The Book of Men and Women, by David Biespiel

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics and also an expert in teaching writing. He has taught at every [...]]]> by David Jarecki

The Book of Men and Women, by David Biespiel

“That’s what’s interesting to me. The state of being both lost and found.”

David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics and also an expert in teaching writing. He has taught at every level of education, from a one-room schoolhouse to large university campuses, and has lectured and spoken to audiences throughout the United States. In 1999, looking to create an independent writing studio, Biespiel founded the Attic in Portland, Oregon’s historic Hawthorne district.

His publications include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, Wild Civility, and most recently The Book of Men and Women, which was among the Poetry Foundation’s selections of top poetry of 2009. In addition, he has been honored with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, a Lannan Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.

In The Book of Men and Women, Biespiel addresses the times in which we live with a perspective that shifts from global to introspective with ease. Always eager and willing to find new layers of metaphor, Biespiel goes to one of our oldest knonw source documents — The Book of Genesis — to help get the collection started. When we met in January to discuss the book, one of the first things we talked about was what it’s like to “cover” Genesis, and whether or not it benefits the reader to brush up on the ancient script.

I recently heard you mention that the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, informed some of poems in the book. As it relates to your opening poem, “Genesis 12,” do you think someone needs to be knowledgeable of this particular chapter to appreciate the piece?

I wrote it under the assumption that a reader would google Genesis: 12.

Essentially I was trying to write my own version and interpretive dramatization of that particular chapter of the Bible. The word I use is covering. I cover Genesis: 12 like the band on the corner covers “House of the Rising Sun.”

The Biblical Genesis: 12 is the point where Abraham is leaving his homeland and headed to Canaan. That’s the transition. If he doesn’t leave Ur, or wherever he was from, and go to Canaan, a lot of things don’t happen. Essentially, Abraham is a fanatic; his trek is related to his fanaticism.

My view of fanatics is that they’re so far around the bend in their fanaticism, that they come right around to the edge of doubt. If you could flip them, you could do so easily, and they wouldn’t know what they’re doing. People who come out of fanaticism often say things like, “Wow, it was like a bad dream.” Or an addiction.

I wanted to tell my version of the story from this awareness. The poem ends with the sentence, “I’m certain I’ve lost my mind.” Of course that’s what the fanatic has done: he’s lost his old mind and taken on a new one.

In the end, the poem is trying to look at Abraham as a prophet who’s unsure. The whole experience isn’t that pleasurable for him.

What the poem doesn’t address is the larger question that relates to the transitional moment in Biblical history, regardless of whether it’s factual. Instead it addresses the emotional state. That’s what’s interesting to me. The state of being both lost and found. And that’s not a Jewish tradition, per se. It’s more of an Evangelical tradition I suppose.

Abraham knows what he’s doing, but he also knows that by doing it, he’s wandering. It initiates this type of wandering motif throughout the entire collection.

You can find out more about The Book of Men and Women, Biespiel’s sixth book, at the University of Washington Press. For more about David Biespiel and his work, visit his blog.

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.

Hotel Imperium, by Rachel Loden

I usually avoid reading political poetry, the poor thing so often abused with polemic and righteousness, so I was skeptical when a friend first recommended Rachel Loden’s “Hotel Imperium.” Would I enjoy a collection [...]]]> by Sarah J. Sloat

Hotel Imperium, by Rachel Loden

“Dan Rather rents by the month; everybody feels sorry for him, even the pimps.”

I usually avoid reading political poetry, the poor thing so often abused with polemic and righteousness, so I was skeptical when a friend first recommended Rachel Loden’s “Hotel Imperium.” Would I enjoy a collection largely preoccupied with Richard Nixon and the Soviet Union?

Luckily Loden is that rare bird who writes political poetry that’s both serious and entertaining. She recently published a new book called Dick of the Dead, which sent me back to my shelf to re-read “Hotel Imperium.” In her poems, she takes on politicians, it’s true, but also celebrity, sexuality, pop culture, power, money and revenge. A heady mix, and occasionally campy.

You can read a selection from “Hotel Imperium” here, but for a taste of Loden’s wit, here’s the beginning of “Blues for the Evil Empire:”

Consider the late Eurasian entity, how it lumbered
into the groggy arms of history where it was

buried. Which is more than you can say
for Lenin’s body, chilly like a mammoth

in an ice floe, if less hairy….

For “Just One Thing” I asked Loden this burning question,

Can you tell me a little about the clientele at the Hotel Imperium?

Well, let me say first that it was once a very grand hotel, but it has seen cheerier days. The lobby is trending toward seedy, like the clientele; both smell of ancient cigarettes and alcohol. Gathered in it, at any point: revolutionists, opportunists, adventurers, ladies of the night and fading men of the hour.

Various central bankers, corporate Sturmführers and other financial desperados turn up for assignations they might prefer to keep out of the Wall Street Journal.

A celebrated wealth manager (and Ponzi schemer) is reluctant to give up his usual lunch table in the restaurant, where he politely ignores the entreaties of a long line of potential marks. The more he rebuffs them, the more frantically they press him with cash.

Other regulars: General Dzhokhar Dudayev of the Chechen Republic, eluding the laser-guided missile that has his name on it; J. Edgar Hoover in a short black cocktail sheath, drinking a mint julep; and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, jollier company for J. Edgar since statues of him started going back up in Moscow and Minsk.

D-list pop stars. Card sharks. A girl who looks alarmingly like Little Bo Peep (but why are her petticoats in tatters?).

Dan Rather rents by the month; everybody feels sorry for him, even the pimps.

Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower wouldn’t be caught dead there, but rumor is that they rent a room once a year and fill it with flowers. Nobody seems to know why.

Svetlana Stalin; Woody Allen; Jayne Mansfield (without her platinum-blonde scalp, left tangled in a windshield near Biloxi); James Brown.

Retired ambulance drivers, driven mad by the things they’ve seen.

Some cinder-boy, who sleeps in the fireplace. A guy named Bluto. An ancient bellman, stooped and halting, cursing the elevator which is, as always, broken.

Odd duos: Bebe Rebozo and Johnny Stompanato; Osip Mandelstam and Madonna Ciccone.

A mathematician nurses his whiskey at the bar, realizing that the tools available to him, such as logic, can’t explain what’s going on.

He gives up and picks a fight with a poet, whom he accuses of necrophiliac designs on the corpse of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Other poets debate fine points of literary taxonomy to the point of fisticuffs. Adjunct professors panhandle at the door.

Pets are strictly verboten, but some say that on certain nights in the threadbare hallways, the spirit of a plucky little dog named Checkers surrenders to the moon.

Find out more about “Hotel Imperium” here and about Loden at her website.

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.

Most Wanted, by Jeff Encke

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 [...]]]> 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.

Moist Meridian, by Henry Hughes

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 [...]]]> 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.

Make Believe, by Thom Donovan

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 [...]]]> 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.

Der Pyjamaist, by Matthew Zapruder

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 [...]]]> 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.

Yellowrocket, by Todd Boss

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 [...]]]> 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.

Talk Poetry, by Mairéad Byrne

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 [...]]]> 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.

Mondo Crampo, by Juliet Cook

Along the lines of Jessica’s Just One (Book) Thing column, this is the first installment in a series I’ll be writing in which I ask a poet a single question about one of his or her [...]]]> by Nathan Moore

Mondo Crampo, by Juliet Cook

“I like to think of the Mondo Crampo poems as being intelligently bawdy.”

Along the lines of Jessica’s Just One (Book) Thing column, this is the first installment in a series I’ll be writing in which I ask a poet a single question about one of his or her chapbooks. I’m hoping this series will not only give some insight into poets’ views of their work but also some exposure to the huge range of chapbooks being published.

Poet Juliet Cook is editor of Blood Pudding Press and the online magazine 13 Myna Birds. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Diode, Octopus, Robot Melon and Womb. Her chapbooks include The Laura Poems (Blood Pudding Press, 2006), Girl Gang (Blood Pudding Press, 2007), Planchette (Blood Pudding Press, 2008), Gingerbread Girl (Trainwreck Press, 2008) and Projectile Vomit (Scantily Clad Press, 2008).

Cook’s chapbook, Mondo Crampo, was published this year by Dusie Kollektiv 3. The poems in this collection are darkly humorous, surreal and macabre. Cook has generously agreed to answer a question about the work.

I should note, before delving into the question and answer, that there is adult language below. It appears in the context of poetry, but still: If you are shy about this kind of language, you might want to avert your eyes.

Many of the poems in Mondo Crampo are built on images of the body and food. Would you say something about the importance of these themes in your work?

I’m interested in presenting startling juxtapositions related to the intersections of personhood and consumption, especially personhood as it is situated, perceived and interpreted in the realm of the female body. I’m interested in juxtapositions that seem initially unlikely and maybe even disturbingly absurd, yet upon closer consideration are actually troublingly apt.

I’m interested in the various definitions and implications of consumption. I’m interested in the weird conflict inherent in many women’s desire to be perceived as consumable, even though they don’t really want to be consumed. Being perceived by others as a hot commodity or desirable object does come along with a certain sort of power, but it also seems to increase the likelihood that one will be critiqued, criticized and attacked.

I’m interested in the fine lines that exist within relationships that some perceive as dichotomies, such as love/hate — or maybe to put it more specifically, how can a woman’s feminism coexist with her self-hate or how can her creativity coexist with her self-destructive impulses? I’d like to think that an ongoing pursuit of creativity, even in the midst of contradictions and certain kinds of negativity, will eventually lead to a circuitous yet significant sort of accretion that will take precedence over self-effacement.

I’m interested in the subjectification of objectivity and the objectification of subjectivity. In some of my poems, I want to objectify my own subjective experience of being a conflicted female in a way that is unique, fun, funny, but also authentic in my own warped way. I also want them to be genuinely provocative. In certain real-life settings, I can be kind of quiet and unassertive, but it’s not because I’m meek or prim or hung up on keeping up appearances or trying to adhere to some false sense of propriety; it’s more because of a strange sense of self-consciousness and often feeling out of my element or ill at ease. Well, in the realm of my poems, I’m in my element, I’m in control, and I’m going to slant things, skew things, skewer things and shake things up however I want to and it’s not going to be quiet or demure or docile. It’s probably not going to be palatable to people with tame taste buds either.

On a side note, I like to think of the Mondo Crampo poems as being intelligently bawdy. They have a feminist sensibility underlying them, but it’s not an academic treatise kind of feminist sensibility. In fact, I’ve gleaned a special kind of delight (perverse glee?) by using pornographic language in some of my recent poems. I enjoy recontextualization, and I think it’s fun to pluck porno words out of a porno context and place them in a poem. I know Mondo Crampo includes some cum sucking, some dog fucking, some throbbing meat and my personal favorite, a reference to bukkake; I was thrilled with myself for managing to use that word in a poem.

I was similarly thrilled with myself for managing to use “meat curtains” in a poem just last week, although funnily enough, I spent a few minutes thinking about whether it should be “meat curtains,” “beef curtains” or are the two terms interchangeable. “Meat curtains” was used in a new series of poems I’m working on called “Designer Vagina,” which will hopefully make my body-consumption issues even more uncomfortably in your face. Or in somebody’s face anyway. Since I’m working on this series, I think it would be fun to start calling all my poems designer vaginas. That seems apt to me. My poems as some kind of excessive hybrid of surgical precision and questionable aesthetic appeal.

Mondo Crampo is sold out, but Susana Gardner, who runs Dusie Press, will soon make it available online as a free PDF. Juliet’s chapbook Pink Leotard & Shock Collar has just been published and can be purchased through the publisher, Spooky Girlfriend Press. Learn more about Juliet Cook and the work she publishes by visiting her poetry blog, Doppelgangrene, the Blood Pudding press blog and the Blood Pudding Press Shop.

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.

Cradle Song, by Stacey Lynn Brown

Just One (Book) Thing, and its sister column, Just One (Chapbook) Thing, are two of the new columns we’re sharing each month here at Read Write Poem. The idea of [...]]]> by Jessica Fox-Wilson

Cradle Song, by Stacey Lynn Brown

“The literal truth of a poem is much less important to me than its emotional core and relevance.”

Just One (Book) Thing, and its sister column, Just One (Chapbook) Thing, are two of the new columns we’re sharing each month here at Read Write Poem. The idea of the columns is to share books and chapbooks with our participants in a fresh way. Rather than doing a book review or a long-form interview, I will read a poetry collection every month, and Nathan Moore will read a chapbook collection every month. Then we’ll ask each author one single question — the one thing we really want to know, and share with you, after experiencing each work.

We hope you find the Just One Thing columns to be entertaining and informative. And we hope the authors’ responses to our questions make you want to pick up their collections and find out more about their work.

For the inaugural Just One (Book) Thing interview, I chose to interview Stacey Lynn Brown, author of the debut collection Cradle Song (C&R Press, 2009). The book is ambitious, a collection of 41 linked poems that tell the story of a young, Southern white girl raised by an African-American nursemaid and caregiver. All the poems are written in persona, using the voices of the young girl, the nursemaid and the girl’s mother. Through these voices, Brown reveals the undercurrent of race, class and gender that has shaped these three women’s lives.

The use of persona in the book is remarkable because each character is distinct, from the tough-talking Gaither (the nursemaid) to the quietly rebellious mother. Brown captures the cadences and emotions of each character, without drifting into sentimentality or stereotype. Instead, the reader feels drawn into these characters’ worlds, watching as their relationships shift, evolve and strain as they age.

Considering her use of persona for a full-length book, I chose to ask the author about the strengths and limitations of the character’s perspective, in contrast to the autobiographical “I.” Below is my question and her response.

What do you feel you can accomplish by writing in persona that you cannot accomplish by writing in an autobiographical voice?

As with any construct in poetry, there are limitations and possibilities inherent in both persona and the autobiographical “I,” but I don’t actually see them as being mutually exclusive. Each one relies upon and, to some degree, incorporates the other. An autobiographical poem isn’t necessarily striving to represent or replicate the author in full. Instead, it creates a version of the author that is not unlike a persona. Similarly, a straight-ahead persona poem relies upon the poet’s own personal experience and his or her self-awareness and knowledge of the human condition to be accessible and resonant.

What I was hoping to do in Cradle Song was to navigate the space between the two by incorporating both. I wanted to create a more fully realized portrait of a time and place by presenting different perspectives on the events that are discussed. So there are poems in the narrator’s voice, which is a closer, more autobiographical voice that skips back and forth between the child-like and the adult, and there are poems that are written as “memories,” stories that were told to me in the voices of the people who told them. While they are technically persona poems in that they represent a speaker other than the author, they exist somewhere in the space between the imagined and the remembered.

My hope with any poem, regardless of its construct, is that it accomplishes some level of emotional truth — not that it follows the arc of what really happened but rather that it reveal something important about why those things that happened, or didn’t happen, matter. The literal truth of a poem is much less important to me than its emotional core and relevance. Like Richard Hugo said, “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” If you can write a poem that reveals and resonates emotionally, it accomplishes its goal, regardless of how real or imagined the speaker might be.

Order Cradle Song from C&R Press. Learn more about Stacey Lynn Brown by visiting her website and blog. Read sample poems from Cradle Song here.

Jessica Fox-Wilson is a columnist for Read Write Poem. Her work includes the Read Write Word prompts every month and the Just One (Book) Thing column. Visit her at her blog, Everything Feeds Process.