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.
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.
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.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
 Archive for read write poem news »
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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