Farrah Field's first book, Rising, is forthcoming in early 2009 from Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and are forthcoming in Pebble Lake Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Fulcrum, and The Pinch. You can read her poems at the following online publications: Typo, Harp & Altar, 42Opus, and The Cortland Review.
Jared White was born in Boston and has lived in Brooklyn for seven years. His poems have appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, The Modern Review, Sawbuck, Word For/Word, and Meridian (runner-up for the Editor's Prize 2007). He also published an essay in the most recent issue of Harp & Altar and his poems are forthcoming in Horse Less Review, Fulcrum, and LVNG. A chapbook of poems which may be entitled Headquarters or possibly Yellowcake will be included in the forthcoming inaugural issue of Narwhal from Cannibal Books. He occasionally posts online at jaredswhite.blogspot.com.
What did you want to be when you grew up? (Are you grown up now?)
FF: I always wanted to be a teacher. I had a chalkboard on wheels that I rolled over to my friends’ houses and my mom let me wear her high heels when I delivered my make believe lessons. I recently quit teaching high school and am somewhat surprised to be considering different opportunities.
JW: I was pretty ambitious (or ambivalent?) when I was little; in home videos I delivered a litany of potential future jobs: a detective, and a doctor, and a scientist, and a magician, and a writer, and the president. Just after I was born, before I was given a name, for some reason the nurses and my mom referred to me as a tiny zoology professor.
What are your poetry pet peeves? What moves are you a sucker for?
JW: I’m not interested in poems that tell stories in very straightforward ways, whose setting is “the real world.” I try not to believe in the real world.
I’m fairly skeptical about the lower-case i.
I get weirdly excited when I see the vocabulary of Marxism in poems, for instance in Joshua Clover or Anne Boyer. I can’t totally explain it. One time I saw Joshua Clover read in Bryant Park during an incipient rainstorm; every time he said the word “capitalism” the skies responded with a deafening thunderbolt.
FF: I don’t particularly like the overused “field” metaphor.
I take it your surname is not metaphorical, then. You are both musicians as well as writers. How does this affect your writing, if at all?
JW: I’ve been a musician for most of my life and I think as I started writing poems seriously I expected the two to synthesize more than they have so far. For a period in graduate school when I was devoting a lot of time to playing with groups of musicians, it simply became a scheduling issue, struggling to sustain my writing beside all the music-related work—rehearsing, performing, publicity, etc. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and I have plenty of time to write, but my musical energy is more dormant.
In the past I’ve also done some work arranging poems by other poets—Edwin Muir, Stanley Kunitz, Walt Whitman, Mark Strand, among others—for voice and piano, kind of in a classical music-y lieder vein. That’s been a satisfying cross-breed (though I haven’t found collaborators to bring it to performance much). I have thought about trying to do the same with my own poems and I’m very intrigued by the split position it would put me in, adding another layer of information to the poem like a revision, but without revising the words as such.
Mostly though, the predominant music I’ve played most since I was a teenager is just solo improvisation on the piano. I suppose structurally that’s fairly similar to poetry writing: trying to tap into an extemporaneous fluency that communicates.
FF: I’m no musician by any stretch. I played instruments while growing up, and I’m currently trying to learn the cello. Cellos occasionally creep into my poems because the cello is such a large instrument. I also feel really guilty when I haven’t practiced.
Jared, I find when I'm in a writing slump I tend to engage more with music; when I'm writing and reading a lot I don't keep up with it as much. It's like they're competing for the same limited resources in my brain.
Farrah, you're currently working on a novel. How does your process compare when writing fiction vs. poetry? Jared, have you written fiction? Why or why not?
FF: I can’t say that my friends haven’t heard me complain about the laboriousness of novel writing. When I first started, expanding and pacing the ideas was really difficult because my kind of creativity is accustomed to economy, not “showing not telling” in the fiction sort of sense. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I do. I’m really proud of the hundreds of pages I’ve written, investigating and commenting on politics and what it’s like being sort of southern. Novel writing is complicated enough to want to do again. The characters in my novel are so profoundly clear to me that I daydream them into scenes in a television show, something like Buffy meets M*A*S*H.
JW: I haven’t written fiction since I became serious about writing poetry; in fact, I scarcely even read fiction. The only novels I read in the last two years or so are Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (about poets), Harry Mathews’ My Life In CIA (full of Oulipian paraphernalia) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (ok, I can’t rationalize this last one re poetry, I read it in one curious sitting in a bookstore).
But I have been very excited in the last year about a few “graphic novel” series such as The Sandman, Y The Last Man, and Lucifer. They’re more like movies, or television shows perhaps, than novels, and maybe what I find intriguing about them is the bagginess of them, their quality of inefficiency and improvisation, something that I feel more interested in right now.
On the other hand, I have done some screenwriting, collaborating over the last year with a friend in Los Angeles. Over the intense weeks of producing our first draft, I felt an extraordinary, satisfying sense of living inside our characters’ heads. It was entirely other from my experience with poetry: a totally different paradigm of problem-solving, shifting things like puzzle pieces until they slotted into place. With clean storytelling, there often is a definitive solution, not only intuition.
Do you write reviews? Why or why not?
JW: I’ve done some writing about poetry on a blog I set up last summer, talking about Paul Killebrew’s Inspector Vs Evader, Sandy Florian’s Telescope and a few other books I’ve been reading. I do find it weird, though, making the transition from just reading to reading in order to write about something, how I start to commoditize my reactions, like “Oh, good, here comes a thought, I can use that!” Means rather than ends. I haven’t written for several months on my blog and this may be partly why.
I also remember something Peter O’Leary said at a conference on George Oppen a few months ago about “provisionality” of Oppen’s notebooks and criticism, the desire not to be entrapped by categorical statement, the flexibility of opinion over time and over different relationships and contexts. It’s an idea that I think a lot vis a vis reviews.
These issues came up recently when Keith Newton, who edits an online journal called Harp & Altar, asked me to write a review for the latest issue. I wouldn’t have had the same degree of engagement with the book if Keith hadn’t asked me to write about it. So the experience left me feeling like I’d consider doing it again. I especially like that it was an assignment, and outside my zone of comfort and taste. I’ll have to think about it further. This is, I suppose then, provisional too.
FF: My journal tends to be the place where I respond to what I’ve read. The English teacher in me prefers to read well-developed reviews that contextualize the work. I’m quite aware that a lecture isn’t a review, but I’d like to mention how affected I was by a lecture given by Peter Gizzi on Jack Spicer. The lecture really opened up how I could respond and interpret Spicer’s poetry. Gizzi discussed Spicer’s artistically designed publications and how the assemblage art movement affected how he put a poem together, among other aspects about his life.
Jared’s review of the re-release of Thomas James’ Letter to a Stranger very much impressed me because he spent a long time with the work and the review ultimately is an eloquent example of poetic readership.
Have the two of you ever tried writing collaboratively?
JW: I hope you’ll bear with a longwinded answer but I’m kind of fascinated by writers’ collaborations and I’ve read a bunch of them lately—for instance, pieces by Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen (I haven’t gotten to see their chapbook), 2A by Jeff Clark and Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Figures for a Darkroom Voice by Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Noah Eli Gordon. I find the uncertainty of the rules with these kind of poems fascinating and slightly unsettling; I actually wrote a poem a few months ago called “By Me and Someone Else” trying to grapple with this issue, the idea that all poems are collaborations with some other or others, even if it’s happening inside your own head mysteriously and unconsciously.
When I read these collaborations in which there is a pretense of a uniform voice, the differences smoothed out, it seems uncanny and ambiguous; should I read the poem like a puzzle—who is responsible for which word? Can I intuit the process? Or, do I ignore the authorship issue altogether? As I think too much about it right now, I start wondering about these poems as a series of actions—lines, sentences, maybe individual communications from one poet to the other—strung together linearly. As opposed to a network of impulses, some contradictory, that could kind of scrunch up against each other.
Vis a vis Farrah, we haven’t specifically collaborated on poems, though we do read most of each other’s work, often with editorial suggestions. It’s a sweet and also somewhat fraught process because we’re wearing so many hats: the “is this about me” hat, the intimate “what can I learn about you” hat, the “trying to be objective” hat, the “bonding as poets” hat, etc. At least that’s how I feel when I read Farrah’s poems, which are always invitingly full of secrets.
We have very occasionally given each other assignments, for instance once in the Tate Modern on a trip to London two years ago we agreed as a game to do simultaneous ekphrastic writing in a room of the surrealists. Farrah took Magritte and Paul Klee while I wrote about a Joan Mirò painting; we’ve both returned to these painters a lot since then on our own. After reading poems in Farrah’s latest project, story poems about a witch and her runaway adolescent daughters, I dreamed a name for the collection in my sleep, “Wolf and Pilot.” Farrah has actually adopted it as a working title, much to my surprise.
Maybe we’ll try some collaborating though; Farrah says she has some ideas. We’ll keep you posted.
Who are you both reading lately, and who are your old favorites?
FF: I just finished Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and I try to read one of his each year. I’ve been reading extensively about food and food politics, particularly explored by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. I read Juliana Spahr and Andrea Baker’s books, enjoying both a great deal. Jared and I attend many poetry readings around town, a reason why we live in NYC, so I feel constantly exposed to new poetry and am happy to have people read to me. Maurice Manning, C.D. Wright, Joshua Clover, and Amy Clampitt are my steady favorites.
JW: My primary, somewhat obsessional reading is non-fiction, all over the place, on the Internet, magazines, etc. I read a lot of political blogs every day, probably to my detriment because it’s very time-consuming and riles me up. For the same reason, I love to read Mike Davis and Slavoj Zizek.
Book-wise I’m pretty scatterbrained; I usually read about thirty books at once. Right now I’ve been reading Octavio Paz’s Collected Poems, Tom Raworth’s Collected Poems, Anne Boyer’s Romance of Happy Workers; I’ve been trying to get through John Ashbery’s Three Poems; I’ve read the first two parts of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees; I keep carrying around Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Poetry, etc. by Jacques Roubaud; I’m halfway through Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and partway into Eugene Ostashevsky’s OBERIU anthology; I’m almost done with the first volume of The Grand Piano; I’ve been very slowly savoring Lyn Hejinian’s wonderful My Life for more than a year. The last two derive from my interest in the Language poets; I enjoyed in the last year Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence and The Age of Huts, Carla Harryman’s Open Box, Bob Perelman’s The Marginalization of Poetry, and Rae Armantrout’s Collected Prose.
My standby poets for several years have been Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, though I don’t know how obvious their influence is on my current poems. I also like Jack Spicer a lot, and I’d be a totally different poet if I hadn’t studied Wallace Stevens very closely in college. I’m mesmerized by Gertrude Stein. I loved Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s In No One’s Land.
In another discourse, Farrah and I saw an amazing stage production of Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls. Churchill’s plays are very worth reading.
Do you have a favorite recipe to share with our hungry readers? Be specific, for the love of god.
FF: I enjoy making jambalaya. Add steamed white rice to a large saucepan with a can of diced tomatoes. Be sure to separate the tomatoes from their juice because it can make your jambalaya really watery. I save it to add it in if I think it’s looking dry. Add pre-cooked shrimp and pre-cooked sausage. (I use vegetarian sausage). If you want it really spicy, add a chopped jalapeno, but otherwise add all the cayenne pepper you can handle. This is an easy meal to make when you’re having friends over.
JW: Here’s a recipe I got from Tom Clark, a friend of my dad who, when he isn’t cooking, thinks a lot about the irrational nature of free will and runs a monthly “philosophy café” at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. He also spearheads a kind of ontological think tank called The Center for Naturalism and this is his recipe for Philosophy Bread, though we call it Tom Clark Bread in my family:
Combine a box of raisins, a cup of oats, ½-¾ of a cup of whole wheat flour, ¼ teaspoon of salt, ½ teaspoon of baking powder, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/8 teaspoon of cloves. Mix with 2 eggs, ½ cup of milk, ½ cup of orange juice (a little orange peel is optional), ¼ teaspoon vanilla, 2 tablespoons canola oil and 2 tablespoons of molasses. Pour into an oiled 9x9 pan and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. It comes out like brownies; sometimes we serve it with maple syrup poured on top, and a raspberry or two. You can try all kinds of variations with the dried fruits (say, apricots or currants or golden raisins or whatever) and the grains, it always comes out very delicious.
Continue Reading
Hide Full Post
