Simone Muench was raised in Benson, Louisiana and Combs, Arkansas. Her first book The Air Lost in Breathing won the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry (Helicon Nine, 2000), and her second Lampblack & Ash received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (Sarabande Books, 2005). She has poems appearing in Iowa Review, American Poet, Caffeine Destiny, Three Candles, Poetry, Dusie and others. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is Director of the Writing Program at Lewis University. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books, is a contributing editor to Sharkforum
First Car?
A white Dodge Aspen that I wrecked when I was fifteen while chasing a school bus with the boys’ baseball team down a gravel road.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
High school is a long period of time, especially when you’re in the midst of it. Junior/Senior years it was a toss up between Yaz, The Smiths and The Cure. When I went to the Kiss me Kiss me Kiss me concert, I got depressed because I knew I could never be with Robert Smith of the inscrutable hair and lipsticked lips.
Favorite book(s)?
Joyce Peseroff’s The Hardness Scale. I memorized the title poem and read it to a high school auditorium crowd. Also Plath’s Ariel, which has to be the single most loved book of all high school girls, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (don’t hold it against me).
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
First two years of high school I attended a small school in Iota, Louisiana, and skirted popularity—played basketball, was a cheerleader, and was on Homecoming Court. The final years of high school I moved to Colorado and wasn’t really part of any crowd, though I was involved in student government and the debate team, which I absolutely sucked at. I also enjoyed a stint as a Goth girl, which translates to me donning combat boots, powdering my face white and dancing at the Annex to the Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus; and also falling in love with a beautiful boy named John who sported a Mohawk and safety pins in his cheek.
First job?
It was either McDonalds in downtown Colorado Springs, or a tiny café midway up Pike’s Peak. At McDonalds during lunch rush one day, a man ordered fries and a Coke. I began to silently sob and couldn’t stop. The manager had to come over and gently nudge me out of the way to take his order. I often wonder if he recounts the incident to his friends—the day he made the teenage girl in her blue polyester uniform cry by ordering French fries. There’s a great Buffy episode called “Doublemeat Palace” that always catapults me back to that day.
Car now?
A dented Chevy Lumina that I bought from a friend.
Favorite book now?
Impossible question to answer, but a few of them include Wallace Stevens Collected, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Julio Cortazar’s Blow-up and Other Stories and Hopscotch, Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, Robert Desnos’ Selected. . .
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
Califone’s Roots and Crowns
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
Chan-wook Park’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance.
What are you working on these days?
I’m currently working on a book tentatively called Bind. Dancing Girl Press has accepted a section of the manuscript, titled Orange Girl, as a chapbook that will appear in July. The term “orange girl” historically refers to girls during England’s Restoration period who sold oranges at the theatre. Selling oranges was often a euphemism for prostitution. The poems revolve loosely around issues of female sexuality, voice negation, and empowerment. All of the titles are extracted from the OED; for example, “The orange-girl is generally allowed to enter an auction-store, for auctioneers are mortal, and sometimes eat oranges.”
Anything coming out soon?
See above. Also, a collaborative piece that I wrote with the poet Bill Allegrezza will appear in Dusie, and I have poems forthcoming in the anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century from Cracked Slab Books.
What are you reading that's fun?
Bloody Disgusting and Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer.
What's your favorite exercise?
Running, especially over the tri-borough bridge in Astoria, NY.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
I suck clothes into my apartment at an alarming rate. I love Edith Head and vintage dresses and have a black crepe flapper dress with an illusion lace bodice, full-length sleeves, and fringe all the way to the ankle. Oh, and a pair of United Nude black velvet Eamz shoes with chrome heels shaped like the legs of an Eames lounge chair. I feel like I’m walking in art.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Eating 5th-grader candy like Gobstoppers, Haribo gummy bears, and chewy Sprees, beating puffed-up men at pool, slasher films, Dashboard Confessional, and serial killer novels. However, I don’t feel particular guilty about any of these. (See film theorist Robin Wood’s treatment of the phrase “guilty pleasures”).
Favorite recipe?
me + restaurant
What's on your desk?
Clutter. My two kitties, but only when I’m working. Plus, Kristy Bowen’s The Fever Almanac, Lara Glenum’s The Hounds of No, Arielle Greenberg’s My Kafka Century, Elizabeth Treadwell’s Cornstarch Figurines, and Alex Lemon’s Mosquito. I just received them all in the mail.
Stones or Beatles?
I’m a fan of them both. When I was in 2nd grade I pined after George Harrison. I owned the red and blue albums. One night my parents had a party and a naked man sat on the stereo player thinking it was a chair. Alas, there went George and the boys.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Hobby Benson
January 30, 2007
Quickie Interview #14: Simone Muench
January 29, 2007
Rally Round the Flag!
Hal G.P. Colebatch, writing in the conservative mag The American Spectator, wonders how we'll ever stave off militant Islam and cultural relativism without a few decent patriotic poets.
Can anyone figure out what the hell he's talking about?
Or think of anyone (besides maybe Dana Gioia) who would meet this guy's definition of somebody who's technically skilled, writing in a mode that would be appropriate for patriotic poetry, and also politically conservative?
January 26, 2007
The critic has become the criticized
Callback to a post on William Logan. I enjoyed this review of Logan's criticism collection The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin on the Verse blog. Reviewer Brian Henry calls Logan out for a string of tics and no-nos, from overuse of adjectives to sexism (for instance, Logan compares Mary Jo Salter's poems to those "a housewife would write" (if a housewife could write poems??)).
January 24, 2007
Radio Dark Room
Major Jackson and Kevin Young, two alumni of the Dark Room Collective, the Cambridge-based African-American writing collective of yore, will each be featured on different NPR programs this week. Jackson will be on Open Source tonight from 7-8pm, and Young on On Point tomorrow from 11am-noon. Both programs offer online downloads or streams, so you should hopefully be able to catch the poetic goodness ex post facto, in case you can't hear it as it happens.
January 23, 2007
Quickie Interview #13: Lewis Robinson
Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, winner of the PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2003. He teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine.
First Car?
A 1987 Honda CRX, the kind with no back seat. I owned it when I lived in Brooklyn—the car was so light you could nose into a tiny parking spot, then get a friend to help you lift its rear end and scoot it into place.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
The Water-Method Man by John Irving and The Police.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I stepped pretty easily between the athletes and the stoners.
First job?
I worked odd jobs in the neighborhood (mowing lawns, raking, snow-shoveling) until I was 11, when I got a paper route. I delivered the Portland Press Herald and the Maine Sunday Telegram.
Favorite book now?
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee and The Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
The end of the 1st season of The Wire.
What are you working on these days?
I’m finishing a novel called In My Days as a Champion.
Anything coming out soon?
A piece I wrote recently about my obsession with Ally Sheedy for an anthology of fiction writers writing about John Hughes’ movies. The book comes out in March and is called Don’t You Forget About Me (Simon & Schuster).
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Persistence is king.
Is there a piece of writing advice you find yourself frequently repeating to your students at Stonecoast?
Writing works best when the reader and the writer are exerting equal effort.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Following pro sports.
Favorite recipe?
A fish stew I make, which involves cooking a lb of bacon first, then cooking the potatoes and onions in the bacon fat before adding the stock and the haddock. I’m having it for lunch today.
Can you describe your workspace? What's on your desk?
I work in a bedroom near the back of the house full of laundry and boxes and piles of paper and books. The rest of our house is clean, but my office is a disaster. I try to clean it up every once in a while, but I lose steam. I like it messy.
What’s the most interesting place you’ve ever been?
Ephesus, in Turkey.
Stones or Beatles?
Stones.
January 22, 2007
Emerging Writers Issue Guidelines?
We’re planning way ahead here, but every five years, we do an Emerging Writers issue, and Winter 2008-09 (December 2008) will be our next. We wouldn’t begin reading for it until January 2008, but we’re interested in hearing suggestions on how to organize the submissions process.
We liked what we did the last time around, featuring poets and writers who had yet to publish a full-length book, nominated by authors who had. This process made things manageable for us, rather than getting flooded with submissions.
There were drawbacks, of course, namely in that writers had to know published authors who would nominate them. Any ideas to refine the guidelines?
These were the guidelines for the 2003 edition (the finalized 2008 guidelines will not be posted on our main website until this fall):
ELIGIBILITY OF CANDIDATES: Candidates should be writers of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction who have yet to publish a full-length book in any genre in the U.S. or abroad. We define a full-length book as being 40 or more pages in length and in an edition of 500 or more copies. Chapbook, limited-edition, or vanity-press publications will not disqualify the candidate; neither will a forthcoming book, as long as it is not released before the issue’s publication on December 15, 2003. Writers who have been previously published in Ploughshares are also eligible. Citizenship or residency is immaterial.
ELIGIBILITY OF NOMINATORS: Nominators should be authors of at least one full-length book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction from a recognized press that has been published by January 1, 2003. Citizenship or residency is immaterial.
January 21, 2007
Willful
My high school English professor used to say that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing soap operas. (I’m more of the opinion that it would be Law & Order.) At the very least, he has inspired a fair amount of melodrama, as set forth in Ron Rosenbaum’s new book, The Shakespeare Wars. The book serves mainly as a fantastic clearinghouse for just about every petty and fanatical tactic ever deployed for, against, and by the adherents of the Bard.
Make no mistake, Rosenbaum does put pretty much everything in: actors, critics, movies, gossip, journalism, trivia. I was unaware that the antidote to the “dark spell” of Macbeth (and the prohibition against actors naming it) is to instantly recite some verse from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was however, immensely charmed to hear that on the British version of The Weakest Link, a British actor was disqualified because he insisted on answering a question with “the Scottish play” instead of “Macbeth.” Take that, popular culture.
There are far more strange doings in the Elizabethan Land that I was aware of. Hamlet is now (well, always was, sort of) three distinct textual kingdoms: The Bad Quarto, Good Quarto, and Folio. 230 lines in the Quarto are absent from the Folio, and 70 lines in the Folio are absent from the Quarto. In the Folio, Hamlet’s “The rest is silence” is followed by “o,o,o,o”. As Grey’s Anatomy would say, “Seriously? …Seriously?”
Pursuit of the definitive spellings, lines, and so forth has led to some excesses. Charlton Hinman went so far as to invent a sort of special Shakespeare collating machine, a cybernetic contraption with magnifying glasses that has been likened to “riding a stationary bicycle with flashing lights and mirrors.” Perhaps aerobic oxygen deprivation is responsible for such barn-burning analysis as this:
"Hinman himself observed that Compositor E was demonstrably very much more influenced by previously typeset copy than either A or B was… the extent of E’s conservatism can be quickly demonstrated by an analysis of the Folio punctuation of the plays he has known to set from printed copy… The very first page that Compositor E is agreed to have set in the Folio, pp 4 of Titus, he retained Q3 punctuation 77 times and altered only 12 times, on the next page he retained punctuation 126 times and altered it 36 times."
Makes your heart pound, doesn’t it? Stick in an interrobang, and you’d have textual nuclear fission. But this isn’t to say that some Hamlet variance isn’t sexy:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your/our philosophy
You answer with an idle tongue
You answer with a wicked tongue
And would it were not so, you are my mother.
But would you were not so. You are my mother.
O, that this too too sallied/sullied/solid flesh should melt…
I guess it’s not terribly surprising that having texts that change based on the whims of typesetters would produce some… well, rather irregular interpolators. Rosenbaum recounts the peregrinations of a young prodigy named Teena Rochfort-Smith, who was adopted “professionally and romantically in the early 1880’s by F.J. Furnival, an original sponsor of the Oxford English Dictionary, a Victorian Gentlemen who had a penchant for sponsoring ‘young ladies’ rowing clubs’ and becoming involved with the young ladies.” Yes, the Victorians. They did have a way of euphemisms, didn’t they?
The precocious Teena Rochfort-Smith undertook, at the tender age of twenty-one, to issue the four-text Hamlet in parallel columns, the three original Hamlet texts joined by a fourth, conflated one. The text itself must be quite an artifact, with four different colors of ink, three different underlining styles, six different typefaces, and asterisks, daggers, and other innumerable signs and symbols. She met her end when she accidentally set her dress on fire while burning some letters with a candle. Rosenbaum also postulates that John Berryman’s suicide in the 70’s was in part engendered by his continuing failure to complete an edition of King Lear, which he began in the late 1930’s.
Such crankiness… it rings through the ages. Rosenbaum marvels at one Lear scholar who is moved to deploy a classical Greek obscenity (that translates as “goatsucker”) against one of his allies. I think that would liven up some academic panels. But the book is dominated by a takedown of critic Donald Foster, who made his bones by claiming a rather dreary elegy was actually Shakespeare’s. His “proof” was mathematical validation by his super secret SHAXICON, a digitized database of renaissance-era literature. Foster, of course, rode high for a while, happily accepting the mantle of a master of forensic linguistics and the world’s “first literary detective.” His fame was such that he was brought on to decipher the letters from the 2001 anthrax mailings and the ransom note from the Jon-Benet Ramsay case. At one point, Donald Foster cheerily warns Mr. Rosenbaum that “I could destroy you.” He is eventually brought down, and the elegy generally agreed to be the product of John Ford.
Some of the strongest parts of the book are Rosenbaum’s accounting of the various antics of Shakespearean actors, beginning with Will himself, who knew a good racket when he saw it. According to legend, he espied a would-be groupie who was evidently overcome by the force of Richard Burbage’s Richard the III and wanted to express her appreciation intimately. Will got there first, however. Burbage arrived after Shakespeare was already occupied with the groupie, and banged on the door, declaiming, “It is I, Richard the Third.” To which Shakespeare allegedly replied, “William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third.”
Subsequent actors also had their day, so to speak. The legendary eighteenth-century actor, David Garrick played Hamlet so well in Drury Lane that the critics were actually convinced that he made the temperature of the theatre go down. The same Mr. Garrick relied on some outside help in adding verisimilitude to his performance, engaging a wigmaker who would make his hair stand on end when he saw the ghost.
Modern actors have gone a little more organic in their efforts. Olivier recreated such an authentic ecstatic fit in his Othello that he actually achieved climax on the stage. Our contemporaries have been equally zealous, as in the case of Steven Berkoff, whose Hamlet engaged in a little frottage during his bedroom conformation with Gertrude. While holding her down, he did more than just enunciate as he declaimed “It shall go hard, / but I shall delve one yard below their mines , / and blow them at the moon”. So when he stood up, some, uh, aftereffects flowed down his leg. Which I’m sure the groundlings would have enjoyed.
January 20, 2007
Radio Killed the Poetry Star
Chris Salerno (our first Quickie) sitting in on guitar for the NOLA band this morning on WKNC.
January 16, 2007
Phatlanta phreview
Have y'all checked out the schedule for AWP yet? I have, I have! We can look forward to panels centered around some of Pshares' favorite hobby horses, like the sliding scale of plagiarism ("Poets on Appropriative Writing") and what the hell is up with reviews of poetry ("National Book Critics Circle Panel on Poetry Reviewing," covering the "ethics, vagaries [&] conflicts" of same).
Other topics that entice and intrigue: books every poet should read, the making of collaborative poetry, post-avant "strategies of excess," online literary journals, the junction of science and poetry, the contemporary "I" in poetry, the value of "difficulty."
In the end, of course, whatever panel you're at, you'll wish you were still in bed or out drinking already.
January 12, 2007
Right now, the Kelly Clarkson of American fiction walks unheralded among us
But not for long, thanks to a contest that hopes to be the American Idol of books.
The only thing that would make this better is if contestants were required to re-write scenes from established literary classics in their own idiom, a la the cover versions of monster hits performed by Idol contestants.
January 9, 2007
Literature Map
Frivolous and not very useful, but sort of fun: Literature Map is a site that shows how authors you like relate to similar authors in a spatial format. Some odd names appear, but hey, guess who's closest when you type in James Tate? That's right: Bill Knott.
Does mental health blunt creativity?
According to Janet Hadda, author of "Ginsberg in the Hospital," it doesn't, at least not in the case of Allen Ginsberg.
But would a healthier mental life have led to a less healthy poetic one for other artists? Discuss.
January 8, 2007
Workshopping Pynchon?
If you’ve ever had your writing trashed in a workshop, take heart. Maybe you’re just the next Thomas Pynchon.
January 5, 2007
January 3, 2007
What feelings
To throw yet another log on the dull fire of the ongoing conversation about reviews of poetry: the blog Very Like a Whale asks 10 questions of poet Tony Williams, including a request for comments on the article "Why Poetry Criticism Sucks" from Jacket. Williams responds, "If you’re publishing your work you’re inviting criticism. If you care about your feelings more than about poetry, then write it as a hobby and keep it to yourself and your friends. If you publish it – especially in book form – you’re asking strangers to read it and even pay for it, and you’re putting it up for comparison with everything else. It is not the job of the critic to spare the poet’s feelings."
Chris and I were just blabbing last night about the relative merits of brutally honest reviews and (often politically) careful ones. I love when Dan Chiasson or William Logan sticks it to Mark Strand or whoever, but when you're a poet as well as a critic, you run a certain risk by publishing a negative review. 'Twould be nice (or interesting, I guess, if not nice) if poetry had a large enough readership to justify critics who aren't also actively publishing poets.
