silences.  The silences.  Where would we be
        without them, what were we, what will we be, oh to be,
        and again be, that damn linking verb.  I’d rather be tracking
        my lioness up to the rim of that mountain top,
        I’d rather let be and let go.  Let the anemone
        cling, the hawks soar, the lioness squander another day
        trying to find what she’s looking for.  Give her another day,
        I ask the Almighty.  Give the birds one more day
        scolding the rapscallion squirrels stealing birdseed.
        I rest my case, carapace, my own little voice trawling
        the silences, the bully wind boasting its presence in present-tense,
        no linking verb to shut down the show.  Let
        my lioness lounge in the sally grass.  Licking her paws.

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Richard Krawiec has published three books of poetry, Breakdown, She Hands Me the Razor, and most recently Women Who Loved Me Despite (Second Edition, Sable Books).  His work appears in dozens of literary magazines, including Drunken Boat, Shenandoah, sou’wester, Lavure Litteraire, Dublin Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, New Orleans Review, Blue Fifth Review, Connotations, etc.   In addition to poetry, he has published 2 novels, Time Sharing and Faith in What?, a story collection, And Fools of God, and 4 plays. His most recent novel, Vulnerables (Editions Tusitala, and Points Press), was published in France to widespread acclaim, even reviewed in the French edition of Rolling Stone. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NC Arts Council (twice), and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is founder of Jacar Press, a Community Active publishing company that also runs an online magazine One. He has taught writing to people in homeless shelters, women's shelters, prisons, literacy classes, community sites and elsewhere.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Meet the Press: Dos Madres Press—An Interview with Robert Murphy and David Giannini

Dante Di Stefano: How did Dos Madres come into being?

Robert Murphy: Like Athena the Press sprang from the head of Zeus – along with a headache - or was it from his thigh as with Dionysus. (well, actually, the head and heart of The Muse probably is more accurate – and a bit of the unexpected, if not miraculous thrown in). And it is longer in the tell of it than anyone would wish to hear, because it has to do with my own journey as a writer and a poet, and for the last fourteen years, along with my wife, Elizabeth, a publisher.

Until the age of forty I was completely unknown to the vibrant literary community of the Greater Cincinnati Area. I, for the most part, wrote in isolation (literally) often in my car.  I was not in academia, but made my living in the building trades.  One day my brother suggested I enter a local competition sponsored by the Greater Cincinnati Writer’s League. My poem won, and a year’s free membership to the League came along with it. The GCWL had, and still has, monthly meetings where the members’ work is critiqued by poet/teachers from the likes of Xavier University, the University of Cincinnati, Miami U. and, Thomas More College, and others.  The miraculous thing that happened was that at one of those critiques Dr. Norman Finkelstein, poet and scholar/critic, after the meeting took me aside to say that he was astonished that I was not known to him, and where exactly had I been.  At work in a different world, I said. But it was he who opened his world to my life with an introduction to not only significant local writers such as Tyrone Williams, and Richard Hague, and Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel, but also to more distant luminaries such as Nathaniel Tarn, Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, and to one who became in a short year my friend, mentor, and alma pater: the extraordinary William Bronk.  This all began thirty years ago.  And finally in 2004 I decided to give back to that community kind enough to take me in. To give back, in some small measure, all that I had been gifted.  The project was made all the easier by my wife Elizabeth who is a gifted graphic designer, portraitist, and iconographer, and now a celebrated book designer.  Which means, of course, that she is the true midwife of the Press. I am but the ghost in the machine. As for a name, we decided on Dos Madres, two mothers in Spanish, in honor of our own mothers, respectively: Vera Laverne Murphy, and Libbie Hart Hughes, both lovers of literature and promoters of literacy, and who contributed financially to us in the nascent years of the press.

DD: How has publishing poetry changed for you since beginning in 2004?

RM: Well the obvious change involves sheer numbers. The significant increase in those seeking publication, and then just the problem of finding a way of doing it.  It can be a bit harried for three people, I being the only reader, my wife Elizabeth the only designer, my son manning the website.  It is truly a Mom and Pop corner grocery store kind of concern.  Still in all we have managed somehow since 2004 to see 176 titles by 107 authors into print.

And that means, too, thousands of books mailed out.

My wife and I began this enterprise thinking we would just do chapbooks for poet friends. We printed our own chapbooks on our laser color printer, even folded and stapled them. And when we began doing the perfect-bound books we started with traditional offset printing, which cost-wise, demanded that we print at least 500 copies to gain any price advantage. As you can imagine, given the nature of poetry readership, 500 copies of any book produced by an unknown press was likely to remain significantly on their shelves for a very long time.  In fact, I still have hundreds of copies of books from that early period. Luckily, with advancements in laser technology came the possibility of printing fewer books at a time, and also the ability to reorder as the need arises, yet with a quality indistinguishable from offset.  We found a printer who could print books of high quality, not only in black and white, but fine color reproduction as well.   

DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Dos Madres poets share in common?

RM: First of all, when I look upon our catalog (here) I am every time reminded of the virtuosity of the design for the covers of these books.  There has just been unstinting praise of Elizabeth’s design work:  the look of the books: outside and inside, cover and text, the clarity, the appropriateness of the appearance of the poem on the page – the font, the margins, the decorative and organizational aspects she brings to enhance the quality of each book. Elizabeth’s presentations are unique. And as far as what our authors share in common, despite their eclectic nature in terms of tone, style, formal and informal verse: as one our author’s Dick Hague wrote (he having edited our ten year anniversary issue: The Realms of the Mothers – The First Decade of Dos Madres Press: “It is not possible to generalize about all these Dos Madres Poets, beyond claiming their universal mastery of craft. Beyond that, the diversity of theme, subject, form, diction, speaker echoes what I, a former collector of beetles, loved about the insect order Coleoptera: a tremendous range of size, structure, color, habitat, life cycle.   . . .  Likewise, Realms of the Mothers shows in the domain of poetry a rapturous fondness for, and extensive expression of, a similarly multifarious creation.”

And also I do find it interesting that the Press has published not just the expected numerous poet/teachers/critics from the academic community but a group consisting of two editors of professional magazines, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, an eminent doctor of pediatric psychiatry, a Jungian therapist, a pediatrician, the head of the emergency room of a Greek island hospital, a physicist, a somatic therapist, an eminent professor of cognitive science, a lawyer, a psychologist, a librarian, a writer of children’s literature, a legendary artist from the psychedelic era, a world renowned expert in biological regeneration, award winning high school teachers, one of the foremost scholars of Sufism, and councilors in mental health and drug rehabilitation. And perhaps most importantly not a few who took on the role of mother and housewife, the raising of children and so in turn the bearer of the future - maintainers of the light and life of civilization.  The voices of those many who often go unheard while employed in the most important job in the world.

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

RM: More readers. And poets who don’t write narrowly for other poets, though that surely will go on, that necessary con-verse-ation between the voices of the living and the dead, the past and the present, and all that futures there (and all of it in our heads). And, of course, it is good to remember as Whitman said, “To have great poets you must have great audiences.” We are at the risk of always losing both. And what did Pascal say. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Alone, with our terrible loneliness, always a difficulty, for sure.  And without a smartphone or an I Pad. But I do believe that Pascal might have agreed that the read of a good book of poetry would go a long way to solve our problems as well. One of David Giannini’s books of poetry being a possible cure.

DD: What can we look forward to from Dos Madres in the near future?

RM: One hopes, of course, for more of the same, if by the same one means those qualities of language which may make a difference in the reader.  And, if he or she is alert enough, change them forever.  Such a book, and a recent addition to our catalog is Christopher Smart’s Cat by Igor Webb.  The late novelist Philip Roth wrote of it,  . . .”it’s marvelous, excellently written, inventively told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair . . . “ Born Igor Weiss in Slovakia, he and his parents survived the Holocaust in hiding and then after the war made their way by way of Ecuador to upper Manhattan. The book takes Igor back to Slovakia as an adult, retracing his childhood—and also veers off into numerous engaging side trips into literature, so that the whole thing reads quirkily as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive heft.” 

Another great read, which will come to press soon, probably in August is, by noted poet Roger S. Mitchell. his Reason’s Dream. Elaine Sexton says of the book, “In Roger Mitchell’s sinuous new collection, he speaks of “a livable oblivion,” something “better than rapture,” where “ the dog catches what it knows it can’t catch,” and something “keeps us rafting/this waterfall of urgencies/in a storm of interrupted calms.” This master poet . . . raises the bar, here, again, illustrating the intense delights in the lyric moment, where the articulated self comes alive in the natural world.” And, with any luck we will have another book from David Giannini.

DD: You’ve published two excellent books by David Giannini, Faces Somewhere Wild (2017) and The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up (2018). Could you tell us a little bit about what you admire in these books and introduce David Giannini?

RM: You mean beyond his wonderfully eccentric intelligence, his ability to surprise, his quixotic perception, his fine ear, his wonderful eye in observation of nature, his ability to hear all the possibilities in a word in association with others: a sentence, a stanza and so create a poetry that gets up on its hind legs and howls . . , that is to say . . . come almost physically alive?  Beyond this, I would say it is his deep and abiding compassion, his full human heartedness, not just for his fellow man/woman/child but for all that creatures there – if we but for a moment look, hear, see and feel, take the census of a breeze. For, indeed, it is a world that for many of us is in want of reintroduction – as if forgotten, but always wanted, always yearned for, always waiting to be remembered, that lives trembling with invisible, anticipatory recognition for us there.

DD: You’ve had eight books published in the last three years. This is amazing by anyone’s standards? How do you write so prolifically?

David Giannini: I’ve said and written that poetry is daily and not merely some subject to be studied in a classroom or a lesson with given ‘prompts.’  I have always enjoyed what Mallarme said: “Poetry is not made with ideas; it is made with words.” I very rarely start a poem with a concept or any sort of preconceived notion. A word or phrase or image comes to me, and I try to ride the crest of an inspiration and craft a poem usually through many drafts. I am always working at writing. I discard a great many false starts, whole drafts, or just wrong-headed ways of wordy work. All writers do that. I rise at 4 a.m. most days, jot and /or revise immediately, sometimes in a more or less liminal state, between dreams and waking. There are words and / or images, as I said, already knocking around in my head, waiting to be said or typed into my computerized journals and drafts. I work for several hours until my wife gets up, and most days I am working on several drafts at a time throughout the day, nearly every day. On any given day, I may go out and stack cordwood or go to a dentist appointment, poetry reading, etc., but lines of poems I am working on stay with me and I often jot things in my car while driving. Before cellphones there were drivers scribbling on pads or napkins beside them in the car. It is all a matter of persistence, discipline, and long love for what I must try to accomplish. I have the feeling, the sense, every day when I wake, of rising into poetry.  Cid Corman, who wrote over 100 books of poetry, used to say, “catch the poem as it is occurring.” The immediacy of the thing at hand that seems to be thinking you as you work on it, that’s the feel. It can take years sometimes to finish a single short poem. It can also take just few minutes, but when the latter happens there is always the sense that it has come from a long way off, a long gestational period. I find a certain spiritual dimension through perception of physical things, the interrelations of all things and beings. I have two or three more completed, full-length books not yet out to publishers, and at least one chapbook.  Well, they are all books, though some, usually academics or those who are overly influenced by professors, apparently feel that chapbooks are “less.” It is a silly notion. Leaves of Grass was first published with just 12 poems (later closer to 400.) Tomas Tranströmer’s first book contained 17 poems, a slim volume. On and on. The point is: they were books. I have been very fortunate to have Richard and Elizabeth Murphy at Dos Madres Press, and Joan and John Digby of Feral Press (a.k.a. New Feral Press) as publishers who are also fine, interesting, and very talented people who like my manuscripts. Writing, as you say, “prolifically,” refers only to amount.  My publishers and others also see quality in the amount, of course, or they would decline publication. 

DD: Beginning with the title, tell us about The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up.

DG: The title comes from a prosepoem (as I spell it) in the third section of the book.  It is the last line or sentence of “Returning Gift.” Some people have told me they use that line as a sort of aphoristic mantra sometimes. The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains relatively short lyrics, some with deadpan, absurd humor, and even a line riffing on Whitman. The middle section is a suite of 10 poems for my wife, Pam, tracing our relationship, how it began, and the sense of how there is “third being formed from tones of talk we fuse”, not a child, but what the marriage deeply is. I speak, in all of those poems, in somewhat oblique terms, feeling and intuitive terms, taking Emily Dickinson’s cue in “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” as epigraph. Some things are more truly revealed when seen at an angle, rather than looked at flat on. That section continues in lyric tradition. The third section is composed of prosepoems. They, too, are anchored in lyricism, but also in metaphysical and comedic circumstances. There are thematic, lyric, and metaphysical-spiritual elements in this and the previous two sections that call to each other, back and forth, throughout the book. At the same time, so much of life is comic and absurd, tragically so. There is not enough meaning in life without poetry, without attempts to find meanings not obviously present every day. There are a number of the prospoems that I still find humorous, and apparently some readers do, too. I try to write books and not just a sort of anthological smattering of poems that may not cohere as a book. Many poets find it difficult or even oppressive to talk about their books thematically or generally, and I am one of those. All I can really say is that once I have an intuitive grasp of what poems work well together a book begins to gel. I have an almost absolute trust in my intuitions, though Pam, my wife, has sharp and intuitive critical instincts, too, and often points out defects in later drafts of poems, for which I’m grateful!  A single line or even a phrase may undergo 50 drafts, and even then Paul Valery’s saying is at least in the background: “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.”  Enough said.

DD: The third section of The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up consists of “Vertical Prosepoems,” a designation that characterized the poems in another one of your recent books, Porous Borders. Can you explain what you mean by a “Vertical Prosepoem?”

DG: I call them Vertical Prosepoems to call attention to their relatively narrow (3”, left-to-right) margins that force a reader to break into the next part of a sentence more quickly than in normative prose paragraphs. It is a way of focusing attention or concentration more sharply. I am calling the reader’s attention to something resembling prose, with ‘justified’ margins, yet with a sense of the narrow linearity of most poems, especially lyric poems. The prosepoem allows for more expansiveness and flexibility, but is ‘held’ in its visual shape that is both and complement and offset to its internal structure. Here I pause and say it’s not good to intellectualize what is essentially an organic process of ‘making.’ I usually pay close attention to the sonic elements, the “music” as some still call it, such things as internal rhymes or repeated sound patterns, for instance, within the rectangularly upright prosepoem on the page. Someone asked why I don’t just leave the lines ragged on the page, instead of with ‘justified’ margins. I’m not sure I know the answer, but it has something to do with an enigmatic sense of flat-top obelisks or monoliths which may be tributes to something unknown or once known, with or without instructions or runes, or inscriptions, like those on gravestones, and I’ve always liked that alien monolith in the book and film, 2001, A Space Odyssey.

DD: Who are the contemporary poets you admire the most?

DG: I don’t like to even imply hierarchies. I’ve learned to appreciate a wide range of people and their ways, of poems not at all like mine, but ones that may succeed beautifully on their own terms. I enjoy reading and exploring, for instance, Elizabeth Willis as well as Irene Willis and Williams Hunt (the latter two are terribly neglected!) Andrew Schelling, Lewis Warsh, and lately I am enjoying more of Sarah Sousa’s, Charles Rafferty’s, and Xue Di’s poems and prosepoems. I have very little use for urban poets and poetry that often seem to live too far up in their heads, away from the body and its senses. As usual, though, exceptions prove the rule. Some poets, like Warsh, are able to bridge, it seems, a sense of urbanity with a sense of the rural. Octavio Paz once referred to “the lacerated speech of the big cities.” I’ve always admired what Gertrude Stein once wrote, “Civilization is always rebeginning in the country.” Yeah, man! That’s a very contemporary idea! I also still have a lot of love and respect for Gary Snyder’s work as a whole. Same for Susan Howe and Jean Valentine—all wildly different poets!

DD: Whose work do you return to the most?

DG: In poetry, the dead: Tomas Tranströmer , Henri Michaux, Rene Char, Zbigniew Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Riding, all early ‘influences’.  But as Louis Zukofsky once said, “Influence is literally in the air.”  All is of influence, every thing and every phoneme—Everything!

DD: I'd like to end with a poem of yours from The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up:

 

            INVERSE MIRROR

            A man fiercely tight in himself, stone-like,
            nevertheless scrabbled forward along a massif

            and felt a fierce break in the clouds
            where a woman fiercely light, cloud-like, floated

            over the man fiercely tight in himself, stone-
            like, and so on they went into the master task

            of reflections, where one was not the other
            and the other was not the one, and both upon

            reflection found themselves curiously inverse,
            one up, one down, each wanting to speak,

            wanting truth, but knowing that the last word
            is never in, though it is waiting.    

                    by David Giannini

---

Robert Murphy’s work has appeared in the literary periodicals Smartish-Pace, The Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, Cultural Society, Marsh Hawk Review, Beans and Rice, LVNG, the Annals of Scholarship, and Live Mag!. He is the author of a chapbook, Not For You Alone (2004), Life In the Ordovician - Selected Poems (2007), and From Behind The Blind (2013) - all published by Dos Madres Press. He is a 2000 winner of the William Bronk Foundation prize for poetry. Robert Murphy is executive editor and publisher of Dos Madres Press. He is married to the iconographer and painter Elizabeth Hughes Murphy, who is both book designer and illustrator for Dos Madres Press. 

David Giannini’s most recently published collections of poetry include: THE FUTURE ONLY RATTLES WHEN YOU PICK IT UP (Dos Madres Press, 2018;) IN A MOMENT WE MAY BE STRANGELY BLENDED (New Feral Press, 2018;) FACES SOMEWHERE WILD (Dos Madres Press, 2017;) SPAN OF THREAD (Cervena Barva Press, 2015;). He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; and taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others; and he worked as a psychiatric case manager for 31 years.  His Installation, The International House Dust Collection, was exhibited most recently at the Yager Museum in Oneonta, New York.   He has been a committee and board member of The Becket Arts Center where a dramatic reading of his extended narrative prosepoem, RIM, was produced in 2005. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded, the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He started and hosts Writers Read, an ongoing series of monthly readings by poets and fiction writers presenting at The Lee Library in Lee, MA. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam, and their two cats, Mina and Maya.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Alone with John Ashbery (by Angela Patrinos)

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.  Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

                                                                                          At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

 

 

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.      

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.  But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.   

 

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

 

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said. 

 

He moved on to his translations of [Pierre] Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

 

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even.  There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in.  No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years.  As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.  This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”  He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.  It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.  The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.” 

Does he attend openings and visit galleries? He does.

John Ashbery confides that he is looking forward to the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

 

from the archives; originally posted April 16, 2008. Reposted today, April 7, which was designated "John Ashbery day" in perpetuity in a ceremony in the New York City Council in April 2006 during the John Ashbery festival we staged at the New School that week.  Participants included  Strar Black, Billy Collins,Jane Freilicher, Jorie Graham, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hammond, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Meghan O'Rourke, Ron Padgett, Jenni Quilter, Archie Rand, Eugene Richie,David Shapiro, James Tate, John Emil Vincent, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Adam Clay and Meagan Cass of Shelterbelt Press

DD: How did Shelterbelt Press come into being?

AC: Meagan and I were both teaching at the same university and we decided to form a press to be affiliated with the university so our students would have a hands-on experience. We also wanted to focus on a press that would have social justice at its core, so in publishing books, we also want to think about how the work we publish can do something important and valuable in the world. We plan to incorporate ideas of activism into publicity.

DD: What have been some of the challenges and rewards of starting a new press?

AC: One of the largest challenges is always funding—finding a range of support created some challenges, but the rewards are well worth it. And of course there are many. Primarily, having the chance to read so many different writers is a huge award. Receiving support and guidance from other presses, too, has been especially rewarding.

DD: The first book Shelterbelt will publish is the debut collection of an amazing poet, Eloisa Amezcua. Can you tell us a bit about From the Inside Quietly?

AC: Eloisa’s book is an amazing debut that explores life and loss, family and identity. As we talked about the collection, it seems the image of reflection comes to the surface. The poems are very direct in their assertions and explore a wide range of ideas, including sorrow alongside joy. We particularly love how the book manages to have a wonderful sense of humor at times.

DD: Meagan, your new short story collection, ActivAmerica, is on my reading list for the winter break. As your website notes, this collection explores how we confront (and exert) power and re-imagine ourselves through sports and athletic activities. What draws you to this subject matter? What connections do you see between the writing life and the world of athletics? What did you learn about yourself and American athletic culture through the writing of this book?

MC: Thanks for these wonderful questions, Dante, and for putting my book on your list! Sports were a big part of the community in the town where I grew up. I played (and still play) soccer, ran track, figure skated. It was a decade after Title IX was passed, so there was all this rhetoric surrounding “girl power” and athletics: like, through sports girls/women will defeat the patriarchy! Of course, it’s way messier than that. The book helped me understand the ways in which certain unequal power dynamics manifest on fields, rinks, and courts, power dynamics which impacted me and my teammates growing up, often in the form of patriarchal coaches and struggles with body image and eating disorders. I also learned more about how American sports/fitness ideology often masks different forms of injustice. Writing and sports are deeply related for me. They both involve daily practice, humility, and the need to develop both individually and within a broader community. No one writes or story, or kicks a soccer ball, in a vacuum.

DD: Adam, I recently read your newest poetry collection, Stranger. For me, the central poem of the collection was “Our Eternal Sounds,” which begins with the line: “What might all songs lean into?” Another poem I admire in Stranger, “Everyone Trying to Start / Something New,” ends: “…every record / flipped to its B side is only grace / garnered with more grace.” Could you talk about your poetry in terms of these two quotes? Could you riff on the different kinds of music that converge in your poems?

AC: Thank you for reading the book so closely! Both of those poems are thinking about poetry in terms of music, though I think “Our Eternal Sounds” is thinking specifically about poetry as the place from which language was born, while the other poem is thinking of music as a form of mourning. The book is trying to explore, more often than not, abstract ideas in concrete form. I also tend to speak my poems out as I write them (and have music on during the process of writing them), which might explain how the theme comes up throughout the book.

DD: What’s on the horizon for Shelterbelt Press in 2018 and beyond?

MC: At this point we’re thinking a lot about publicity—as mentioned above, financial well-being can be a challenge related to running an independent press. We’re going to AWP to engage with the literary community and are looking forward to how readers will respond to Eloisa’s book.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from Eloisa Amezcua’s collection?

        SELF-PORTRAIT

        I walk between whitebrush and blackfoot
        daisies alone at the desert botanical garden

        and know not to touch the devil’s
        tongue or saguaro spines but still

        I move my hand closer to the teddy bear
        cholla until I touch it or it touches me

        the needles clinging hollow
        curve under the skin and I like it

        I used to be a nice girl
        euthymic too

        but when the only thing
        you have left of yourself                              
                                                is pain

        the filter with which
        you move through

        the world becomes impossibly
        tender like fingers swollen

        papules of foreign material
        lodged in the body

        to be unroofed or
        left there to dissolve 

Meagan Cass is the author of Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press, 2014). Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other places. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield. Over the last fifteen years, she has done editorial work for a range of national literary journals and presses, including Stirring, Harpur Palate, Rougarou, and Sundress Publications.

Adam Clay is the author of Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. A co-editor of TYPO Magazine, he serves as a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID WOJAHN [by Nin Andrews]

I

 I recently moved back to my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the most exciting events in Charlottesville is their annual Virginia Festival of the Book. In preparation for the festival, I have been reading the books of some of the featured presenters. I thought I might interview a few of the poets that I am most looking forward to hearing read, starting with David Wojahn's collection, For the Scribe.  

 

NA: Tell me about the evolution of your latest collection, For the Scribe? How did it begin?

DW: Thanks for the kind words. I’ve always considered myself an elegiac poet, but in the case of this book I wanted to break out of that mode. I’d never really had much interest in writing about “nature,” so I thought I might start there—with some animal poems, for example. But I found that the only poems of this sort that I could write were about extinct animals: passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, ivory-billed woodpeckers. These poems became a series within the book, and the collection started to arrange itself around them. And so I couldn’t escape from elegy after all, despite my efforts! The intention of the book, I guess, is to find the means to move between personal losses—death of family, beloveds, and friends—and loss on a grander scale: threats to what used to be called our democratic institutions, ecological destruction, apocalypse. I also tend to arrange my books around sequences, groups of related poems, or poems in multiple sections that can run to ten or more pages. There are five such sequences in the new book, and I try to get these longer pieces to be in dialogue with the shorter lyrics.

NA: I love how you make the political personal and vice versa. While eating bivalves, for example, you think of prisoners being force-fed at Guantanamo. I’m wondering if you might say a few words about your poetic intuition, your process, and this kind of weaving you so beautifully do.

DW: The poets who have most inspired me over the years are figures like George Oppen, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser, and especially Robert Lowell. These writers didn’t draw a great distinction between the personal and the ideological, and they taught me how important it is for a poem to try to navigate between the micro and the macro, the private life of the individual and a public reckoning with history and politics. Finding the means to make those two things merge and commingle is a task that feels essential to me--as a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one. “Political” poetry that merely rants in a preaching-to-the-choir way simply bores me; so does autobiographical poetry that doesn’t seek to find some respite from mere self-disclosure. But when these two intentions can come together, can alchemize into a third thing, then the poem has a chance to avoid agit-prop on the one hand, navel-gazing on the other.

NA: I had to laugh out loud when I started reading “Nineteen Eleven Blues,” which opens with Ronald Reagan talking about Elizabeth Bishop. I wondered if we could post that here. And maybe say a few words about it?

DW: I wrote an essay awhile back about Bishop and Reagan, about the America Reagan represents and the one that Bishop exemplifies. I am bewildered by the way that even people on the left who should know better think of Reagan as great leader—to me he was simply an intellectually impoverished reactionary and a genial criminal. Bishop was a fundamentally apolitical individual, but her work is profoundly democratic and progressive; it continues, on its smaller scale, the transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Whitman.

Bishop and Reagan were born within 48 hours of one another, in February of 1911. Czselaw Milosz, another figure who’s a touchstone for me, was born a couple of months later, as was the greatest of the Delta Blues singers, Robert Johnson--in one of her letters to Robert Lowell, Bishop rhapsodizes about hearing an LP of Robert Johnson’s songs. Bishop, Milosz, and Johnson had more in common than their birthdates: they’re artists who obsessively write about the conditions of loneliness and exile, and do so with immense invention. So I wanted to find a way to write about them, and came up with the notion of having each of them compose little essays on one another. So Milosz speaks about Reagan in a sonnet that samples some lines from one of his essays; Johnson speaks about Bishop and Milosz in a poem modelled after one of his blues lyrics, and Bishop writes about Johnson in a villanelle. That left Reagan to write about Bishop, again in the form of a sonnet, though in the poem Reagan’s not exactly capable of much insight. In college he actually attempted to write some poems, although I can’t say I’d recommend them.

NA: When I was a student at Vermont, one of your colleagues called you a poet of dark lyricism and a poet who is not afraid to be challenging. He contrasted you with what he called “chatty, undisciplined poets of our day.” Is that how you see yourself?

DW: I suppose my poems are dark. I love good comic poetry—Kenneth Koch is a favorite of mine—but couldn’t write comedy if you put a gun to my head. But I have a special affection for poetry that challenges me, intellectually and emotively. And that often means difficult or allusive poetry. I love something Geoffrey Hill wrote: “Whatever strange relationship we have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” My sense of what a poem should do isn’t that haughty and dyspeptic, but the poems I most admire are always aware that the diction of poetry can be different from the conversational, that it can be strange and majestic like the language of The Book of Common Prayer—you heard passages from that book a lot if you grew up, as I did, as an Episcopalian in the ‘50s. On the other hand, I write a lot about popular culture, music especially, and also films. Subjects like these don’t always mix very well with a Grand Style. I like it when my poems can function as mash-ups of high and low cultural allusions, of high and vernacular diction. I also like to write in a variety of formal and metrical approaches—free verse in one poem, received form in another. What purpose does it serve to favor one method over the other? Louis Zukofsky said that poetry’s upper limit is music, its lower limit speech. I want a poetry that moves steadily between one limit and the other.

NA: You are often referred to as a political poet. How do you keep your head, your heart—your poetry alive in this insane time?

A Dare to Be Unconventional: Nin Andrews and Dante Di Stefano Discuss Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017)

DD: In his introduction to the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present,David Lehman notes: “Writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional. It is a form that invites the practitioner to reinvent it.” Using Lehman’s words as a jumping-off point, could you talk about your experience of writing such lovely, brilliant, challenging prose poetry over the years? Why is the prose poem your preferred medium?

NA: When I began writing, I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be the next Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. I wanted to tell the story of Miss August, even back then, of a transgender boy, growing up in the 1950s and 60s. The title scene of the book: a young girl and boy looking at a Playboy Magazine, flipping open the centerfold of Miss August—was already written in some version or another. In that scene, the girl cringes, just as I did when I was eight or nine years old, and announces, Whatever that is, whatever made that lady into Miss August—that is never, ever, ever happening to me. (I didn’t have too much to worry about, but Miss August gave me nightmares for years.) The boy, gazing at the same centerfold, said one day he’d be Miss August, adding, Just you wait and see. 

But in my last of year of college, I took a creative writing class with David Lehman in which he taught us the wonders of the prose poem. We read poets like Gertrude Stein,  Russell Edson, Henri Michaux, Julio Cortázar, Günter Eich, Tomas Tranströmer, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Max Jacob, Octavio Paz, and so many others.  I was smitten. My whole world changed. And I knew I would never  be a fiction writer.

The prose poem was and is the form I have always felt most at ease with, the form in which I could wear jeans to the literary ball. No more pretenses, no more dressing up in outfits that didn’t fit me. I like to write in smaller units, stanzas or paragraphs, and I have always been enchanted by the magic and music and mystery of poetry. I also love humor and surrealism, as do many of the masters of prose poetry. And I love how prose poetry can mimic other forms and mock one’s expectations and assumptions.  Even when lean towards fiction, as I did with Miss August, I want to write each page as a prose poem. I never want to give up that tightness that poetry offers, that jewel-like quality, even if I am writing a novel.

DD: In your latest book, Miss August, you draw on your childhood experiences growing up in the south, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, an area to which you’ve recently moved back. What insights did you gain about yourself and your writing from the imaginative return you made in Miss August, and the actual return you made moving back in real life? What can the South of the 1950s and 1960s tell us about America today?

NA: When I wrote Miss August, I thought I was writing about the past. And that we, as a culture, were finally moving towards a less racist, less sexist and less oppressive future.  I thought I was writing about a time and place mostly visible in the rear view mirror.  My insight—I was living in a bubble.  

I should have known, I suppose, what the character, Gil, points out in the beginning of the book—the past has not really passed.

After the events this summer in Charlottesville, none of what I have to say about that is new or surprising. And I am not a journalist or a historian or a political scientist so I don’t have much to say about the state of America today. 

But I grew up in a time and place where people spoke out against integration. Their logic or justification, like the logic of the Southern Manifesto, was that people are happier mixing only with their own kind. I remember one man telling me how sorry he felt for Arthur Ashe. The poor fellow, he said, he has only white tennis players to play with.   

People believed in dividing lines then.   

DD: Miss August is startling and beautiful. It reads like a novella, in many respects. The finely crafted characters of Sarah Jane Lee, Gill Simmons, and May Dee have stayed with me quite vividly in the months since I first read this book. Can you talk a bit about creating, and living with, these remarkable characters?

NA: Thanks Dante. You are too nice!

Sarah Jane and Gil and May Dee lived easily in my mind for years, chattering on about this and that. They are based on people I loved as a child, on a woman and friends who had inside them a kind of music I associate with the South and with a southern accent and sensibility.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the South, something about its character and characters that casts a spell over me. I love the landscape, the warmth, the people, and the stories people tell. And how people talk and take their time talking  . . . 

Some days I think I could listen to people talk all day, especially if they have a good accent going. It’s the lilt, the twang, the slow dance in the telling. And the descriptions, the similes and metaphors, and the expressions like: You don’t want just a pig in a poke, or, Put a pinch of salt on his tail for me, won’t you?

Just the other day, I was eavesdropping, listening to a guy who was describing a pretty woman he disliked. His words: She’s got the legs of a filly and the soul of an old nag.  And no, you can’t steal that.

DD: As you discuss in your writer’s note at the end of the book, it took you years to engage the legacies of racism and inequality that contextualized your childhood in the south. White middle class writers seem particularly hesitant to write about issues of race and class; nobody wants to be another Vachel Lindsay—that is, to be unintentionally, inexcusably, and naively racist. Obviously, you’ve avoided those pitfalls here, by creating a layered, unflinching, and delicately nuanced portrait of the Jim Crow South. What did writing Miss August teach you about your own history, about race and class in America, about writing race and class in America?

NA: Before writing Miss August, I thought a lot about the hesitance you are describing, about the silence of white middle-class Americans.  And all of the reasons I shouldn’t write about these topics. And the potential pitfalls in any effort to write about race and class. There are many reasons to remain silent. After all, as you say, no one wants to be another Vachel Lindsay.

My father used to say that if you are a well-fed man in a room full of hungry people, you shouldn’t mention the nice meal you just ate. You should stay quiet.

A writing professor told me that I shouldn’t write about my racist ancestors or parents. He said it would be like the child of a Nazi writing about the Jews or World War Two.

A friend and poet once said that she thought of the white silence around these difficult topics as a curtain, a privacy screen, behind which one can safely undress. After all, who wants to be exposed?

It seems logical to avoid uncomfortable subjects even if that means disowning or denying one’s own part or place in history or society.

I simply felt that I wanted to talk about my formative years. But to write about my past, even in a fictional way, composing stories and prose poems based loosely on my childhood, was to write about race and gender and class. After all, I was raised by a black nanny who hated other African Americans, by a father who helped to start an all-white private school, by a father who was also a gay man and who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, by a mother was from Boston and not a typical woman and not a bit like Southern women, by farmhands who were illiterate and who were my playmates, by friends’ parents who called the Civil War –The War of Northern Aggression.  

But my goal as a writer is not to explain, pontificate, or change what is or was, but simply to describe, to bear witness. I know that my particular vision and filter is tainted, colored not only by my class, race and gender, but also by my inevitable prejudices, fears, eccentricities, opinions, and blind spots. Nevertheless, it is liberating to write. Silence, for me, is suffocating.

DD: All of your work, but particularly your last three books, Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Miss August, speak powerfully to the misogyny that is pervasive in virtually all aspects of American life. You’ve spent your whole writing life, examining nuances of gender and sexuality. I wonder what your thoughts are for making the literary world more equitable and not just for women, especially in a country where Donald Trump is president?

NA: Gender roles have always seemed silly to me, as well as arbitrary. Maybe that’s why I’ve written so much about them.

After all, it was my father, not my mother, who played what would be considered a feminine role in my childhood. He took care of me when I was sick. And he helped pick out my dresses (he insisted they had to be short or long, no midis, as they were called back then) and lipstick (the redder the better), and he told me how to style my hair (like an upside down tulip).  His own closet was filled with expensive Italian suits, silky soft shirts, and hats. My mother wore LL Bean boots, men’s socks and dirty brown skirts or jeans. She was dairy farmer and an activist. She was the one in the family who took up political causes. 

But that doesn’t answer your question.

Really, I don’t know how to make an equitable world, literary or otherwise.

As to Donald Trump and this country . . .  Do you think he’s an ugly reflection of what we don’t admit about ourselves.  Some golem-like part of our national psyche that has been dwelling underground, wearing Bilbo’s ring and yet gaining power for years, waiting for his moment to emerge?

It still stuns me that white women voted for Trump. Clearly, misogyny and sexism are not limited to the male gender.  Women of color, on the other hand, did not vote for him.  Women of color consistently vote in favor of women’s rights and health. Women of color might be our best hope for the future.

DD: I’d like to end with a poem from Miss August. Could you introduce one of your favorites?

NA: I’ll choose this one which isn’t really a favorite, but I think it might help to introduce the book. In it Sarah Jane is speaking as an adult about her friend, Gil:

The Story of Gil Simmons

Sarah Jane

People still talk about Gil Simmons. They say, That boy was one strange bird. They say, He wasn’t right in the head. They say, His daddy ought to have taught him a thing or two. These are Lessington, Virginia folks, mind you. When I was a girl, they shot deer frozen in their headlights and stray dogs that howled at the moon. They flew Confederate flags in their front yards. They spoke to God and ghosts and called black folks niggers. And they closed the public schools. Don’t let the coloreds in our classrooms, they said. Restrooms neither. But Gil, they thought, was the strange one. Stranger than a faggot, they said. Still do. I smile, light up a cigarette, and say, Define normal, if you will.

Nin Andrews is the recipient of the 2016 Ohioana Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017).

Dante Di Stefano is the co-editor, with María Isabel Alvarez, of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018)

Happy Birthday Frank! Michelle Dunton interviews David Lehman about Frank Sinatra

Michelle Dunton of Writing Fun interviewed David Lehman upon publication of Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World

"The Unavoidable Sensuous Apprehension that We Were Indeed a Little Ball in Space . . . " David Lehman interviews A. R. Ammons

A recent issue of the New Yorker (the same issue that published David's poem "It Could Happen to You") included an article about the poetry of A. R. Ammons. The article mentions Ammons' Paris Review interview, which David conducted in 1996. You can read the interview here. 

Even better, you can listen to the complete interview tapes. These are a treat; as one would expect, Ammons' discussion of how he works is fascinating and filled with terrific advice for all poets, regardless of where they are in their career. 

David Lehman interview A. R. Ammons Parts I - III

(I almost stopped reading the New Yorker piece early on, when the author describes Ammons as "puttering." Clearly he never met this great genius--which I did, in Ithaca, on many occasions--or "puttering' would never have come to mind. sdl)

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Nicci Mechler of Porkbelly Press

DD: On your personal website, you have a great quote: “In a perfect world, Audre Lorde and Joseph Campbell would sit down over a few pints of Mudder’s Milk to speak about the way our dreams and magic connect us all, teach us all—the way both are vital to a full and vibrant expression and expansion of culture & self.” Can you start the interview by talking about these artistic forbearers, and what it means to you to run a poetry press in America in 2017?

NM: Thank you. No one’s ever asked me about that one before!

The book that most affected me in college, still the one I give to friends at any opportunity, is Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. We choose pieces for Sugared Water, our anthologies, and our Porkbelly chapbooks in the place where struggle, speculative work, humor, sure voice, feminism, and the intimate journey converge. Ray Bradbury might call it tipping out the “beautiful stuff” we hold inside of us, or the voices to help “lead [us] through the dark.” Everything, for us, is about the journey, and accompanying the poet or writer along the way. Our staff interests touch everything from hiking to graphic novels, expressionist printmaking to death positivity and queer theory. We bring that to our lit.

The majority of our writers are women or female identifying, trans, non-binary, queer folx. We support the work of immigrants and expats, multicultural and intersectional work. We love first books, those starting out, and books by poets and writers well on their way. Our poets range in age from teenage to octogenarian. We look to regional artists when we can, and make a lot of our cover art in house. Running a press in 2017 America is, for us, the work of citizens of the world making way for important voices, marginalized voices—voices we need.

DD: How did Porkbelly Press come into being?

NM: Sugared Water came first, a market for genre-straddling work, for speculative work, for new writers and experimental writers and established writers trying something new, for humans letting us into their internal landscape. I decided to go with a handmade approach, a callback to years of making zines, using traditional printmaking and bookbinding methods.

After a few people sent packets of poems clearly from a series (most of our chapbooks are clusters of poems), and many of those poets had no chapbooks listed in their biographical statement (why not?), I did a lot of thinking about the books I owned and what was missing. I’d read this book is the thought that convinced this artist-writer-printmaker-bookbinder to ask for those poems to make books of them. Some generous, lovely poets (and writers!) took me up on that, and trusted a fledgling press with their book.

A handful of our titles still come from poets and writers we find in our Sugared Water queue.

DD: Tell us about Sugared Water.

NM: Sugared Water is a handbound, limited edition literary magazine. Each cover is printed by hand using traditional printmaking methods. Our most recent issue, no. 5, combines screen printing and letterpress (vintage wood type individually inked with 2-5 colors and pulled on a Vandercook Proof Press). We made 240 of our first issue, but since our storage is a box in my closet, I’ve come down to about 100 numbered copies per issue. We’re currently staffed entirely by women,

We look for work that’s sharp and image-dense, work that makes us stop and look up from what we’re reading. Work we’re thinking about days after we’ve read it. We feature a large number of women and genderqueer folx, and we make space for trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and those living in between or everything. No hate speech. Magic, yes. Speculative, yes.

Each issue is supposed to be 56 pages, but some seasons we’re a little greedy and hit 80. 

DD: You’ve published some incredible poets, notably Chen Chen, E. Kristen Anderson, and Eloisa Amezcua. Amezcua’s Mexicamericana seems a particularly necessary poetry collection in the Trump era. Can you tell us a bit about this collection?

NM: Yes. We’re so honored to have these voices, established and up-and-coming, and I’m so, so thrilled to be part of so many literary histories. Porkbelly Press published Chen Chen’s first book. When I read a first book and have trouble believing it’s a first book, and I think—how has this ever been passed up? Why isn’t it already an object people can hold? Why aren’t people already gifting this to friends who need it?’—that feeling is why I started a press in the first place.

This collection is a light in the dark.

Mexicamericana is a cluster of poems about being, about identity, otherness, and the strength it takes to persist, to cross borders, borders sometimes separated by a dangerous line. It’s about people dying for politics, the resilience of self and identity and the convergence of selves, the fact that people are not illegal. People are not illegal.

People are not illegal.

People are dying.

And people are surviving.

And we won’t have a fucking wall.

DD: Tell us about the other amazing collections that are a part of your 2017 chapbook series.

NM: 2017 has sex and body autonomy and desire and infertility (fertility too) and so much strength. 2017 investigates survival and intergenerational trauma, erasures made from punk rags (more sex), ritual, feminist monsters with sharp teeth & blades, blood, bone, and power. Our authors this year: Amber Edmondson, Kelly Lorraine Andrews, Melissa Atkinson Mercer, Donna Vorreyer, Anita Olivia Koester, M. Brett Gaffney, Lindsay Lusby, Kristi Carter, Maggie Woodward, and Eloisa Amezcua. By the time this interview appears, we’ll have just released Apples or Pomegranates by Anita Olivia Koester, Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem by Kristi Carter (covers hand-printed in metallic ink!), and will soon release Found Footage by Maggie Woodward (including erasures!), and Blackbird Whitetail Redhand by Lindsay Lusby.

DD: Porkbelly Press also publishes micro chapbooks, collections of 8-10 pages. How does the micro chapbook as a form differ for you from a regular length chapbook?

NM: Micros tend to be single arcs or very tight clusters of work. It’s an opportunity for poets & writers to send a small sampling out into the world, though they’re curated with the same attention to design and detail as our chapbooks. It’s a taste that can be enjoyed easily in a sitting.

DD: How has Cincinnati influenced the press and your work as a poet/artist?

NM: My father worked close to the river for many years, and I often spent a portion of my weekend downtown at the jewelry manufacturing company where he served as vice president. He worked long hours, and I was there with him more than a few times when the rest of the shop was empty. My childhood is steeped in the architecture, landscape, and lore of this city, and I carry that with me today. It’s why my press is named Porkbelly, after the pork belly trade in Cincinnati. A fellow printmaker beat me to the name Steamwhistle (a local letterpress studio), paying homage to the shipping history of the city, which nestles into a wide bend of the Ohio River. Best American Poetry blog did an interview with Glass recently—Tony named his press after a major trade in Toledo; I suppose we Ohioans have a thing for industry.

DD: You are a talented visual artist. I admire the work on your website, particularly the assemblage to Emily Dickinson titled “Open Me Carefully.” How has your work in the publishing field influenced your art and vice versa? (Clearly, the stunning design of your books is one point of connection).

NM: Thank you so much. “Open Me Carefully” is an homage to a book of the same name, detailing the relationship and letters between Emily Dickinson and her childhood friend, Susan (who moved in across the hedge and married Emily’s brother). I spent a semester avoiding Henry James and mining Dickinson’s poems for erotic poems ostensibly written for Susie, of which there are many. My focus is inexhaustible now and again, always following the personal connection, the surprise, or the secret. Attention to detail and craft spring up from an education in art and writing. It’s inevitable.

Craftsmanship and the hand of the artist are important elements in Porkbelly’s line. I grew up writing stories, making art, and climbing trees to hide, to read, and to ambush my cousins with water balloons. Precision is very important in all of these endeavors.

My visual education certainly informs my writing, and when it came time to start a magazine, and then a press, it lent me the confidence and skills necessary to hand-produce books of a quality with which I’m happy, and which delight (I hope!) the recipients and authors. Though that means a double helping of self-criticism sometimes, and more stress about the occasional 1/8^th inch variation in cover size than I’d like to admit, I am honored to help in bringing these books into being.

DD: What draws you to the chapbook? What can the chapbook offer that a full length collection can’t?

NM: At Porkbelly, each chapbook is made by hand from start to finish, and I love the variety of chapbook design and presentation. I can afford to collect more small works; I can afford to produce more. Most importantly, hand-binding and experimentation in production are valued in chaps. Chapbooks don’t give you time to be distracted—they feel intimate and quirky. Chaps may contain several arcs, but it’s a distilled potion.

DD: What’s forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018?

NM: More first chapbooks investigating things like navigating chronic illness with body-love (first-generation Russian-Jewish-American Minadora Macheret’s Love Me, Anyway), a first book by a Muslim woman of color (Noor Hindi’s Diary of a Filthy Woman), a book of ekphrastic poems inspired by Diane Arbus’ photographs & a poet’s journey (How Darkness Enters a Body by Sarah Nichols), erasure poems imagining the voice of Elizabeth Short reclaimed from a crime novel about her murder (Dreamland for Keeps by Sarah Nichols), and a collection of prose poems which left us speechless (Lisette Alonso’s Wednesday’s Child).

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a Porkbelly Press poet?

NM: Yes, absolutely. Below is a selection from Eloisa Amezcua’s Mexicamericana. This poem was selected for Best American Poets 2017 and first appeared in Public Pool. In her chapbook, it’s spaced a little differently, with a lot of white space for breathing room, and several page-turns to punctuate it.

            Watching Underworld, Inc. Episode 3: Human Cargo

            The Pima County Morgue,

            approximately 110 miles

 

            from my childhood home,

            houses John Doe, Jane Doe,

 

            [sexless] Doe. Dated remains

            found in the Sonoran Desert—

 

            nameless and alone. The medical

            examiner holds a fragmented

 

            cranium, points to where

            the eyes would go. 

 

                            /

 

            I cross the border        on foot.

            My father         waits for me

 

            in the McDonald’s       parking lot

            one block         into America.

 

            I stand        in the line

            labeled             Ciudadanos.

                        

                            /

 

            Francisco, a people smuggler

            in Nogales, says his secret

 

            is training others

            to hide and survive.

           

                                /

 

            I don’t remember much           from middle school

            US History—               who lead the troops

 

            that took          Fort Ticonderoga         or who forced

            General Pemberton                 to surrender in 1863—

 

            but I remember            like yesterday

            the sound of my mother’s voice

 

            practicing         the Pledge of Allegiance

            before her                    naturalization ceremony.

                

                                /

 

            A Border Patrol agent

            explains how after five days

 

            on foot in the desert,

            skin begins to split

 

            from the burning sun—

            flesh exposed and open.

 

            Nothing can be done once

            the breaking has started.

           

                            /

 

            Gratitude is a word that comes to mind.

           

                            /

 

            In Phoenix, Magdalena buys and sells

            moneyless migrants wholesale—

 

            their families unable to pay off cartel

            trafficking rates. Three women/girls sit

 

            one room over, faces hidden with pillow cases—

            they're background. And Magdalena, she talks

 

            a tough talk, says business is business

            and business is good. Her face concealed

 

            by a black bandana and mirrored sunglasses

            reflecting the camera back into itself.

        

                            /

 

            When the show’s over,            I’ll call my mother

            just to hear      the sound of her voice.

 

            Como estas?           she’ll ask.         And I’ll lie,

            tell her things are fine the way

 

            she’d say          the same to her mother

            thirty years before                    when she moved

 

            to this country                         alone

            with her husband.                    I’m haunted

 

            by that for her.             I moved thousands of miles

            away                alone                just to feel

 

            closer. Before        we hang up, she’ll say

            Dios te bendiga, picture me signing myself

 

            or kissing a crucifix                  I can’t bring myself

            to wear.           A blessing I don’t need

          

            but I take it                 anyways.

 

Nicci Mechler is a graduate of Northern Kentucky University (BFA Studio Art, Masters in English). Between research, novel revisions, poetic alchemy, reading, retreats, and caring for roomies, rescue dogs, and rescue kitties, she makes art, edits the literary magazine Sugared Water, and runs Porkbelly Press (a micro press in Cincinnati, OH). She is also the editor and maker of several zines, including the body image zine LMLMB.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Educators Roundtable: Dean Rader & CMarie Fuhrman [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.  For more information, visit his website. 

 

An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom. 

KMD:  You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others.  I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry.  What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them?  

DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way that highlights not just the thematics of poetic creation but its forms as well.

I also think more and more students are pursuing graduate studies in Native literatures. We definitely need more students--ideally more Indigenous students--getting PhDs in literature, English, AIS, and American studies. What has been missing for these students is a current anthology of Indigenous poetics that arms them to to graduate level work in Native poetries.

The second issue is about poets themselves and what gets taught in graduate creative writing programs. I think recent books by Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier might get taught in MFA programs, but there is a vast canon of Indigenous American poetry that does not get taught in graduate programs because graduate writing courses tend to focus on craft, and for years readers have been taught to read books by Native writers through the lens of theme or context or culture. This anthology helps correct that.

CF:  I agree with everything that Dean said.  As a teacher of Native Lit and advisor for our Universities IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program) I am responsible for teaching Natives and non-Natives about Indigenous literature.  I often teach classes for Native students only, but I have taught mixed classes as well.  What I have found in teaching both is that Natives would have to learn about Indigenous writing from a non-Native perspective and non-Natives were never given the chance to hear about craft or the impetus for a poem or story from the Native writer.  Often I would invite, via Skype or classroom visit, the writers and poets to talk to the students themselves, but this is not always feasible.  It is my hope that a collection like this one might be able to bring those voices into the classroom directly.  This way, both student and teacher may gain a better perspective and understanding of Native writing.

KMD:  In what ways is pedagogy politically charged?  Can our decisions as teachers create a more inclusive and just artistic community?  

DR: A great part of teaching is related to 1) knowledge and 2) comfort. Most poets and professors who teach did not, themselves, read poetry by Native writers in college or graduate school. So, they are less likely to teach it now. I think many professors shy away from teaching, say, Wendy Rose poems or Simon Ortiz poems or LeAnne Howe poems because they don’t know much about tribal histories or even larger Native histories. Furthermore, Native issues are not forefront in American culture right now the way African American and Chicano/a issues are. So, the political urgency of Black Lives Matter or the immigration debate may, for some, feel exigent. I would argue though American minority issues, the marginalization of people of color, and the absence of Natives from popular and political culture, and the larger issues of class make teaching works by Native writers paramount at this moment in history.

KMD:  What new directions do you hope that this anthology opens up within our thinking about poetry, literary tradition, and aesthetics more generally?  

DR: I hope this anthology encourages writers and professors to think about Indigeous poetry in terms of craft. I really hope our book shifts the lens a little bit so that people do not turn to Native poetry just to “learn about Indians” (as I heard someone say not long ago) but to learn about art. What if readers start thinking about Native poetry the way they think about Native painting and pottery--as modes of aesthetic production, as vibrant acts of creation.

CF: I can’t say this any better.

KMD:  Tell us about one particular contribution from the anthology that you would be excited to teach.  How would you utilize this particular work in the classroom?  

CF: I am excited to teach work by Nimiipuu poet Michael Wasson.  First, because he is from the Nez Perce tribe which is located here in Idaho, not far from the University.  Many of our students are Nez Perce and I think they would be honored and inspired to hear from one of their own.  Not to mention, Michael’s work is outstanding.  His poems are complex, multi-layered, and extremely poignant.  I am excited to bring poets into the classroom that reflect my students.

KMD:  Given the anthology’s unique structure, what does this book make possible within the context of writing programs?  For writing communities more generally?  

DR: The book’s combination of poetry and craft are going to be unique. I also like the idea that our book foregrounds influential poetic texts. This highlights the ways in which poetry is a kind of collaboration, or at the very least a conversation. It also helps illustrate direct influences and echoes.

CF: Generations and a sense of community are very important to Native people.  This book is way of honoring our teacher, our elders, and inspiring our children to write their truths as well.

Because this book is comprised of writing from poets all over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) it gives a more complete picture of the Native American experience, particularly the contemporary experience while honoring the past.  Though this book is not meant to be a historical work, it does help to fill the gaps in both the current events and the overlooked history of Native people in the U.S.

For more information about our anthology, our mission, and how you can bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.  

Satire, Stars, and Protest: A Conversation with Paul Fericano [by Emma Trelles]

Paul Fericano is a working class poet, satirist and social activist. He is the author of The Hollywood Catechism (Silver Birch Press) and several more poetry and prose books and chapbooks, including Interview with the Scalia, Commercial Break, Driving to Reno with Freud, and Loading the Revolver With Real Bullets. He is the editor and co-founder of Yossarian Universal (1980), the nation’s first parody news service, and he is a founder of SafeNet, an advocacy group that assists survivors of clergy sexual abuse by fixing on healing and restorative justice; he also writes an online column about this work, A Room with a Pew. 

Since 1971, his poetry and prose have appeared, disappeared and reappeared in various underground and above-ground literary and media outlets in this country and abroad, including: The Antarctic Review, Inside Joke, Mother Jones, Poetry Now, Projector, The Realist, Saturday Night Live, SoHo Arts Weekly, Vagabond, The Wormwood Review, and Catavencu Incomod (Romania), Charlie Hebdo (Paris), Il Male (Italy), Krokodil (Moscow), Pardon (Germany), Punch (London) and Satyrcón (Argentina). Paul Fericano received the Howitzer Prize for his poem, “Sinatra, Sinatra,” an award he himself created and exposed as a literary hoax to reveal the absurd nature of competitive awards. The following year, Commercial Break received both the Prix de Voltaire (Paris) and the Ambrose Bierce Prize (San Francisco) for upholding the traditions of socio-political satire. He resides on the San Francisco peninsula. 

 Because I am valuing order at the moment, I thought I'd start at the beginning -- literally. The front matter of your book includes praise from a variety of newspapers & publications both here and across the pond. I noticed that several described you by summoning the language of subterfuge, such as how you write "like a wanted man hiding out in the basement of Poetry magazine" (Chicago Sun-Times) or that "if a witness protection program" existed for poets, you'd be in it (Washington Post Book World). How does your work, and this book in particular, connect to the covert?

Yeah. If you talk to some of my friends they’ll swear they never heard of me. The Hollywood Catechism represents the progressive arc my narrative has taken since my high school seminary days at a Franciscan boarding school in the sixties. My desire to write conspired with my need to be funny which collided with my vocation to serve God.  As a naïve fourteen year old freshman I was taught that God and poetry were essentially great because both were solemn and unfathomable. In English class we were instructed to examine not feel. Poems were prayers and prayers were sacred with no hint that ancient writers even knew what a joke was.

What little I knew of poetry and God was encyclopedic compared to what I knew about sex and my own body. During this time the priest who ran my screwy English class was sexually assaulting me under the guise of medical treatment. I was a fearful, angry and depressed kid, ashamed and confused about something I couldn’t name. The irony of my dismal situation was almost comical. I was studying to be a priest in the house of God, being molested by a priest who was teaching me English, and looking for salvation in poetry. 

One day in religion class, after reading the story of “Mr. Blue,” a modern day parable about a crazy character who doesn’t fit in, I began to write my thoughts in a daily journal. The tide turned for me near the end of my freshman year when I discovered a battered copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy wedged behind a toilet tank in the seminary’s main bathrooms. Some of the pages were torn out which led me to believe the book was not just there for reading. I’d been ignorant my entire short life until I opened that book. For the first time since my arrival I felt someone was speaking directly to me. Six months later I left the seminary for good.

What happened after you left?

By 1977, I was reading and learning from living poets like Edward Field, Wanda Coleman, A.D. Winans, Ron Koertge, Al Young, Laurel Speer, Steve Kowit, Ishmael Reed, Sharon Olds and Gerald Locklin while promoting a second collection of my own poetry, Loading the Revolver with Real Bullets, published by Second Coming Press of San Francisco, my hometown. The year before I had instigated “stoogism,” a mock-literary movement that Allen Ginsberg dubbed “the only movement with a punch line.” The label “standup poet” was being attached to my name and I was playing the role of court jester in a crowded throne room. It was an exciting time to be involved in the small press literary scene.

Stoogism

i dreamt of Moe
last night
he was crying
he took
the laughter
out of his head
and thanked me
and when I saw
myself
about to cry
he whispered:
wake up
and go to sleep
and i did

And then you morphed from satirist to provocateur!

The following year my poetry and politics got me in trouble with the California State Senate. A short, eighteen-line poem from my second collection was photocopied, distributed, and read on the floor of the senate by Bob Wilson, a senator from Costa Mesa. Wilson used it as a reason why the California Arts Council (CAC) should be abolished. The poem in question, “The Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party,” was a spoof of American conservatism.

Wilson claimed it slandered actors John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Stuart Whitman and Glen Campbell, who were all mentioned in the poem. Since the book had been published with grant money from the CAC, the senator argued that California would likely be sued for libel. Within hours of his stunt several major news outlets picked up the story, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian of London, and even the Soviet news agency Tass, which allegedly tried to use the films of the Three Stooges as propaganda for capitalist violence. Dozens of newspapers published the poem. By the end of the year, the book had nearly sold out.

What kind of stage are you setting, so to speak, with a photograph of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry on the cover of this book? 

There’s a lot going on there. There’s the hucksterism of religion and the mumbo jumbo beliefs portrayed in the movie by an actor who, in real life, was a free thinker and champion of liberal causes. There are issues of veneration, hypocrisy and self-delusion presented in the context of a Hollywood culture that survived the McCarthy witch hunts and most of Mickey Rooney’s films. There’s the foible of star idolatry wedded to divine providence. Reciting prayers, memorizing lines and writing poetry are subversive acts. Religious devotion and celebrity worship demand allegiance, but poetry does best when it steers clear of any nonsense that defines it as something better than something else. The book’s cover also represents some personal mischief. Burt Lancaster bears an uncanny resemblance to my father.

Reading this book felt like eating a wild stew of American socioculture and celebrity: Poe and Freud appear alongside Curly and Moe from The Three Stooges; Lon Chaney, Jr. "howls" in the manner of Allen Ginsberg; God throws the hammer down on the "First Lady of Radio" Kate Smith; Porky Pig translates Basho; and Sinatra is defined as an multi-tiered entry in a dictionary. What is important about this kind of collaging? What does it add to the even greater gumbo of American letters?

It extends the reach of my own poetry by relating to time and place and reminding me to take the writing seriously but not the self. (The only thing good about self-importance is that Trump has given it a bad name.) I have no idea what my work adds to that steaming pot of literary mush. The danger of being as relevant as yesterday’s news comes with the territory and I willingly accept it.

[But] missing the mark means you took the shot. I like breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly into the camera. The late poet Ann Menebroker aptly described this rebellion as “Chico Marxist.” Lampoons, parodies and spoofs in literature are hazardous grinds that exact a price and take a toll. Poems like “Sinatra, Sinatra,” “The Director’s Prayer,” and “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” dare readers to take their hands off the wheel and close their eyes. 

Sinatra, Sinatra

Sexual reference:
A protruding sinatra
is often laughed at by serious women.

Medical procedure:
A malignant sinatra
must be cut out by a skilled surgeon.

Violent persuasion:
A sawed-off sinatra
is a dangerous weapon at close range.

Congressional question:
Do you deny the charge of ever being
involved in organized sinatra?

Prepared statement:
Kiss my sinatra.
Blow it out your sinatra.

Financial question:
Will supply-side sinatra halt inflation?

Empty expression:
The sinatra stops here.
The sinatra is quicker than the eye.

Strategic question:
Do you think it's possible to win
a limited nuclear sinatra?

Stupid assertion:
Eat sinatra.
Hail Mary full of sinatra.

Serious reflection:
sinatra this, sinatra that.
sinatra do, sinatra don't.
sinatra come, sinatra go
There's no sinatra like show sinatra.

Historical question:
Is the poet who wrote this poem still alive?

Biblical fact:
Man does not live by sinatra alone.

In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," you've taken one of the most notable poems of our times and married it to the blight of racism. Your model is a poem written by Wallace Stevens, one of the great American modernists who was also a racist and whose indelible work many writers (including myself) feel conflicted about.  To make matters more complex, you are a white man writing about an experience you have only observed vs. endured. Could you share a little bit about your choices behind this poem and how you work through nuance, contradiction, and the hesitancy that can accompany them?

You’re the first to nail that. A lot of my poems have secret passageways and trapdoors that chart unlikely escape routes. I had been re-reading a book of poetry by my friend, klipschutz (Kurt Lipschutz), which included his very funny “Thirteen Ways of Eating a Burrito.” At the same time, the news had exploded about Trayvon Martin, the young, unarmed black man in Florida shot and killed by a man who felt threatened by Martin’s looks and behavior. The first line that came to me was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.” I thought: “Okay, a little channeling of Wallace Stevens would be a healthy thing right about now.” The poem became an absurd retelling of Stevens’ original use of language and ideas with an attempt to reconcile the “eye of the beholder” with the specter of race and racism.

I’d also like to add that while I am, indeed, considered white, I didn’t always feel that way growing up. My family’s thick, black hair, dark, olive skin and imperfect English, as well as those of other Italians in our neighborhood, stood in stark contrast to our neighbors of German and Nordic descent. Race and prejudice in the fifties were as common as rabbit ears on a TV set. It wasn’t unusual to hear words like “black dago,” “dirty wop,” and “guinea” used as nasty invective or with reckless familiarity. The epithets had an isolating effect, particularly if you were very young and heard such distinctions being made between white kids and everyone else. 

What we experienced was nothing compared to what some African American neighbors went through. It wasn’t just white against everyone else. Italians, my uncles included, would sometimes call each other “dago” as if they were talking about fish. But they were just as guilty of using the “N” word as the guy around the corner who flew a Confederate flag every Fourth of July. Some kids would repeat what their parents said, but others crossed the line looking for trouble. I was with my older brother and some cousins in the park when we saw a big white kid pounding on a small black kid. The black kid was someone we’d seen before, my age, about eight years old. My brother, who was 12, ran over and told the white kid to pick on someone his own size. He took a swing at my brother and my brother decked him with one punch. I never forgot it.

At first the tone of this collection feels predominantly playful in terms of subject matter and language, but by the time I finished reading it, I could see that it was also wistful and melancholy all along, addressing not only the silliness of celebrity but also its solitude and, by turn, your own. Why do you find humor as a valuable construct in your work? What tradition do you feel you are a part of in terms of this aesthetic? 

It’s valuable in my poetry because it helps liberate and, in some ways, define the struggle I believe we all have with the absurdity of needless suffering. It’s not enough to stand for something and be angry with how the country is run or where the world is headed. To effect change you put that something, whatever it is, in play.

I think the tradition I’m part of demands I navigate this new golden age of satire with a pocket full of pyrite and no compass. The offensive nature of any satirical work (mine included) is implicit and inescapable. This is not a time for the timid or thin-skinned. I believe I’m just as sincere as anyone else in trying to determine why I’m somewhere rather than how I get anywhere.

There are a lot of borrowed forms in your book -- from Catholic prayer, to found dialogue, to structures imagined first by Ginsberg & Stevens. What do you like about working within an already set framework?

I absolutely love parody. It’s a difficult and challenging form that requires even more discipline and concentration than usual. It’s immensely satisfying when you stay true to the original and hear your own voice. The Catholic prayers came quickly and easily, particularly “The Actor’s Creed” and “The Halle Berry.” In the poem for Robin Williams I used his own words to address the loss I felt on the passing of my friend. Writing “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” was both torture and bliss. I went into a zombie trance for months and loved it. A parody of Ginsberg’s most famous work is doomed to failure from the start if 1) you don’t have a convincing subject of your own to carry the poem; and 2) you’re unprepared to carry it through all the way. I felt fortunate. A twisted Hollywood culture had produced Lon Chaney, Jr. His life, in front of and away from the camera, was eerily compelling. The transformation of the poem itself became an apt metaphor for his heart-wrenching makeover as “The Wolfman.”

Who specifically has influenced your poems and how you approach them?

A lot of my poetry is inspired by an endless list of brilliant and peculiar characters from the classics to cartoons. One of the few positive things I took away from my seminary training was discernment, self-discipline and good study habits. I valued a diverse education and appreciated singular voices no matter how contrary or complex, no matter how silly or strange. Kurt Vonnegut, Buster Keaton, Bob Kaufman, Jelly Roll Morton, A.D. Winans, Dr. Seuss, Adrienne Rich, Scrooge McDuck, Pablo Neruda, the Ritz Brothers and hundreds more, all had a hand in twisting my work like a pretzel.

My personal holy trinity consists of Edward Field, Joseph Heller and Paul Krassner. Their sharp, contrasting styles have taught me to trust my instincts and bring a pie to a knife fight. In the workforce I paid attention to Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima and Lenny Bruce.

We labor in a field of tall egos. It does us good now and then to acknowledge our contemporaries and offer praise without favor. In the seventies I attended a reading by Richard Eberhart at the University of California at Davis. At a reception afterwards, Eberhart encouraged us to not only read the works of living poets but to “drop them a line.” He believed in sincere and unsolicited communication at a time when people walked to the curb to check their mail. Poets, he said, should inform other poets. It’s one way we learn who’s out there in the field with us. 

What are you working on now?

 I’m involved in a number of writing projects. One is a verse novel based on stories my father told me about growing up with wise guys in North Boston. Another is a verse memoir about the first 100 days of my abuse at the seminary. I’m also crafting, under my parody news syndicate, Yossarian Universal, a series of reports and dispatches emanating from an unknown source. The dark, Klingon days of Der Gropenführer are upon us and it’s going to take more than a few torches to illuminate the skulkers who prowl the shadows.

The upside-down optimism that Trump promotes is a threat not only to reality but to legitimate madness. Speak truth to power, yes, but also speak crazy to crazy with a straight face. Reclaim the narrative. When clergy abuse survivors, fearful of being re-traumatized, ask me how I’m still able to walk into a church today, I tell them I simply make the sign of the cross with one hand and hold my crotch with the other. 

 I like to remind myself that the vast literary landscape I wander through often bears more of a resemblance to the “Cheese Shop” sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus than it does to the grand ballroom scene in The Great Gatsby. Karl Shapiro, who had a wicked sense of humor, once told me that if you laid out all the poems in the world end-to-end, people would use them to walk on.

 

Paul Fericano will read his work at Bird and Beckett Books and Records on Sunday, November 12, at 2 pm, as part of Three On a Match, The New and Improved Reading Series.  

Thomas Devaney interviews the late Bill Berkson for the "Brooklyn Rail"

Devaney/Rail: Earlier today you said “something something, baby” and were kind of charting a geography of a tone: connecting a sound in Virgil Thomson’s voice, which you said Frank O’Hara was picking up on. Did you know Thomson through O’Hara?

Berkson: Yes, but also through my mother (Eleanor Lambert). It was very interesting to know him. He had such an interesting speech pattern—this kind of Kansas. It was Kansas, but it was your grandmother. Very high pitched.  

Rail: I know your mother worked in the fashion world. How did she get to know Thomson?

Berkson: He got real fixed on my mother. There was a wonderful man named Morris Goldie who was a friend of the musicians, and he gave some of the most terrific parties. He was not a musician, he was not an artist, and he and his brother had an office supply business, I think that they made things like shredders. Morris had met my mother and thought it would be a great idea to put her and Virgil together. So we had this dinner which was Virgil and my mother and me, and a very close friend of my mother’s named Sybil Connolly. Sybil was an Irish clothes designer (pleated linens and Irish textiles), and also very much involved in rescuing old Irish crafts like glass blowing and tatting and so forth. The five of us had dinner, and so forever after when I would see Virgil (this is an example of how I can get to his tone) the first thing out of Virgil’s mouth would be “How’s Mama!” 

INCONVERSATION BILL BERKSON with Thomas Devaney
http://brooklynrail.org/2017/11/criticspage/BILL-BERKSON-with-Thomas-Devaney

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http://brooklynrail.org/2017/11/criticspage/BILL-BERKSON-with-Thomas-Devaney

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Anthony Frame of Glass Poetry Press

DD: How did Glass Poetry Press come into being?

AF: Glass originally started as the journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry. It was edited by me and my wife, Holly Burnside, and we released our first issue in March, 2008. It started because we had seen a number of journals start up, release an issue online, and then disappear from the web. We wanted to see if we could create something more permanent. We had no real editing experience and no real plan beyond posting our info on a few sites and hoping people would send us work to consider. When we started, we used a free yahoo email account and a free blogger website and yet, somehow, people sent us their wonderful work. In 2014, though, we had to decide if we could keep Glass going. We were both going through career changes and we were having trouble responding to submissions in a timely manner. We felt we weren’t doing right by our readers and our writers, so we decided to close the journal. We kept the website up, though, and made a commitment to our poets that we would keep the site live on the web for as long as we possibly could.

Pretty much as soon as we announced Glass was closing, I started thinking about chapbooks. I love chapbooks. I love their size, their relatively small cost, their variety. I love the idea of working one on one with an author on a finished project. I love the idea of being a completely independent press that can take real risks on work that other presses might not be able to take. And I love the idea of this little book you can hold in your hands and put in your bag or purse and pull out to read, start to finish, during your lunch break. In 2016, I was awarded an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council and I decided to put a portion of that award towards pursuing my dream of running a chapbook press. I already had the Glass website, and people still remembered Glass: A Journal of Poetry, so calling it Glass Poetry Press made sense. I spent four or five months researching materials and other presses, talking with friends who run presses, and talking with poets who might be interested in letting me publish their chapbooks. And in August, 2016, Glass Poetry Press released Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain, the first entry in the 2016-2017 Glass Chapbook Series. I screamed when I finished stapling that first copy. And I’m not going to lie – I still scream a little when I finish the first copy of every new title.

DD: The motto of your press is Precision, Vision, Inclusion. Could you expound a bit on these aesthetic values and how the chapbooks you’ve published, so far, exemplify them?

AF: Those are three elements of glass that I admire most (one nickname for Toledo, Ohio, is The Glass City, because we were the glass capital of the world, which is why we originally named the journal Glass). Glass, as both object and art form, is incredibly precise. It also assists vision, whether through eyeglasses or telescopes or whatever. And glass can incorporate anything – it is a very inclusive object and medium. I also admire these features in poetry – precision of language, the vision of the poet, and the growing inclusiveness of the community. So, for the press, those are both what I look for in the work I publish and what I strive for as an editor.

I’m hopeful that these three elements can be seen in the work I’ve published. I think about Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain – the careful use of language in Francisco’s poems, whether his long poems or his very short ones. There’s incredible precision in his work. Similarly, Steven Sanchez (To My Body) and Kate Fadick (Self Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen) are incredibly precise artisans of words. Sanchez writes these absolutely stunning lyric narratives and each line is as tight as any I’ve ever read. Fadick’s lyric meditations are so precise, every single word carries the weight of fifty pages of prose. And there’s intense vision in these chapbooks. Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline is a visceral exploration of childloss, motherhood, and mental health (and love, which I think is often overlooked in her work). Givhan is a great example of the vision I admire because she has had a number of collections released in a short period of time (in addition to her Glass chapbook, she recently released two full lengths: Landscape with Headless Mama, from LSU Press, and Protection Spell, from University of Arkansas Press). Reading all of these together, you can see a clear vision of the world of the poet and of the world the poet wants to create. Lastly, as an editor, I am committed to equity in publishing. And I want that inclusiveness to be about both publishing underrepresented writers and about the styles of poetry I’m publishing. During the first two years, I will publish ten chapbooks. Six of the chapbooks are written by poets of color, three are by LGBTQ poets, and six are by women poets. They vary in style from narrative poetry to meditative poetry and Jennifer Met’s Gallery Withheld is a collection of concrete/shape poems.

DD: Tell us about the chapbooks forthcoming in your second year?

AF: I’m really excited about this second series of chapbooks. There will be five chapbooks again and four of the chapbooks are debut collections (though, one of the authors, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, also recently won the Kundiman Prize for her full length collection, Shahr-e- jaanaan: The City of The Beloved, which is a book I’m really looking forward to reading).

We just released Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost, which is just phenomenal. It’s a series of poems about love and loss and longing, hidden as a series of recipes. February is a real rising star from Nigeria and his poems in this collection (and his poems that is showing up in journals) are incredibly fresh and exciting.

Also, coming during this series are Malcolm Friend’s mxd-kd-mixtape, which is a fantastic collection of narratives about family and identity. Friend’s poems are heavy with music, which helps ground the work, and they’re full of intense depth and connectivity. I’m working on the first proof set of mxd-kd-mixtape right now and it’s really hard to focus on the layout details because I just keep getting drawn into the poems.

In Bad Anatomy, which will be coming out in February 2018, Hannah Cohen gives us poems about growth, womanhood, politics, and love. Cohen writes poems with a careful precision that allows us to really fall deep into her subjects, her speakers, and her images. She has this wonderful fresh voice that manages to mix elements of Plath and Olds and Sappho, but also with a truly unique tone and style. It’s a really outstanding series of poems.

Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s ghost exhibit is a sequence of prose poems with each one acting like a placard in a museum. The movement, sequencing, and pacing of each poem builds this amazing narrative of the family at the center of the poems. I remember reading the manuscript when it was first submitted and being completely blown away by the complexity and efficiency of how Mercer created the chapbook.

Finally, the series wraps up in June, 2018, with Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s What is Not Beautiful. Talukder’s work is really incredible. Her lines are clear, but complex and packed full of nuance. What is Not Beautiful examines a new marriage and mental health and Talukder approaches her subjects with such precision and depth. Talukder is a master of these tight, short lines that pack volumes of imagery and emotion in just a handful of words. And the music of her poems knocks me out of my chair every time I return to her manuscript.

I could talk for hours and hours about these chapbooks and I, for real, cannot wait to share them with the Glass readers. But for now, here, I think I’ll end by saying that of all the many benefits of running Glass, easily the best is the privilege of being able to sit with and read these manuscripts, to fall in love with them and then to help others find and fall in love with them too.

DD: What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced, starting a new press?

AF: To be honest, I’ve been incredibly lucky. On the one hand, I’ve had a few friends who run presses who have always been there with advice when I’ve been confused (especially Margaret Bashaar from Hyacinth Girl Press, who has been willing to share her experiences and advice with me so many times). I’ve also had a number of readers who have followed the press from the beginning and have helped spread the word on the press’s behalf in so many ways. The support and encouragement from the community and from readers has been amazing and I don’t know how I’ll ever repay all of the kindness that has been shown to me.

The main challenge has been time. I work a lot of hours at my day job and that means I don’t always get orders out right away. But I try to be as quick as possible. I also have friends and family, so balancing time between work, the press, and a social life (plus my own writing) is something I still struggle with.

Then there are the technical aspects of running the press:  figuring out what the best method of shipping is (the folks at my local post office are probably sick of listening to me tell them that they’re overcharging me), learning how to find artists who will provide cover art and figuring out what a fair price is for their work, making sure I’m getting the best materials for the chapbooks at the best price.

It’s important to me that I can keep the cost of purchasing the chapbooks low without charging reading fees which means making sure that the cost to make them stays low. I’ve made choices early on that maybe weren’t the best choices (receiving submissions through Submittable, buying ISBN numbers, etc…), so I’m constantly evaluating and reevaluating those choices. And learning how best to market the chapbooks so I can get as many copies in the hands of readers as possible. It’s a constant learning process running the press. And I kind of love that about it. There’s always something new to look into and figure out. But, once you think you know what you’re doing, you find out that you really need to learn more, which can also be a little frustrating.

Still, all in all, somehow the press continues to thrive and grow and I remain amazed by the trust writers and readers continue to place in me. I’ll keep trying to live up to that trust.

DD: Tell us about Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

AF: Everything related to Glass began as Glass: A Journal of Poetry in 2008, as I discussed above. It seemed like an obvious choice to bring the journal back when I opened Glass as a chapbook press. I like to think of the journal as being complimentary to the press, but it also has a lot of flexibility. When I first reopened it, it was a weekly journal that spotlighted a single poem each week. Starting this year, I’ve shifted to a monthly format. Each issue includes 10 poems (sometimes, a few more) and throughout the month we also publish interviews, reviews (edited by our Reviews Editor, Stephanie Kaylor), and current events poems in our Poets Resist series (edited by Catherine Ellis Chambers). I like that the journal allows me to share the work of so many poets, especially since budget and time constraints mean I’m only able to publish five manuscripts through the chapbook series.

DD: You have an unusual day job for a poet and book publisher; you work as an exterminator. How did you come to work in the extermination business? How has being an exterminator influenced your work as a poet and publisher?

AF: Ha! Yeah, I don’t know many other exterminator poets, to be honest. It’s an interesting industry to work in. I got this job, basically, because I was born into it. It’s a family business, started by my grandparents. My uncles took over for them and now my cousins run it. It’s a little weird driving around with my name on the side of my truck (Frame’s Pest Control – “Don’t get stung by inexperience. Give us a buzz.”) but, it pays the bills. Honestly, it’s a pretty good job for me. I’m outside rather than behind a desk and I see different places and people each day. It’s also a job where I’m constantly learning new things, which, as a writer, is pretty great.

My work has definitely been influenced by my job. On the one hand, pest control gives ample opportunities for new subjects and images for my poems. But, also, this is very precise work. There’s a decent amount of science required to be able to do pest control effectively. And that scientific precision is definitely finding its way into my work. Even at the linguistic level. I’m fascinated by the language of pest control. Pyrethroids is a fantastic word, musically, and there’s something rhythmically interesting about the phrase “Juvenile Insect Hormone Regulator.” And “Instar” — honestly, is there a better word? So, all of that is finding its way into my work. I’m still figuring out how I want to use that material, how to merge the diction of pest control with the music of poetry. I’m reading a lot of Sharon Olds and looking at how she utilizes anatomical diction in her work. It’s a process, like everything else, but it’s a pretty interesting process, I think.

As for the press, my job brings a lot of advantages, mainly because I’m not bound by anyone else. I’m not university supported, either through the press or through my day job, so I don’t have to worry about how various other people are going to react to what I do with the press. This independence lets me look at my submissions and choose the ones that best fit my vision of the literary world that I want to see, without any input (for better or for worse) from anyone else. I really cherish that independence.

DD: What was the subject of the first poem you ever wrote?

AF: Oh, wow, yeah – so, my aunt and uncle had this wall in their laundry room in the unfinished portion of their basement and, basically, they encouraged everyone to write little messages on the wall. I think it was supposed to be inspirational sayings and things like that, but mostly it was just random things we’d heard in songs or on movies. But I thought the idea of this cluttered wall was really really deep. And I had just started really reading poetry and I thought that wall would be a great poem. So, I can’t remember any of the lines other than the opening line: “This wall is cluttered.” I don’t remember much else about it other than that it was a really bad poem, even for a seventeen year old.

DD: What was the first poem you reread multiple times?

AF: It was probably Stephen Crane’s “Many red devils ran from my heart.”

Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.

Crane was the first poet I fell in love with, especially this poem. I don’t know – something about this Ars Poetica really spoke to me. The darkness, the angst, the speaker’s discomfort and feeling of strangeness, it all pretty much gelled with my young, grunge outlook on the world and art. I’ve grown a lot since then, both in how I see the world and how I see art, but that poem still brings me back to being seventeen and full of nihilistic naiveté.

DD: If you had to have one line of poetry tattooed on you, what would it be?

AF: Without question, I’d pick these lines from Rane Arroyo’s “The Burrito King of Toledo, Ohio”: “I’m addicted to dawn/to light, to vision.” (as a backup, I’d choose “You’ll see how we give/birth among the ruins” from Wisława Szymborska’s “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”)

DD: If you had to have one song lyric tattooed on you, what would it be?

AF: “Thunder wishes it could be the snow” from “Purple People” by Tori Amos, with part of the refrain from The Dave Matthews Band’s “Pig” as a backup: “While you’re dancing on the ground,/why think of when you’re gone?”

DD: The newest chapbook you’ve published is Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost. Could you end the interview by telling us a bit about this collection and giving us a poem from it?

AF: How to Cook a Ghost is one of those collections that is really hard to fully explain. It’s a chapbook that really needs to be experienced. Logan February has done a really amazing thing with this series of poems. He’s dug deep into ideas of love and longing and loss and handled them all with a truly unique voice and style. I remember the first time I read How to Cook a Ghost, when it was first submitted, and trying to think of another sequence of poems that I could compare it to and I seriously couldn’t. That’s part of February’s genius. There really is no one like him.

The chapbook is a series of poems that explore those themes I just mentioned, but February approaches his subjects through the experience of eating. So, each poem, in a way, is a recipe. Follow the instructions and you might end up with a wonderful glass of lemonade. Or you might end up with the closure you need to understand a past love. It is truly astounding how carefully, and seemingly effortlessly, he holds these poems together. And his imagery is simply breathtaking. And the accumulation of these poems – this is a manuscript where the parts are incredible on their own but the whole manuscript still manages to be greater than the individual parts. Here’s a sample poem:

            Food Poisoning

            Do not eat that
                                     you are only lying to yourself.

            All of that sugar
                                     – chocolate       [honey & milk]
                                     – ice cream       [prismatic gore]
                                     – poison            [blue blackness]
             and your heart has not been
                                                   broken yet.

            Why do you fill yourself
            with the very things that
            will not stay inside of you:

                                    candied gravel & other indigestibles?

            You have made yourself sick,
            praying for a miracle,
            kneeling
            over the toilet seat – cry:
                                    I heave to make myself holy.

            When an odd thing
            shows you its oddities,
            why are you surprised?

                                          This herb will cleanse you –
                                           juice it, drink, repeat:
                                          he is a boneless body with two faces

            until you understand

            some foods do not taste very good,
            but then, they will not start to rot
            in your stomach.

Anthony Frame is an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, where he lives with his wife. He is the author of A Generation of Insomniacs (Main Street Rag, 2015) and of four chapbooks, including To Gain the Day (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015) and Where Wind Meets Wing (forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press). He is the editor/publisher of Glass Poetry Press, which publishes the Glass Chapbook Series and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Third Coast, Harpur Palate, Boxcar Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal and Verse Daily, among others. He has twice been awarded Individual Excellence Grants from the Ohio Arts Council

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Jessica Kristie of Winter Goose Publishing and William Stratton, Author of These Things Too Have Shape

DD: How did Winter Goose come into being? Can you give us a brief history of the press?

JK: In 2011 I started WGP from a desire to stay close to the written word as a writer and lover of art. The success of our press came quickly with an overwhelming amount of submissions and support from the writing community. We’ve now published over a hundred books and carry several award-winning authors and titles in our catalog.

DD: Tell us a little bit about your poetry catalog. What do Winter Goose books share in common?

JK: Our poetry catalog ranges in variety from traditional form poetry to a more extensive catalog of contemporary poetry and poets. Our poetry books are all laced with a genuine heart-felt journey through the eyes of many different perspectives. In that genuineness, we find a common thread for all our poetry catalog.

DD: What are you looking for in prospective authors?

JK: We are looking for unique and well-designed writing with a strong voice. We publish based on quality more than what the industry may consider marketable material. We appreciate the process of writing, whether fiction or poetry, and are always excited to find the next fresh and talented new voice.

DD: You’ve published two of Bill Stratton’s poetry collections. Can you tell us about what you most admire in his poetry?

JK: Bill brings a strong sense of self with his writing. He writes from a place that brings you in and keeps you there. It’s genuine, raw, and heartfelt. The power shines brightly through his words and gives him a solid foundation that we honor and appreciate.

DD:  You grew up in a rural area of upstate New York. Can you talk about how this upbringing influences your writing and how the natural world figures in your work?

WS: I don't know if I can say anything I haven't already tried to say in my poems, though what I've tried to say has filled a decent part of two books now, so perhaps I ought to try. Where I am from is central New York, more hills than mountains, more dead farms and dollar stores than mines or mills. It's beautiful and haunting, and within my life I saw the end of a certain way of life and the movement into another; from working on farms and local factories to an economy that never really sees the upswing when the country does well and feels every bit of pain when it does not. Drug addiction and violence have increased, as they have in a lot of places where poverty is a problem. Still, there are amazing people there whose friendship I value greatly and who often appear in my poems. I obviously have a lot of conflicting feelings about where I am from, but I'm also fiercely loyal—my friends from home know that, and to me, that is very important. Of course it's a rural place, and in particular I grew up on an old farm with several hundred acres to roam, and several thousand acres of state land on two sides. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods when I was a kid. My father subscribed in part to the idea that I should leave the house whenever I wanted or could (and sometimes when I did not) without a curfew or expectation on return. "He'll come back when he's hungry," I remember him telling my stepmother. As a result, there is little I do not know about those woods and fields. It is a tiny corner of the earth, and I am very aware of how sheltered I was in some ways, despite my fierce independence and oppositional defiance. Those years are formative, and for me, they helped to form a sense of self which maybe relies too much on itself to construct meaning; that is, I often had a hard time relying on others when I reached adolescence, because in my isolation I taught myself that I was all that I needed. Turns out, or so I think now, that's not always the best way to go about life. It taught me patience and that examining simple things at length and in detail can yield surprising results. It taught me that I am something small and fragile and mortal but also big and powerful and destructive. It taught me about consequence. I digress. The natural world is, in short, important to me not only as a writer, but as a person. I hope I do it some justice in my work. Since I believe, in some part, that writing is a process of pulling the internal (reflection, insight, observation, interpretation) and externalizing it as language, I recognize and do my best to work with the kind of internal abilities the natural world endowed me with. I have learned to listen for the voice I recognize as my own, and it is often easiest to see in the natural world. I hope that answers the question.

DD: In These Things Too Have Shape you have poems about being stabbed and being punched in the face. Different forms of violence punctuate the otherwise gentle forward movement of this collection. Could you discuss the role of violence in your work?

WS: This is an important topic for me, and one I think writers ought to speak to more often. I would like to think myself a non-violent person. I would like to think that I no longer need violence in my life, either as way for conflict resolution or as a means of self-discovery, both of which have been a part of my past. I do my best to work through anger and violence internally now, recognizing them for what they are: destructive and unnecessary, and usually ineffective. That said, if I ignore the role that violence has played in forming the person that I am, or if I dismiss the part is has played in the world I grew up in, I am lying to my readers and worse, to myself. The world is sometimes a violent place, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. I say this not to advocate for violence, but to advocate confronting it, to advocate for resolving root problems that lead to violence, to advocate for self-reflection. Often people pretend they are not capable of violence—that’s the worst kind of fallacy. I believe we ought to admit to ourselves, each of us, that we are capable of being violent creatures, hurting and even killing, because I believe it is only with this admission that we can even attempt to solve violence as an epidemic worldwide, and within our own homes. In addition to this, I think poetry and writing in general has its roots in violence. Some of our oldest recorded writings for instance, are incredibly violent. We don't teach Beowulf or Gilgamesh to glorify violence. But to pretend that those works are not riddled with violence is silly. For me, a careful examination of what that violence is, how it operates for the characters and for the narratives, why it exists and what it measures...those are important questions, which I think we might overlook at times. So yes, my poems on occasion record violence, but they are non-fictional instances of violence (as far as my memory operates) and they serve an important function not only for the book, but for me. I would very much like to think that what readers I have are able to engage that violence on several levels, and that their reactions are both visceral and honest.

DD: You begin the collection with my favorite poem, “Milkweed,” which seems really to be an Ars Poetica. In this poem, you write that the burst remains of a milkweed pod are your Paris. What is your personal definition of poetry?

WS: Oh dear. I guess I might say: Poetry is that which, if I attempt to define it, I will sound pompous and moronic at the same time. Milkweed is as close as I can get to a definition, and hopefully I sound neither, but odds are good that someone out there think I sound one or the other or both fairly consistently.  I think, ultimately, whatever my definition is, it's not completely static, and hopefully you can get a feel for it by reading my poems, which I would vastly prefer to attempting to distill it in a definition here.

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

WS: I don't think I read nearly enough contemporary poetry to be any sort of judge. I don't really read enough contemporary poetry, period. I do my best, but there’s so much of it out there, I rarely feel like I'm doing even a passable job. At the risk of sounding completely self-centered, I do read every journal that publishes my work cover-to-cover, and I've found some amazing poems, poets, and friends that way. I suppose I see a trend towards narrative poetry slowly gaining ground on lyric poetry. I recently had a discussion with an editor and poet friend of mine about the types of poetry he sees for submissions. He explained to me about Hoagland's essay and the skittery poet (which I then had to find and read), and I have to say I agree, though again my experience is limited. Personally, my aesthetics run less associative and “experimental” (though that term irks me), but I recognize that those poems have value outside of my taste preferences. I've always thought poetry might want to consider allowing accessibility to be a word which, instead of gathering scorn, might have value. I have had a poet nearly take a swing at me for the very idea that poetry should be able to be 'accessible' if it so chooses. So, I would like to think that poetry today is, increasingly, large enough to accommodate all types of poems and all types of audiences. I certainly think it can be, and while I don't buy a lot of books that don't fit my aesthetic, I am honored to be published in the same journals as those that differ, and I would very much like to live in a world where both can exist peacefully, as it were. 

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

WS: Ha! Prufrock maybe? I'm terrible at memorizing poems, it’s embarrassing. Prufrock was the first poem though, that made me think: "Shit. I wish I had written that." and really feel it.

DD: We both attended Binghamton University as undergraduates at the same time, in the late 90s and early 00s. I was lucky enough to be in Liz Rosenberg’s poetry workshop and Michael Klein’s creative nonfiction workshop with you. How did Binghamton University influence your development as a writer?

WS: Looking back on my life as a writer, I have been so fortunate. Not only to be in those classes with you (and several other talented, amazing people), but also to have the teachers I have had. From a very young age I was lucky enough to have one or two who would challenge me, push me, allow me to invest myself in learning and education and writing. Liz, Michael, Ruth Stone, David Chirico and others at Binghamton, a couple of very good high school English teachers, even a teacher who had me in a gifted and talented program in elementary school. As I write this, I am recovering from the loss of one of my great mentors in writing, Tom Lux. Along with Stuart Dischell and a few others at the Sarah Lawrence summer program for adult writers, he helped me to discover that writing was, actually, a thing I could not live without. I have met and worked with some amazing writers over the years, many of whom are also amazing people. David Rivard and Mekeel Mcbride helped guide me through my graduate program, and I was lucky enough to Charlie Simic as my thesis advisor. I was able to spend a day with Phil Levine less than a year before he passed, and we spent a few hours talking about poetry and writing and poverty and how we both felt a sense of responsibility to the people and places that raised us.  I have so many wonderful moments with so many wonderful writers, and they just keep coming. Lately I have been lucky enough to be accepted into a group of talented writers in Burlington and I am lucky enough to say that Major Jackson now reads my poems every week, for example. Not all of my encounters with poets and writers have been positive ones, and certainly I have met some writers which, for one reason or another don't seem interested in engaging with me. But overall, I have been blindingly fortunate. It is my great desire to be able to give back to poetry and writing and young poets and writers what has been given to me.

I'm not sure I can specifically say exactly what Binghamton did for me as a writer, the time now seems to all blend together.  I'm not sure I can quantify my time there in a satisfactory way. I suppose it will have to suffice for me to say: It influenced me greatly, and I would not be the writer I am today without it.

DD: I’d like to end with your poem, “Harness,” which appeared in a recent issue of Field. Could you introduce us to this poem?

WS: “Harness,” like the vast majority of my poems, is in large part non fictional and narrative. My father really did drive a team of draft horses, they really did take off with me on their backs, and I really was found some time later in an old apple orchard/pasture. To me, that's important, though I've heard from others that the distinction holds less meaning for a reader, and I have only their feedback to go on. When I became a father, my perspective and thoughts on my childhood started to shift. In particular, one day, I remembered this story, told to me many times by many family members. I was too young to really recall the incident, though I remembered instantly the smell of the horses and how the world looked from their backs. When I started to process the memory through the experience of a father, I nearly had a panic attack. I have no idea what I would do if my daughter disappeared up and over a hill on the back of a massive spooked horse. Chase them, I suppose. As for the ending, I think what was most telling about my memory was that I did not remember specifically that event, though I remember many others and I remember generally things about the horses. To me, that indicates that the event, while terrible and traumatic for the adults in my family, wasn't for me. I thought about that a long time, and the story of what passed between Angel and I came to me slowly, in the way things sometimes do when they have truth without adhering strictly to fact.  I often write instinctively, doing my best to lose myself in the process, listening more than speaking (the exact opposite of how I revise). In Harness, I think I was somewhat successful in tapping into my own voice, and finding a way to translate a real event of my life into the fantastic we sometimes need to connect experience to the universal.  I'm not great at talking about my poems, or at least, I aspire to be much better than I am. I hope that suffices.

            Harness

            They tell me I was too young to remember
            the day the horse team spooked and broke
            the reins and left my father empty-handed,
            running after them with me on their backs.
            I rode every time he took them out, Marsha
            one was called and Angel the other and I was
            too young (maybe four) to be up on their
            broad backs, without a saddle, but they were
            so calm not even a shotgun made them bolt
            and my father was so young and proud
            not even his son could scare him. I was
            never scared, their black manes smelled
            so good and the rise and fall of their shoulders
            as I lay on my stomach pulled the horizon
            up and down and I kept the flies from their face
            with a long branch. Now that I am a father
            and my father is dead I think he must have
            felt, in the moment the reins left his hands
            and the trace snapped, that all of what his life
            had led to up to at that point was now in full
            flight from him, his hands never so empty
            as right then and it was a beautiful day
            to lose a son. I was lost for only an hour
            they tell me, but I know the truth: the horses
            and I ran to the thickest part of the old
            orchard and there I passed into Angel
            and Marsha watched as Angel passed
            into me and that is why still today on spring
            days in the sun when the people are all
            very happy to have the warmth I am remembering
            a collar and the feel of a boy on my back
            and the taste of wild apples sour and sweet.

Jessica Kristie is an award winning author, social entrepreneur, and a lover of poetry. She is an advocate for art, an activist against human trafficking, and a soulful contributor to the strengthening of our creative communities. Her novel, Barbed-Wire Butterflies, donates 100% of all print royalties and a percentage of digital copies and merchandise to fight human trafficking. Look for her poetry collections, Dreaming in Darkness, Threads of Life, and Winter Dress, as well as her eBook offering to creators, Weekly Inspirations for Writers & Creators. You can find her fusion of poetry and music with the collaboration, Kristie & Cloverfield, released through Ultrasonic Music Germany, and available everywhere. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica Kristie discovered her passion for writing as a child. Along with her creative side, she works in the publishing industry, is an avid supporter of all creative souls, and hopes to draw readers into her world through shared emotion. She inspires to forgive, remember, and heal, while continuing to dedicate herself to fighting social injustices.

William Stratton currently lives in Colchester, Vermont. He teaches writing and poetry at SUNY Plasttsburgh, and is associate poetry editor at the Saranac Review. His first full length collection of poetry, Under The Water Was Stone (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014) has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery award and the Eugene Paul Nassar Award. His second book These Things Too Have Shape was released in January of 2016. His poetry is published or forthcoming in: FIELD, Sugar House Review, Spillway, The Cortland Review, Best of Pif Magazine, The North American Review, Connotation Press, Canary, and others.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

"My Favorite Gershwin Song (in the manner of David Lehman)" [by Lauren Hilger]

POSTED IN PANK ON JUNE 12, 2017

INTERVIEW BY LAUREN HILGER

Poems in the Manner of… David Lehman’s most recent book speaks to the future by speaking to the poets who have come before. Featuring poems inspired by Kafka, Lady Murasaki, Catullus, alongside translations and astrological profiles, it’s a book that opens up with enthusiasm, deep love for poets’ technique and for their individual personalities, and provides possibilities for teaching. When I met David, he placed his hat on his hat stand and sang me the lyrics of my favorite Gershwin song. I talked to him about Poems in the Manner of… (Scribner), collaboration, and the American songbook.

Lauren Hilger: Most of the titles in this book begin “Poem in the manner of” and all start with a preface. I especially admire the poems that twist this constraint, like the twice-baked idea of a poem in the manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein. I am curious, though, about how many layers it would take for it to no longer be a poem “in the manner of” and for it to just be your own. If this is a poem in the manner of Stevens rewritten through Stein, for instance, how many other voices would need to appear before it was yours again?

for Lehman's rejoinder, and more Q & A,  click here 

http://pankmagazine.com/2017/06/12/my-favorite-gershwin-song-in-the-manner-of-david-lehman/