Mark Yakich is the author of Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (National Poetry Series, Penguin 2004), The Making of Collateral Beauty (Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo 2006), and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin, 2008). He is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Mark divides his time between the bedroom and the kitchen.
You currently reside in New Orleans—where are you from originally, and how did you end up in Louisiana?
A long story. The short version: I detested poems until I was in my late twenties. I was living in Belgium and they knocked on my door and I—for good or bad—answered. The Europeans don’t have MFAs, so I had to return to the States to buy time to write, i.e., get an MFA. The most foreign place in the States is Southeast Louisiana, so I applied to LSU’s MFA program and, by some miracle, was accepted. That was a little more than ten years ago. By another miracle, a poet/professor job opened up at Loyola in New Orleans and I was offered that in 2007.
One of your most recent publications is the chapbook Green Zone New Orleans which is a poem for nine voices—why nine?
No particular reason—the poem simply came out that way organically. Though I suppose a nice answer would be there are nine for the nine muses.
In addition to writing poems, you draw and paint—do you consider yourself a visual artist as well as a poet? What is the relationship between the two?
I am an amateur drawer and painter. The two feed each other is the plain and boring answer. I enjoy painting because I don’t have to work with words. I will probably give up working with words at some point. There are too many words today that are unnecessary. And some words should be outlawed, e.g., flow, nice, booger, terror, bananas, amazing.
First Car?
I have only bought one car ever. It is a truck: a 1989 Toyota pickup.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
I loathed books in high school. That is, reading them. I was always attracted by their covers and heft and touch. But I didn’t enjoy reading them. I read three novels before I was twenty-five. Two of them were The Catcher in the Rye.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
Whichever crowd I happened to be in: band, cross-country, college-prep students, smartasses. That is a funny question for me right now, in fact, as I just last weekend attended my twenty-year high school reunion.
First job?
Baskin Robbins.
Car now?
We have a Forrester that my mother-in-law gave us as a wedding present. I am curious: what does it matter what kind of car a poet drives? Is the question supposed to lead to some kind of hypocrisy or touting (“I live in NYC and do not require an automobile” or “I drive a Prius and allow my testicles to be zapped continually by a rather larger electromagnetic field underneath the driver’s seat.”)
Favorite book now?
Confessions of a Part-Time Call Girl by Barbara Ignoto.
What's new on you iPod or CD player?
Andrew Bird.
What's the best DVD you've rented of late?
We have a baby and don’t watch movies, predictably. But I enjoy Law & Order: Criminal Intent because I think Vincent D’Onofrio is an acting maniac.
What are you working on these days?
A novel.
Anything coming out soon?
Green Zone New Orleans, a chapbook of my poems and drawings just came out with a small press here in New Orleans (Press Street).
What are you reading that's fun?
The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion by Edmond Jabes.
What's your favorite a) writing exercise, and b) physical exercise?
a) Don’t have a favorite.
b) Making out.
What's your favorite piece of clothing?
I don’t think much about clothes. But I do like a certain pair of underpants.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Jesus. Airline crashes. Leaving poems in library books.
Favorite recipe (please be specific, like so we can cook it if we want)?
The Moroccan Chicken Recipe We've Waited All Our Lives For
Ingredients:
4 cloves garlic
4 tbsp olive oil
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp salt
1 tsp paprika
3/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 cup chopped dates
2 cups green olives
1/5 cup grated lemon peel
4 chicken breasts (or equivalent chicken things)
Put the first set of ingredients above in a bowl, place chicken in there too, stir around. Let this mix and marinate for at least one hour in the fridge.
Then, take our marinated chicken and put in a frying pan. Use medium heat and let fry for 20 minutes. Then, turn the chicken over and add the chopped dates, green olives, and grated lemon peel. Let fry until done, another 15-20 minutes. Serve with cous-cous.
What’s on your desk?
A mess.
Stones or Beatles?
False dichotomy, predictably. I like both. Maybe the question should be: bangers or mash?
So sometimes we ask: Fitzgerald or Hemingway?
Ditto. Maybe the question should be: which one of them would you prefer to sleep with?
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
Lacy Meadow
September 29, 2008
Quickie Interview #34: Mark Yakich
September 28, 2008
Kevin Prufer's similes
The second poem in Kevin Prufer's latest book, National Anthem, blew me away. It opens like so:
We wanted to find America through the gasps of snow that fell like last century's angels--That's evocative in its way, but the simile is specific while still being vague--how would last century's angels fall differently from this century's angels? It's a pretty line masquerading as an image but I can't really see the snow.
The texture of the poem gets richer from there, the metaphors evoking a kind of gorgeous but terrible dreamscape: "the moon atop its brilliant derrick, the poor burning so beautifully in the oilfields" ... "by dawn the light played its ringed fingers over the dashboard and said, Wake up, // fellow Americans, wake up and see what I have made for you" ... so by now I am beginning to be convinced by this speaker. Then Prufer echoes the structure of the first simile, and you realize that semi-weak gesture serves mostly to foreshadow and act as a foil against this one:
the snow grew thick and clotted on the windshield, sleet falling like frozen pilots,Holy shit! Now that's a simile. You apprehend its intense palpability all the more for the vagueness of the first version.
their legs shattering in the crowded streets.
Similes so often seem needless to me, an impulse to "poem up" and describe. One that really adds meaning to a poem is rare.
September 25, 2008
Not that way, Mr. Updike
I'm reading James Wood's How Fiction Works (which could more accurately be titled How Realism Works since that is what he seems chiefly interested in describing). (We discussed the book previously here.) It's more of a primer on some basic elements of fiction (narration, character, etc.) than an in-depth work of criticism, and it's pretty interesting, but so far (I'm about halfway in) Wood does better when he's writing about writing he likes (say, Chekhov's use of detail) than writing he doesn't.
For example, in one passage he criticizes Updike's clumsy way with Wood's beloved free indirect style in the novel Terrorist (which probably is bad, though Wood seems disapproving of Updike's oeuvre as a whole); Updike outlines the inner monologue of an 18-year-old American Muslim "look[ing] down from his new height" and imagining that the insects in the grass would see him as a god, were they conscious ... which sends him off on a tangent about hell and the Qur'an. Wood scoffs, claiming that it's "very unlikely that a schoolboy thinking about how much he had grown" would delve into big spiritual questions about "the next life."
A "schoolboy"? Does he really see men of 18 this way? I certainly thought about existence and death and shit at a much younger age. What about Matthew Murray, who, at 24, shot and killed four people, then himself? According to posts he wrote on an "Ex-Pentecostal" forum, he was tortured throughout his youth by questions of what it meant to be "saved." Updike's character doesn't seem so implausible to me.
September 23, 2008
Everything you know is wrong
Bear in mind that I haven’t fact-checked this yet, but Nin Andrews has a succinct, entertaining little primer on lies:
“Nero didn’t fiddle when Rome burned. (The violin was not invented until the 16th century.) The soil of Carthage was never sewn with salt. Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake. Or brioche, as her enemies said, to inspire hatred of the queen. And Louis XVI did not have a tiny penis. (Quite the opposite. The letters suggest he was too large for the poor Marie.) Catherine the Great did not die when having sex with a horse. Nor did she die on the toilet. Napoleon was neither short nor impotent. Nor was he cured of his impotence by eating green beans. The Virgin Queen might not have been a virgin. And George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth. Roosevelt did not know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Churchill was not an alcoholic, and his father did not have syphilis. Hitler was not an atheist, a social Darwinist, or a follower of Nietzsche. He believed the Bible was the history of man; he professed his beliefs in speeches, and encouraged Nazi soldiers to worship in churches. In short, like most leaders in this country today, he considered himself a good Christian.”
This is why I never worry about running out of stuff to write. The corrections to the general universe alone could occupy me for the rest of my life. It does, however, kind of inspire a millisecond-long wish to go back and be a middle-school Social Studies/History teacher. Then it passes.
The unspoken point is that these things are part of our pop culture heritage (and our intellectual heritage, to a degree), and drastic measures should always be taken. Arthur Miller summed it up thus:
"Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed."
I love the idea of data getting married. (If we carry this metaphor forward, the internet is a brothel for data.) But probably the plague is a better metaphor. As long as it has one host (living or paginated), it’s still alive, if only dormant. [So you should stay away from squirrels.]
In this vein (the non-squirrel one), Philip Levine also has a great poem in What Work Is on the subject of veracity:
Facts
The bus station in Princeton, New Jersey,
has no men’s rooms. I had to use one like mad,
but the guy behind the counter said, “Sorry,
but you know what goes on bus station men’s rooms.”
If you take a ’37 Packard grille and split it down
the center and reduce the angle by 18 degrees and reweld it,
you’ll have a perfect grill for a Rolls Royce
just in case you ever need a new grill for yours.
I was not born in Cleveland, Ohio. Other people
were, or so I have read, and many have remained,
which strikes me as an exercise in futility
greater even than saving your pennies to buy a Rolls.
F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton. A student
pointed out the windows of the suite he occupied.
We were on our way to the train station to escape
to New York City, and the student may have been lying.
The train is called “The Dinky.” It takes you only
a few miles way to a junction where you can catch
a train to Grand Central Station or—if you’re scared—
to Philadelphia. From either you can reach Cleveland.
My friend Howie wrote me that he was ashamed
to live in a city whose most efficient means of escape
is called “The Dinky.” If he’d invest in a Rolls,
even one with a Packard grill, he’d feel differently.
I don’t blame the student for lying, especially
to a teacher. He may have been ill at ease
in my company, for I am an enormous man given
to long bouts of silence as I brood on facts.
There are two lies in the previous stanza. I’m small,
each year I feel the bulk of me shrinking, becoming
more frail and delicate. I get cold easily as though
I lacked even the solidity to protect my own heart.
The coldest I’ve ever been was in Cleveland, Ohio.
My host and hostess hated and loved each other
by frantic turns. To escape I’d go on long walks
in the yellowing snow as the evening winds raged.
The citizens of Cleveland, Ohio, passed me sullenly,
benighted in their Rolls Royces, each in a halo
of blue light sifting down from the abandoned
filling stations of what once was a community.
I will never return to Cleveland or Princeton, not
even to pay homage to Hart Crane’s lonely tower
or the glory days of John Berryman, whom I loved.
I haven’t the heart for it. Not even in your Rolls.
This is the Levine I like. The acerbic, trickster one. (Not the schmaltz vendor.) The one of M. Degas Teaches Art And Science At Durfee Intermediate School and the immortal essay, “Part of the Problem” (available in The Breadloaf Anthology of Writers on Writing) where he insults just about everyone in a delightful fashion.
(I realize that I have strayed somewhat from the thesis of writers as corrective forces in the universe. Oh well. It felt very natural.)
September 22, 2008
Poet dreams
I dreamt that Reb Livingston was having her big annual No Tell Motel retreat weekend (this does not exist) and I was invited. The weekend was work-centric (which doesn't make sense since Reb openly admits to preferring to do almost everything herself), but there was some time allotted for old-fashioned group fun (e.g., a karaoke machine). Inexplicably, the retreat took place at my parents' house. On the way we stopped and bought a lot of food at Trader Joe's. Everyone scorned me for buying/eating their "cheap, generic" candied ginger.
September 20, 2008
Are Books Dead? Doomed?
It's not news to anyone in the writing industry that people are reading fewer books than they did in the past, but with the advent of all these internet publications, there's the question of whether reading is really declining or people are simply turning to different media. The Guardian seems to claim the latter here. But should this make us feel like people are not devaluing literature? The ratio of internet sites out there that carry lit vs. the sites that do not must be much lower than the ratio of literary books vs. otherwise. And lit on the web, at this point, is arguably not at the same quality, nor pays authors nearly as much in most cases. So should the Guardian's spin on the bad book news give writers any hope? Readers?
September 18, 2008
To Website or To Not Website?
I recently had a debate with a friend of mine about author websites. He finds them pretentious and unnecessary, while I took the position that given the ever-increasing power of bloggers and web journals and the online community in general, it was pretty hard to argue that having an online presence, via a traditional website or a blog or some combination of the two, isn’t advantageous—especially if you have a book you're trying to promote and can talk a kindly, web-savvy friend into doing the set-up work. I’d be curious to hear from people who have a web presence of some sort—has it in fact been useful to you? And those who’ve actively decided against it—what made you steer clear?
I've definitely come across author sites that struck me as annoyingly formal and pretentious, like ones that prominently feature super-airbrushed Marion Ettlinger photos on each page, but most of the sites I see these days are informal and conversational, though probably for practical/monetary reasons as much as aesthetic reasons. But no matter how cool and non-pretentious they are, author sites seem akin to author photos in that some people just object to them on principle.
September 14, 2008
Who's embroidering now
We like to follow scandals and hoaxes around here, and I like to call people on empty rhetoric. Francine Prose has a piece in the September Harper's that smacks of the latter, with a dose of self-righteousness thrown in for good measure. Called "The Politics of Literary Scapegoating," it's about memoirs and the lying liars that write them, and about how Prose doesn't give a shit if they do. She writes that every time she's been invited to speak somewhere, on either fiction or nonfiction, some audience member asks her what she thinks of James Frey. And she replies that she's "puzzled that people seem more upset by a lie about how long a writer spent in rehab than a lie about whether Saddam Hussein had access to weapons of mass destruction." She goes on to say that the response of Americans to exposed literary hoaxes is "to tar and feather James Frey and Margaret Seltzer rather than Bush and Cheney."
I feel like I hear people complain (with every reason, of course) about Bush way more than James Frey, but not to make assumptions, I googled "Frey is a liar" and "Bush is a liar" (in quotes). There are only 936 results for Frey, but about 381,000 for Bush. If calling someone a liar on the Internet is "tarring and feathering" them, then Bush has been T&F'ed about 407 times as many as Frey.
This is not to say that there's enough outrage over political matters. But to claim that there's been more outrage over A Million Little Pieces than the war strikes me as more than a little disingenuous. Does Prose really fancy herself the only one around who cares that our president lies to us? Maybe her audience members just figure that a talk given by a writer of fiction and nonfiction is an appropriate setting to discuss matters of writing, fiction, and nonfiction. Whereas Saddam Hussein seems slightly less germane.
More sad news
There are literary deaths every week, it seems, but the two this week were especially tragic--Reginald Shepherd and David Foster Wallace were both only in their forties. Shepherd's death was not exactly a surprise, since he had been writing in harrowing detail about his battle with cancer for some time. But it felt sudden nonetheless. The news of David Foster Wallace really shocked me though, I gasped audibly. (For a moment, for some reason, I wondered if it was a hoax.) It's difficult not to speculate about the suicide of someone famous, to guess at causes, though of course we know nothing.
I'm going to seek out some David Foster Wallace to read or re-read today. My favorites are his essays, like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," and one on lexicography and usage and the fine art of dictionary making (called "Tense Present") that appeared in Harper's in 2001. I still have the issue somewhere. This also makes me want to finally tackle--I'm sure I'm not the only one--Infinite Jest.
September 13, 2008
Fiction v. self-help: who will win?
These days, I’m somewhat more interested in the things—such as, for example, Barack Obama—that Oprah is endorsing in addition to books.
But the other day, I got my Oprah’s Book Club e-newsletter reminding me to “Tune in Friday, September 19!” Why? Because “Oprah's announcing her new book club selection. Once you start it, you won't want to put it down! Until then, it's a great time to reflect on the lessons you've learned from A New Earth—and how you'll continue to apply them to your everyday life.”
What do you think the next OBC selection will be? Do you care? Do you hope as hard as I do that it is a good, well-written, engaging novel instead of this facile, self-helpy new age Eckhart Tolle awakening-to-your-life’s-purpose crap she’s been flogging since January? Any predictions on what the next book will be? Anyone wanna place any bets? Put a little money on this?
September 11, 2008
120-second recommendation
Donald Dunbar's poem "Buttons for Buttons" in the new DIAGRAM:
I wrote this play while I was falling in love
& the characters, all of my characters, in every play,
are improbably falling in love for the first time. [...]
I like how I often don't recognize the names in DIAGRAM. It's not always the samo samo. Also, like Linebreak, they respond pretty fast.
This poem never would have cut it for Cesar Garza, whose pet peeve, he says in this interview w/ various editors, is lines that break on "the."
September 9, 2008
One of These Things is Not Like the Other
Official gibberish is not all that new. Especially if deployed in sustained, strophic fashion (scroll down to the bottom).
Why are the contemporary texts ("Howl" notwithstanding) that so often inspire censorship, so... disappointing? And give rise to ripostes that also lack something. When Virginia Woolf was supporting Radclyffe Hall during the obscenity trial as a result of The Well of Loneliness, she wrote privately, with almost audible sigh, that she didn’t think it was a very good book.
We need some more insult poetry. Truly. There was Catullus. Then a long gap. And... who? No, really. I want to know. In a similar vein, one of the most enjoyable revenge poems I’ve read is “Disjunction” by Kate Daniels (from Four Testimonies), where she describes squirting breast milk into her office trashcan, all over the dean’s “debatable policy on sexual harassment.” Now that’s an objective correlative.
I heard this 10 years ago in undergrad from my German professor, but Kafka is actually very funny. And not so much with the frigid, nebbishy, torment.
So very behind the curve on this (did I mention that I’m not attached to an institution of higher learning?), but I just love the very idea of Seven Types of Ambiguity. It’s like having a limited view of infinity.
60-second recommendation
I like this poem by Heather Christle just up on Linebreak. Excerpt:
I complained to my friends.
I said I am looking for bears
and I am finding them everywhere
but I am not finding, for example,
a town in Tennessee
populated entirely by historians
who refute the Persian Wars.
My friends looked at one another
and ordered a new round
while at the back of the room
a bear in a tiny car
drove in circles on the platform.
It seems to be "about" finding something by not looking for it, which is exactly what's going on right now in Atmospheric Disturbances, which I am reading, thanks to the generosity of Brian Foley of the Brookline Booksmith.
Linebreak is a newish online journal with a nice design, audio files and a quick response time. Heather Christle is a poet I once read with in Amherst. She had really good bangs.
September 8, 2008
Well played, Harvard Review
The Harvard Review, I am now privy to know, sends out a really nice rejection note:
Dear [your name here]:
Thank you for submitting your work to Harvard Review. Although we do not have a place for your piece in the current issue, we wanted you to know that our readers enjoyed your poems.
We hope that you understand that we can only publish a small fraction of the material we receive. We encourage you to submit your work elsewhere and to consider us again in a half-year's time. ...
While it sounds like a form letter, it's typed up on actual letterhead and actually signed by the editor. Which made me feel nice. At least, as nice as one can feel upon receiving a formy rejection. (I'm guessing they have two versions of the rejection letter; maybe one is in fact just an unsigned slip. It's a little hard to believe they'd blanketly encourage everyone who submits to send again in six months. I'm sure they get enough repeat submitters whose work still isn't good enough as it is.)
September 6, 2008
Sarah Palin and Censorship
Palin? That came out of nowhere. I was sitting in my classroom in Korea, about to teach English to children who hate America, when what did I see on my computer? VP nominee for the Republicans: Sarah Palin. Ridiculous to think the women's vote is just about voting for a woman, right? Because that can't be why Hillary was so popular. Because Sarah Palin is just about the opposite of the Clintons. Actually, it would be fairer to say she's just about the opposite of Congressman Kucinich. Hotter than her significant other, as far right as can be considered socially-acceptable, young and with only 2 years real experience. And you won't find Dennis (or Hillary, for that matter) out there threatening to fire librarians who won't censor books. (See, I made this post literary in the end...) Also, check this out, courtesy of a friend's gchat profile and, really, the NY Times. Since I'm out of the country, I've been wondering, how is this playing in the States?
September 5, 2008
Best Bets for Fall
Many much-anticipated books will hit the shelves this fall, and, since I'm on a serious book budget at the moment, I'll have to limit my purchases to the titles I’m most excited about. Here’s what I’m betting on for fall:
Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth, McSweeney's Books, September. I have been a huge fan of Unferth’s—Diane Williams calls her “one of the crucial literary artists of her generation"—work for a while (if you haven’t already, check out Minor Robberies) and so I can't wait to read her debut novel. Run, don’t walk, to the nearest bookstore.
In The Devil’s Territory, Kyle Minor, Dzanc Books, November. I have been reading Kyle’s fiction and nonfiction in magazines for ages, it seems, finding myself especially partial to "A Day Meant to Do Less," a novella first published in The Gettysburg Review and reprinted in The Best American Mystery Stories, and I predict his collection with be nothing short of riveting. Also, check out the 25-city book tour Kyle and our very own Kathleen Rooney will be embarking on this spring to promote Kyle's collection and Kathleen's forthcoming memoir.
To Siberia, Per Petterson, Graywolf, October. By the same guy who wrote Out Stealing Horses. What more is there to say?
All American Poem, Matthew Dickman, American Poetry Review as the Honnickman First Book Prize Winner, September. Another writers whose work I’ve been enjoying in lit mags for ages, and hoping to see a book from in the near future.
Camera, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Dalkey Archive, November. Oh, how I love Jean-Philippe and his novels that are static and explosive at the same time. After falling in love with Television last year, I’m anxious to read his latest.
Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Harcourt, September. I was totally blown away by Bynum’s first book, Madeline is Sleeping—an eccentric, unsettling, and stunningly gorgeous novel that was a National Book Award Finalist in 2004 (aka the year experimental female fiction writers reigned supreme).
Abstraktion und Einfuhlung, Percival Everett, Akashic/Black Goat, November. Everett is an unfailing interesting writer and I’m excited to see what he’ll accomplish in this book of poems.
What are you looking forward to snapping up at the bookstore this fall?
September 4, 2008
Don't say Bret Easton Ellis
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution asks, What is the classic book of the '80s and '90s? I like that question, though I'd think it would have to be two different books. Of those mentioned, Bonfire of the Vanities sounds about right for the '80s. '90s mentions include Generation X and The Firm.
The idea is not to name the best book from the era but the most emblematic. (Otherwise my pick would be White Noise.) But it seems like there's always a "literary" pick and a mainstream pick competing. Someone mentioned A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but that was published in 2000. Which "begs the question" (Oh my god do I hate when people (mis)use that phrase this way), What will be the classic book of this decade? I don't think we have enough "distance" on it yet ... the book I felt most pressured to read and therefore didn't was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I'm inordinately sensitive to hype.
