Michael Robins was raised in Portland, Oregon. He received degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His book, The Next Settlement, was selected by Anne Winters for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2007 by University of North Texas Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, LUNA, Third Coast and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago and is a contributing editor at Born Magazine.
Your first collection was selected as the winner of the Vassar Miller Prize and was recently published by the University of North Texas Press. How many contests did you enter before winning one, and what do you make of the contest system of poetry publication?
I entered less than ten contests before submitting The Next Settlement for the Vassar Miller Prize in November 2005. During that month alone, however, I did something I’d never done by submitting the manuscript for a dozen different prizes. I have no idea where I got the money for all those entry fees, but I was apparently hungry.
There’s been so much attention to favoritism and the sometimes incestuous nature between judges and book prize recipients, and I’ll admit that I breathed a small sigh of relief for the fact that I had no history with the judge who chose my manuscript. Is the system fair? Probably not, but the poetry world is a small community, the vast majority of poets don’t have agents who seek publishers on their behalves, and I think most presses (and now many literary journals) sponsor contests with entry fees in order to help keep their project afloat. In the last few years a number of these presses have developed or adopted a code of ethics to help ensure a kind of transparent integrity. I’d say that this is a good thing.
You grew up on the West coast, got your MFA in New England, and now you live in the Midwest, specifically Chicago—is there a region you prefer? Why? How much does place inform your writing?
I certainly miss New England and my friends there, and now all my immediate family is in the Portland area again. I don’t necessarily have a preference for a specific region, though I can say that I’ve been happy in Chicago these last three years. There’s a wonderfully diverse and supportive literary community here, one that lacks predictable categories and refuses to be pigeonholed. When I go to a reading in Chicago I have no idea who might show up or who I might be having drinks with afterwards. The scene is vibrant and its existence doesn’t rely on a single reading series or graduate program. Plus, I really enjoy the snow, which seemed like a rare and magical occurrence while growing up in Portland.
To answer the second part of your question, I think that I write from an imaginative space that is relatively free from the physical environment I inhabit on a given day. Having said that, I know that the leap into imagination is partially rooted in what I know, including place. Having said that, in the last few years I’ve written poems that occupy the atmosphere of specific locations I’ve never visited. Ultimately, the act of writing a poem might take me anywhere.
First Car?
A 1979 Oldsmobile “Gutless” Supreme.
What was your favorite book in high school?
I tried to get everyone I knew to read On the Road. One day a friend presented me with a certificate that read, “To Michael Robins—For making everyone sick of Jack Kerouac.” I got stuck on the Beats for a time and, once I started reading poems, refused to buy anthologies unless Allen Ginsberg was represented. Just before graduation I went to a book signing at Powell’s to give Ginsberg a letter I’d written (I think I naively hoped we’d become fast friends) and was thrilled when I received a postcard in response. That example of generosity meant so much to me, an eighteen year old poet just starting out.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
High school was the strange social experiment one might expect. My taste in music—ranging from MC Hammer one year to the Chili Peppers and Nine Inch Nails the next—helped dictate my social circles, as well as my sense of fashion. I was also in AP classes and ran cross country during those four years, so there were some expected results and strange overlapping of crowds there too.
First job?
Yes, I was once a fourteen year old busboy.
Car now?
Sadly, I traded in my ‘76 Volvo (dysfunctional heater, complete brake failure) toward a ‘02 Honda Accord with low-mileage. Now I have payments and a car that looks like every third car in the parking lot.
Favorite book now?
I was taken by Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while traveling last December (to fulfill my need for originality I like to note that I read the book before Oprah chose it for her club). Really though, there are too many books to choose a single favorite. I’m about to restart The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I inexplicably put it down in May, too many days passed, and now I’ll begin anew. Finding time to read is a much neglected priority.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
I’ve been nostalgic of late and started listening again to both early and late Nirvana, but in terms of something new, well, Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha has caught my ear, along with Cryptograms by Deerhunter. I also enjoy pretty much anything that surfaces from The Mountain Goats, and I’ve finally begun to warm to Sky Blue Sky, the recent Wilco album.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
I was happy to finally see A Patch of Blue, starring Sidney Portier and Elizabeth Hartman, directed by Guy Green. Recently I’ve also rented In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The tensions and themes of these films—three of about eight Portier films in the space of two years—feel just as relevant today.
What are you working on these days?
A series of prose poems, the titles of which I’ve borrowed from the text of late 19th and early 20th century American circus posters. My current favorite is “Personations of Mother Goose,” which has begun to feel like a break-up poem that draws the line between me and the president.
What are you reading that's fun?
I’ve fallen recently for chapbooks and the reward of being able to finish something in a single sitting. Simone Muench’s newborn, Orange Girl (dancing girl press), is great, along with Kate Schapira’s The Hold. I’m also looking forward to getting my hands on C. S. Carrier’s Lyric, which is just out and should arrive any day from Horse Less Press.
What's your favorite exercise?
Playing fetch with my dog on the shores of Lake Michigan, followed closely by cycling.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
Colorful socks, without a doubt.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Define guilt. A few weeks ago I was coaxed into riding an ATV . . . Does that qualify?
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so people could cook it if they wanted)?
Shrimp Tacos: Warm a puddle of olive oil in a non-stick skillet. Combine red onion, garlic, jalapeno pepper, fresh corn, cilantro and shrimp. Cook until the crustaceans turn pink. Serve with a half dozen corn tortillas, yellow rice, salsa verde. Repeat if necessary.
What's on your desk?
My desk is terribly cluttered at the moment and during most other moments as well. There’s way too much, including an unbalanced checkbook, $1.76 in loose change, a Hohner Kazoo (light blue with red trim), a single AA battery, unopened mail, a nearly empty bottle of Advil (containing multivitamins, I think), and an incomplete set of Desert Storm trading cards, which includes a sticker of the Saudi Arabian flag and instructions to “Peel Carefully.”
Stones or Beatles?
The Beatles, though I lack a strong conviction in saying so. How about the Stones? . . . I mean The Beatles . . . No, I mean . . .
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Kermit 111th.
Steamy, isn’t it?
July 31, 2007
Quickie Interview #24: Michael Robins
July 29, 2007
Bit of a tangent
This being a lit blog, we've talked about the lit blogs we like. What non-lit blogs do we like?
Here are two of my faves:
The Sartorialist: Street pics of the well-dressed (both men and women) by a fashion photographer, mostly in NYC and Europe. Tres inspiring for the haberdasheree.
Marginal Revolution: I'm hooked on pop economics. Run by two bloggers including Tyler Cowen, the author of Discover Your Inner Economist. Recent topics include the localvore's dilemma and Excessive Ovation Syndrome.
July 26, 2007
Coming to a Theater Near You….
While our favorite fictions appearing on the big screen from time to time is nothing new, there seems to be a whole slew of potentially exciting novel-to-film adaptations (and I’m not counting Harry Potter) on the horizon. So settle in with some popcorn and enjoy the previews.
The trailer for The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, adapted from the novel by Ron Hansen, despite being overly reliant on eerie music and shots of Brad Pitt trying to be rugged, looks like it could be good. The trailer for Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, directed by the Coen Brothers, is awesome--in less then five minutes, Javier Bardem managed to completely freak me out (but what’s up with his hair?). The award for best date movie goes to the trailer for Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love. I love it when Morgan Freeman does voice-overs. Love in the Time of Cholera (Javier Bardem again!) and Revolutionary Road (which will reunite Titanic cast members Kate and Leo) are coming along, but currently trailer-less. In the meantime, let us hope that none of these people do to any of these books what the makers of Evening did to poor Susan Minot’s novel.
July 23, 2007
Quickie interview # 23: Matthew Rohrer
Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books, most recently Rise Up, published by Wave Books. A former poetry editor for Fence, he lives in Brooklyn.
I think male poets dress better than men in many other "professions." Do you like shopping? Where/how do you shop?
No, I’m a terrible shopper. Right now I’m wearing some tan corduroy shorts that were supposedly size 34, but are clearly not, because I can pull them on without unzipping or unbuttoning them. And I have to say, this rankles. Because “34” is not just a number like with women’s clothes, you know, that are size 0 or 2. “34” means the waist is 34 inches. Which, in this case, is obviously not true. But I do think my father unconsciously taught me the one important dressing lesson I know: how to dress down well. I can dress down like a motherfucker. It’s always so embarrassing to see those guys who obviously work on Wall Street and they’re out there in the park on the weekends trying to be weekend daddy and they have their shirts tucked in, and tassel loafers on, and shorts with pleats. Please. I love your book Nice Hat. Thanks. written collaboratively with Joshua Beckman. Are you guys still collaborating? If so has your process changed at all over time? Are there things you can do in collaboration that you can't do in your solo poetry? We still do collaborate, though he lives most of the time in Seattle so it’s much less frequent. What’s happened is that we feel we’ve pretty much reached the limits of what the word-by-word collaboration can teach us. At least in that form. So we’ve been doing ones that are more narrative, trying to do stories — and we’ve allowed ourselves to say, rather than one word, as much as we feel like we can say. Sometimes it’s a long sentence, sometimes just a word. Those feel fun now because they feel so different. We’ve also given these to Matthew Zapruder who has then worked on them and the resulting poems have been through three people’s heads, and are pretty interesting — and surprisingly, much more readable than we thought. They read more like “real” poems, I think because Matthew is such a good, natural born editor. We also recently did some collaborations with Anthony McCann — erasures of some of the main texts of the Romantics, which we then traded around and altered. So that might be the answer to the question about things you can and can’t do in collaboration versus solo poetry: frankly, I like collaborating with these guys so much because they’re so good, so graceful, and getting their help just makes my writing better. Sometimes I feel lonely and inept sitting down by myself afterwards to write one of my own poems. I caught the Wave Books poetry bus tour in both Boston and New York. How was that experience for you? Did you meet a lot of poets you hadn't been in touch with before? What was your favorite stop on the tour? I only did eight or nine days I think — and that was plenty. I loved it, it was great, and I think it lived up to its expectations, in that it was often out of control and unexpected things happened. The camaraderie on the bus was by far the best part, which is what everyone who was on it will tell you. My first night on was at Providence, and then driving through the night down to NYC and stopping over in a truck stop. Major Jackson and I were both giddy with the newness of it and we drank a lot of terrible whiskey which was not such a good idea but the absolutely giddy feeling sitting at the table there on a bus full of poets rolling down the highway was unforgettable. And yes, I got to meet so many people I’d only read before, or people I’d never read before but am now very into, like Jon Woodward who was on that same leg. So maybe that was my favorite night since it was the first. But Las Vegas was pretty funny. Are there any words or phrases or moves that really grate on you in poems? I'm sick of poems that begin "Dear [such and such concept or inanimate object]." Yeah that sucks. I hate that too. I hate the completely greedy and sophomoric use of parentheses in order to pretend to say two things at once. Like when people say “(re)vision” -- once I apparently went on a rant in a class at the New School (which I don’t remember but a student reminded me of later) calling this greedy and “totally 80s.” It seems to me to come from the same excessive and grasping era that brought us Reaganomics and cocaine abuse and the heyday of theory for theory’s sake and the utter selfishness of the NeoCons — because that was, of course, when they were all hatched from their evil serpents’ eggs. What contemporary poets are you reading? Favorite journals? I am extremely taken with Eileen Myles’s poems right now. She was on the Poetry Bus too, and was such a great presence. I think her lines are intuitively brilliant and I’ve been really influenced by them recently. I’ve also been reading a hilariously good book by David Cameron called Flowers of Bad, which is a mistranslation of the entire Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire. The process, which he goes into extreme detail about at the end, is pretty ridiculous and inspiring. My all-time favorite journal is Fence because, you know....I also love Conduit. And 6x6, which Ugly Duckling Presse does. I have a subscription to Ugly Duckling and get everything they publish, which is the best poetry money I’ve ever spent, no question. Seen any good movies lately, if you watch movies? Uh, I saw Knocked Up, which was really funny. I mean, relentlessly funny. But I have to say, though it will make me sound like a kind of Marxist grouch, that ultimately it was just a fancied-up reification of capitalist hegemony. I mean — he didn’t have to stop smoking pot to be a good dad. What did you read/listen to in high school? I didn’t read any poetry in high school — I wanted to be a sci-fi writer. I read a lot of the heavies of modernism. I listened to Robyn Hitchcock and the Smiths and the Talking Heads and stuff like that. But I think it was Robyn Hitchcock’s lyrics that opened the door for me to a way of writing that I later learned was heavily Surrealist and Symbolist influenced. What are you working on these days? I just wrote a 38-page poem that is a long uninterrupted narrative about a guy who gets caught up in an anti-government rebellion in an unnamed country. I’m also working on a series of poems called THE TERRORISTS, which looks at terrorists as just regular people who happen to also be terrorists. But I do mean regular people — I’ve been thinking about the way the word “terrorist” is wielded now against anyone who doesn’t do what they’re told — the Verhoeven movie Black Book is great for this — have you seen it? It’s the 2nd best World War 2 movie ever made! Anyway, the Nazis called the Dutch resistance “terrorists” and so I imagine all of these regular people, parents, white people (gasp!) who are furtively involved in something terrible. What's the best writing advice you've gotten? Matthew Zapruder has consistently given me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. He’s edited four of my books and he’s really changed them, done seriously intuitive and brilliant and sometimes drastic things to the poems and to the books as a whole, and he’s always right. Have you ever been in a fist fight? No. I wish. I was weak when I was a kid but now I’ve been doing 100 push-ups a day and just looking for a fight. When was the last time you cried? I cried when I heard a Paul Simon song the other day because it was a song my parents always listened to at home when I was growing up. Favorite recipe? Please be as specific as possible so readers can make it at home if they dare. Well I love spicy black beans. Here’s what you do. You get a can of black beans — Goya are the best. You mince 3 or 4 cloves of garlic and fry them, along with a medium onion, in oil in a pot. Then you add the beans. Add 1 or 2, if you dare, chopped up chipotle peppers, the kind in adobo sauce. Then add a pinch, just a pinch, of cinnamon, and salt, pepper, a little oregano. Juice of half a lime. Cilantro if you like it. Cook on low until it’s mushy. Porn name? (first pet's name + first street you lived on) hmm....Squeaky Cinderella.
July 19, 2007
Quickie Interview #22: Justin Marks
Justin Marks' latest chapbook is [Summer insular] (Horse Less Press, 2007). His poems and reviews appear in recent issues of Absent, La Petite Zine, horse less review, Octopus, Soft Targets, and Word for/ Word; and are forthcoming from Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor, Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and Tarpaulin Sky. He is the founder and Editor of Kitchen Press, and lives in New York City.
The usual question is "first car?" but knowing you, I'm going to expand the scope of the question to "first vehicle?" since it was prolly some sort of off-road situation.
My first motorized vehicle was a 1979 Yamaha GT 80. My parents got it for me when I was 8 years old. My dad is a big gear-head and huge motorcycle enthusiast. I've been obsessed with motorcycles, especially dirt bikes, since I can remember. Over the span of my childhood, I had 3 more dirt bikes, but that Yamaha was my first. I loved that bike.
My first car was a 1985 Volkwagon Jetta, a hand-me-down from my parents. I think it had 150,000 miles on it by the time it came to me, but it was still going strong. I loved that car.
Where are you from (if you didn't get to that in the first question) and how does it inform your poetics?
I grew up in Marion, NY, a small town about 45 minutes east of Rochester, NY. It's largely a farming community, or was back in its "heyday," which was basically the 19th and early 20th century. Marion is actually right next to a town called Sodus, on Lake Ontario, which, coincidentally, is where John Ashbery grew up.
It's difficult to say how growing up in Marion informs my poetics. In some recent poems I allude to not liking it. I was lucky enough to have 3 really great friends while growing up, and a good home life, but that didn't really stop me from feeling alienated from other kids I went to school with and the people in the town at large. It was often a very boring place, and pretty isolated geographically (or at least I felt it was). But my parents owned 11.5 acres of land that I could ride my dirt bike on, so that was fun.
If all that has somehow made it into my work, and I assume it has, I'd say it's reflected in the energy of my poems. Whereas very little happens in Marion, I try to have a lot of things going on in my poems, make them feel exciting and charged. Basically the opposite of where I grew up.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
I didn't discover books until I was about 17. Before then, outside of motocross magazines, and later, glam and metal magazines like Hit Parader and RIP, I basically hated reading.
The first book I remember loving was Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Shortly after that I discovered Kerouac. I read On the Road, of course, but I think Dharma Bums was my favorite Kerouac book, and definitely my favorite book in high school. But now that I think about it, Tristessa was a pretty great book, too. The idea of running off to Mexico to do morphine, falling in love with a junkie-prostitute, that definitely appealed to me at 17. Then again, maybe not. I'll stick with Dharma Bums.
Favorite band from that time is a toss-up between Pearl Jam and Jane's Addiction. One of my first great teenage love affairs with a girl was based in large part on our mutual obsession with Jane’s Addiction, and Pearl Jam went a long way toward making those final couple years of high school bearable.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
I don't know. I guess kind of the “loser”/metal-head/alternative crowd. From about 4th grade on, I had the same group of 3 best friends. They were all fairly troubled kids. By junior high, their parents were getting divorced, they were estranged from their fathers, stuff like that, so they'd act out, get in trouble, get poor grades. My home life was pretty good, but I wanted to be like my friends so I'd do poorly in school, get in trouble, and because we lived in a small, conservative, somewhat religious town and liked Ozzy Ozbourne, people assumed we were druggy-satanists. By the end of high school, though, myself and one of my friends from that group—a guy named Jake whom I’m still very close with to this day—started listening to alternative music, reading books, writing (very bad) poetry, and generally behaving well and getting good grades. I think ultimately, by the end of high school, you could say I was in the alternative/wanna-be bohemian crowd. Of course, I had other friends from different cliques, but what I just described was my main one.
Oddest/coolest job growing up (talk about the potato farming gig...pretty please)?
From age 12 to 17 I worked on a potato farm with my 3 best friends. The owner's name was Gordon Bleak. We called him Gordy. He was this really big guy, about 6'4", with a big Buddha-belly, usually a cigar nubbin in the corner of his mouth, and, a schnauzer named Smokey under his arm or close on his heals. Pretty cartoonish. We worked every day after school from 3pm to 6pm, and Saturdays from 7:30am to noon. That was probably the best job I ever had. I got to be outside, drive tractors, chew tobacco and/or smoke cigarettes (neither of which I do now), hang out with my friends, and, when we worked indoors, listen to music. Of course working inside in the winter was not pleasant. We were in a cement warehouse with no heat and this machine that washed the potatoes spit cold water out everywhere. If you got stuck on that machine, you were in for a long, cold day. Gordy had a kerosene heater he'd sometimes run to help keep us warm, but he would also close up all the doors to keep the heat in, plus he’d be driving a forklift around, loading and unloading huge boxes of potatoes. It took us a while to figure out why we were all so dizzy and tired by the end of the day. Turned out we were getting minor carbon-monoxide poisoning from all the kerosene and propane fumes.
By the time I was 17, Gordy's health was declining. He had all sorts of troubles with his feet and basically was no longer able to stand for more than an hour or two a day. His son didn't want the farm, so he had to shut it down. On the day they auctioned off all the equipment, my friends and I skipped school and went to the auction. It was sad, but also kind of nice. Gordy and his wife, Joan, really liked us and were introducing us to all their farmer friends, telling them what good kids/workers we were.
After that, one of my friends from the farm and I went to work at a pizza shop. The money was minimum wage, which was better than farm labor (we never made more than $3 an hour at Gordy's because the minimum wage for farm labor was $2 or something awful like that), and the work/people were fun, but it just wasn't the same. We missed the farm.
Favorite book now?
Wow. What an impossible question.
I was on vacation recently and read American Psycho for the first time. That was pretty good. Great beach reading. I liked Matthew Rorher's Rise Up a lot, as well as Peter Gizzi's The Outernationale. I was really into Work by Dan Boehl for a while there. I've been digging Amy King's new book, I'm the Man Who Loves You. The newest Kitchen Press chapbooks—Otherhow, by Morgan Lucas Schuldt, and Run Down the Emphasis, by Erin Elizabeth Burke—are pretty great, if I do say so myself, as are the books I'm working on publishing over the next several months: Why I Am White, by Mathias Svalina; Tentative List A, by Tom Lisk; Out of Light, by Joe Massey.
There's also a bunch of great stuff I've been reading that hasn't been published in book form yet—Sam Starkweather's Transcontemporations of Vallejo, J.V. Foix, and Max Jacob; Ana Bozicevic-Bowling's new chapbook, Document, which is forthcoming from Octopus Books. I could go on forever, probably. I've gone on too long as it is, dropped too many names, I'm sure. If you know where to look, there's a lot of amazing work being written these days by young poets.
What's new on your iPod or CD player?
I've been really into this band called Malajube. They're French-Canadian, and sing in French, which I love. I have no idea what they're saying, but it sounds cool, so I just assume it's great, and in that sense they are—lyrically—the best band I've heard in while. But they also have great, great tunes. I saw them live recently. They did not disappoint. The new Panda Bear cd, Person Pitch, is really good, as is the new Cocoa Rosie and the new Rufus Wainwright. I have the latest Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire cd's but haven't really gotten into them. I also recently discovered—and really like—the bands Pelican and Isis.
I only got my iPod about 6 months ago, so everything on it is fairly new. When they first came out, I had no idea what iPods were. I'd see kids with them on the subway and be like, "that can't be a radio, because you can't get a signal down here, and I don't see how you could put a cassette tape in it, and it definitely can't play a cd. What is it?!" Then, once I knew what they were, I had no idea how they worked. Downloading music completely baffled me, and still does, kind of. I hope the bands I listed make me look sufficiently hip, though.
I've also discovered the PENN Sound site recently. They have all sorts of cool readings you can download, stuff by Spicer, Ted Berrigan, Fanny Howe...all sorts of people. So now I have those on my iPod.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
Das Boot, the director's cut. It's great, basically a war movie that draws on the story of Jonah and the whale, Moby Dick, the Odyssey, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not picking up on. I first saw it at my uncle's house in the 80's, when I was around 9 or 10. He was a photographer and lived in Rochester, and always was going to cool, hip movies. He had a VCR before my family and had rented Das Boot one time when we went to visit him. When I watched the film with him I was, of course, completely lost. I mean, it's in German with English subtitles (though the director's cut is pretty poorly overdubbed in English and you still need the subtitles, which is a shame). So seeing it all these years later—in addition to it being a great film—was exciting.
What are you working on these days?
Trying to get my full length manuscript published, as well as a new chapbook, plus working on some new poems.
What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten? The worst?
I don't know. I feel like I should have something inspiring to say here, but I don't. I've had some pretty great teachers who have given me great advice, but I can't seem to recall any of it.
Some a-hole teacher once told me something to the effect of: if you begin a poem on a certain note, then you can't deviate from it for the rest of the poem. That was pretty bad advice.
Actually, the chapbook I'm working on now is based on a best practices guide for writers and how horrifyingly wrong/bad that advice is, but at the same time, how "right" or useful it can be if you want to reach any kind of "mainstream" audience, which makes it all the more horrifying.
As for the best advice, I remember Richard Hugo's book The Triggering Town had some good advice (that I can't recall) that I benefited from when I was first trying to write poetry seriously. But mainly what has worked best for me is simple stuff like: the only rule is there are no rules. Or: trust thyself. Actually, yeah, "trust thyself"—Tom Lisk, one of my mentors from grad school at NC State, used to always say that to me. It's probably the best advice I've ever gotten. It was his twist on Shakespeare's famous "Know thyself." Or maybe Tom stole it from Emerson?
Another teacher also said that the main thing is to make sure you are around others who are into the same things you are, working as intensely and passionately as you are. That was pretty great advice, too.
How did Kitchen Press happen? What has been hardest about it? What has been the most fun? What has been the biggest surprise? And dude, why don't you have interns?
I started Kitchen Press almost completely on a whim. Shanna Compton was teaching a two or three day class at Bowery Poetry Club on how to make your own chapbooks. She showed us how to do the layout and the folding and cutting and stapling and stitching and all that. Then, as I recall, she casually mentioned that you could very easily start your own press. All you needed was a blog or website and a paypal account. So I thought, cool, I'll start a press, put out my own chapbook and if that goes well, I'll ask other people who don't have chapbooks yet if they want to publish on the press (I had 3 people in mind specifically).
At that point, the poems I wanted in my chapbook became apparent, as did the title for the book and the name of the press. It was really kind of easy, just happened, I didn't put much thought into it at all. Then I asked a friend from college, Josh Elliott, who is a graphic designer for Dark Horse comics in Portland, OR, if he would design the logo for the press and also the cover for my book. He agreed, did a great job, and went on to design four more killer covers for the press before he got too busy with his own stuff.
The hardest part is dealing with covers. With Josh no longer able to design them, I struggle a little, though something always seems to work out. Efrem Oshinsky, a friend of mine who’s a really good printmaker, is letting me use one of his prints for Mathias' book, and is also working on something for Tom Lisk's book. Joe has asked Wendy Heldmann to provide the cover illustration for his book. Other than that, it's not hard at all, just time consuming. It's too much fun to be difficult, really. The only thing I worry about is coming up with covers and designs that the poets will love and feel proud to have represent their work. Oh, and diversity. I'm well aware that women make up less than half of the poets on the press. I fret quite a lot about that fact, actually. My resources are limited, and I'm booked up for a while, but once I get Joe's book out I'd like to concentrate on publishing more women poets.
The most fun part, though, is hearing from the poets once they've gotten their books in hand for the first time, or when they've first seen the design for their covers, and are happy. Telling someone I want to publish their chapbook is really fun as well.
The biggest surprise, for me, has been how well received the press has been. People really seem to enjoy the books and appreciate the work I do. Each book tends to sell about 100 copies, which is pretty good for chapbooks, I think. The first time someone told me they thought what I was doing was really important and that 10 years from now people would look back and see it as an integral part of the small press DIY thing…that pretty much blew me away. As did the first time I was invited, out of the blue, to participate in an independent press book fair (the Boog City Renegade Press Series). A Kitchen Press chapbook was recently reviewed on Silliman's Blog. That was definitely a surprise. I mean, yeah, I sent him books, but he gets tons of books every day. What were the chances that he'd choose something from Kitchen Press to even read, much less review?
As far as interns go...that's something I've never thought about. I'm a control freak, and would have a real hard time trusting anybody besides myself to do the layout properly or anything like that. I'm interested in publishing books that are good, but also that likely wouldn't be published by anyone else, or at least would have a really hard time finding a home somewhere else, so I certainly wouldn't trust and intern to help decide on what to publish, I don’t think. I tend not to have open reading periods and wouldn't do a contest, so there's really nothing for an intern to do.
I don't know. Should I have one?
You recently stepped down as editor of LIT. Was that a tough decision...I mean, how cool is it to say, "I'm editor of LIT?" So I imagine it was part of your identity as a poetic figure, no? What did you like best/least about it? Why did you leave?
LIT was a really great experience. I learned a lot, worked with a ton of great people, and published (in my opinion) some of the best poets writing today, and even "discovered" a couple poets who published some of their first poems in LIT and have gone on to publish books and win prizes. That said, it wasn't tough to decide to step down. I'd been involved with the magazine for 5 years and had done pretty much everything I'd set out to do, and I wanted to put more time and energy into my own writing and Kitchen Press. LIT is a student/alumni run magazine and I figured it was time for someone else to have a go at it. I feel great about the people in charge now (Peter Bogart-Johnson and Nicole Steinberg), and am excited to see what direction they take it in. Their first issue as Editors should be out in Fall '07, I believe.
I don't really know how to answer your question regarding LIT as part of my identity as a poetic figure. Am I a poetic figure? A very small group of people read my work and know me as a poet and editor/publisher, but the phrase "poetic figure" seems like something much larger than what I am. People write books about poetic figures, teach them in undergrad and grad courses. Poetic figures don’t get rejected from magazines. They publish books whenever they want. I'm no where near any of that. A fair number of people know me as the Editor of LIT, but I'd rather they know me for my writing. So, in that sense, no, I wasn't worried about what impact stepping down from LIT would have on what little reputation I have in the poetry world. It was just time to go, that's all. I no longer had the time to devote to it that would allow it to continue to grow as a magazine.
Your chapbook [Summer Insular] just came out on Horse Less Press. In it you say that you're mind works differently in summer than other seasons. How so? Also, you mention that the work is heavily influenced, but that you prefer not to name names. That has to be A.R. Ammons you are referring to, right?
That's a tough question too. I had to write a whole chapbook and spend two years tinkering with it to figure out how my mind works differently in summer. If people really want to know the answer to that question, they should just read the book. For me, though, it's about feeling a certain sense of freedom poetically, just getting everything you can down on the page. But then again, that’s part of what I’m attempting in all my work, if you ask me.
As far as influence, I'm still not going to name names. I imagine they'll be apparent to folks who read the book. I do, however, love Ammons' work. He's one of those poets who, when I'm stuck, all I have to do is read some of his work and I'll get going again. I was definitely thinking of him, especially what I've always perceived to be his sense of freedom as a poet, when I was writing [Summer insular]. But I was thinking of several other poets—Shelley, for example, and of course Roethke, whom I do name—as well as my own writing up to that point. Part of why I wrote the book was because I'd just finished my MFA thesis and needed a project to help move me beyond that experience, something that would force me to write differently. So, in that sense, I was also thinking about all the work I'd done over the previous two years, how this project fit into and differed from my thesis, what the conversation was in my work, how it could be different, evolve, etc. I'm not saying I was my own influence, I don't think. Just that a lot of outside forces went into the making of [Summer insular].
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
I enjoy US Weekly and In Touch magazines. And Kelly Clarkson, at least that one song, "Since U Been Gone," I think it's called, as well as some Christina Agulera, particularly "Beautiful," or whatever that song is—the one where words can't bring her down, "no matter what they say." I also watch far too much television. I'm watching it now.
Favorite recipe (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)?
My dad's pasta sauce:
Lightly coat a frying pan with olive oil.
Thinly slice one clove of garlic and cook in oil until golden brown.
Remove garlic slices.
Add in one 28 oz can of tomato sauce; one clove of garlic, crushed; one 15 oz can of diced tomatoes.
Sprinkle with ground black pepper until it lightly coats top of sauce.
Sprinkle in a little less dried basil than pepper.
Add in whatever veggies and/or meats you desire.
Let simmer at least 30 mins (the longer the better), stir periodically so sauce doesn't stick to bottom of pan.
Boil pasta.
Drain.
Add sauce.
Eat.
What's on your desk at the moment?
My laptop, digital camera, lots of iterations of Kitchen Press chapbooks that I'm trying to get together, some drafts of poems, a glass of water, lamp, ream of paper, keys, cd's, notebooks, headphones, pens, a mostly unread copy of InDesign CS2 for Dummies, various computer cords, iPod, a contract for some freelance copywriting I'm doing, my cat. Nothing too exciting.
Stones or Beatles?
David Bowie. I think he's the ideal artist. Able to stay with the trends, but not be trendy. Remains interesting and innovative. Great songwriter. David Byrne and The Talking Heads have also been really important to my new poems. And the first Arcade Fire cd was important for a lot of the poems in my book length manuscript.
But, to your point: Beatles, though I actually listen to the Stones more.
Not sure what the poetry equivalent of "Hemingway or Fitzgerald?" is, but I'll go with Kleinzahler or Gioia?
If you're referring to that review of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems each of them did a few years ago, I side more with Kleinzahler, and I'm also a fan of his work, especially Green Sees Things in Waves. I like that book quite a bit. Kleinzahler represents more of an aesthetic of risk and innovation. So, you know, for me, that wins-out every time.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Shadow Heather Drive
July 17, 2007
Speaking of judging books & presses by their covers...
...there will be thousands of books and presses at the 3rd Annual Printers' Ball, this Friday, July 20 from 8pm to 2am at the Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 West 35th Street in Chicago. The event is hosted by Poetry, in collaboration with more than 80 local literary organizations, and organizers expect to give away more than 6,000 free magazines. If you happen to be in Chicago, stop by. It's free.
July 13, 2007
Judge a Book...and a Press...By Its Cover(s)
Over at The Guardian, artist Harland Miller has recently been "hearten[ed]to see the high standard of entries in the inaugural Penguin Books Design award...aimed at final-year art students, which recognises an awareness of the book, not just as something to be read, but as an object in the world, an artifact in its own right."
Covers, I have to admit, mean more to me than they probably should. As a reader and as a writer. I was reading a book on the train yesterday and found myself folding the cover back so as not to be seen with it and it's swooning neo-Renaissance aesthetic. It might as well have been gilded. And I'm not sure if the cover influenced my reading, but the content seemed to be as embarrassingly dramatic.
When I got to work, after perusing my sticky notes, I realized that several contest deadlines were looming. I found myself submitting my manuscript to presses/contests I'd never heard of simply because their books looked terrific. And vice versa. I found myself passing on presses/contests I had heard of because their most recent books displayed lackluster design.
There is something about holding a well-designed, well-constructed book, and I think the recent swell of chapbooks has perhaps helped refocus the publishing industry's priority on putting out books with compelling covers and textured materials. What are some books (from books you read as a child to books you've recently read) that have been a pleasure not only to read but to look at and hold in your hands? What are some presses/journals that we should be looking out for that consistently put out such publications?
July 12, 2007
Quickie Interview # 21: Sheri Joseph
Sheri Joseph’s short story collection, Bear Me Safely Over, was a Book Sense 76 selection and was published in England, France, and Italy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Atlanta where she teaches at Georgia State University and serves as fiction editor of Five Points. Her first novel, Stray, was published by MacAdam Cage in February.
First car?
A hand-me-down 1980 Toyota Corolla hatchback.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
Early on it was the original Van Halen, with Ozzy a close second, and everything by S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, etc.). Later, it was Vonnegut, Camus, and probably a tie between Prince and Duran Duran.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
Geeks, smart kids, dyslexic writer wanna-bes, the pre-Goth (pre-gay) bunch that worked at Halloween haunted houses and went to The Rocky Horror Picture Show every weekend. I was a metalhead, but not a big part of that crowd. I was also born again for about a month, but I hated those people.
Favorite book now?
I’ll arbitrarily say Moby Dick. At least that’s what all my current grad students are being forced to read. I’m also pushing Revolutionary Road, Pale Fire, Housekeeping, and The Transit of Venus. My guilty-pleasure favorite of the moment is Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
The Decemberists—everything of theirs—and Katell Keineg’s Jet.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
I’m probably the only person in America who doesn’t own a DVD player. I also don’t see movies in the theater. I’m a real homebody, so I wait for just about everything to come out on cable. My recent discoveries include The Wire (other people are renting that on DVD, right?) and the made-for-HBO film Longford. And Capote was great—that tells you where I am with movie-watching.
What are you working on these days?
I’ve just finished the 38th revision of a novel I’ve been writing for 15 years, no kidding. My agent has it now and has been charged with helping me decide if I should publish it or put it back in the drawer for good. And I have a scary brand-new novel I’m trying to start—scary in the sense that I don’t know much about it yet, and I resist going to parties where I don’t know people.
Is there any advice you find yourself frequently repeating to your students at Georgia State?
Oh, loads. Stories need up front: tension, a sense of aboutness, a reason to turn the page. I talk a lot about sitting in all the chairs and about making an imaginative commitment to a scene, which means sinking in deeper than your intentions and discovering what really would happen, or might happen. I guess maybe all that falls under instruction. Here’s a piece of advice, which I stole from somewhere, full of pseudo-science I can’t verify: the idea is that while we’re awake the brain cycles through the same REM patterns it does while we’re asleep, at about 20-minute intervals, so if you get stuck while writing, you might have to wait that long for your dream state to kick back in. (The short version of that advice: keep your butt in the chair.)
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Erin McGraw once read a story of mine and suggested “more forthcomingness,” which was exactly right for the story and across the board for my work. I repeat that to myself a lot, because I otherwise have a tendency to let a vague suggestion or a mood stand in for something important that needs to open up more.
You’re also an editor at Five Points. Do your editing and writing lives inform each other at all, or do they stay pretty compartmentalized?
Back when I was a grad student screening the slushpile for another journal, I think it really helped my writing to read so many stories: the good, the so-so, the very very bad. It showed me how to avoid problems I’d see again and again and made me think about how to write something that would stand out. Now it probably has a negative effect, since my reading for Five Points is mostly limited to the stuff that’s good enough to make it up the chain to me but ultimately “not quite good enough for us.” Rejecting all those pretty good stories makes me as a writer overly focused on producing something superior, which inhibits the necessary “crap” stage of drafting. That’s at least partly why I can revise my old novel all day long but can’t get the new book started. Teaching can have the same effect: every time you sit down to write, some inner demon tells you you’re required to out-write your very talented students, and a first draft just isn’t going to do that.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
TV, candy, potato chips, staying in my house for a week at a time. The internet in general. For some reason I can’t fathom, I love to visit animal rescue websites and pick out dogs I would adopt if I didn’t already have two.
Favorite recipe? (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)
I don’t cook, but if I’m feeling ambitious in the kitchen, I’ll make sweet potato fries: chop a sweet potato into fry shapes, roll in parmesan cheese (Kraft works better than the real stuff), and bake on a sheet for 20 minutes—no need to turn them, though I hit them with the broiler for a few minutes at the end. The parmesan gives them a lovely crispy coating. They’re delicious, nutritious, and nearly fat-free, until you dip them in the required blue cheese dressing.
What's on your desk at the moment?
Ridiculous piles of clutter; candy; coffee; binoculars (2 pairs, for some reason); “An A-Z compendium of Useful Information for Fellows” at Hawthornden castle in Scotland, where I’m headed this summer; a reconditioned toner cartridge I bought 8 months ago and can’t figure out how to install.
Stones or Beatles?
The Beatles.
Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
Fitzgerald.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Muffin Belfast.
July 11, 2007
Dead Souls
Interesting article in The New Yorker on artists who immolate, who take big swaths of their work and put it forever beyond the reach of texts and their scholars. Kafka would have had it so, if he had been obeyed. And doesn’t Emily Dickinson read like someone who always thought it was going to happen that way? In some quasi-Borgesian way, the poems feel like it did happen to them, and we are only reading them through some metaphysical accident. My fiction professor wrote a novel about Hemingway’s lost suitcase full of manuscripts, only to discover that two other novelists had also done so. The trope was kicking about in the ether around that time, apparently. These damaged, endangered, or posthumous texts hold a mystique that can’t ever be fully stomped out. As one of Stoppard’s characters laments in Arcadia, it’s all Cleopatra’s fault:
But instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue. O, Septimus! – can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides – thousands of poems – Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?
When I was 18, this was exactly the sort of thing that would have kept me up at night. Like those meticulous listeners of vinyl who somehow still know that the Beatles covered it up that Paul really was dead (which kind of explains Wings, if you think about it), there will always be an audience for aftertaste of these defunct books. Maybe people don’t really feel that way about poetry because poems are themselves rather endangered, tenuous propositions which already seem to argue that they’re not really on the page, but elsewhere, thwarted and receding, undone by other agents and pow’rs.
July 9, 2007
Funny heh-heh
In the latest issue of Jacket, a dossier of poems from the HumPo list (devotees of humor in poetry), as well as a roundtable discussion among contributors including Maxine Chernoff, K. Silem Mohammad, Ange Mlinko, D.A. Powell and Ron Silliman.
The intro asserts that comic poems need not be "light verse" or even, according to Rachel Loden, "funny." I am anti-LV (duh) but absolutely pro the comic in poetry. In fact most often when I find myself in a state of distaste while reading poetry I can identify the cause as humorlessness. Although humor with no sense of irony is probably equally bad...
What poets achieve funny without crossing the banana peel into lite?
July 3, 2007
Also, he's apparently getting a divorce.
So "Salman Rushdie, whose British knighthood has led to worldwide protests from Muslims angered by his 1989 novel, The Satanic Verses, is not commenting on the uproar, for now."
"Salman Rushdie is a detested figure among Muslims. The British government has hurt Muslim feelings by honoring a person who is facing a fatwa for blasphemous writings," says Maulana Abul Hasan of the Ulema council.
"The British authorities have not asked me to do or not do anything. I have simply chosen to remain out of this storm for the moment. And nobody is turning anything down," says Rushdie.
What do we make of his decision not to comment? Is he obligated, as a public literary figure, to say or not say something? Or is his non-comment kind of a non-story?
July 1, 2007
Is the NEA really out of controversy?
An article on cnn.com lauds Dana Gioia for rescuing the NEA from where it was in the 1990's when it: "cranked up senators to high-decibel shouting fests over its grants that supported exhibitions of controversial artwork by Andre Serrano ("Piss Christ") and the late Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photography."
Gioia explains:
"We've been able to bring the agency out of controversy and into a new consensus. It's a new NEA."
No controversy? Consesus? Sounds awesome, huh? Is this not at least one criterion for art, to push the limits of what "the man" finds acceptable? And even if it's not, is it a criterion for what shouldn't be considered art?
You can't argue with Gioia's numbers though, I guess--he's increased the budget some $25 million during his tenure. And I mean, c'mon...Businessweek has touted him as 'The Man Who Saved the NEA.' Businessweek...sweet. I hope Businessweek blurbs my first book, them knowing so much about art and all.
His Big Read program and XM Satellite Radio Literature Moments seem cool enough, but is his condemning artists for being "'wonderfully expert in talking to one another' but not to the wider world" a valid concern? I understand his goal: "to bring forth the greatest art possible[...]to serve all Americans, to get the broadest reach we can." But can the 'greatest art possible' be chosen by arts organizations who are being, as Gioia mentions, "'more careful' with how they direct federal grant money?" Is it possible to reach 'all Americans' without being careful?
