by Nathan Moore
 Most Wanted, by Jeff Encke “Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats.”
For this installment of Just One Thing, I asked Jeff Encke about his collection Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, which I find both intriguing and beautiful. The work opens up so many questions about the nature of a collection of poetry and about chance and reading.
Most Wanted is not your typical collection but instead one presented as a deck of cards. As such, word and image are married in a unique way. Why did you decide to present the collection in this manner, and what are your thoughts about how the reader might approach the work, what reading process they might employ?
Spinal Liberation: A Manifesto for Chance Operation
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000
Every poet who compiles a book-length collection faces a figure of this magnitude. Most Wanted consists of 52 poems. One can order 52 poems in exactly 8.0658 x 1067 ways — the factorial of 52, or 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 … 52. A group of 104 poems presents an even less imaginable total of 6.5044 x 10135 permutations. If each distinct arrangement represents a different possible book, then the work the poet would have to do to identify the best book from a group of 52 poems (assuming such a thing exists) is equally inconceivable. If the überpoet in question had the manuscripts printed and arranged ahead of time and could read one per minute, the task would still take 1.5346 x 1062 years. It’s probably safe to assume that our überpoet wouldn’t live that long. Even if Knopf published the collection.
Few poets I know see their work in terms of set permutations and probabilities, but most are familiar with the agoraphobic anxiety of infinite possibility — that perilous angst the artist in John Ashbery’s sestina “The Painter” feels as he tries to get the sea to sit for a portrait. An intimate recognition of and respect for infinite possibility has defined the work of many modern poets, inspiring them in varying degrees to embrace the futility of authorial intention, abandon narrative and write what Ashbery once called “hymns to possibility.”
For most, though, the consequence of uncertainty is a struggle against continuous failure with respect to self-inflicted notions of mastery. When sitting down to arrange a manuscript, a poet typically assumes that there’s a right way to do it. Certain poems belong together. An inherent natural order should be respected. While we can argue endlessly about what the specific principles of arrangement entail, the ethic of aesthetic perfection persists. If it didn’t, institutions like peer-edited journals, MFA programs, poetry prizes, state laureateships and genius grants would cease to exist.
Certain arbitrary impositions of order simplify the poet’s task. A subset of poems may share some common characteristic. You may decide, for example, that six sonnets belong together, and since there are only six, you’ll probably overlook the 720 ways to arrange them. Or perhaps you’ll decide to frontload the manuscript with the 10 best poems; even the 3.6 million variations of this subset are less daunting than the alternative (8.0658 x 1067). After months of rearranging, when you’re certain you’ve exhausted all the possibilities, you ultimately close your eyes and take the plunge. It’s called trusting your gut. Toss a pinch of salt into the pot and call it done — you don’t count the grains. You taste the soup and, like a little god, decide it’s good.
One’s comfort level with that ineluctable moment of arbitrariness — that surrender to chance operation — is what defines poet. No matter how much formal, psychological or narrative control the poet attempts to exert, writing for an audience is always a gamble. Each poet defines the stakes. When I consider the risk of writing, and the concomitant reward of complete freedom, W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” always comes to mind:
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t
you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write
In their 1992 study “Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to Its Lair” (appearing in the Annals of Applied Probability), mathematicians David Bayer and Persi Warren Diaconis famously averred that it takes seven riffle shuffles to randomize a deck of cards. On those rare occasions when I read Most Wanted straight through, I always begin by shuffling the deck seven times. I could do this for the rest of my life and probably never reproduce the same sequence.
I was recently invited to give a reading at a liberal arts college in Eastern Washington. When I came to Most Wanted, I decided to read from the freshly randomized deck continuously, as if it were a single poem. The natural symmetry and flow of the card order caught me by surprise, and I stumbled a few times as I read. I casted each card into a disheveled pile on the lectern, as if I were dealing a 52-card hand to eternity. During the post-reading Q&A session, a perceptive student asked me how I felt knowing that I would never read all the variations of Most Wanted. I answered that the thought was depressing, and the audience laughed, but I had meant it.
Most Wanted is a multifaceted animal. It has many heads. It wears many hats. Among other things, its form was meant to allude to the insurmountable distance between authors and readers (or lovers and beloveds), a distance that resides at the center of Merwin’s youthful self-doubt. My decision to print excerpts from the Most Wanted series on a deck of cards represented in some sense an attempt to free myself from the psychological strictures of literary production, throw off the shackles of the spine, and shift the anxiety of order to my readers. Together we — that is, all readers of Most Wanted — have a better chance, albeit an infinitesimal one, of discovering the best book. That may still be a hopeless cause, but at least the odds have improved.
The full-length version of Most Wanted is currently looking for a spine. Publishers may apply here: jeff (at) matlub (dot) net.
Jeff Encke’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Salt Hill and others. He published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse in 2004, through his imprint, Last Tangos Editions, and has since sold almost 2,000 decks to poets, tarot readers, book artists, playing card collectors and special-collections libraries throughout the world. Until 2003, he taught writing and criticism at Columbia University, where was writer-in-residence for the Program in Narrative Medicine while completing his Ph.D. in English. He now lives in Seattle, where he edits for a large philanthropic organization and teaches literature on weekends at Richard Hugo House.
 Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Dave Jarecki
 Moist Meridian, by Henry Hughes “If you write all the time, you’re going to get more of those “bonuses,” as Stafford calls them.”
Henry Hughes is a very hard working poet, and the evolution of his lines and style is a product of the amount of time he puts in. His second book, Moist Meridian (2009, Mammoth Books), has amazing sea legs as it crosses through some of life’s more interesting passages. During an interview, I asked Hughes about a specific line in one of his more aerial poems, “Flight,” in which he details the fatalistic musings of a traveler aboard an airline. I wanted to find out about his choice to be playful in that moment.
There’s a line in the second-to-last stanza that reads: “The invisible captain speaks of seat belts, / weather and time — and that’s fine if we’re coming back to earth.” You could have started that in so many different ways, but you wrote, “Invisible captain.” Was that phrase ever anything other than “Invisible captain,” and how do you as a teacher get your students to be playful in their writing?
I don’t think the line was ever anything else but “Invisible captain.” Plenty of lines get changed quite a bit, as you well know. Sometimes they even get better.
Just the way it’s there in the sentence structurally, it sounds like the kind of thing I do a lot, especially in my first drafts. If I’m going to modify something, I’ll do it kind of crazily. If I get one out of 10 of them to work, then it’s worth it.
Rereading it, the line feels like it was probably that way since the first draft. Lots of other things in this poem were probably revised, however.
The poem is about religion and God, and the indifference of the universe when you’re up there in a plane. You’re at the mercy of this crazy craft and crew. “Invisible captain” works nicely as a God-thing. And I was just being playful. And I got lucky.
Stafford talked a lot about luck, but I like the Arnold Palmer quote that you’ll find in writing books here and there. He makes this incredible shot, some sort of sand-trap-to-green thing. Someone says, “Lucky shot, Arnold.” And Palmer says, “Yeah, the more I practice the luckier I get.”
If you write all the time, you’re going to get more of those “bonuses,” as Stafford calls them. You’ll pick up extra points here and there.
In terms of getting students to be more playful, I’ve talked with plenty of art professors about this. You can encourage playfulness, you can lighten up on kids a little bit, and you can be conscious about not making them write like you write.
A lot of writing teachers and artists admit to the fact that, unconsciously, we want our students to write like us. We know it’s bad, but unconsciously we do it. We encourage a kind of aesthetic that we love.
One thing you can do is be better about lightening up on your students, letting them do more of whatever the hell they want to do without being careless and stupid. Of course they still need some guidance.
I do think a lot depends on the way we grow up, and who we are, and the way our minds form. There are a million reasons why some people are good at math, or music, or good at finding their way through a crowded city, for instance.
There are also those students that don’t need play. Maybe they need structure. I have some students who just absolutely gush — they bring in five-page poems that are just wild sprawls. I say, “Man, there’s a lot of really neat stuff here, but there’s no form, there’s no care.”
It’s always a paradox. You want to be free and original and organic, but you also want to be artistic and controlled.
Order Moist Meridian from Amazon. Find out more about Hughes’ work at his website.
 Dave Jarecki writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction from his home in Portland, Ore. Read and listen to his work, as well as the work of guest writers, at DaveJarecki.com.
by Nathan Moore
 Make Believe, by Thom Donovan “All poetry is about seeing and, more accurately, a discourse of the senses in which seeing is just one faculty.”
For this installment of Just One Thing, I have asked poet Thom Donovan a single question about his new e-chapbook, Make Believe.
Many moments in Make Believe are concerned with vision. These poems, among other things, explore vision in various modes, from the spectacle of cable news to the very formation of subjectivity. Do you think of your work as constructing what might be called a poetics of seeing?
Many of the poets I have grown up reading closely tend to be poets associated with “seeing.” George Oppen, Louis Zukofsky … an Objectivist continuum. Then again, any poetry worth its mettle tends to be preoccupied with vision, whether vision in its literal fact (optics, phenomenology, spectacle) or ‘inward’ states (memory, imagination, hallucination, eidetics).
Vision is also of course very much meditated by language. There is no “pure” seeing in poetry without the literal word — the fact that words are printed or heard, that they are likewise seen in the air as Hannah Weiner’s “clairvoyance” demonstrates. So I want to say that Make Believe puts forward a “poetics of seeing,” but first qualify that all poetry is about “seeing” and, more accurately, a discourse of the senses in which seeing is just one faculty.
Make Believe responds to images from various films, videos and other media noted on the last page of the book, including Guy Ben-Ner’s Berkeley Island, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006), videos by Harun Farocki, Terry Cuddy’s video essays about Harriet Tubman, as well as Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1972). “Berkeley Island” begins from some research I was doing about Ben-Ner’s work in relation to solipsistic philosophy and the political situation in the Middle-East — namely the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Ben-Ner is Israeli, so I was thinking about how much his work is concerned with his position as an Israeli citizen. That “Berkeley Island” stages Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe within the home of the artist — where the artist uses his children as actors — dramatizes a situation of interiority.
At a micro-level, the set of “Berkeley Island” as well as the video’s content represent the ego, nuclear family, patriarchy (the “law of the father”); at a macro level, we can read these same boundaries existing among states internationally. For Ben-Ner to take on Defoe’s work in the ways he does I cannot help but read through a micro and macro politics of what Lévinas calls “the face of the other” (that which makes a radical ethical demand upon subjects). Ben-Ner “acts out” the problem of his biographical interiority if only so that something will break through to the other side of the aesthetic glass where political and ethical decisions are made. Where I write “acting out,” I mean it in the psychological sense of a subject learning to manage their traumas, but also in the sense that one becomes abandoned. One plays to have control, and to learn how to give control up. That Ben-Ner plays with his children in most of his videos seems essential to the political and ethical dimensions of his project.
While I am saying all of this, I wonder how much any of what I’m saying is conveyed by the poem itself. The poem leads, as David Wolach points out, with its ear, but often the senses become cross-wired — confused and ruinous. I dedicated the poem to my friend Gregg Biglieri who is a master of the pun, and of what he calls “negative synaesthesia” after Zukofsky’s Bottom. Flights into nonsense — into language play — seem necessary for the brain and the senses to sync themselves. So in “Berkeley Island” “when dissolves to wind” and a lens “points and chutes” as though to conflate photography with branching. Nonsense, of which poetry obviously has a lot, is meta-political in that it refuses to reduce language use to a representation (whether for a vulgarly conceived common sense or for the sake of communication).
Revolutionary moments and moments of insurrection prove this time and time again. There is also a sense for me after Biglieri’s work that the ear (rather than the eye) is the direct line to others. The lines “One’s ears for others / look into their own” (paraphrased from one of Zukofky’s shorter poems) alludes to this ethical dimension of listening/hearing. By giving ourselves to the ear, by letting the ear guide us and the eyes take a back seat, we perhaps open to something more ethical than the logical, rational, purposeful eye will permit. This link between ethics and aurality is definitely one of the major ones made by French Phenomenology from Sartre through Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. But it is also an idea reiterated by poets throughout history, especially “visionary” ones. Blake, Dickinson, Oppen are all important reference points for my own poetics in this regard.
Throughout Make Believe, the “Imaginary” (in Lacan’s senses of this term) takes precedence. In “Berkeley Island,” we are at the “mirror stage” — the point where an ego begins to recognize itself through a projection of (its own) otherness. The home is the site of the imaginary, being “at home” where relations between different egos issue from. In “Surveillance Says” (the second poem), I was thinking of the problems of the other’s gaze as a gaze of surveillance and interpellation — all of these ways of identifying and registering the “self” which Foucault originally historicized and the artist Haroun Farocki (whose videos the poem are directly responding to) has made much of his art about. “Children of Men” (the third poem) is a preliminary meditation on Alain Badiou’s philosophy, and specifically the term “grace” as it is used in Badiou’s book on St. Paul, The Foundation of Universalism. Looking back on the film Children of Men, the film seems a bit cheesy, and yet I dwell on its messianic tropes as they relate to the structure of social revolutions. I have been preoccupied by forms of messianism for a long time, so this poem channels some of that thinking. Aren’t all revolutionary moments moments of return to the imaginary, as if to say “this isn’t working,” or to ask “what if there were another image (of what we are) instead of this one?”
In Lacanian psychoanalysis the procession from the Imaginary to the Real leads to nothing less than a psychotic break from which subjectivity must be reconstituted, made-up again. The radical subject formation articulated by Badiou’s notion of Truth — by which the subject is subtracted from (revolutionary) events — is an idea I continue to come back to as a way of thinking through subjectivity non-representationally — as a process rather than a telos of social reality.
In “Unsalvageable in Auburn,” I began to think more radically about the lyrical line, and especially forms of caesura (movement within the line itself). All the poems of this section of the book, for me, are trying to get to this line that is constantly moving (yet interruptive and polyvocal) through a concatenated syntax and certain affective forms of address. This problem has been with me for some time since the composition of those poems in spring 2007. “Unsalvageable in Auburn” also starts to think about the problem of salvageability as an extension of community, activism and love. What happens when what we share is what is ruined, thus not always there for the sharing — occulted, destroyed, lost or displaced? This is a question I started to ask myself in the spring of 2007 that has informed my poetics ever since.
The last poem of the book, “The Spirit of the Beehive,” is a meditation on Vince Erice’s film by the same name. In one of the opening scenes of the film we see an audience of children watching James Whale’s Frankenstein. Throughout the film, the protagonist — a girl of about 6 or 7 played by Isabel Telleria — continually hallucinates the Frankenstein monster. Eventually she meets with a Republican solider who has taken refuge in an abandoned stable near the girl’s house. She brings him food and comforts him. When the soldier disappears one day (he is presumably executed by the people of the girl’s town), the girl suffers a psychotic break. As in “Berkeley Island” and “Children of Men,” “The Spirit of the Beehive” envisions an allegory.
At the level of form it would like to draw out this allegory through a kind of ekphrasis by which certain aesthetic facts are not only described but elevated to propositions about the imaginary and the terrible turn the social imagination must take in order for a society to become fascist. The form of “The Spirit of the Beehive” is very similar to “Berkeley Island,” perhaps because the poems are dealing with inverse problems. How, on the one hand, does one rescue the ego from the solipsistic disregard of others? How, on the other, does the subsumption of the ego by what Lacan calls the “big other” (the other of fascist “fatherland” and democratic multitude alike) risk something equally painful and destructive?
View Make Believe at Wheelhouse Press.
Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire and co-edits ON Contemporary Practice. He is co-curating SEGUE series this December/January and is an active participant in the Nonsite Collective. His critical work and poetry have appeared widely and most recently in ECOPOETICS6/7, War and Peace vol. 4, PAJ, The Brooklyn Rail and with The Fanzine. He is currently working on a collection of critical texts titled Critical Objects 2005-2010, as well as a book on cross-cultural translation after disaster, and a manuscript of poetry titled The Hole. He teaches at Bard College, School of Visual Arts and Baruch College.
Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Nathan Moore
 Der Pyjamaist, by Matthew Zapruder “It came together in this really amazing object.”
Struck by its shocking beauty, I’ve chosen to ask Matthew Zapruder about a new graphic novel version of his poem, “The Pajamaist,” which is the title poem from his Copper Canyon Press collection.
Zapruder has authored two collections of poetry: American Linden and The Pajamaist, selected by Tony Hoagland as winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. His poems, essays and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many publications, including Open City, Bomb, Harvard Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The New Yorker, The Believer and The Los Angeles Times. He is also co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. His third full-length collection, Come On All You Ghosts, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, works as an editor for Wave Books, and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Desert.
In this series, we ask the poet just one thing about their work. Below is my question for Zapruder, followed by his answer.
German publisher Luxbooks recently released a graphic novel in German of your title poem from the book The Pajamaist, with drawings by Martina Hoffman. How did that come about, and what is your reaction to seeing a visual interpretation of your work — in German no less?
The way it came about is Luxbooks, a wonderful publishing house in Germany that does extremely high-quality poetry books, has a division of the press where they publish contemporary American poetry in German translation. I don’t know exactly how they became aware of my work, but Ron Winkler, a German poet, translated a selection of my poems from my first two books as well as my third (forthcoming next year from Copper Canyon). Luxbooks also does illustrated books — they did one by Matthea Harvey — and asked me if I would be interested in a graphic novel version of the title poem of my second book, “The Pajamaist,” which is basically a synopsis for a novel that does not actually exist, about a person who discovers a way to transfer other people’s suffering to himself, so that he can suffer for them. To which of course my answer was yes.
Luxbooks found a fantastic German artist, Martina Hoffman, who has just the right sensibility (very contemporary, dark but also whimsical and full of feeling, and also somehow quite urban, which is right for this particular poem). Basically they did all the work with Martina and Ron. My only contribution was to tell them to use as much or as little of the text as they thought would make the best graphic novel, and not to worry about me, only the book. It came together in this really amazing object: The book is in a soft cover casing, and when you open it you see the actual graphic novel, along with a great little mysterious business card that gives a phone number and describes the services of the Pajamaist. The whole thing is perfectly done, and my reaction is that I love it, and hope people get to see it.
You can see the graphic novel version of the poem at artist Martina Hoffmann’s website. You can also order the collection through the Luxbooks site.
Nathan Moore is community director and columnist for Read Write Poem. In his spare time, he plays with his children and with fire. Never at the same time. He blogs at Exhaust Fumes and French Fries.
by Jesssica Fox-Wilson
 Yellowrocket, by Todd Boss “Nature aches at the seams with both tenderness and savagery, which makes it a divine puzzle, a great work of art.”
Todd Boss’ first book of poems, Yellowrocket, is firmly rooted in a sense of place. The book centers on the landscape of the upper Midwest. As such, its poems are populated with images of farmsteads delineated on maps, violent storms wreaking havoc on a harvest and stands of trees that line the edges of properties. Mingled with these poems are poems that examine the workings of personal relationships — between husbands and wives and fathers and sons.
Several poems throughout the book combine these two seemingly separate themes. For instance, in a poem that appears near the end of the collection, “What Yesterday Appeared a Scar,” the narrator ponders his marriage while watching a frozen lake. He writes: “ … My sorrow / is tomorrow’s only season, / and it comes on now // like this cold thaw comes / upon the lake / or like the soft song one sings to sing / the past to sleep / only to keep it wide awake.” In images such as these, the beauty and austerity of the landscape mirrors the narrator’s sense of sorrow and longing.
I recently had the opportunity to ask Todd Boss about his writing about landscapes and relationships and how those two are connected for him.
Yellowrocket includes poems that examine the natural landscapes of the narrator’s childhood home, as well as poems that explore the shape of intimate relationships, such as those between a husband and wife. In what ways has writing about external landscapes informed your writing about emotional landscapes?
I guess it’s all bound up in my understanding of “God,” or whatever you want to call the creative forces behind the universe.
It’s negligence to call it science, I think. Nature is more than a confluence of geological forces; we are of the same stuff, and so we are mirrored in nature, and vice versa. Therefore, nature has two brains, a right and a left. It has a soul and it speaks and thinks and has ideas about itself, though perhaps none of these are conscious.
Nature aches at the seams with both tenderness and savagery, which makes it a divine puzzle, a great work of art. Maybe all nature writing is ekphrasis.
Nature exhibits both conservative and liberal tendencies. Maybe all nature writing is peacemaking except that which fails to be truthful.
To write truthfully about nature is to write about a conflicted chaos of personalities, deities, impulses and relationships. Any exploration of nature’s aspects is also by default an exploration of one’s own, since we have only our own to explore from.
So I guess I must excuse myself from your question. My writing about the natural world does not “inform” my writing about emotional landscapes. They are in fact the same thing. In poems about my turbulent marriage, my wife is cast variously as a force of nature, an absence, a wild rose, etc. Meanwhile, my poems cast nature as a dark muse, an oncoming train, a bridal couple. And then god keeps reappearing, as a poker player and a lousy poet.
It’s possible to think of ourselves as the consciousness of the planet. Nobody makes any sense of it but us, after all. And yet, our consciousness itself was bestowed upon us. Some want to think this happened by chance, but then isn’t chance the responsible divinity? We are all religious. We all believe in something, for even nothing is something. I believe that to write about the world is to study the sacred (the mystery) and the profane (the self), and that no conversation about one can preclude the other.
Order Yellowrocket from Amazon. Find out more about his work at his website.
Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Fall Creek, Wisconsin, and attended St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN and received his MFA from University of Alaska-Anchorage. His poetry has appeared in many journals, including The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Boss lives and works in the Twin Cities.
by Sarah J. Sloat
 Talk Poetry, by Mairéad Byrne “My ambition to talk only in poetry hasn’t been completely achieved.”
Mairéad Byrne’s collection of prose poems, Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), is going on 3 years old but it’s still as fresh as the smell of a new car. The bright green cover should clue you in: think energy. Think breath mints for the brain.
Like a lot of her fans, I discovered Byrne’s poetry through her blog, which provides temporary housing to a number of the poems in the collection. One of the first things you’ll notice about the poems is the voice — funny, open and ready to take on the world. Everything is fair game for her, even terrorism, as in this excerpt from “The Tired Terrorist”:
The terrorist was tired. Goddammit he said, I could do with some bacon & eggs. He was sick to the back teeth of killing. It was ugly. He’d had enough. He laid down his shotgun, his nail-gun, his knife. He emptied his pockets. He unzipped his jacket. He thought of the spare room in his mother’s house.
What I particularly like about these poems is the diction. They read like someone talking, and can careen off into unselfconscious monologues, or bend away on a hilarious tangent. This, for example, is the beginning of “Quick Movie”:
I had to watch the movie very fast because I was going out. The valedictorian. The guy. His sister. Her father. Inexplicable love. The break-up. Jail time. On a plane to England. Good movie!
Or this from “The Russian Week”:
Inside this week is another week & inside that week is another week & inside that week is another week & inside that is another week & inside that is another week & inside that week is another week so that instead of 7 days each week is actually composed of 7 weeks each one a little smaller than its container week but still workable & with rosy cheeks.
Byrne’s poetry is highly original, and very inviting because it’s like eavesdropping on an interesting conversation. It makes you want to get a good look at the person talking, to find out their take on things. In this book, you’ll find Byrne’s take on divorce, parking, family photographs, shingles and whether you can die from eating pancakes.
Although I think her poetry speaks for itself, I asked the poet about the meaning of Talk Poetry. Is it a kind of poetry, or an invitation, as in “let’s talk poetry?”
What’s meant by the title Talk Poetry?
On my blog, “Heaven,” in 2005, I began to notice a few poems which mentioned the phrase or concept talk poetry. The first was about my plan to learn or improve on languages: Italian (2005-2010), French (2010-2013), Spanish (2013-2018), Irish (2018-2021), Turkish (2021-2026), and my concurrent realization that all I really wanted to talk was poetry. That poem was actually called “Talk Poetry.” Then there was another one that year:
Writing Practice
I write every day.
But not really.
But really.
This is a new way of speaking.
Talk poetry.
And, in early 2006, this, which doesn’t mention talk poetry but it’s the same idea:
A New Way of Talking
Poetry is important poetry is not important.
I am an important poet I am not important.
He was indifferent as to what might happen to his pictures even
though what might happen
to them affected him profoundly, well that is the way one is, why not,
one is like that.
Welcome to our enclosure.
One of the good things about poetry is that it lets you say contradictory things, and multiple things, at once. Another thing that happened in 2004-2005 was Brendan Lorber asked me to do a talk/poetry reading at the Zinc Bar in New York. Instead of doing a talk, and then a reading, I put the poems into the talk. It was such a relief. Really, I wanted to talk only in poetry.
Also in 2005, I did a radio interview with William Gillespie, who had a show on Brown Student Radio, and I answered every question with a poem. I had a big sheaf of them with me and I had to think quick. Ideally I would write a colossal swathe of poems and my memory would be sharp enough to pluck them out as needed. I think this would be better than the way I usually talk.
It’s not just a question of talking only in poetry. It’s also the relief of excluding everything that isn’t poetry. My ambition to talk only in poetry hasn’t been completely achieved. But poetry is where my talk is most alive, or at least most like me. I’m aware it’s kind of one-way traffic. Following from my ambition to talk only in poetry, however, came an intense interest in audience, and a posture of listening.
One of these years I might even get a conversation going. I know I wrote the stuff but, for me, it’s like the poems are zones, meeting places where spirits can flash up. It’s very talky, and material, but that materiality (which I also love) can clear in an instant and open on joy, which is shared. That’s what it’s about.
Order Talk Poetry from Miami University Press. Learn more about Mairéad Byrne by visiting her blog.
 Sarah J. Sloat lives in Germany, where she works in news. Sarah likes red wine, olives and stinky cheese, rather like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Her chapbook “In the Voice of a Minor Saint” was published by Tilt Press in 2009. She writes at The Rain in My Purse.
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Wear it loud, wear it proud! Display the Read Write Poem badge on your site. Just click here or on the image above to get the code! read write poem news- yes, yes, here’s another virtual book tour stop for ‘a walk through the memory palace’
February 6, 2010 | 11:37 amFind the latest tour stop for Pamela Johnson Parker’s debut collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace at Jillypoet, Jill Crammond Wickham’s blog, where you can find an interview with Pamela that discusses how she creates manuscripts.
Previous stops include Daniel Romo at his blog, Peyote Soliloquies and James Brush at his blog, Coyote Mercury.
You can find all our plans for the tour here.
- the best of the web is in our ranks
February 6, 2010 | 11:35 amSarah J. Sloat’s poem,”Attending the Tasting” (published in The Literary Bohemian) has been selected for Best of the Web 2010. Congratulations, Sarah!
- another (w00t!) read write poem member on the joe milford poetry show
February 6, 2010 | 11:34 amOn the Joe Milford Poetry Show tomorrow (Feb. 6): W.F. Roby at 9 AM (PST). Find the show here!
Joe describes Will as a “great language poet and bad-ass.”
- ‘literary podcasting made simple with wordpress.com’
February 6, 2010 | 11:33 amDave Bonta has published a how-to article that might be of interest to WordPress users: “Literary Podcasting Made Simple with WordPress.com,” based on his and Beth Adams’ experience at Qarrtsiluni.
Thanks, Dave, for continuing to help make the community aware of technological resources that can expand our art.
- the latest (virtual) book tour stop for ‘a walk through the memory palace’
February 3, 2010 | 3:53 pmThe latest tour stop has been posted for Pamela Johnson Parker’s debut collection, A Walk Through the Memory Palace. Find out how Daniel Romo responded to the work at his blog, Peyote Soliloquies.
James Brush provided our first tour stop at his blog, Coyote Mercury.
You can find all our plans for the tour here.
- planning for napowrimo in april, and you are invited!
February 2, 2010 | 6:12 pmHello, hello dear Read Write Poem community members! We are in the planning stages for NaPoWriMo. (What? Is that a groan I hear, or an excited exclamation?)
We are planning another prompt-every-day for those folks who love to write a daily poem in April (which is, as most of you know, National Poetry Month in the United States — although there is an international following of writing poetry every day in April, too, so it is not just about the States).
Anyway! This is a call for prompts because we want to run your ideas, one every day, in April. So here’s what to do:
- Prompts must be no more than 250 words, and we will take the first 30 that we receive.
- Include “NaPoWriMo Prompt” in the subject line of your email as well as your username (e.g., the name you use when you log in) so we can match you up with your prompt and give you the link love.
- Email your submission (in the body of the email — no attachments please) to prompts (at) readwritepoem (dot) org!
We’ll let you know when we’ve got the 30, but don’t delay because it takes a lot of time to format the posts and we want to be ready come April Fools’ Day. Woohoo!
- new senior contributors at read write poem
February 2, 2010 | 11:51 amWe are thrilled to announce that Ren Powell and Dave Jarecki are moving into the senior contributor role at Read Write Poem. Both have been writing feverishly for the site, as well as providing ideas for content and for the community as a whole. In short, they make this site a more lively, and better, place.
Ren and Dave will fill the roles vacated by Carolee Sherwood and Jill Crammond Wickham, who have moved into the manager role.
Everyone please thank Ren and Dave for their hard work and commitment to Read Write Poem.
- rounding out the virtual book tour of sarah j. sloat’s ‘in the voice of a minor saint’
January 31, 2010 | 1:53 pmOur last stop on the Virtual Book Tour of Sarah J. Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint is with Ren Powell. Find Ren’s review at More Babel.
Joseph Harker provided our first stop in December, and you can find David Moolten’s review at Edible Detritus. David’s was followed by Dave Jarecki’s. Dave’s review is at his blog. Find Jill Crammond Wickham’s at Jillypoet: Mom Trying to Write.
In case you missed the introduction, we are (virtually) hosting Sarah J. Sloat’s In the Voice of a Minor Saint. For complete tour information, such as how you can get your own copy of the collection or how you can get involved in future tours, read this post.
- make your own book: get off the computer and onto the paper
January 30, 2010 | 4:19 pmBeth Adams has posted her latest project at The Cassandra Pages. “A Handmade Book” may not explicate all the details of bookbinding, but Beth shows readers the “Secret Belgian Binding.” It’s a beautiful as well as inspiring post.
If you would like more detailed instructions, Google “secret Belgian bookbinding” and find sites such as this one. Or look for a local book arts class for hands-on instruction.
As Beth says, ” … it did me good to get away from the computer and feel my hands at work!”
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