Now, as this last miserable year grinds to a close, I thought I’d snatch some last 2008 tidbits out of the ether, before unplanned obsolescence (the lifeblood of the internet in general and blogs in specific) take hold.
Gabriel repurposed the most ineradicable of internet memes--the cat:
how i feel about poetry
sitting on machine i don't understand
cannot make it speak/fly/produce food/pet.me
Nin Andrews managed a bit of brilliant urban camouflage:
I am at the mall, and I have lost all interest or memory of why I am there. (I always do this at malls. It takes twenty minutes, and then I am out of my body. I am floating around, watching the other shoppers shop, the sellers sell, the mothers tug their children and large bags, the fathers wander off aimlessly like fish in the air . . . ) Some man hands me a card and puts out his hand for money. It's one of those cards that reads I am deaf. Give me money. Or something like that. I give the man a dollar.
I am suddenly distracted by a young girl. She's maybe twelve or thirteen, and she is trying on a skimpy skirt (the kind hat my dad would say- shows more than your legs), boots, and a clingy shirt. Her mother is appalled by the outfit. The girl is pouting and twirling around in front of a mirror. Her breasts hang loosely out of the top of the blouse. She is blond and red-lipped and angry.
You look like a slut, the mother says angrily.
I look normal, the girl says. That's the trouble with you. You have no clue what normal is.
The mother looks at me, suddenly, as if I might help her.
Is that normal? she asks me, pointing at her daughter. Tell her THAT is not normal. Tell her.
The girl glares at me.
I can't think of what to say. So I give the mother the man's card. I am deaf...
K. Silem Mohammad attempted... well, I feel I would cheapen it if I slapped a modifier on it:
If a poem about sunlight on a desk is to be relevant, it must have a context for reception among a set of readers who are appreciably qualified to gauge its effectiveness on any number of thematic or structural levels, and to situate that effectiveness in relation to some additional evaluative factor based on the poem's usefulness in sustaining a social aesthetic.
And in response to quibbling, became even more delightful:
From now on I will flag all my satirical intentions as such by writing in this ridiculously inflated 1923 voice. Or maybe I was doing that already. Oh, vexation!
Michael Swanwick gave aid and comfort to the deity-less via a tactical exchange of Godless Atheist Christmas Cards:
Third place went to Friends Who Spent Christmas in Hawaii -- which in and of itself was already one strike against them -- for a card decorated with Adinkra symbols expressing such sentiments as Obik Nka Obie ("bite not one another"), Sankofa ("return and get it") and Funtunfunefu Denkyemfunefu ("Siamese crocodiles"). A card whose irrelevance extends beyond Christmas to cover Easter, Arbor Day, your cousin's Bat Mitzvah . . . and in fact, any card-worthy event you can think of.
Second place went to multi-year-winners Couple A. Their card arrived the day after Christmas, almost disqualifying them. But its artwork of a faceless soldier holding a machine gun (good artwork, I hasten to stress) was so strong as to demand their inclusion.
But the winners were unquestionably our good friends Anonymous, who sent the above photo with a cheery message of "mathematical modernist winter greetings." It was the, yes, mathematical grid-like machined precision of the chair, coupled with the inherent sadness of a garden in winter that did it. Truly breathtaking.
The horde at Delirious Hem came up with a brilliant advent poetry calendar.
Peter Sagal’s Pinter elegy post provoked a self-fulfilling prophecy:
I love that Pinter-Beckett story. It reminds me of a friend of mine who confessed to Leonard Cohen that he was considering having an affair. “You have to do it,” said Cohen. “You have to risk everything, or you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened.” My friend started to take the advice seriously, but then he stopped short. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You’re Leonard Cohen. Of COURSE you would say that!”
John Hodgman pimped the daily Moleman:
The death of irony was declared (and argued against):
Not according to the thin black novelist Colson Whitehead, who wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times under the headline, “Finally, a Thin President.”
“Something bad happens, like 9/11, it’s the death of irony,” Mr. Whitehead said in an e-mail message on Thursday. “Something good happens, like Obama’s win, it’s the death of irony. When will someone proclaim the death of iceberg lettuce? I’m sick of it making my salads boring.”
And Neil Gaiman lucidly defended icky speech:
I loved coming to the US in 1992, mostly because I loved the idea that freedom of speech was paramount. I still do. With all its faults, the US has Freedom of Speech. You can't be arrested for saying things the government doesn't like. You can say what you like, write what you like, and know that the remedy to someone saying or writing or showing something that offends you is not to read it, or to speak out against it. I loved that I could read and make my own mind up about something.
(It's worth noting that the UK, for example, has no such law, and that even the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that interference with free speech was "necessary in a democratic society" in order to guarantee the rights of others "to protection from gratuitous insults to their religious feelings.")
[...]
Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you're going to have to stand up for stuff you don't believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don't, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person's obscenity is another person's art.
Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.
December 31, 2008
Eventide
December 30, 2008
New Voices: Andrew Foster Altschul
Andrew Foster Altschul is the author of the novel Lady Lazarus. His short fiction and essays have appeared in publications including Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, StoryQuarterly, and anthologies such as Best New American Voices 2006 and O. Henry Prize Stories 2007. He is also the books editor of The Rumpus.net, a new arts & culture website. A former music journalist and rock DJ, he currently lives in San Francisco.
Your story, y = mx +b, recently appeared in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Jean Valentine. Where did the idea for this story come from?
I have to confess that this story had a more or less personal basis, though I don’t like to write about my own life. But I went through a few months about a year ago where absolutely everything was going wrong, one thing after another – my dog was very sick, my landlord – a very sweet man – died and his widow was thinking about selling the building, there was a crazy student threatening me, my car broke down, my publishing house had begun its slow disintegration just as my book was going to print. Lots of other small stuff I can’t remember now. I woke up every day and just wanted to hide. Everyone has periods like this, where you just feel like you can’t possibly deal with one more thing – and then one more thing inevitably happens.
I’d love to say that when life throws so much at me I respond by sublimating it into fiction, but the truth is that usually I can’t write when there are so many other things demanding immediate attention. In this case, I got up the day before Thanksgiving and sat down to make a list of things I needed to do (I’m a classic Virgo), but instead I wrote, “This is how the day begins: badly.” Something darkly whimsical about the line amused me. By lunchtime, I had a draft.
I was impressed by the compression of y = mx + b. Despite the relative brevity, the story offers a tremendously full and wrenching rendering of a life. Was writing such a compressed narrative something you’d set out to do with this story?
No, but there were a number of reasons I knew this story could only work as microfiction. The most important was, frankly, the whininess of it – seen a certain way, the whole piece is one long lament, and I’m a pretty firm opponent of writing that inflates the quotidian hassles of life into Greek tragedy. I see a lot of this from students and I always tell them there has to be something more. But microfiction is not the same as narrative fiction, or at least not entirely. It doesn’t have the same requirements and doesn’t promote the same relationship with the reader. In many ways, microfiction is “about” itself and its own form – it’s a kind of performance, like Robert Frost says about poetry. So you can take a subject that would be too slight for a proper short story, but the real interest and engagement becomes what you can do with it in such tight confines.
The other reason was the music of that first line, and the wordplay it led to. This, too, is something more appropriate to microfiction- or poetry – because the shape of a very small piece puts a kind of pressure on the language and makes it rev up higher than it otherwise would, do more tricks, roll over, play dead, etc. But if you do this kind of thing for more than a few pages, it gets annoying.
Your debut novel, Lady Lazarus, was published by Harcourt this spring. The book involves—quite awesomely—celebrity, punk rock, suicide, and a confessional poet named Calliope Bird Morath. Can you talk a little about the origins of the novel?
The origins are probably as numerous as the subjects you mention above—and you can add to the list Zen Buddhism, psychoanalysis, alchemy, and Vegan cheese steaks, some of the novel’s other crucial concerns. But the deepest source was probably my fascination with so-called confessional poetry and confessional poets (the novel’s title is also the title of a Sylvia Plath poem). I do admire some of the poetry, especially Plath and Berryman—but the fascination is with the phenomenon of an artist’s work and her life story getting conflated in the public imagination, to the extent that it’s impossible to read the poetry without mixing it in your head with the (often tragic) biography. Are we reading the same poems as we would be if we knew nothing of the poet? Is there any way to evaluate the work separate from the life? And, to take it to a different level, if an artist knows her public behavior will influence the reception of her work, who could resist the urge to create a little drama and drum up interest? Who doesn’t love a little scandal?
It seems to me a phenomenon that’s just as relevant today, in the age of Paris and Britney, David Duchovny’s sex addiction, Angelina’s adoptions, “wardrobe malfunctions,” and all the other highly manufactured ways celebrities draw attention to themselves. So my main character, Calliope, is a modern-day confessional poet whose public antics bring her a lot of attention. She’s also the daughter of a famous ‘90s punk rocker who committed suicide when she was a toddler – so a life of obscurity was never really an option.
Then, too, there’s this whole thing about biographies, memoirs, and the fakeries thereof, à la James Frey, Margaret B. Jones, et. al. But I don’t want to bore you.
What is your favorite first line from a work of fiction?
“Way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.”
[For print, though, you can’t beat Lolita.]
What music are you loving at the moment?
Sadly, I stopped finding out about new music a few years ago, when commercial radio became unlistenable. I spent my early 20s working at an alternative rock station in Providence, RI, and my late 20s, living in San Diego, listening to 91X. So in some ways I’m still stuck in the ‘90s, or at least the artists who came into the public eye then. There’s usually a CD by Radiohead or PJ Harvey in my stereo (and yes, I still listen to CDs, which further proves how stuck in the past I am). Leonard Cohen is a perennial favorite. Last summer I went to see Liz Phair perform Exile in Guyville song for song, amazed that this album I love is already “nostalgia.” Things I’ve been turned onto lately include Cat Power, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Hold Steady. Some Latin music, from my time living in Peru: Shakira (pre-English), Jarabe de Palo, Manu Chao… Sometimes one of my students, shocked by my utter un-hipness, will make me a CD of something new and interesting.
What are you working on now?
A cycle of novellas set in Peru, tentatively entitled Gringo. But I’m researching a new novel, also with a Peruvian element, that promises to be bigger, more complicated, and potentially more interesting even than Lady Lazarus. Hard to believe, I know!
December 26, 2008
New Year's Resolutions
Happy Holidays! Here are my literary New Year's Resolutions:
1. Write a draft of my novel. And revise that draft.
2. Stop nitpicking (this can also be non-literary).
3. Read more. Books, specifically. Stop wasting time on-line.
4. Stop upsetting my fiancee with my prose. (Maybe not.)
5. Make my characters nosier. And noisier.
I'm curious what other people plan for next year... and whether those plans ever work out.
30-second recommendation
The January issue of Harper's is really bringing it: The "Readings" section alone has excerpts by Charles Bernstein, Diane Williams, Susan Sontag, poems by John Ashbery and Rae Armantrout (AND two visual poems), George Saunders and Don DeLillo on David Foster Wallace, etc. There's also sex-themed "Findings" ("Roosters that have had sex recently make more noise at dawn") and a rather Big Lebowski-esque short story by Heidi Julavits:
"How appropriate," I said. "And what if a man asks you to kill another man just because he thinks he's an asshole?"How does the New Yorker sleep at night knowing Harper's exists?
"It's not my job to evaluate motive," he said.
"You'll just kill anyone," I said.
"Not anyone," he said cryptically. "But let me ask you. Would it be so terrible if an asshole died? Think of how little sense it makes when generous, lovely people die. But when an asshole dies, we think, well, hmmmm. An asshole is dead."
Our conversation lagged.
The January Lucky, on the other hand, though usually dependable airplane "reading," kind of sucked. I blame the economy.
December 23, 2008
I avoided sleep for years,/ up at night replaying/ evening news stories
By now, you’ve probably all heard that our President-elect has selected poet, essayist, playwright and teacher Elizabeth Alexander to be his inaugural poet.
Feel free to weigh in on that choice in and of itself, but what I really want to know, Ploughshares blog readers, is: in light of the fact that she has been commissioned to compose and read a brand new poem exclusively for this particular event, have you ever been called upon to write a poem for a special occasion? And have you done it? Has a friend or relative ever approached you and said “Hey, I’m getting married next spring, can you, like, write something for us?” or anything of the sort? If you have done it, how did you approach it? If not, why not?
Writing an occasional poem seems to have a very public, stunt-y, Evel Knievel-meets-schoolyard-dare vibe that makes it both appealing and inspiring, but also a little silly and scary. For example, Martin says “If Elizabeth Alexander writes a 50-line poem for the inauguration, every line of which rhymes with ‘Obama,’ I will give her $5.”
December 21, 2008
20 questions
Over at the Best American Poetry blog recently, poets of various stripes (e.g., Ron Silliman, Stephen Burt, Moira Egan) were answering 20 questions posed by H.L. Hix. I found some of the questions kind of boring so I skimmed a lot of the answers, but one answer I always took interest in was to the question, What poem do you love but not understand? Somehow at the moment this kind of artistic experience seems more important than the kind whereby you love something (because?) you do understand. I noticed several people mentioned Wallace Stevens, and I have to agree, Stevens writes some of the best nonsense ever. Here's one I "love, love, love" as Hix writes. But even as I say I don't understand it, I feel that really I do. It actually makes perfect sense: what is true is that I cannot paraphrase it.
Talk about your depression before spring; today is but the first day of winter and, in Boston at least, it's brutally wintry already. I've got the Sunday blues and a back ache from shoveling. Wallace would understand.
DEPRESSION BEFORE SPRING
The cock crows
But no queen rises.
The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.
Ho! Ho!
But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.
But no queen comes
In slipper green.
December 17, 2008
New Voices: Ashley Capps
Ashley Capps’ poem “Winter” appears in the Winter 2008 issue of Ploughshares, edited by Jean Valentine. Her first book of poems, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, was published in 2006 by University of Akron Press. Recent work has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, and Poetry London.
Can you tell us a little about your poem, “Winter”? What sparked its creation? Is it part of a larger project?
No, not really part of a larger project per se. One thing I was thinking about—often lately I do become conscious of trying to depict a very precise quality of light—or what light does—of trying to recreate the effect of an exact visual sear. And I remember being conscious of that when writing that poem, which is actually a couple of years old, and I was obsessed with a quality of winter light on snow in Iowa. I was also at the time reading manuals and vocabulary of guns and bombs—thinking a lot about violence—and war—and that phrase “diode array,” for example, came from something I was reading about laser-guided missiles; but also sounded like it could’ve just been shaken out of the sky with a bunch of snow.I’m very curious about accidents and coincidences in language; same thing with that verb “to home,” the act of a missile seeking its target. “To home by light” sounds like a very beautiful thing to do.
Your first book, Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields, won the third contest you sent it to. (I’m jealous!) Are you sending out a second manuscript?
No, not by a long shot. I’m writing poems, and I have finished some poems, and sometimes based on the things I have been thinking about when writing those poems, and the things I continue to be thinking about, sometimes I can see the poems beginning to fit together with a title and everything—but right now I’m just writing when- and how-damn-ever I can.
If so, how are you approaching that process? Is the second book easier or harder? To publish? Ask me again in a few years!
There’s a lot of lore around the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—how did your experience there match up with your expectations?
I didn’t really have any expectations except that I would get a lot of writing done. I was really excited to be going into a situation where I was going to be held accountable every two or three weeks for a solid draft of a new poem, and I was going to get feedback. I would say, though, that my time there far surpassed my hopes for it, and my hopes are always really high—I hoped my experience there would be transformative. I was in a really restless place in my writing when I went there; I wanted more ways in, to seeing and thinking about writing, more approaches to subject matter, than I had at my disposal. The “way” I knew of writing and moving in a poem didn’t always feel entirely true or … sufficient to the way I actually experience the world; nor to the world itself. I hope that makes sense.
One of the amazing things about Iowa, for me, was that it seemed like you couldn’t have four more aesthetically diverse poets (James Galvin, Mark Levine, Cole Swensen, and Dean Young (I mean, I guess you could, but you know what I mean)) all together in one program, so I was bound to learn new approaches and possibilities if I wanted to. I was bound to be challenged. It was a tremendous education. I’m still learning from the ideas and books and conversations I was exposed to there. The faculty are all amazingly committed teachers, in both their literature seminars and their workshops, and it was also just enlightening to get to study with and receive input from these really different poets whose work I admired across the board. For me, that kind of aesthetic diversity was Iowa’s greatest gift; which also speaks to something that’s really important to me with poetry in general, which is to not get too invested, in terms of what you value or are open to experiencing, in camps or labels or one theory of writing. Certainly the different kinds of voices, styles, representation—they exist—and can be heard and plotted, and classifications facilitate discussion, etc, but I also think, as a writer and a reader, that you can find compelling ideas and charged poetry under just about all the umbrellas out there holding up the rain.
I found the following headline about you: “Ashley Capps reads dark poetry”! Do you think your poetry is dark?
Not particularly, no! I thought that was a very strange headline! But I also don’t think I said that I think of my poetry as primarily Southern or autobiographical—and something in the article made it seem like that was what I was saying—I may have discussed those elements when asked at a Q & A, but I don’t tend to think of my poetry mainly through those lenses. Or any lenses for that matter—I’m just writing.
How do you respond when people ask what kind of poetry you write or, worse, what your poems are “about”?
Yeah, I don’t like that question. It feels like being asked, “So, what do you knit about?” How do you answer that? “Oh, me, I mostly knit about sweaters and socks and scarves…” I usually just say “I write about whatever I’m thinking about I guess” and then in order to avoid dissatisfaction I switch the subject.
Who are your old-favorite poets? Which newer poets are holding your attention?
How about dead and living, and I’ll still leave out a bunch, but these come to mind: Hopkins, Shakespeare, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Whitman, Moore, Williams, Pound, Millay, Sexton, Berryman, Plath, Creeley, Spicer, O’Hara, Koch
and
Anne Carson, Mary Ruefle, Rae Armantrout, Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, Michael Palmer, Frederick Seidel, Gerald Stern, Dean Young, Stephen Rodefer, C.S. Giscombe, Amy Gerstler, Linda Gregerson, Laura Sims, Mark Levine, Emily Wilson, Lance Phillips, James Galvin, Louise Gluck, Brenda Hillman, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Franz Wright, Robert Hass, Kevin Davies, Michele Glazer, Matthew Zapruder, Erin Belieu, Fanny Howe, Christopher Salerno, Alice Oswald, Josh Bell, Graham Foust, Cole Swensen … I just ordered a copy of Stephen Berg’s Rimbaud Versions and Inventions … still unilluminated I … after a few poems from a friend’s copy floored me; and I’m reading and liking Norma Cole’s Spinoza in Her Youth. Some poems by Allison Titus and Louise Mathias in the current issue of Blackbird really stuck in my head.
December 12, 2008
Things I was not digging in '08
Thought I'd write a different kind of end-of-the-year list, so here are things I was not digging in '08:
Long response times from journals, and no simultaneous submissions
Mad Cow Disease
People thinking the Vampire Weekend album was overrated
Season 3 of Heroes, and Season 3s of anything, and sequels in general
The Half Man Half Tree--scary!
Sarah Palin--also scary!
Chinese exports--melamine, anyone?
Not writing, a.k.a. hating myself
Presidents, though hopefully this will change
War
December 11, 2008
New Voices: Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts writes poems. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in several national magazines. He is a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference scholarship recipient, a finalist for the 2007 Ruth Lily fellowship, and received Honorable Mention for the 2007 Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest. He’s taught poetry and made appearances at several DC Metropolitan Schools, and currently teaches poetry with the DC Creative Writing Workshop at Hart Middle School. A student on full scholarship at the University of Maryland, Betts has also won the prestigious Holden Fellowship to attend the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He currently works on his debut book of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, and has a book contract with Avery/ Penguin for his memoir, A Question of Freedom.
Your poem, Ghazal, will appear in the Winter 2008-09 issue of Ploughshares, guest-edited by Jean Valentine. Where did the idea for this poem come from?
Most of my good poems don’t come from ideas as much as places, moments in my life. I’m walking in the grocery store and suddenly a piece of a line comes into my head. But even before that happens there has to be something in my experience that will make me open to noticing those lines, those scraps of details that all of us get or ignore every day. For this poem the start came with my finding the form. It might have been 2002, 2001. I read Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazal Arabic and an essay of his on the form. I’ve always been somewhat of a formalist on the low. Intrigued by how you can find freedom in confinement, and so I was drawn to the possibilities of the form. How you could tell a number of narratives at once, without really telling any narratives at all. I consider the ghazal a way to link seemingly disparate images, ideas, circumstances in a way that isn’t jarring.
Yet, really all I’ve said so far is how I came to the form. The thing about the ghazal is that even though it’s a strict form, the poem is all about the subject. The form, when executed well, emphasizes subject just as much, if not more, than it does rhyme and repetition. I got my subject matter from the time I spent in prison. Anyone familiar with the ghazal will notice that I signed mine, Shahid. For me, the signature in my ghazals is a nod to a phase in my life when I was known as Shahid to the people closest to me. One of the pleasant coincidences in my life is to have been introduced to the form through the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali –because my decision to be called Shahid was about my need to hold on to an identity as a witness and so much of his poetry is an act of witnessing.
There really are two repetitions going on in ghazals that hold strictly to the form. There is the refrain, called a radif, and there is the rhyme that precedes it, called a qaafiyaa. In my poem, the refrain is “in prison.” I wanted the poem to get at how once you’re in prison, it’s inescapable. That the idea of prison begins to dominate who you are and what you think about the world. But also how it’s a multifaceted experience, how it’s a number of different stories that are only linked by prison, but so strongly linked by prison that you can’t get outside of the idea.
A lot of ghazals in English that I’ve read don’t use the qaafiyaa. I’d say even less try to do something to approximate the Urdu meter. The meter doesn’t translate to English, but Agha Shahid Ali talked about using syllable counts, or English meter to create a stand in. And I think the idea is that, by having a form that is built on so much repetition the writer is free to pull those disparate ideas, places, things together with the confidence that there is something built into the poem that will hold the connection there.
When I first wrote this ghazal, I didn’t have the qaafiyaa. I was talking to a friend of mine, John Murillo, about the poem and he suggested that I should push the form if I were to use it. What he was arguing with me was that the skill in manipulated the qaafiyaa, was like a rapper who can push the same rhyme for sixteen or twenty bars without it sounded redundant. And the thing is, after talking with John about it, I began reading more on the ghazal. I wanted to learn not only the form but also the sources of it and what were the typical themes. By getting more at those, I was able to think about what I was saying and how I was saying it in context of the form. What I found in deciding to work the trilogy of repetitions is that it led to thoughts, words and images I wouldn’t have found otherwise, and I hope it leads to a, sort of, restlessness agitation in the poem itself.
In addition to writing poems, you also just finished a memoir. How has it been to move between genres?
It’s interesting. There are things that I couldn’t do in the memoir that I can attempt in poetry and vice verse. My poems are about me and they aren’t about me. When I think of poetry I think of talking to the world about what I see in the world. My memoir was really me talking to the world about what I saw in my life. There is a filter in it that doesn’t exist as much in my poems. I don’t try to write every poem from my perspective. Poetry wouldn’t be as fun for me if I did. Even the poem published by Ploughshares has several strands of experience that aren’t in any way mine. My memoir is different. It’s about me. No matter how much I tried to write a world into the book, it’s unabashedly a world through Dwayne’s eyes. It’s about the eight and a half years I spent in prison and what it meant to be a juvenile in an adult prison. Sitting down and writing about the phase gave me the opportunity to do much more explaining than a poem gives room for, and it also just gave me time to say something about the hard accumulation of moments in prison. My poems go for an expression of a moment, a few moments at most. But the memoir is an attempt to let the reader stand at the bottom of the hill and feel what the snow ball feels like as it’s rolled down the slope and gathered more snow; to see that snow as it gathers and decide what to make of it.
I started writing alone. No workshops, no critiques, and few people reading what I’d written. Yet, I had the most diverse community a person could wish for. I used to kick it with Walter Mosley and then Franz Kafka. One week it would be Robert Jordan, and then it would be Octavia Butler. Baldwin, Wright, Hughes. Etheridge Knight, Galway Kinnel. Point is that literature opened up a world to me. Problem was that I still pretty much only interacted with that world through certain episodes, through some eternalized moments. I don’t think my early writing was as sensitive to the world I lived in because I was isolated, literally beginning my life as a poet during a sixteen month period where I spent twelve months in solitary confinement. Once I begin to get closer to the diversity that is in a few acres of prison cells, I began to understand that I had to at least think about the nuances of people.
Writing communities give you that same chance. To see nuances in folks and in the world and to write from a place, that at least on the periphery, cares about that nuance. I’ve been in rooms with white men from Mississippi who I honestly may have never spoken to outside of writing. Talked with amazing writings from different continents, different countries. And the thing is, the important thing is, that the talk isn’t always about writing. I remember one conversation I had about this pizza that you make with thinly sliced mandolin potatoes. The story is absolutely irrelevant, except one day I’ll eat that pizza and introduce it to someone else and my life will be a bit richer for having done it. You can’t really have rich work without have a rich life –or, I should say that I can’t imagine writing about a world if all I know are the things five blocks or fifty miles from my front door. The communities you mentioned have been a part of introducing me to the world. For me, someone with no money and no real history of travel or college in my family, Cave Canem, Bread Loaf, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Warren Wilson opened my eyes up to people from different states, different backgrounds, different goals, and different voices. I think that’s invaluable experience for a writer who is aiming to be sensitive in a world that is increasingly becoming simultaneously global for some folks and hyper-provincial for others.
Favorite writers. That’s a hard question. I’ve spent weeks with R. A. Salvatore. You know what I’m saying? I mean, I’ve gotten genuine pleasure from reading those four in one Reader’s Digest abridged edition. Then too, I’ve learned something about the music in a sentence from John Edgar Wideman. I spent a few years wanting to write something that in any way came close to the Walcott lines, “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” So I have to say that my influences are really all that I’ve read that comes back in my mind in the moments when I’m searching for a reason to give a care about the world.
Best reading? Two come to mind. The 10th anniversary Cave Canem reading with Elizabeth Alexander, Cyrus Cassells, Lucille Clifton, Kwame Dawes, Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, Nikky Finney, Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tim Seibles, Afaa Weaver. The range of voices there was crazy. And the crowd got involved, reciting the lines they knew, calling for certain poems. You couldn’t beat it for the sustained energy.
Then there was this Thomas Sayers Ellis reading at the University of Maryland. He has skills, and you can tell that he cares about the audience when he reads. Or at least he cares enough about the poems to make them new each time. Plus, there were a few moments during the reading where I just had to pause thinking about what he’d said. And if a poet can make you pause in a one to two minute poem, I feel like he’s accomplished something.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Advice. Stephen Barnes said everyone has to get out their first million words before they have something decent to write. He also said read ten times the amount that you want to write.
Just poems. I have a few ideas that I want to work out. One is about time and prison. I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, the edition edited by Bruce R. Smith with texts and commentaries. One of the commentaries addresses the issue of time and how it figures in the play. The commentary talks about how Shakespeare marks time in a way similar to the Book of Commons, through recognition of certain practices: holiday time, youths preparing to marry, mystery and epiphany. Shakespeare has those things function as measures that a reader or audience can use to trace the passage of time in the play. Prison has its similar set of ideas and I want to find a way to explore those in verse. Because ultimately, I think time is different in prison and if I find ways to bring out those differences I can say something that people recognize about their own lives in the lyrics and narratives I pull from prison.
December 10, 2008
Some things I was digging in '08
"Like the makeshift orchestra on the deck of the Titanic, the decline of a culture deserves the right arrangement. The sadder the world becomes, the more important the artists are, and the less their work belongs to them."
HTML GIANT: Part "boys' yuk yuk fag jokes club" perhaps, but more literary announcements (and random diatribes) than you can shake a stick at. "Fiction Workshops Examined" was a favorite.
Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes: "Blue Ridge Mountain Song" is so sad and gorgeous you'd need to be in mourning or going through a divorce to fully utilize it.
Hit Wave by Jon Leon: Great little prose chapbook by a Kitchen Press labelmate. I pushed it on some nonpoets and they didn't like it. Assholes.
Donna Stonecipher's poems, some of which I published in Absent.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: A page-turner! I couldn't put it down! I was on the edge of my seat! Seriously though.
Man on Wire and Funny Ha-Ha in the film department.
The Many Worlds Interpretation.
House and Gossip Girl. Can't be high-brow all the time.
December 8, 2008
How many kites?
Ploughshares blog Quickie Interviewee #32 Jen Karmin sent out an email the other day inviting everybody to join the ninth annual CALLS FROM HOME radio broadcast for prisoners. Maybe some of you got that email? Or heard of it elsewhere? Or have already called in a contribution? If not, the details are as follows: "Thousand Kites is asking you to call our toll-free line 877-518-0606 and speak directly to those behind bars this holiday season. An answering machine will record your message. Read a poem, sing a song, or just speak directly from your heart. Speak to someone you know or to everyone---make it uplifting. Call anytime, now through December 9, and record your message."
They are posting each call to their site as it comes in here, and will also broadcast the project on over 200 radio stations and make it available for download from the site on December 13th. As they point out, there are 2.4 million people behind bars in the US, and this is a small way to let them know they are not forgotten.
December 5, 2008
First, you divide it. Then you divide it again.
Hey there, fans of eclectic and cutting edge poetry, prose, interviews, art, and single-word palindromes: volume six, issue one of Emerson College’s grad-student run literary journal Redivider is now all printed up and ready to go, just in time for holiday gift-giving. For one thing, it’s always a pleasure to see what/who is in its pages (fiction by Robert Olen Butler, an interview with Shelley Jackson, poetry by Laura Kasischke and Bob Hicock, a pretty cover by Meagan O’Brien, the AWP Quickie contest winners, and much, much more), and this issue is no exception. And for another, it’s a total bargain: you can get a year’s subscription for just 10 bucks, and two years for $18. Click here for subscription details.
December 3, 2008
Numerology
VQR has just bestowed on the web at large the most disturbing fact I have heard all year. Perhaps in many years. According to a piece by Ashley Gilbertson in their Fall 2008 issue (audio interview posted here), every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide.
I know that the whole casualty model is flawed to begin with (the vast number of amputees and vets with brain trauma attest to that), but this simple monthly number of 690 makes it obscenely incomplete.
According to my dad, the lesson that the silent, taciturn Texas veterans he grew up with had to offer was this: “The Army may teach you how to kill, but it doesn’t teach you how to live with yourself afterwards.”
Check out the numbers compiled by Michelle Paley in the online article itself:
4,128 number of American soldier combat deaths in Iraq (as of August 2, 2008)
21 number of American soldier suicides in Iraq (as of August 2, 2008)
550 average number of completed suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans not in the care of the VA
140 average number of completed suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans within the care of the VA
1,000 approximate number of attempted suicides per month by Iraq/Afghanistan veterans in the care of the Department of Veteran Affairs
300,000 approximate number of Iraq veterans who report signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or major depression
3,000 number of mental healthcare professionals specializing in PTSD hired by the VA since 2005
HR 327 bill signed into law by President Bush on November 5, 2007, mandating mental health training for VA staff, mental health screenings for veterans receiving VA care, and suicide counselors for all VA health care facilities
183 average wait, in days, for a disability claim to be processed for Iraq/Afghanistan veterans
1,600 number of calls by veterans to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in one month, three months after the NSPL veteran hotline was created in July 2007
8,500 approximate number of calls by veterans to the NSPL in one month, twelve months after the veteran hotline was introduced
47 percentage of Iraq veterans with PTSD or depression who have not sought treatment
2–3 billions of dollars veteran PTSD and depression cost the US annually
2 years it would take for improved veteran care to pay for itself, based on increased productivity and reduced medical costs
Isn’t it satisfying when our little literary subculture produces something that is not only culturally relevant, but relevant now, in a big bad way?
