Little Myths

Four Questions for Madeleine Barnes

2017-08-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

Madeleine Barnes is a poet and visual artist from Pittsburgh. She is the author of the chapbook The Mark My Body Draws in Light (Finishing Line Press, 2014), and her poems have recently appeared in places such as Pleiades, Fields Magazine, Jai-Alai Magazine, The Rattling Wall, The Literary Nest, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She earned a BHA from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master’s of Philosophy in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University.

She is the recipient of a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Princeton Poetry Prize. She loves animals, her two weird sisters, and cheese.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

MB: My mother is a poet, so I was familiar with her poems and her passion for poetry at an early age. As I grew up, I’d occasionally sneak books from the shelves of her study, and in this way I secretly encountered the work of poets like Yusef Komunyakaa (with whom she and I both eventually studied!), Rilke, Lorca, Franz and James Wright, Keats, Plath, Kim Addonizio, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Li-Young Lee, Jan Beatty, many Irish poets, and so on. I have always loved my mom’s poetry; it is sonically familiar and deeply comforting to me. From this starting point, I expanded outward and built my own mini-library. Then I began to write and never looked back.

I felt (and currently feel) that reading and writing poetry are the only things that keep me from going mad. If I’m not writing, I am not engaging with the realities of life. For me, reading is the surest way to get close to the important truths of living—and it arms me with the compassion I need to reflect on trauma, grief, loss, political strife, and the subject that levels and unifies us: death.

Poetry is also a way for me to understand my family history. My grandparents worked in steel mills shoveling zinc or building railroad ties; they were carpenters and teaching artists—members of the working class. Through poetry, I’m trying to examine and preserve their stories with a lens that is simultaneously personal and objective, and filled with tenderness. I write poems because life seems unbearable when I stop wondering about the truth of other people’s experiences.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

MB: This changes and evolves over time; I have recently encountered some surprising losses, so in other people’s poems, I look for solace. I have really, really loved rereading the U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. “When the storm // kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing // after all we’re certain to lose, so alive— // faces radiant with panic.” Thank god she is our poet laureate during this terrifying political time!

I search for poems that cut straight to the bone; poems with lines that you want to write down again and again until grief reconfigures. I’m looking for poems that will see us out of this time with their hard truths and compassion. I love the raw, egoless work of very young poets and the poems of the very old. The work of my friends is staggering, and I love the courage and ferocity of what they create.

Sometimes I read 6-7 books in a week and find only one line that gives me an answer to my questions, but that is enough to keep me going.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

MB: I'm fighting hard to finish and send out the full-length manuscript I've been working on for seven years. People I trust have told me that it's done, but I feel there is a section about my family’s working-class roots and experiences missing, so I'm hammering that out slowly and with patience. I’m interested in the ways they suffered and what it took for them to survive—there are threads of addiction, grudges, domestic violence, and mental illness, but also strains of resilience and love. Steel and Pittsburgh, my hometown, are everywhere in this manuscript.

I am also working on a chapbook of visual poetry—something like poetry comics in the style of Bianca Stone layered in with some Matthea Harvey-style cutouts and possibly embroidery. Still mulling this over and experimenting, but it has been a lot of fun to work on.

Finally, I help read poetry for Cordella Magazine with the creative director Cate Clother, and this has been a wonderful project that helps me look outside myself.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

MB: I hope that poetry outlives us all. I hope it becomes a little less insular—maybe people who wouldn’t normally read poetry will engage with it and find some relief in it, as I have. I hope that young people write fiercely and in their own styles. I hope that society starts to value poets a bit more and starts paying them and taking the work they do seriously—society is obsessed with “what you do,” but somehow you get the occasional eyebrow raise when you say, “I’m a poet.” I hope future poets protect their creativity and value it with all their hearts. I hope poetry preserves the names of things that seem to be disappearing. I recently read that the words “acorn” and “blackberry” have been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, and that botany is a dying science, so please, poets, help us remember the names of things.

I also hope that the kind of hustle/ego that I find in some poetry these days dissolves and leaves the raw, true things behind. I respect the hustle but think it’s sad when the “social scene” of poetry sidetracks writers. Sometimes I just want a cabin in the woods and, like, 10 pugs by my side while I write the truest things I can. I want poems that eradicate prejudice, call attention to and dismantle oppressive systems, and raise hell. I am so grateful for everyone writing and creating today—keep going!

Madeleine’s Web Site

Four Questions for C. Kubasta

2016-11-29T09:05:00.001-08:00

C. Kubasta experiments with hybrid forms, excerpted text, and shifting voices – her work has been called claustrophobic and unflinching. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. A 6-year-old once mistook her for Velma, from Scooby Doo, and was unduly excited. She feels a strong affinity for Skipper, Barbie’s flat-footed cousin. For each major publication, she celebrates with a new tattoo; someday she hopes to be completely sleeved – her skin a labyrinth of signifiers, utterly opaque. She is the author of two chapbooks: A Lovely Box, which won the 2014 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize, and &s (both from Finishing Line); and a full-length collection, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX). She teaches English and Gender Studies at Marian University, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She lives with her beloved John, cat Cliff, and dog Ursula. Find her at ckubasta.com.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

CK: When I was in 6^th grade, my Language Arts teacher challenged us each to write a poem – I think it was for Read magazine. That was probably the first time I really thought about poetry, but somehow it stuck. I turn to poetry often when I want to express the fragmentary and evocative: much about our lives seems fragmentary; bits and pieces of language that evoke something about our human experience, without attempting to fully explain or narrativize that experience is what draws me to poetry. Although lately I’ve been writing fiction, and fully planning to immerse myself in that, setting aside poetry for a while, I’ve been unable to do so. Poems call to me to be written. Sharp fragments (the roadkill clustered with crows; the half-toppled Martin house; the formula for a chemical reaction; how denim is riveted) become embedded in my consciousness and want to become poems, and nothing else. Since the election I’ve been thinking of bees and colony collapse. What could that be but a poem?

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

CK: I want poems that occasion a physical reaction. I’m drawn to poems with sharp lines, with intricate & surprising forms. Poems and poets that move me cause excited utterances, usually an expletive, the sort of thing that could be admissible in court even after I’m gone. Recently I was trying to explain to a student what I liked about a poem and I wanted to draw a picture of a screw with a t-handle for extra torque. The good poem affects me like the screw is in my belly, and there are various “turns” throughout the poem, a good quarter turn, that sinks it deeper in. I want poems that are visceral, that cannot be ignored, that demand our emotional, psychological, and mental energy. We are forced to engage with them – poetry, like humor, porn, & horror, should also be a body genre.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

CK: &s, a new chapbook, is just out; the poems in it use the ampersand to construct and deconstruct the poems. My second book of poetry will be out next year from Whitepoint Press. Of Covenants explores linguistic, religious, and legal covenants – these tacit agreements define & articulate our experience. Lately I’ve been thinking about the last idea a bit more, especially in terms of language. There are a number of poems in the book that explore pronouns and their supposed antecedents. Certain pronouns seem to have lost their moorings, a happenstance both troubling and liberating. Additionally, the sentence diagrams that map these relationships seem to need an additional dimension that accounts for who interprets meaning, for who overhears the transactional nature of the naming. Perhaps what I’ve been reconsidering since the election, when we’re arguing whether words mean what they purport to mean, or whether they mean anything at all, is whether the notion of language as a covenant has begun to fray in a very visible way. The poems I’m writing just now are a longer series; I seem to be thinking in moving parts of longer pieces, rather than in individual poems. One series, Percolations, engages (obliquely) with the questions/concerns/issues raised this last summer through the public responses around shootings & protests. Another series, Corpus, utilizes the body and its products as a sort of autobiography: the stapes, the eye, ambergris. I also recently wrote a poem I love about a dear friend who died – it’s a poem about his dying, the days of it, the waiting for it. Each section of the poem is titled “The Present.” His dying was always in the present.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

CK: I want more poetry that challenges us, as readers and human beings. I want less “nice” poetry, fewer “pretty” things. I want poetry that is difficult – and I don’t mean less accessible – I mean poetry that deals with difficult topics, that forces us to picture things we’ve never imagined, that asks us to empathize in ways we haven’t, that asks us to inhabit uncomfortable spaces, that asks us to sit with discomfort and doesn’t let us off the hook. And I want people to not only be willing to read this kind of work, but to seek this out, to seek ways to stretch our humanity. Our humanity is a muscle like any other.

Four Questions for Ruth Awad

2016-11-09T07:05:00.000-08:00

Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Sixth Finch, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl Poetry, Drunken Boat, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. Her work has also been anthologized in The Hundred Years' War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press, 2015), and Poets on Growth (Math Paper Press, 2015). She won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and she lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her partner, Pomeranians, and bunnies.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

RA: I wonder about that a lot. When I was writing my first book, I had such a clear sense of mission. In the US, we often get a flag-waving and human-erasing narrative of far-off wars waged against and between brown bodies in the Middle East. I wanted to understand and portray that destruction’s civilian price, so I wrote about my father growing up in Lebanon during its civil war. And this answer might speak more to where I am right now (between projects / floating in space), but some days, I just don’t know why I write other than I can’t stop. Strip away the altruistic desire to say something honest, reach people, and change minds, and there’s just me and my nagging want to create. Maybe it gives me some semblance of control in a world ruled by chaos.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

RA: I’m always looking for that one line that will sink its teeth in me. That will upend my expectations and make me reassess where I was before I read the poem. That will make me wish I’d thought of it first.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

RA: Right now I’m working on a second collection I affectionately call my “feminist love poems.” I don’t feel very in control of these poems, which is a departure from my last project Set to Music a Wildfire, where I interviewed my father, his friends, and my family, and researched, planned, and obsessively plotted the collection’s narrative arc, etc. So with this new project, I’m forcing myself to be more open to emotional logic, which is a fine enough guide when you’re writing about your fucked up romantic past and what it means to be a woman heavily instructed by patriarchal norms but who’s trying to unlearn it.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

RA: I hope it keeps evolving. I want inclusion to be business as usual and not exceptional or a selling point. I want more POC editors running big-name journals and presses. I want ableist, sexist, racist poetry to never see the light of day. (I’m surprised this point can even make a wish list in 2016, but here we are.)

Ruth’s Web Site

Four Questions for Megan Merchant

2016-10-25T06:17:00.000-07:00

Megan Merchant is a resident of Prescott, Arizona, and holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from UNLV. Her second full-length collection, The Dark’s Humming, was the winner of the 2015 Lyrebird Prize (Glass Lyre Press, 2017). She is also the author of four chapbooks: Translucent, sealed. (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), In the Rooms of a Tiny House (ELJ Publications, 2016), Unspeakable Light (Throwback Books, 2016), and A Thousand Paper Cranes (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming). Gravel Ghosts is her debut full-length poetry collection through Glass Lyre Press. She also has a children’s book forthcoming through Philomel Books.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

MM: For so many reasons. For one, I write because I love language. I experience it as a pulsing, tangible element: the tools for trying like hell to make sense of what it means to be awake in this world. I write poetry specifically because I have had a long love affair with images and music. I write to give my brain something to do other than limp around and worry without taking action. I write as a form of meditation. I write so that I can see my breath in a season other than winter. I write to reclaim my agency and to connect with others. I write with the hope of creating something beautiful and worthwhile. I write to connect with people in an intentional way. I write to give my own prayers ink and a spine.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

MM: I read hoping to fall in love, in every way: with the order and disorder of words, the images that open my own mind and eyes to fragments of this world in which I am both familiar and estranged, with honesty, music, and perspective. I am always hoping to find a part that makes me do that little sucked-in breath of awe and inspiration. But mostly I am hoping to fall in love.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

MM: I have three manuscripts that I wrote over the last eight months. They are nearly complete and radically different. The third manuscript begins with the quote from E.M. Forster: “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” It brings into focus the violence and terror of this world from a mother’s perspective—one who grows to become “all mothers” by taking on their sorrow. It’s about interconnectedness and started with a spiritual quest to truly understand the differences between empathy and compassion.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

MM: I hope that more poems will “go viral” and extend their reach. Also, that the publishing world will continue to grow in an inclusive way, bringing unrecognized voices into the light.

Megan's Web Site

Four Questions for Michael Albright

2016-04-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

Michael Albright has published poems in various journals, including Stirring, Rust + Moth, Tar River Poetry, Pembroke Magazine, Cider Press Review, Revolver, Moon City Review, Pretty Owl, Uppagus, and the chapbook In the Hall of Dead Birds and Viking Tools. He also curates the "Under the Sign of the Bear" reading series in Pittsburgh, and is managing editor of the Pittsburgh Poetry Review. He lives on a windy hilltop near Greensburg, PA, with his wife, Lori, and an ever-changing array of children and other animals.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

MA: Well, not to get too cute about it, because I can't paint. Everyone has some kind of creative urge, and if we're lucky, we find out what we have an affinity for, how we can express it. Writing has always been my primary means of expression, even before it was something I took seriously. But why poetry? Because I am not a novelist. Or a song-writer. For me, the concision and heightening of language, the interplay between words written on the page, as they are read, evoke a sort of altered state of consciousness, like listening to King Crimson through headphones on acid. I've always considered poetry the highest form or art, which is why I would never be so hubristic to describe myself as "poet." I try to write poetry; it's for other people to say whether I am a poet, or not.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

MA: Simply stated, words I can't stop reading, or listening to. I'm less concerned (but not unconcerned) about meaning than I am with the lyric in the poem. In my favorite poems, the words make the music, and in turn, music makes meaning. I don't care if a poem is linear, as long as the words are arranged in the way that makes me want to read it over and over again, just for the pleasure of it, the way I listen to music. The best make me feel something physical; goose bumps, chills, a feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach. Without the lyric, poems are just newspaper articles.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

MA: I have three projects in progress. The first is a chapbook length collection of usually short, somewhat surrealistic, sometimes absurdist, and always dark hybrid-y prose poems. I am also deep into a manuscript of a combination of original and hybrid work dealing with my balance disorder, and the other conditions that contribute to my disability. Then there is my ever-present "gothic novel in verse of forbidden love, murder, and global warming." I am nothing if not ambitious.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

MA: My hope is that poetry continues to become more and more relevant. Despite charges that it isn't relevant (and when did the non-poetry community ever think it was?), it has emerged as one of the best vehicles for people writing from outside of privilege to find an audience. Despite seeing statistics that fewer people are reading poetry than ever, we have this absolute explosion of independent journals and publishers. I'd be surprised if enrollment in poetry MFA programs isn't at an all-time high, a circumstance often maligned, but you'll never hear that from me; you have to be crazy serious about poetry to choose that as your life's work, and all those people have a vested interest in getting more people to read and write poetry. These people are my heroes. They are the future of our art. Every poet who has published a book, or even published a poem in a journal, has friends and family that will read at least one of their poems if they ask them. Ask them.

Four Questions for Susan Yount

2016-04-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Susan Yount was raised on a farm in southern Indiana where she learned to drive a tractor and hug her beloved goat, Cinnamon. She is editor of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, madam of the Chicago Poetry Bordello, and founder of Misty Publications. She also works full time at the Associated Press and teaches online poetry classes at The Poetry Barn. As if all that wasn’t enough, she is mother to a rowdy 9-year-old. She has published two chapbooks, House on Fire and Catastrophe Theory. A third chapbook, Act One, is forthcoming from Saucepot Publishing. In her free time, she works on the Poetry Tarot. You can keep up with her progress here.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

SY: Unfortunately, I only write poetry when I have something burning to say. My muse has never been sweet but has always been a bitter fire demon at the edge of a rotting hole inside my being. When the demon gets too close to the raw edge, when the hole feels threatened, that is when the poems erupt. I write poetry to keep the hole from consuming me.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

SY: My favorite poems are honest and filled with the gruesome imagery of the human condition. They reveal something about humanity that we mask in our everyday lives. I’m currently reading Notes for My Body Double by Paul Guest – WHOA! Now that is THE SHIT I’ve been looking for.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

SY: This is the year I want to work on the Minor Arcana of the Poetry Tarot I started in 2011.

I’ve finished the Major Arcana which utilizes images of dead poets, their handwriting (whenever it has been available in the public domain) and often an image of their childhood home – or some other important place of writing. You can view some samples here. These are not haphazard images and ideas thrown together. I have meditated, worked myself into frenzy, and even dared the demon to the middle of the hole in order to provide the best representation of the card and the poet.

The true challenge for me is the Minor Arcana and will consist of living poets (at least at the time of creation), a sample of their handwriting and some essence of the poet they are within the imagery of the card itself. I’m currently seeking volunteers – details on how to query me can be found at my tumblr page.

Once all the graphic work is completed, the final goal is to edit a book which interprets the cards and includes a poem from each poet.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

SY: I hope I don’t lose it. I hope it finds me furious, thirsty, and crying. I hope it fights me in the middle of the night. I hope it buries me alive.

Susan’s Work Online:

Booth

Menacing Hedge

Cease, Cows

Ghost Ocean

YouTube

Susan’s Chapbooks:

Catastrophe Theory (Hyacinth Girl Press)

House on Fire (Blood Pudding Press)
Act One (forthcoming, Saucepot Publishing)

Four Questions for Sarah J. Sloat

2016-03-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Sarah J. Sloat has lived in Germany for many years, where she works as an editor for a news organization. She is usually found at her desk at home or her desk at work; otherwise she is stuck on the subway between them. Sarah’s poems and prose have appeared in The Offing, Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, and many other journals and anthologies. She blogs occasionally at The Rain in My Purse.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

SS: Because I love language, mostly, and the phrases, juxtapositions and sounds that ask to be made more of. There are words that need fondling, and poor lost little ideas that need a parade. Also, as someone who’s lived in a foreign country for more than two decades, poetry is a way for me to be at home. I come as much from English as from America, but in the case of the former I still dwell there every day.

And also, what is there to do? When you’re charged with making a life and meaning for yourself, what’s better than making art with what confronts you every day? Keeping up with the new TV shows?

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

SS: My favorite poems articulate something I know or feel but never found the words for, like Cesar Vallejo’s “Prayer on the Road,” which begins with the arresting ... “I don’t even know who this bitterness is for!”

I like energy and daring and surprise, like the wild red-white-and-blue laughter in Colleen O’Brien’s “In the Democracy.”

I like poems that show me some truth I vaguely sensed but never pursued, whether in thought or articulation, like Marie Howe’s “My Dead Friends.”

“I have begun,

when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion”

I am also in love with funny poems. They do so much work and are difficult to do well. Like Jessy Randall’s “Forgetting Simon Perchik.”

DS: Describe your works in progress.

SS: Like everypoet I could tell you about my manuscript-in-progress. With five chapbooks, I’ve got the poems. But that’s boring.

Poem-wise, I’m working on what I call sentence and fragment poems, some of which have been published recently, like “Inebriate of Air” and “Deluxe Moments.” I’ve always loved aphorisms so such poems satisfy my inner pithiness.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

SS: I wish more people would read it. It’s not hard. It’s kind of wonderful. It doesn’t take long.

Or did you mean the future of my poetry? I hope it becomes wildly successful! I hope it lands a multimillion-dollar deal!

Sarah's Work Online:

"Airstrip Heart"

"See Also Fire"

"Curtains"

Sarah's Chapbooks:

Heiress to a Small Ruin (Dancing Girl Press)

Inksuite (Dancing Girl Press)

Homebodies (Hyacinth Girl Press)

Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair (Dancing Girl Press)

In the Voice of a Minor Saint (Doubleback Books)

Four Questions for Les Kay

2016-03-15T16:42:00.000-07:00

Les Kay is the author of Fronts (Sundress Publications, forthcoming 2016). He is also the author of the chapbooks The Bureau (Sundress Publications, 2015) and Badass (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015), as well as co-author (with Sandra Marchetti, Allie Marini, and Janeen Pergrin Rastall) of the collaborative poetry chapbook Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016). His poems have been published widely in journals such as Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Collagist, The McNeese Review, Redactions, Santa Clara Review, South Dakota Review, Whiskey Island, and The White Review. Les holds a PhD in English and comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati with a primary emphasis on creative writing, an MFA from the University of Miami, and a BA from Carnegie Mellon University with a double major in creative writing and professional writing. Les currently teaches writing in Cincinnati and volunteers as an associate poetry editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

LK: To change the world.

I know that sounds grandiose, but it's not. I think of poetry primarily as a didactic tool, not in the pejorative sense of the word, but in the sense that I believe any poem, if it's well executed, can teach a reader something about the world. Oftentimes, something about the world that's difficult to teach through other means, like prose or in the classroom. I recognize, of course, that there's a tendency to equate such a view or poetry with elitism—a problem that's been core to poetry in the English language since, well, "Caedmon's Hymn." And if I'm honest with myself, it's probably still a problem with my poetry, primarily because of how I think and the need, at least for now, to engage with multiple visions/versions of poetic tradition.

But let me be clear that I'm not talking about romantic or Romantic notions of a Poet writ large, stumbling down a mountaintop; rather, I think that poetry gives us access to all that is not ourselves and sometimes that which we are not yet. I honestly don't think there's anything that horribly special about me, as a poet, except in the sense that we are all—every last one of us—remarkably special. So my goal isn't to teach, necessarily, all the "important" things I know, but to offer a simultaneously tiny and vast prism on the world and perceptions of the world around us. So, in this way, I think poetry is a radical act, a means of resisting and hoping. A means of sharing knowledge that may otherwise be unquantifiable.

And I think that's part of how the world (of people anyhow) has been and will be changed, but slowly. It's not unlike the recent Doctor Who episode "Heaven Sent" where the Doctor, trapped inside a "confession dial," punches his way through a diamond wall over eons and countless lives. That to me is what the writing of poetry is; it's punching a diamond wall.

Or maybe I just punch the wall because of life's peculiar momentum. I've written poems for so long, why would I stop?

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

LK: I want to catch my breath. I want to learn something, however small, about the world around us. I want to see that tiny sliver, like a crack of light in a concrete wall that tells me that this will be different. I want an experience, buttressed by craft, of what has happened, even if only through the contours of imagination. I want to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, sense what I would not otherwise know without the gift of that poem.

DS: What are your current writing projects?

LK: Well, I'm the sort of "prolific" writer who typically has a number of projects in various states of disrepair, so if I'm writing on any given day, the work could be any number of projects, so here's a brief overview of what I'm thinking about these days with the understanding that this is by no means a complete list.

A collaborative chapbook called Heart Radicals, which includes poems by myself, Sandra Marchetti, Allie Marini, and Janeen Pergrin Rastall was just published by ELJ Publications, so I'm spending a fair amount of "free time" promoting that. This summer, my first full-length collection, Fronts, will be published by Sundress Publications, so I expect that some serious editing work is forthcoming.

Aside from that work, I'm planning to revise what was my creative dissertation in a creative writing PhD program. I hope that will be my second full-length collection and pray that finding a good home for that book doesn't take so long or cost so much as Fronts did.

I'm also working here and there on short stories, particularly flash pieces. I have a chapbook in mind, but that's not quite to the stage where the entire manuscript can be sent out. So far, I've published three of the stories, but there are a few that need substantial revision before a publisher sees the book.

In addition, during the summer of 2015, I started writing a creative nonfiction essay about returning “home” to Texas from Ohio for a weeklong visit. It, somehow, became much more to me than a simple travelogue with scenes of family interspersed. In fact, that project became more in every sense of the word; the draft is over 50,000 words now and is growing. When I have time, this is the writing project I most want to focus on, for now.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

LK: I'd like to see the audience for poetry grow substantially. I've long believed that our short-attention span, technology-infused, overwhelmingly busy lifestyles both need and want the tiny sticks of dynamite or swelling murmuration of starlings that can be found in poems. Read a poem on the bus, be transported. Read a poem during a commercial break and learn something that someone with too much power may not want you to know. Read a poem before bed and see that your mind, too, might reach vistas that even the best of films can only approach.

In some ways, I've found myself both baffled and fraught by the relatively limited reach and cultural import that poetry has in this country from the perspective of every poet who is not Billy Collins. This is not to suggest, as has been suggested in decades past, that poets should change what they do to make it "easier," "more relevant," or "more exciting." Poetry is already all of those things, though its ease is relative and frequently mistaken as something altogether different. I honestly don't think poets (for the most part) should change a damn thing other than what they are already changing in order to write what they need and want to write in the way that they need and want to write it. I think, instead, that publishers and editors ought to question, deeply, their business models. No one should have to pay a dime to have their poems read. They should need, only, to write good poems. Moreover, all of us involved with poetry, including teachers and writers, should be clear about what poetry does. It is not the answer to a quiz question or an esoteric religion or a complex puzzle. It is—even its most emotionally difficult forms—a technology and art that points the way toward joy.

And who doesn't want that?

Les' Books

Badass

Heart Radicals
The Bureau (free PDF as an e-chap)

Four Questions for Mary Lou Buschi

2016-03-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

Mary Lou Buschi has been nominated for Best New Poets 2014 and was a finalist for the Best of Net Anthology, 2014. She received the Apospecimen Award from A Cappella Zoo for noteworthy contribution. Mary Lou has received fellowships from The Santa Fe Writer’s Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and The New York City Teaching Fellows. Her work has appeared in many literary magazines, such as Indiana Review, Rhino, Field, and Radar, among others. Her full-length poetry collection, Awful Baby, was published this year through Red Paint Hill Publishing. Mary Lou is a special education teacher in the Bronx. She lives in Piermont, New York, with Jeff (husband) and Nate (French Bulldog).

DS: Why do you write poetry?
MB: I write poetry because I can’t sing, play an instrument, or paint. I write poems to knit disparate images, to play with sound, ink up the white space or give white space the silence it deserves. I write poems to remember the ugly, the thorny, and the forgettable—to find that kid by the fence we all forgot about.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?
MB: When I read other poets, I’m looking for an exact order of thought. The moment when you say, yes, exactly, that is what I’ve been after—a clearly wrought image or simple realization. From Larry Levis’ “The Spirit Says, You Are Nothing”:

A thin line of ants hesitate

Before running over it,

And you think how

The thread of worry running through a human voice

Halts when a syllable freezes, then goes on,

Alone. …

DS: What are your current writing projects?
MB: I’m still listening to two lost girls who I believe to be a version of Vladimir and Estragon. I’m not sure where they are or why they keep speaking to me, but I’m on an adventure with them. Every time I think I have it all figured out, the girls introduce a new character or problem. In some ways the project is addressing infertility, miscarriage, and the need to keep creating.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?
MB: I think poetry is right where it needs to be and it will continue to grow and respond to the world around us. I think there are more voices being heard across the world, across styles; genre-bending poets, poets willing to talk about race, gender, oppression, violence. There are also many poets devoting their personal time and passion to founding reading series, presses, and literary magazines. There is no sign of poetry disappearing. We need it in much the same way that we need fine art and music.

Mary Lou’s Books:

Awful Baby

Ukiyo-e

Mary Lou’s Recent Poems Online:

Thrush

Hermeneutic Chaos

Four Questions for Nikki Allen

2016-02-17T04:51:00.000-08:00

Nikki Allen scribbles poems on cocktail napkins, receipts, and/or any other blank space she can get her pen on. She’s been getting on stages to read her work for over 15 years in various places that include St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Seattle, war protests, music festivals, charity events, backyards, and art openings. She is the author of numerous books, including Gutter of Eden, My Darling Since, and Quite Like Yes. Her work has appeared in The New Yinzer, Crash, Open Thread Regional Review Vol. 2, out of nothing, Profane Journal (Pushcart Prize nominee '14/'15), and Encyclopedia Destructica. Allen has also contributed vocals to tracks by recording artists Poogie Bell ("Question Song") and Jack Wilson ("NYC"). She loves couscous and garlic breath.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

NA: The short answer: I don't have a choice.

The not-so-short answer: I've always been a writer. Page & pen were my escape in childhood--stories that conquered notebooks and fell out onto restaurant place mats, receipt paper, any blank space. Near the end of high school I started writing poetry. Maybe it was first-time love that pushed me to it, or maybe the collection of e.e. cummings poems I hauled around. Maybe it was just a matter of time. But it happened. Poetry was the mainline to the feeling. I felt so much that I wanted to get to it as quickly as possible. There is a relief in getting it out, putting it down--it's hard to describe.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

NA: It doesn't have a name. It's a thing, a moment, turn of the knife in a phrase. Whatever it is pulls me to it as soon as I read it. My body disappears.

DS: What are your current writing projects?

NA: I'm writing new things and editing older pieces. I hope to have a book ready to go this year.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

NA: Continued growth. Continued dialogue. My hope is that people continue to use poetry as a means of expression, truth-telling, protest, release.

Nikki's Books:

My Darling Since
Gutter of Eden
ballet: exits & entries
birds at 4 a.m.
Quite Like Yes

ligaments of light tigering the shoulders

Some of Nikki's Poems Online:

Nailed
Profane
Walking Is Still Honest Press

Four Questions for Amorak Huey

2016-02-02T17:48:00.000-08:00

Amorak Huey is author of the poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and the chapbook The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl, 2014). After more than a decade as a newspaper journalist, he now teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, The Poetry
of Sex, The Southern Review,
Cider Press Review, Poet Lore,
The Cincinnati Review, and many
other print and online journals
and anthologies.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

AH: It all starts with reading. Reading was such an important part of my childhood. Is such an important part of my life now. Will, I assume, always be so. There’s something powerful and mystical about disappearing into language, losing yourself in someone else’s words and worlds. The way I feel when I read something good, that lump in the back of the throat … I write on the off chance my own words could ever come close to creating that feeling in someone else. It’s about human connection. About making sense of the world. About the hope that my voice could somehow, some way matter to someone.

As for why poetry as opposed to some other genre, maybe it’s because I have a short attention span and I can finish writing a poem a lot quicker than a novel or even a short story? Maybe it’s because I wanted to be free from narrative requirements? Maybe it’s because poetry is inherently disruptive, challenging, sometimes difficult and I like the impossibility of it; maybe poetry knows
full well it is destined to fall short of its aspirations and I can relate
to that.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

AH: I want to be surprised, unsettled, envious. I want to read a poem and be instantly irked that I didn’t write it myself. I want to read a poem and know that I could never, ever have written it myself. I want a poem to stick with me so that I find myself still musing on it hours, days, years after reading it. I want a poem to leave me hungry.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

AH: I have two manuscripts that are in that maddening state of being done / almost done / maybe done / I don’t know what to do next with them. One’s currently titled Boom Box, and it’s full of poems about growing up in a small town in Alabama and religion and heavy metal and the 1980s. The other I’m calling Seducing the Asparagus Queen and it’s about wandering and rootlessness and this character named The Letter X. And love. Both books are about love. (“About” is probably the wrong word. I resist the idea that saying what a poem is “about” is a meaningful way to talk about that poem, yet I do it, here and all the time, for lack of a better way to say what I mean. Once again, language falls short.) Anyway, I’m arranging and rearranging these two manuscripts, adding new poems and deleting others and sending them out and getting them rejected and waiting for a publisher to share my vision of turning them from manuscripts into books.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

AH: Wow, I don’t know. Poetry is not a monolith. Sometimes I think we all spend too much time talking about “poetry” and not enough about poems. So many think-pieces about how poetry is dead, or poetry is alive, or poetry can or cannot be taught, or academia is ruining poetry or whatever, as if poetry were a single thing, an entity we can see all at once. Like poetry is Spider-Man and we’re all J. Jonah Jameson chasing the expose. Poetry is not Spider-Man. It’s not even the whole Marvel Universe. It’s more diverse and diffuse and ineffable
than that.

But I feel like I’m ducking your question, so how about this: I guess I hope poetry keeps on doing what it has always done: exist and struggle in this complicated human world, pushing against the limits of language and striving to explain and reflect and explore what it means to be alive and feeling and thinking on this crowded planet.

Amorak’s books

Ha Ha Ha Thump

The Insomniac Circus

Some of Amorak’s poems online

The Collagist

Four Way Review

Menacing Hedge

Rattle

Four Questions for Robert Walicki

2016-01-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

Robert Walicki is the curator of VERSIFY, a monthly reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in HEArt, Stone Highway Review, Grasslimb, and on the radio show Prosody. He won first runner up in the 2013 Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition and was awarded finalist in the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. He currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015).

DS: Why do you write poetry?

RW: I write poems because I have to. It's a creative impulse that rooted itself in me and really feels as necessary and as natural as breathing.

Interestingly, I actually began as a visual artist as far back as I could remember, but halfway through art school, I realized that I wasn't in love with what I was doing, and I was pretty crestfallen at the time about it. I played around with writing, but I only started writing seriously about eight or nine years ago. I fell in love with the form and the possibilities in writing poems.That was it for me. I was sold.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

RW: What I like to see in poetry are poems that are honest and aren't afraid to express emotion. I look for poems written with restraint, guts, and humor. I never want to be lost in the poem. Grounding is very important for me. I need to know where I am within the context of a given poem and to believe in the world that the poet is trying to create. In short, I like poems that engage the heart as well as the head.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

RW: I am working on several projects. One, a full length which features poems from both of my chapbooks as well as others that tie together the narrative thread between them.

The other project is a chapbook which is a bit of a departure for me. All of the poems will be about or inspired by elements in popular culture. It started very organically. I suddenly realized I had a bunch of poems that fit that theme. I'll be excited when that's finished!

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

RW: My hopes are twofold. One of my dreams is to have poetry accepted more by the mainstream community and media. It's a vibrant time to be a poet in Pittsburgh right now, but we're preaching to the converted. Most if not all of the people that attend our readings are other poets and writers. I want to see more awareness brought to the art of poetry as a vital and legitimate art that can be accessible and appreciated by all people, whether they are poets or not.

My other goal is to break down barriers within the community itself. There are so many groups and communities of poets that make up this thriving literary city, but that said, this can lead to it being fragmented. This is what I've tried to do with my series: put poets together that have never or probably would never read together to see what happens. It's about community. The sense of belonging that we are a part of something bigger than what we are apart.

Robert's chapbook from Night Ballet Press:

The Almost Sound of Snow Falling

Robert's Recent Works Online:

Verse Wrights

Cultured Vultures
Kentucky Review

Four Questions for Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

2016-01-06T07:35:00.000-08:00

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently lives in the Washington, DC, area with her family. She is the author of six chapbooks. Recent ones are out from Dancing Girl Press, Be About it Press, and Shirt Pocket Press. Her first full-length poetry collection is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Pretty Owl Poetry, Gargoyle, Jet Fuel Review, glitterMOB, Pith, So to Speak, Apple Valley Review, Otis Nebula, FreezeRay, Entropy, Right Hand Pointing, and decomP.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

JMS: I am probably going to sound like a broken record but fuck it. I write poetry to make sense of the noise that is in my head. Words make sense to me when I write them down. I grew up with four older brothers, and I always remember writing letters to members of my family when I felt something was unfair or if someone was being mean to me. It was better than screaming. (Though screaming also sometimes worked.) So instead of going to bed, I would hide under my desk and write a letter and then sneak out, or I thought no one could see me--I am sure I was just being ignored-- and slide the letter under the bedroom door of the person in question.

I also like how poems can be short since I have some attention challenges.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

JMS: I love reading a poem and just feeling YES, I GET IT. That is the best feeling in the world to me when you just feel a kinship with another poet/poem. It definitely helps in not feeling alone in the world to read a voice that you “recognize” and then think, well see, I’m not a freak because they get it too. :) I also like being surprised by what words they use--like I hate it when I know how something is going to end. I’d rather it make no sense to me or just possess a sliver of sense rather than tie it up neatly with a bow. Though there is a place for these poems in the world as well. I just prefer the other kind.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

JMS: I just wrapped up a chapbook called Clown Machine that I really love--I guess at its heart it is about disguises and art and tangents and does it matter if we wear masks? I sort of came to the conclusion (in the poems) that it doesn’t matter--maybe. It’s up in the air. (But I like that, I don’t like spoon-feeding readers--I like them to come to their own conclusions.)

I am also writing these tiny poems that all begin with the same line: “She came out from under the bed.” When one of my writer friends read some of these and said that I should write a horror movie, it was the best compliment!

We start our reviews up again for TheInfoxicated Corner at TheThe Poetry.com, so keep a look out for those in the next week or so!

I also have these collaborative poems that I am trying to find a home for.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

JMS: One of my hopes for poetry--and I totally think is possible--is there should be more venues and reading events, and it should be like rock music. Like it should just be huge and big and glam but everyone should still be nice and respectful. Like New York has a great mingling scene with Dead Rabbits reading series, Great Weather for Media, Flapperhouse, Luna Luna--all of these readings and poets are sort of intermingling now, and that is awesome. It would be awesome to bring more poetry to the people so to speak. (Pittsburgh Poetry Houses is doing this.) Like I know my neighbor Fran would just LOVE it if she was exposed to more modern, inclusive poetry. Everyone still just thinks of Poe and Whitman and Keats when you run up to them and say “POETRY.” The recent poetry write up in the New YorkTimes (where Bloof Books had some great press) is a start. ROCK STARS.

Jennifer’s chapbooks:

xx poems (forthcoming)

Backyard Poems

The Visitant

Jeanne (Poems about Revenge, Ants,and Light)

Every Her Dies

Clotheshorse

Jennifer's full-length book:

Your Best Asset is a White LaceDress ( forthcoming)

Recent poems online:

e*ratio

decomP

Otis Nebula

Jennifer’s website:

https://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/

Four Questions for T.A. Noonan

2015-12-23T05:15:00.000-08:00

T.A. Noonan is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Midway Iterations (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), Fall (Lucky Bastard Press, 2016), and The Ep[is]odes: a reformulation of Horace (Noctuary Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in LIT, Menacing Hedge, Ninth Letter, Phoebe, Reunion: The Dallas Review, West Wind Review, and others. A weightlifter, artist, teacher, and priestess, she is an Associate Editor of Sundress Publications and the Development Director for the Sundress Academy
for the Arts.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

TN: Poems are spells. I write what I want to manifest, banish, bless, curse, invoke, evoke, honor.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

TN: Magick I haven’t seen before. Or maybe magick I have seen before, but executed in a different way. Ultimately, I want wonder. I want to be swept up in the spell.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

TN: All of them? Well…

I’m kidding. Kind of.

Right now, I’m bouncing between three major projects. The first and oldest is Extraordinary Claims, a poetry collection exploring the intersections between astrophysics, fashion, and Florida. You’d be surprised at how much they connect to one another. I’ve probably been working on EC for about six years, and every time I think I’m done, I realize I still have a lot more to do. So, the fact that I just said something about it publicly probably means I have to start over.

Then there’s Kraftwerk and Other Euphemisms, a kind of cross-genre monster exploring witchcraft and occultism. Being all weird and shit means it doesn’t lend itself to my usual process.

The last one is Watermamas: A Fable, a novel about gods, manatees, and memory. I’m still in the early-draft stage but really excited about what I’ve got thus far.

I’ve also been picking here and there at a series of poems about Sailor Moon, but I don’t know if that’s a “work in progress” so much as an “occasional obsession with an unsure future.”

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

TN: A lot less fear, a lot more inclusivity. I want a poetry world that isn’t afraid to let marginalized writers step out of those margins; the poetry world’s plenty big enough for all of us. No one should feel “threatened” by diversity. I think the only real “threat” is that those diverse voices may be too fiercely beautiful, that the heat from their awesome words might be too much for us to handle, that we may have to work twice as hard to be half as hot. Of course, this means we need people willing to do that work—editors and publishers determined to make their venues safe for poets from every race, class, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, educational background, career path, etc. Those who are marginalized, though, can’t do that work by themselves. It’s up to those coming from places of privilege to use that privilege responsibly.

I’d also like more handmade books, please. I’m a sucker for them.

T.A.'s Books:

The Midway Iterations

The Bone Folders

Petticoat Government

Some of T.A.'s Poems Online:

Split Lip Magazine

Menacing Hedge

Open Letters Monthly

Four Questions for Sarah A. Chavez

2015-12-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

Sarah A. Chavez, a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley, is the author of the chapbook All Day, Talking (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). She holds a Ph.D. in English with a focus in poetry and Ethnic Studies from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the anthologies Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts and Political Punch: The Politics of Identity, as well as the journals North Dakota Quarterly, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and The Boiler Journal, among others. Her debut full-length collection, Hands That Break & Scar, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

SC: As a kid growing up in a mobile home on the west side of Fresno, CA, when I was upset or couldn’t sleep, I read. Mostly prose, novels and the occasional short story; they were about upper class people, romance, things that take place in forests, or vampire/horror – always an escape. When I was done with a book, it felt like I was transported back against my will. My brain a little fuzzy, feeling dissatisfied closing the back cover, unhappy to come back to the life I had. But when I got a little older and was assigned to read poetry for class, all of a sudden, it was reading that didn’t transport me; it grounded me. After reading a poem, I didn’t feel ethereal and torn between realities, I felt solid and clear-eyed. The close attention to detail, the concentrated and highlighted emotions, the care with which lines were broken, and diction chosen: it brought my lived experience into focus. It taught me how to look at my circumstances differently, more closely, with greater compassion and nuance.

I write poetry largely to continue this practice of compassion and the search to understand myself, and my lived experience more mindfully, and in turn hope to understand other forms of human experience. Even now that I teach poetry writing and publish my work, writing it somehow still feels like a secret, selfish act, like it’s always just for me, and the only way I can justify continuing to write poetry is by carrying what I learn with out in the world.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

SC: I think I freak my poetry students out a little bit when I tell them this, but I want poems to devastate me. I want them to break me in half and make me cry. The tears can be for sadness, desire, or happiness; it doesn't matter which, just something felt strongly.

For me, poetry, like visual art, is about feeling connected to other humans, and I like for that connection to be tangible. It’s why I gravitate – both in my reading and writing habits – toward poetry that is sensory and concrete. While this goes in and out of fashion, I’m always a fan of narrative poetry. I like being told a story and I like stories that work; poetry that shoves its hands in the dirt and rips up weeds, poetry that washes dishes and loads trucks. Not poetry that is practical, per se, but poetry that serves the purpose of diversifying while simultaneously drawing connection to varied human experience. I hope to find poetry that spotlights the import in small moments, sees the people that have been shoved to the margins, but in a way that recognizes the beauty in the steel, in the grease on cracked hands.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

SC: I’m currently working on two projects. One is a series of poems based on the indigenous mythology around the turtle that carried the Earth. That has always been one of my favorite myths, partly because I’ve just always loved turtles; they have those cute, little, tough-skinned faces and sturdy, short bodies. The myth also appeals to me because of the level of sacrifice that Turtle makes in the story. For the rest of the world to exist, all the vegetation and animals, he has to agree to a life of isolation and loneliness. I’ve always wondered about how that would feel. That led me to imagining the kind of life Turtle had before taking on that monumental responsibility and what it might be like if he got to come back to the Earth. I’ll have three of these poems coming out on THEThe Poetry Blog early in 2016.

The second project is an extension of the epistle poems in my chapbook, All Day, Talking, which are letters from a singular speaker to a woman she loves who has died. The manuscript is tentatively titled This Dark Shining Thing.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

My primary hope for the future of poetry is to once and for all shake this nonsense about it being intimidating. It’s maddening to encounter over and over again people who don’t read poetry or are scared to read it because they think they won’t “get it.” I’m tired of hearing not just students, but even people I encounter out in the world, say that there was some rigid high school teacher who told them that poetry is a puzzle, locked with a key, and only the smartest people can access the deep wells of knowledge that lie therein. Our culture doesn’t treat music that way and it doesn’t treat painting that way (well, maybe a little), both forms of art that are equally as difficult to do well, and equally as enjoyable once you lose yourself in it. And I’m not saying that good poetry isn’t at times difficult to read (though it often isn’t), but that I hope a larger population of people begin to trust that whatever they get from a poem, even if it isn’t the same as what the person next to them felt, is valuable and worth the effort. I want to hear people casually talking on the bus about that new poetry collection that came out last week.

Sarah's Chapbook:

All Day, Talking

Sarah's Recent Poems Online:

Rogue Agent

The Boiler Journal

Four Questions for Meghan Tutolo

2015-11-25T04:05:00.001-08:00

Meghan Tutolo lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where she earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Chatham University and her B.A. in English Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Skilled in the trade of romancing olives and pasta, Meghan works as writer, editor, and designer for an Italian foods company and also teaches composition at her alma mater. Her work has appeared in journals such as Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Arsenic Lobster and Main Street Rag. Her first chapbook of poems, Little As Living, was published in September 2014.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

MT: Because I have to. Because from such an early age I felt things so tremendously that I had to get them out. I didn't understand myself and barely had words. That's the magic of poetry for me: it makes all the stuff inside a little more tangible. It really boils down to energy. And though poetry isn't my only outlet, it's the most efficient at helping me to connect with others on that plane, relate.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

MT: Basically? I'm looking for someone who gets it. I can't be anymore forthright than that. I'm just looking for people with voices and experiences that don't make me feel so damn alone. It's those people I can trust to guide me to new perspectives and understanding. If I read your work and it feels like my guts fell out, then I know I'm on the right page.

DS: Describe your works in progress?

MT: I'm working on another manuscript. I haven't decided whether it's another chapbook or a full length. There is something about a full-length collection that scares the shit out of me. I could barely get through the editing process of my chapbook with the constant changes and rearranging. It's hard to nail those pieces down in time, as everything shifts around them.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

MT: This question reminds me of records. They've made a hell of a comeback. People are paying attention... to some things. You know, I want people to listen again. To open their minds, put down their magic rectangles and pay attention. I sound like an 80 year old, but phones worry me. No one can read a paragraph anymore. Maybe that's why poetry will prevail, the capturing of those small moments, condensation.

Meghan's chapbook:

Little as Living

Meghan's website:

http://www.meghantutolo.com

Four Questions for Dan O'Brien

2015-11-11T04:16:00.000-08:00

Dan O'Brien is a playwright, poet, and librettist. His play, The Body of an American, will receive an off-Broadway premiere at Primary Stages, in a co-production with Hartford Stage, in 2016. O'Brien's third collection of poetry, New Life, will be published by CB Editions in London in 2015, and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn in 2016. His second collection, Scarsdale, was published by CB Editions in 2014, and in the US by Measure Press in 2015. War Reporter, his debut collection, was published in 2013 by CB Editions, and by Hanging Loose Press in the US. War Reporter received the 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Foundation's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, both in the UK.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

DO: I simply always have written them. At least since I was twelve or so. Life almost always feels overwhelming, in terms of the sadness, occasionally the joy, the randomness and incomprehensibility of everything. There’s little else to do with these feelings than to make something of it, at least that’s how it seems to me, and for whatever reason writing is how I like to make things.

I write plays and prose too, but poetry is what I return to when the emotions are most intense, and usually the most private. My first poem was about my brother’s suicide attempt, and now almost thirty years later I’m still essentially writing that poem over and over again. The longer you last, of course, the more traumas you have to live through. So there’s no shortage of material. Clearly I’m a gloomy sort.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

DO: I hope to find honesty and intimacy. I want to feel honored by what the poet has revealed to me, even if it’s not a so-called narrative or confessional poem, even if I don’t “understand” it. In fact I don’t really want to understand it. I want to feel moved by the poem. I want to feel I know the poet now.

DS: Describe your work in progress.

DO: I’m publishing my second collection of poetry derived from the work of my friend, war reporter Paul Watson, entitled New Life—what I’m describing lately as “poems of Syria and Hollywood,” as the book deals with Paul’s time covering the war in Syria, and our concurrent, tragicomic attempts to sell an American cable TV drama about journalists covering Syria. I’ve received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year to write a play for Center Theatre Group here in Los Angeles that will be, in many ways, an adaptation of New Life.

I’m also writing a new play for Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater in NYC on the history of guns in America, and a new play for Portland Center Stage that may or may not be about Sasquatch, and may or may not involve music and song. My play about Paul Watson, The Body of an American, opens at Hartford Stage this winter before running off-Broadway with Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater. There are separate productions of this play next spring in Chicago and Washington, DC. And I’ve been chipping away at a short memoir of childhood in Scarsdale, New York.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

DO: I don’t know that I have any hopes. I like poetry just as it is, and I trust that people will always write poetry because they have to, and they enjoy it, and that people will read poetry for the same reasons. I don’t care about styles or fashions, what poetry “is” or “should” be.

Perhaps I do have one selfish hope: that what I’ve written, and still might write, can be a comfort to people the way I’ve been comforted by other people’s poems.

Dan's Books:

New Life
Scarsdale
War Reporter
The Body of an American

Some of Dan's Poems Online:

ForeignPolicy.com

The Cossack Review

storySouth

Four Questions for Jessy Randall

2015-10-28T04:51:00.001-07:00

Jessy Randall is the author of Injecting Dreams into Cows and other books. She grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where she helped invent a controversial Frisbee game and famously cried at a Dolph Lundgren movie. She is also the guiding force behind the Huge Underpants of Gloom zine series, and she keeps all her secrets hidden in decades' worth of black-and-white composition notebooks.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

JR: This question was a lot harder to answer than I expected it to be. So I guess the answer is "I don't know" or "I can't explain it." Kenneth Koch says writing poems lets you have your emotions instead of your emotions having you. When I'm writing a poem I feel a way I wish I could feel all the time.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

JR: My favorite poems are the ones that make me say "yes, that's exactly IT," usually when "it" is something I didn't realize needed to be captured. Sarah Sloat's poem "Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair" is one such poem. She has a million bookmarks and can't find any of them.

I also like poems that make me go Whuhh-huUUHHH? such as Scott Poole's "New York Women."

I want poems to have sly wit. I want them to be about emotions, for me the most important and least understood things in the universe.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

JR: Lately I've been making poems out of illustrations in old books I find at the library where I work. I find these extremely satisfying. Most editors do not.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

JR: I love the virtual salons poets are creating online. We can't all live in hotbeds of poetry (New York, San Francisco, etc.) but we can make our own through electronic journals, Facebook, and email collaboration.

Go to Jessy's website here.

Four Questions for Isobel O'Hare

2015-10-14T04:03:00.000-07:00

Isobel O'Hare is a poet and essayist who was born in Chicago but did most of her growing up in Ireland. She is the author of Wild Materials from Zoo Cake Press. Her writing can be found in The Account, Dirty Chai Magazine, HOUND, FORTH Magazine, Numero Cinq, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, and Cease, Cows, among other publications. She received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she was recently awarded a Helene Wurlitzer Fellowship. She lives in Oakland, California.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

IO: I started writing poetry when I was a kid because I didn't have anyone to talk to about a lot of very traumatic things that were happening in my life. I grew up in various abusive environments where I often felt isolated and unheard. I was already writing short stories about fantastical things like a world-traveling young girl and her pet chimpanzee, a couple of time-traveling elementary school students, as well as some retellings of classic horror stories. Poetry came to me specifically as a form of self-care when I needed someone to talk to and nobody was there but paper and pens.

These days I write poetry for a few different reasons. Self-care is still definitely one of them, but I don't tend to share the things that I write for my own therapeutic purposes, as they tend to be unfinished thoughts that are suspended in liquid anger. These are the pieces I have to write in order to get to a truer place.

Poetry can take the form of magic spells when I start to feel that some form of transformation is needed in me but I don't yet know how to achieve it. I usually end up realizing that the poem wasn't the entire spell itself but just one component of it. Maybe the eye of newt.

I also write poetry in order to translate the world as I see it into something that can be communicated to another person. It is often difficult for me to communicate my experiences of the world via spoken language, and sometimes prose seems too direct in an explicit sense. Poetry offers a form of communication that is more intuitive, and thus paradoxically more direct than saying literally what one is thinking or feeling. It creates a conduit for two minds to read one another without speaking.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

IO: That same conduit. Whenever I connect to a piece in this way, I get so excited. It makes me want to write more myself, to continue communicating in this language that exists in a universe parallel to our own.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

IO: I am (very) slowly putting together a full-length poetry manuscript. Some of the pieces from Wild Materials will be included, as well as some pieces that didn't make it into Wild Materials, but it will mostly be new poems.

I am also working on a long-form piece on PTSD that connects personal narrative with scientific research out of the desire to further mainstream understanding of the disorder. It is becoming increasingly important that PTSD is understood as a major health concern in the United States.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

IO: With all of the recent scandals in the poetry world, my hope is that we will continue to communicate openly with one another about race, class, gender, disability, and other social issues in order to increase accessibility for all poets who are part of our community. It is consistently distressing to wake up to news of the latest scandals on a weekly basis, but the fact that we can openly recognize and talk about these events as problematic is promising. Social media has given access to so many people who were previously cut off from such conversations, and I look forward to its continued use as a tool for discussion and increased accessibility.

Isobel's Book:

Wild Materials (SOLD OUT!)

Some of Isobel's Poems Online:

HOUND

FORTH Magazine

Cease, Cows

Four Questions for W. Todd Kaneko

2015-09-30T04:08:00.000-07:00

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of the Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor, 2014). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Bellingham Review, Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review, Barrelhouse, NANO Fiction, The Collagist and many other journals and anthologies. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he co-edits Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

TK: I write poetry because I want to write poetry. To me, poetry is the closest thing to rock and roll a person can do without strapping on a guitar and windmilling their arms for dear life. The poet sits down and creates this beautiful, irreverent creature out of words and language, a creature that can make an audience feel anything the poet wants them to feel. It’s so thrilling to see a poem come to life on the page, and doubly so to see it come to life for a reader. I’m one of the lucky ones—there is this thing I want to do, and I’m privileged enough to be able to do it. Really though, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to write poetry.

But I also write poems because I have to, as corny as that sounds. If I go for any extended period of time without writing, I become short tempered and feel like my insides are made of sandpaper. I can be a real jerk when I’m not writing, and I don’t like being a jerk. It’s not good for my marriage or my job or keeping me out of car accidents.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

TK: When I read poems by other people, I hope to experience the world in a way I haven’t experienced it before. I hope to find a poem that lodges in my stomach or slithers beneath my breastbone, a poem that makes me want to throw up my fists and bang my head. I hope a poem will surprise me, not in that guy with a knife hiding behind the door kind of way, but in that Aristotelian surprising yet inevitable kind of way. I hope for poems that turn into a robot or an airplane or a cemetery plot. Maybe it seduces me or maybe it smooth talks its way into my boudoir. I hope a poem will grab me by the ears and make me believe that what it has to tell me is so urgent, I have to drop everything to hear it sing. A poem has to matter to someone, and I hope it makes me understand that it matters to me on a physical, emotional, or even spiritual level. And I also hope for standard punctuation.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

TK: I’m the kind of writer who is always working on too many projects at any one time. I am currently working on a chapbook of flash fictions I’m calling Bang Your Head, a series of 300-word stories about this teenage loser named Metalhead and his best friend Rockgod who are growing up together in the 1980s. Some of these pieces are also part of a larger work-in-process, a book length manuscript of poems that play with Heavy Metal songs and tropes.

I’m also being drawn back into a project I put back in the drawer a few years ago. It’s a book of poems about my family’s incarceration in Idaho during World War II along with many other Japanese-American families. My family, like many, has never wanted to talk about that experience, so the book is about the silence, how that silence is handed down from generation to generation, and how we fill those silences with other stuff. It’s kind of a painful book and quite exhausting to work on.

And on the back burner, outside of poetry, I have this series of lyric essays about professional wrestling, staged masculinity, and race that I hope I will figure out how to make it into a book one day.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

TK: When I look at poetry, I see a lot of lines being drawn, territories being carved out by groups on the basis of race, gender, sexuality—of course, they must be carved out and claimed lest they be overtaken by other more dominant territories, nations who have long since dominated the world. I think my main hope for the future of poetry is a healing of the map so that poets don’t feel like they have to compete with other groups, so that poets don’t unconsciously (or consciously) shut down voices that they don’t recognize as their own, so that poets can look at publishing markets and not feel unsafe when submitting to them. I know this is like wishing for world peace, and I don’t think I’m likely to ever see this come about.

Also, I think that for so long, people have looked at poetry as this arcane, obscure thing that is too brainy or highbrow or too chock full of feelings for most audiences. I hope for more poems that connect with the everyday culture that surrounds us in our modern world. This is a fancy way of calling for more poems about the ordinary things like popular culture, which is something that I think a lot of writers consider to be beneath their notice. But popular culture is a reflection of its audience, isn’t it? When we are horrified at Miley Cyrus wagging her tongue on a television awards show, or watching the Avengers battle a cosmic menace on a movie screen, or cheering on our favorite pro wrestlers (Brock Lesnar) as they clash with our less favorite sports figures (anyone not named Brock Lesnar), we are reacting to reflections of ourselves as a culture and how we orient ourselves to that reflection. To me, this is something worth writing about.

So, I think I just said that I hope for world peace via poems about pro wrestling. I’m good with that.

Todd's Book:

The Dead Wrestler Elegies

Some of Todd's Poems Online:

Menacing Hedge

Boxcar Poetry

[PANK]

DMQ Review

Four Questions for Ruth Foley

2015-09-16T03:53:00.000-07:00

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for
Wheaton College. Her work
appears in numerous web and
print journals, including Antiphon,
The Bellingham Review, and Sou’wester.
She is the author of two chapbooks,Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press)
and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications), and serves as Managing Editor forCider Press Review. You can find her online at her blog Five Things, or on Twitter or Facebook.

DS: Why do you write poetry?

RF: This seemed like such an easy question to answer until I tried to answer it. The shortest version (which isn’t terribly short, I’m afraid) is that poetry is the art form that addresses most of the things that make me tick. It’s the most condensed form of humanity I’ve found. Also, I trained as a classical vocalist when I was younger and studied a lot of music, and poetry carries a lot of music within it, for obvious reasons. I love its sonic qualities, its rhythms, and its obsessive, glorious attention to detail. Poetry is also a bit of a chameleon—my favorite poems look and sound effortless but are in fact intricately crafted.

DS: What do you hope to find in poems written by other people?

RF: Stuff to steal. Moves that make me lose my breath. Some piece of language that I would never have thought of in a million years but which feels perfect. Illumination. Shadow. The occasional sex scene.

DS: Describe your works in progress.

RF: I’m in the final-for-now stages of putting together a manuscript that mixes my old obsessions with my new ones. It’s a watery manuscript—I grew up spending my summers on the Rhode Island coast, and the ocean is such an essential aspect of my nature that I can’t escape it. And don’t particularly want to. I’m fascinated with human failings and human fears, and I’m obsessed with the idea of place and space, and those interests are all there. I’ve also started moving into exploring ways to include my belief in the essential value of life. I’m a feminist and a humanist, and I also believe very strongly in the importance of the natural world. I love the fuzzy and sweet, but I also love the creepy and crawly and the creatures that make a lot of people recoil. I want to advocate for the deep, deep beauty of the world while simultaneously exploring hopelessness and loneliness. But, you know. No pressure.

DS: What are your hopes for the future of poetry?

RF: World peace? Or maybe just continual exploration of the human condition. When I say that, I mean all humans, with as diverse a swath of backgrounds as there are poets. I make an effort to read poets from as varied a group as I can think of—varied in terms of sex, sexual orientation, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background...whatever I can do. Some of the poetry speaks to me and some of it doesn’t and all of it helps me understand myself as a poet just a bit more. I see it as part of my responsibility and privilege as an editor to do so, but it’s also opened up my writing in ways I couldn’t have anticipated and may not be able to explain. My hope for the future of poetry is that more and more writers and editors open themselves up to experiences that don’t align with their own. There’s no downside to doing so—nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Ruth's Chapbooks:

Creature Feature

Dear Turquoise

Some of Ruth's Poems Online:

Three poems from Creature Feature

Poems (with audio) at The Poetry Storehouse

“Judas”

“Castaway”

Three poems at Front Porch

Next Big Thing Interview

2013-01-29T19:15:00.000-08:00

The fabulous Carol Guess has tagged me for the Next Big Thing Series, in which writers give brief interviews about their forthcoming books. (I'm looking forward to reading the interviews of the people I've tagged at the bottom of this post.) Here goes:

What is the working title of the book?

How the Potato Chip Was Invented; there’s a poem in the book with that name. It was inspired by a visit to the Utz factory in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I remember watching a short video there about the history of the chip. Basically, I took the real story, forgot large sections of it, and replaced the forgotten sections with references to Lionel Richie. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I had been writing a bunch of mock-history prose poems. Some of these took historical figures and placed them in impossible contexts (e.g., Fred Astaire performing with the Black Eyed Peas), while other poems were aimed at righting wrongs; certain celebrities received long-overdue comeuppance. The idea to focus the book solely on these celebrity poems came from the editors, David McNamara and Brian Mihok.

What genre does your book fall under?

Prose poems, mini teleplay, standardized test portion, etc.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Some of the characters in the book are movie actors: Christopher Walken and Max von Sydow, for example. I would want them to play each other.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

These poems about celebrities are occasionally creepy and loosely research-based—Wikipedia, basically.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I sat in my basement a couple of Aprils ago and thought up dozens of “what if” scenarios involving famous people—Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon. Then I turned these into longish prose poems that had to be pared down. It took a couple of months to revise and turn the poems into a manuscript.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I was a journalist and advertising copywriter before I became a poet. Some of the ideas in the book probably come from my brain’s inability to differentiate among these disparate media. I sometimes distort facts and serve up a poem as a tweaked biography. Anyhow, the writers who inspired me most were David Wojahn—who wrote several brilliant, celebrity-oriented poems in his book Mystery Train—and my heroes of prose poetry: Russell Edson and James Tate.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I blaspheme mainstream darlings such as Thomas Kinkade and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Somehow, even Julie Andrews winds up under the proverbial bus. I also profess my decades-long love for Rosanna Arquette.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It will be published in summer 2013 by sunnyoutside press, which makes beautiful books. I am so fortunate to be able to work with David and Brian.

======

My tagged writers for next week are:

Mary Lou Buschi
Sarah Carson
Matt Hart
Shannon Hozinec
Jessy Randall
Daniel Romo

Interview with Matt Hart

2012-12-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, most recently Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012). A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. This fall he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.

=============================================================

DS: What’s your earliest memory of poetry (either yours or someone else’s)? What do you think led to your strong attraction to poetry, or poetry’s attraction to you?

MH: My earliest memories of poetry are pretty negative actually. Mostly they’re of being told in one setting or another that I’d gotten it wrong. That what I thought the poem was about wasn’t it at all. One particular instance with “Ode on a Grecian Urn” really left a sour taste in my mouth. I just couldn’t relate to the antiqueness of the language, nor the idyllic subject, and while I had pretty good teachers, I was wildly resistant to everything at that point and/or wanted to do things so radically my own way, that it was probably a nightmare trying to teach me anything. I heard what I wanted to hear. And this made interpretation particularly tricky, especially when the teacher clearly had in mind a right answer.

DS: I’ve always thought that the main difference between poetry and prose is that poetry allows for more interpretation. The reader is allowed to incorporate his or her baggage (or perhaps positive energy) into what he or she gets from the poem.

MH: Yeah, of course, right. But I think so many students, especially at the high school level get turned off to poetry early on, because it’s presented like a puzzle, a thing to be solved—rather than as a thing to engage with, to converse with, to sit down at the table and go haywire together. I realize that last part doesn’t make any sense. But yes, poetry allows for a different, more acrobatic, more up close and personal kind of reading. That doesn’t mean there aren’t meanings to get, but that those meanings are nuanced, because poetry activates the connotative associative atmosphere of the language, which allows me and you and everybody we know to collide with that atmosphere and find him or herself THERE!

What was funny with regard to my high school experience was that I loved song lyrics, especially Bob Dylan and The Dead Kennedys and Hank Williams—protest music, folk and punk and twangy country stuff. I played in punk bands. I wrote my own songs. What changed for me with poetry was getting into college (where I was a philosophy major) and as a Junior taking a poetry workshop with Tom Koontz and being exposed to poems like “Howl” and Etheridge Knight’s “Feeling Fucked Up” and the Charles Bukowski book Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame (I loved that one, still do—though I haven’t read it in a long time), “Some people never go crazy/What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

DS: I have probably spent more time with The Essential Etheridge Knight and that orange Bukowski book than I’ve spent with any other poetry books. Initially, I couldn’t think of any overt connection between their poems (style, themes, etc.) and your writing. Those poets seem to infuse their work with authentic raw emotion, though, and you seem to operate that way, too.

MH: Well, Etheridge spent a ton of time in Indiana (including in prison in Michigan City, and then later as a teacher in Indianapolis), so there’s that connection. But yeah, I want to connect viscerally with the poems and hopefully with readers as well. The older I get, the more I think authenticity is a matter of being open to change—maybe on a dime. That it’s a matter of not being static—of staying open to possibility, to poetry as a kind of constant re/activity and a way of being in the world. The Beats and Knight and later the New York School provided me with a way into poetry that made sense to me, because the poetry seemed infused with the life, and the life was infused with the poems.

That said, looking back, I think the poems I loved early on were performative, irreverent, and political—often with surreal elements. I liked William Carlos Williams quite a lot too for what I took then to be a kind of generous simplicity, a concrete plainness, which I now realize isn’t simple at all. As for Keats, of course I love him now. He’s one of my favorites, as are the Romantics in general: Clare, Coleridge, Shelley—some Wordsworth, not so much Byron, but I’m impatient with him. Some day I’ll get with Byron too.

DS: How have you been able to become less “wildly resistant” and relate to the Romantics and others? Or have you changed in ways that welcome poets you might have rejected earlier?

MH: Oh, definitely the latter. I grew up. I became over time less angry. I fell in love and I fell in love with poetry. I encountered the poets/poems mentioned above, along with others like Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, etc. that were resistant in all the ways (and more) that I was. These poetic points of resistance (to the conventions of the tradition, but also to conventional decorum and the status quo) provided me with a window into the art, which I was in some sense waiting for. I needed a portal, a vast void to climb into and GO!

So there were a lot of reasons why poetry struck me when it did. I loved that a poem was in some sense always a song, but one that contained the words AND the music. The words were the music; the music was (the) words. No cantankerous band mates necessary, no heavy lifting, no special equipment. To write a poem, one needed words—something available to all of us. But the poet’s job is to in some significant way misuse and mismanage the language (a kind of resistance) to create aesthetic effects/affect. One didn’t need to be rational all the time (remember I was a philosophy major). One could press one’s face up against the noumenon in poetry, one could taste the meadow, revel in the cool clarity of contradiction, snuggle up to nonsense. Finally, it was expressive, not overqualified, not a thing to prove. It was a thing to be and to BE in. In a poem one could make and remake the world, vision and re-vision.

DS: When did you first find your own voice as a poet? How have you been able to incorporate other influences while still maintaining that voice?

MH: Gosh. Do I have a voice? It certainly doesn’t feel that way to me. To me it feels like I’m always trying to find my way, like I’m stumbling around in the dark, and every once in a while I trip over something, and for a couple of moments there’s a flash of bright light, a little clarity, and then everything’s plunged back into darkness. Was that the dog or the ottoman? A buttercup or a body? Writing poems is for me always explorative, which is thrilling, sometimes terrifying, and often, too, a bewildering wilderness of doubt—highs and lows and everything in between. So maybe my voice is voices (plural—or just flashes of things against the screen of the ghost in machine). Writing is a process of pitching out beyond me the sounds/images to see if and how they bounce back—I’m sending out a call for a response that I can hopefully shape into something else entirely.

As for the second part of your question, that’s easier. One doesn’t have to try to incorporate one’s influences; that happens automatically, if one pays attention. We’re all constantly filtering everything we’ve read, been told, experienced, or remember through our unique weird brains. You can’t help but be original if you keep your eyes open and avoid being a numbed out, passionless, too cool to feel anything zombie. I truly believe that we’re all a lot more similar than we are different from each other, and yet there’s nothing more strange than any other human being on the planet. On a more practical note, though, if one trusts the writing process and keeps trying things out, resists one’s habits, and continues to explore the possibilities of a practice, the influences get incorporated, mulched up and reintroduced to the soil (whether we want to acknowledge it or not).

DS: How do you think our current culture (including increased availability of information via Internet, reality TV shows, etc.) influences us as writers? Forklift, Ohio, is forward thinking in its content, but it also takes pleasure in throwback-style artwork and tactile elements that wouldn’t be possible online. It seems like Forklift leans toward a future that both celebrates and pokes fun at the past.

MH: Obviously one of the main things that has changed over the last 20 years is the speed at which we can access (though maybe not fully absorb) small and massive chunks of data/information. I think that to be influenced in a really significant way, one had to go to the trouble—one had to do real research, which required going somewhere where the information could be found, or acquiring the resources oneself. It was a more rigorous process. Now one just pulls up the Internet, and there’s almost anything. Of course, the cost of this is that the depth of exposure to the things that influence us may not be quite as great. And the things themselves may be a little more flimsy, e.g., reality TV or an “excerpt” of something I can read online. But hey, there’s give and take to everything. We gain a lot; we lose a lot. I have students now who can’t read the comments I write on their papers if I write them in cursive because they never learned to write in cursive. Of course, they have all sorts of tech skills that I don’t know anything about…. Anyway, the more direct answer to your question is: Speed of access and the quantity of information we can access RIGHT NOW have really impacted contemporary poetry, though I’m not at this point willing to go to the mat and talk about how particularly. I feel it. And I feel like I read it and write it.

Maybe that dissonance you’re feeling with Forklift, Ohio, between looking forward and looking back, has to do with the fact that Eric Appleby (Forklift’s designer/publisher) and I were both born in the late sixties/early seventies, and thus grew up without personal computers, the Internet, cell phones, etc. As a result, we sort of wobble back and forth between embracing technology/contemporary attitudes about it, and having some kind of nostalgia for the world we grew up in—not to mention also an interest in the late 19th and early 20th century avant-garde, engineering manuals, factory parts catalogs, old cookbooks, etc. There’s a sense—maybe one shared by lots of people of my generation, I don’t know—in which I want to live significantly in my own time and be a part of that, and yet I also long for something that seems lost to me now, even if I can’t explicitly say (or don’t want to say?) what that is. Again, it’s a feeling. We definitely aren’t trying to make fun of the past. I’d say we’re trying desperately to hold on to it, while also living in the present and looking to the future. I want all of it at once—which is simultaneity, which is Apollinaire. I want Apollinaire.

Jessy Randall interviews me about her book

2012-10-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

Injecting Dreams into Cows, Jessy Randall's latest book of poems, is now available from Red Hen Press. I was fortunate to be able to tell her my feelings about the book, and now I pass those feelings on to you. --DMS

====================

Jessy: Dan, is this the best book you have read by me, or what?

Dan: It is most certainly the best book of yours I’ve read that doesn’t include a fictionalized version of me. It is eclectic, but not in an ill-advised-potluck way. There is no Jell-O mold with bananas in it. It’s more like a mix tape made by someone who really knows what you’re supposed to be listening to.

Jessy: I would say there is a fictionalized version of you in the poem "The Way We Felt Playing Cards." Because I can't know for sure if we really all felt the same way about it. Do you think it's okay that there are two poems in the book about Ms. Pac-Man, and that they appear right next to each other?

Dan: I don’t object to anything about those poems. If you had portrayed Ms. Pac-Man as the sort who would have badmouthed the Donkey Kong gorilla behind his back, that might’ve rubbed me the wrong way. You did no such thing. I like the second poem especially because it’s not about the real Ms. Pac-Man at all.

Jessy: While we're on the topic, do you read poetry books from beginning to end or do you jump around? If you jump around, please describe how. Do you read like Aimee Bender says she reads, showing her eye pattern with this map?

Dan: It depends on whose book I am reading. If it’s a Thomas Lux book, I scan the titles, rank them, and read from highest- to lowest-ranked titles. If the poet is not a deity when it comes to titles, I might read from beginning to end. When I read your book, I used the same method I use to read Lux’s books.

Jessy: Can you make a map like Aimee Bender's for how you read my book? Would that be too much trouble?

Dan: I think it was David Byrne who said, “I ain’t got time for that now.”

Jessy: Oh, all right. Next question: which poem do you feel is the most "me"?

Dan: That seems like a trick question, like, “Why do these pants make me look fat?” But we will assume all the poems are great, and therefore, the most “you” poem shows your specific greatness the most. I suppose I would vote for “Home” because it represents a version of you I remember well: the one that lived near Elmwood Avenue and couldn’t resist quoting “Broadcast News.”

Jessy: Which poem do you think could have been a collaboration between us?

Dan: "Wedding Food." It is the logical companion for our poem "What Is It They’re Supposed to Throw?" We could (should, really) have bookends made with those poems affixed to them.

Jessy: Wow, you are right. I think I will do that right now.

Jessy: How do you feel about prose poems? Do you feel that they are not actually poems, the way some of the commenters at io9 do?

Dan: I almost feel compelled to answer seriously. Let’s just say I would be a hypocrite to criticize a form that breaks rules, not to mention a form I use regularly. The main reason I write poetry is to break rules. Poetry has less severe consequences than shoplifting.

Jessy: Do you feel that some of these topics are not appropriate for poems? Muppets, Velcro, Pippi Longstocking, bad phone sex, robots, video games, Whac-A-Mole, etc.

Dan: Each of those topics could be a stand-in for more “appropriate” ones: Muppets (puppetry, e.g., lack of freewill or responsibility), Velcro (inability to let go), etc. Of course, you know this is true.

Jessy: If you say so, though I think you are kidding. I hope you are. What do you think is the worst poem in the book? I think it is "Trouble in Pac-Land," because Ms. Pac-Man makes a lame pun on the word "packing."

Dan: ”Something is Chasing You” might be my least favorite because it rhymes, though I believe you rhymed for fun and not to be a snooty smarty pants. You used “pell-mell,” for gosh sakes. What’s more fun to say than “pell-mell”?

Jessy: Maybe "hideous" or "berserk," which also appear in the book. One last question: do you have any memories you would like deleted in the manner of "The Seductiveness of the Memory Hole"?

Dan: Yes. I once had a female friend with long, blond hair. I had told her a story someone had told me about a drunk guy at some advertising conference, and the guy yelled to a woman, “Hey, Blondie: How ‘bout a smile?” Anyhow, I was fond of saying this to my female friend with long, blond hair. One time, I said it while I was behind her, but for whatever reason, she didn’t respond. So I said it again much more loudly. Again, she didn’t respond. Finally, I shouted, “Hey, Blondie: How ‘bout a smile?” so loudly, that she stopped and turned around. The problem was, it wasn’t my friend. It was some other woman with long, blond hair. The End

Interview with Juliet Cook

2012-03-07T18:54:00.002-08:00

Juliet Cook's poetry has appeared in Action Yes, Barn Owl Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Diode and many more print and online entities. She is the editor/publisher of Blood Pudding Press (print) and Thirteen Myna Birds (online). Juliet’s first full-length poetry book, "Horrific Confection," was published by BlazeVOX. She also has oodles of published poetry chapbooks, most recently including FONDANT PIG ANGST (Slash Pine Press), Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), POST-STROKE (Blood Pudding Press for Dusie Kollektiv 5) and Thirteen Designer Vaginas (Hyacinth Girl Press), with another new chapbook, POISONOUS BEAUTY SKULL LOLLIPOP, coming very soon from the new Strange Cage. She is currently submitting her second full-length poetry book. To find out more, visit www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

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Note: I interviewed Juliet via instant messaging because her spirit of spontaneity seemed to lend itself to such a format.

DS: Hello! I assure you I have no written questions or notes.

JC: Haha. Well I am in total PMS mode, so I hope my whole perspective isn't altered by that...

DS: It's actually sort of perfect. I wanted to ask you about honesty, so this will be good.

JC: I'm not a very picky judgmental type, but if there's one thing I can't stand it is fake-ness! So there's really nothing fake about me - but on the other hand, by some people's standards, I am a too-much-information sharer.

DS: You are giving good answers, and I haven't even asked a question yet.

JC: I'm a blabbermouth. Plus which I am brimming with mixed feelings about most things, including myself and relationships and my poetry!

DS: I feel the same way, though I don't know if it helps to mention that.

JC: Sure it helps because I don't understand people who think every little thing is awesomely perfect. I know I have a passion for poetry and I like my poetry, but sometimes I feel like so many of my poems are variations on the same topic.

DS: What topic is that?

JC: Well lately it's my brain wanting to grow stronger; my brain wanting to attack or drown or vomit out weaknesses and exert or empower or rise up strengths? There seems to be a lot of sea creature imagery, water imagery in general, and funereal imagery - so I guess it's semi-related to pieces of me having drowned or died and figuring out what pieces can still swim... and hopefully swim even stronger and more powerfully than the misshapen death sinkings (and also, not in any kind of direct way, but on a side note, maybe lashing out against some of the end of my relationship with my ex-husband and our divorce).

DS: I wondered how much of the horror in your poems--sometimes disturbing, sometimes fun like an "Evil Dead" movie--comes from how you want to deal with pain (physical, emotional, etc.).

JC: I like horror movies and that kind of imagery; I'm also overwhelming over-the-top emotional.

DS: But it doesn't come across as over the top.

JC: Well good. I'm also really bodily oriented in both positive and negative ways - not about other people's bodies, but about mine. Maybe it seems over the top in a way to me, because my family, although very intelligent and loving and caring people, are not as into in-depth conversation as I am - and I think that's part of the reason I often feel compelled to express a lot of my thoughts/feelings through poetry. Plus they think a lot of subject matter is “inappropriate” and I disagree so I'll spew it out if I want to.

DS: One of my favorite horror directors is David Cronenberg, who is so body-obsessed. There's some Cronenberg in your poems, I think. I was thinking of “The Fly,” in particular, because it is about a body rebelling against itself when a person seeks immortality.

JC: I saw “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers” long ago, and I really liked them, especially “Dead Ringers.” I like things that would creep many people out or gross them out (but that's not WHY I like them).

DS: “Dead Ringers” is creepy because the male gynecologist invents tools that are made for how a woman's body is SUPPOSED to be, according to the doctor.

JC: Every time I have a bad dream and tell my mom about it, she tells me it's because I watch too many horror movies.

DS: Some of your poems are more like allegories because they have movie-like images. They might not seem overtly realistic, but the images make me uncomfortable, nonetheless. Your poems in POST-STROKE are more realistic because I picture you telling your true story.

JC: Some of my earlier poems fuse together real-life experiences with non-real life horrific-ness inspired by thoughts/feelings etc... As for POST-STROKE poems, I'm not sure how best to describe them, even though they make sense to me. They're shorter than most of my poems used to be. Another little way in which they differ is some of the word usage. Tons of food words used to infuse my poetry. Oddly, food words are an example of these easy little words that my brain cannot easily think of these days. The part of my brain most affected by my stroke must have been this part of things you learn when you were a kid, because big words still spurt out fine (yay) - but I have serious issues with food words, names, household items, stuff like that... Even colors! I have to concentrate hard to get color words right.

DS: My mother-in-law had a stroke in her early 50s, and she would often substitute words in unusual ways. I related to your poems more because of that. Did you substitute similar-sounding words in your poems before the stroke or just after?

JC: I think most people who talk to me in person would have no idea (at least not quickly) that I'd had a stroke because I've gotten to the point where I am good at substituting some basic word I can't think of with another word - even though sometimes it annoys me that it's not quite the right word. A BIG word to use in a poem will spurt out of my head and FEEL right, but I'm not sure what the word MEANS. I'll have to look it up in Dictionary.com, and occasionally it won't make the right kind of sense, but USUALLY it will. Odd, eh? Another odd word-oriented issue with my brain is that oftentimes, I can't think of some easy little word, BUT my brain can visualize its first letter and relative length - and sometimes if I write down that first letter, then the word comes back.

DS: Did you have poetry in your head while you were still in the hospital? Maybe it was there but you couldn't write it down.

JC: I remember when I was still in the hospital telling me mom that I had all these writing projects to work on as soon as I got home, and she got this weird look on her face and made some remark about how my reading was going to be a little slower for a while, and I didn't believe her, and she handed me a magazine, and even the letters made no sense. I couldn't spell my own name. I still had poetry in my head but no way to express it.

DS: I am trying to imagine what that would be like...

JC: It was tough, BUT I honestly think that my passion for reading and writing and poetry is what led to a pretty good recovery. I think a lot of people in a time like that would maybe go to therapy but watch TV at home, whereas I repeatedly worked on trying to read no matter how long it took.

DS: You mentioned that you have mixed feelings about your poetry. How do you decide how/what/where to submit?

JC: I don't dislike my poetry pieces (I just question the semi-repetitive content on a larger scale). If I feel good about a poem, I'll start submitting it right away. However, I don't write as much as I used to (because everything about me is slower), so thus I don't submit as much as I used to.

DS: How has it been to put together your second manuscript?

JC: It's an ongoing process (adding poems, removing poems, changing order etc...). Overall I quite like the manuscript, but I'm a bit nervous it might not be any press’ style. My first manuscript was published back in 2008 - so one thing that means is the content of my second manuscript is both pre-stroke and post-stroke. I don't think that's a huge deal but I recently had an editor suggest that my older work was better (in terms of more HIS style), which is no big deal, which is fine (everyone has their own style) - but I will admit it made the insecure part of my brain wonder if most people might feel that way.

DS: As a publisher, you have found people who are distinctive, but they might not be considered marketable based on a publishing business model. How are you able to put out the chapbooks you produce?

JC: I design the chapbooks on my computer and print them on my printer, one by one - and then do my hand-designing. It's quite time consuming and frankly, the printing/designing expenditures slightly outweigh the money I make selling them.

DS: What got you interested in doing it?

JC: The main reason I started my online lit mag is because I can't afford (money-wise but also time-wise) to create a lot of print chapbooks. One thing that inspired me to start Blood Pudding Press (the print chaps) is because I had created a chapbook and didn't feel like submitting it for years during which it might or might not be accepted, so I decided to publish it myself, BUT even though I was going to start by publishing my first chapbook, I planned to publish others too, but first I wanted to make sure I could do a decent-looking job. I also think it is important for poets to work on not only their own writings, but also reading (and ideally publishing) other poets too.

DS: What do you think will be the “next big thing” in poetry (yours or poetry in general)?

JC: Hmm... I kind of hope poetry doesn't turn into performance art - because even though I like some other people's performance art, it's not MY way of expressing myself - but I guess that's a possibility. I don't think poetry is ever going to be very popular in a mainstream sort of way, and that is FINE WITH ME! It's interesting how it's not very mainstream, yet there are SO MANY different poets - and SO MANY different styles of poetry. As for MY poetry in general, I'm not sure, but I am excited to find out!

DS: I've told my students about getting books or poems published, and they wonder why I still work. I tell them I've made maybe $100 in 10 years.

JC: I know; some people don't understand that! Maybe there will be some type of poetry/horror movies fusion. Or poetry/porn fusion. No, never mind the porn; that would probably be dirty RHYMING poetry. But horror movie/poetry reading fests?! Fun?! Maybe?!

DS: I wrote my first zombie poem recently.

JC: Haha. The word “zombie” appears in several of my semi-recent poems, in relation to my brain feeling zombie-fied. This has been a fun IM session; yay!

DS: It has been fun.

JC: Anyway mister, I'm getting off here for now; talk with you later! P.S.: Only one other guy IM'd me during this process, and he was ignored.