Interview with Matt Hart
Risky Business
Interview by David Sewell
If the title of Matt Hart’s first book, Who’s Who Vivid, were to be rearranged (which would be a fitting exercise given Hart’s affinity for Apollinaire and Ted Berrigan), we would get a different question altogether, and one that’s more easily answerable: Who’s Vivid? Who? Well, Matt Hart, that’s who. Proof’s not hard to come by: his consistently fantastic journal, Forklift, Ohio; his auspicious Who’s Who Vivid; his chapbooks, Revelated and Sonnet; his punk rock band Squirtgun’s beguiling-yet-catchy tunes (“Well my hair is cryin’ / In wild mist of liar’s corner / Tearin’ fruit apart with my bare hands / the pears are fallin’ / they’re on fire in this liar’s corner / burning up Egyptian daughter / tearing fruit apart with my bare hands / my hands are cryin’ lately”). In this far-ranging interview, Hart spills the magic beans, touching on everything from what’s inside a giraffe to the exfoliating properties of the Dead Kennedys’ music to the role of style in the 21st century.
David Sewell: In Dean Young’s most recent book, Embryoyo, he makes the point that the rapid movement in his poems from idea to idea is based on feeling—that is, he’s feeling his way around…his mind, the poem. How do you see the movements in your poems functioning?
Matt Hart: I don’t really see myself feeling around in poems much, because at least initially in my writing process, I try very consciously not to think about poems at all. I can’t stand having a plan, so I give myself limits as a way to generate the material I need to actually work. My hope is always that the walls I’ve put up are elastic enough to hold the wildflower meteor shower grocery list KA-BLAM!, and also strong enough to contain the pterodactyls-dactyls, rhinoceros-hearse.
As the material starts to accumulate, I begin trying to attend to where it wants to go, what it wants to look like, and who it wants to talk to about the weather at the party. In a sense, I guess I feel my way through a process to try and get to a poem, but initially the process is all-important—the visceral engine that gets me on the road to something I’d never think of without it. I write every day, but most days I fail to write poems. In my process, I feel like one of those little wind-up godzillas that bobbles mechanically across the floor, shooting sparks out of its mouth. Then I throw everything into the blender and see what it tastes like.
The trick, of course, is to come up with something that amounts to more than the sum of its parts—something more than experiment (procedure), technique (craft), and all that one knows and can articulate about poetry. The proof of good craft is that nobody mentions it when they talk about your poems, and a good procedure is often one that almost disappears—it informs without essentially defining the art. For me, lines, words, stanzas all have to function to point the poem (in some sense, on some level) out beyond itself and its poemness. Dean Young once said to me that “after a hundred years of experimentation, experimentation is no longer enough—now we have to amount to something.” And I think one could say the same thing about craft (or what have you) as well. To be wildly experimental, or technical, or associatively high-flying isn’t enough. Which is why, to get back to your question, I’m trying to get it all in somehow—to include everything and the kitchen (not merely its sink)—and to do it by whatever means I can muster.
DS: Young also says, in a sort of “Ars Poetica” moment, that he’s trying to make birds, not birdhouses, a wonderfully fitting metaphor. Are you making birds, or something else? (I’m thinking of some lines of yours from “In Fifteen Minutes,” and I know I’m really taking them out of context: “But what do birds know? At best they sing / only one or two songs.”)
MH: A friend called me up one night and said, “Here’s the assignment: write a poem in fifteen minutes, and include at least five things that happened during the day. Call it ‘In Fifteen Minutes.’ I’ll do the same and then call you back, and we’ll read them to each other over the phone.” Now, the poem that’s in the book isn’t exactly the poem I wrote in fifteen minutes, but it’s pretty close. What’s important in the lines that you mention is that what birds “know” is what’s being devalued, not the birds themselves, and not their songs, either. The skepticism is about knowledge itself.
I love that poem of Dean’s (“Leaves in a Drained Swimming Pool”), and those lines in particular are ones that I’ve thought about a lot. This issue of making birds or jumbo jets or stem cells is why on some fundamental level (open mouth insert foot) capital-P Poetry (the writing of it) cannot be taught. A teacher can provide atmosphere, energy, enthusiasm, technique, but marvelous poetry always contains something inexplicable—an impossible ingredient that’s there in spite of the person who wrote it. A poem isn’t simply the best words in the best order, it’s a series of transformative gestures, a demonstration of consciousness that reaches out into the world or the Vast and Void and smacks things around a little bit (including the person who wrote it). So at the same time that a poem has to be more than the sum of its parts, it can’t be reducible to them either. As Breton and Eluard wrote somewhere, “A poem must be a debacle of the intellect.”
On the other hand, it’s probably not quite as bizarre as I want to make it out to be, either. In many ways, against the backdrop of ordinary language, a poem is always a sort of extraordinary monstrosity of/in language—i.e., it’s the language we already know without the necessary legislation of meaning provided by ordinary aims, syntax, punctuation, etc. We recognize the words, but their use is very specialized. Taking the monster idea a bit further, Frankenstein’s monster, for instance, was made out of a variety of recognizable body parts, but it was nobody recognizable—it was in fact a malformation, extraordinary and terrifying and imaginatively (in)human. That’s poetry. As Wittgenstein said, “Even though a poem is composed in the language of information, it isn’t a part of the language-game of giving information.” What’s important is to make one’s monsters more bird than birdhouse, more pterodactyl than carburetor, more human than Argghhh! I don’t want to make a poem that’s so disproportionate and inappropriate to its context (as a poem) that no one recognizes it for what it is—i.e., I don’t want its surface deformities/enhancements to entirely obscure and obliterate its depths.
As artists, we’re responsible for (and to) the things we make, but if we do our job, they also take on a life of their own that has little to do with us. My poems are my problem, and while that doesn’t mean I can necessarily control or understand or explain them (cause I can’t), it does mean that I have to try.
DS: Animals—elephants, rhinoceroses, dogs, giraffes—make up a large percentage of your poetic image bank. I think it’s relevant to mention that animal imagery plays an important and large role in childhood, serving as a vehicle for that blooming sense of wonderment and imagination in children. Why do you think animals are so prevalent in your poems?
MH: Animals are who/what we’d like to be but aren’t, and, conversely, they’re what we fear most in ourselves. Also—and this is, I think, really important to me as a poet—they don’t use language—at least not in the way we think of it—and thus they exist differently than we do. How differently? I have no idea. That’s the allure and the mystery, the interface between the animals in my poems and what I can and can’t imagine about them.
Beyond that, many of the specifically animal-focused poems in my book—“Address to the Rhinoceros,” “Great White Shark,” Wildebeest,” etc.—came out of an assignment a friend gave me to help me ground and focus myself. He said, “Write a poem of at least ten lines ABOUT a rhinoceros, and make every line refer to the rhinoceros.” Easy enough, except that I didn’t know the first thing about rhinoceroses (not that knowing anything really mattered, but I needed base material). So I went to the dictionary and copied out exactly the definition for “rhinoceros.” Then I looked up and copied out the definitions of all the words in the definition of “rhinoceros” that I didn’t know, and from there I did the same for this second tier of words. Pretty soon I had pages and pages of meticulously copied definitions. It was very boring work. The next day, without looking back at the definitions, I sat down and wrote the poem, which turned out to be a sort of ode to the rhinoceros, but, more than that, to the word “rhinoceros.” The poem is essentially: fallout from the word exploded in conjunction with my imagined sense of the animal represented by the word. All the other animal poems followed in the same way. Not all of them worked, of course—the lion, the crocodile, and the ostrich didn’t make it. The dictionary process, however, has stuck with me, and I use it quite a bit to get myself spinning in every direction at once.
DS: In “Shag Carpet Gala” you say, “I don’t believe in authority figures. They’re like symbols, / and symbols I don’t believe in either.” Ideally, one would think you wouldn’t have to state your disbelief in symbols. But do you find, with your students (or with anyone, really), that there’s still the idea that images or ideas in poems are symbols for something else? Have you found that people try to read your poems symbolically or metaphorically?
MH: From writing reviews myself, I’m convinced that most of what the vast majority of people get out of poetry has more to do with what they bring to it than with the poetry itself—which is fine with me. Also, I think that even here in the 21st century it’s pretty difficult for a lot of people to get the idea that a poem might not be about something in the strict sense, but that it demonstrates something or points somewhere outside itself. I like the idea of letting a poem wash over you when you read it, paying close attention to the after-grit that sticks in your head or your heart.
For me, “Shag Carpet Gala” is a poem about the love of spectacle and the spectacle of love—images upon images upon images, where (in the Baudrillardian sense) the “map has replaced the territory” in almost every aspect of our cultural lives. The speaker in the poem is bombarded with the objects of his own imagination and also a string of real ones (physical, linguistic, musical) at the same time, and he blenders them—which is his want and love to do, but all the while he’s reminding himself that what’s important is the process. The process—the walk down the carpet—is the part of the event that shines (the life, the poem), not the carpet itself (it’s ’70s shag, after all) and not the speaker’s judgment or experience of it. Good or bad, true or false, left brain right brain, oompah oompah, the meaning of life and its requisite party is in maintaining one’s footing until the very end.
DS: You have a background in philosophy. The question of whether or to what extent philosophy informs your process or your poetic product does not seem all that interesting to me. I do wonder, though, assuming that philosophy does play a part in your poetry, what might the poetry reader be fairly asked to bring to the table? Should the reader of contemporary poetry, of your poetry, know his Wittgenstein and his Heidegger?
MH: Philosophy is a backdrop to some of my poems; it was a pretty formative part of my early academic life. But while I sometimes reference it (as I have above) to talk about where I come from, what I’m doing, or how I’m thinking about the work, ultimately the poems have to have their effects and be affective (on some significant visceral level) without a reader’s having any knowledge of theory or philosophy. I quit grad school in philosophy to focus on poetry and music, because I got to a point where I was doing the latter (writing poetry and music) to get at the very things that philosophy purports to deal with but can’t ever really touch—the how and why of human existence. In my experience, life’s not very logical; “uncertainties Mysteries and doubts,” not to mention contradictions, are the order of the day. What’s philosophy (which is, after all, based in the scientific method) gonna do with that, other than stroke its white beard and look baffled on the mountaintop? The fact is that philosophers argue endlessly and in minute detail about things that have absolutely nothing to do with human life or knowledge or truth or anything else, because what they’re really arguing about—what they’re confused by (Wittgenstein would say “bewitched by”)—is language.
I love Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the Philosophical Investigations. In spite of the way philosophers and literary theorists abuse it, it really goes a long way toward demystifying and dissolving (rather than solving) philosophical problems. Without going too much into it, he actually thought of philosophy as a sort of mental illness for which his own philosophy was the cure. The idea is that if you need the cure (and not everyone does) and you understand him, you stop doing Philosophy (that is, neurotically questioning and arguing about things, which have clear enough, ordinary answers to begin with. “Reasons end somewhere,” Wittgenstein reminds us). Interestingly, he also wrote that “all philosophy ought really be done as a form of poetry,” by which I think he meant: unsystematically, exploratively, with coherence, association, and comparison in mind, rather than certainty and scientific rigor. There are no universally acceptable, essential answers to questions like “What is knowledge” or “What is the nature of art”—though there are numerous solutions to be had in the relationships to be found via sifting through and comparing the nonessential answers. And these “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein’s term) offer us myriad ways of both thinking about and making our work and the world.
DS: You also have a background in punk music. Beyond the DIY ethic that’s clear in the production of your journal, Forklift, Ohio, does the punk-rock mentality play a part in your life as a poet, or in your poetry?
MH: I don’t know that there’s all that much that’s specifically punk rock in my poems, but I do feel that I want them to have some similar characteristics and effects—the noise, the energy, the sense that everything could fall apart at any second. Sloppiness. Elasticity. Negation. The very first punk rock record I ever listened to was the Dead Kennedys’ Plastic Surgery Disasters, which I put on the turntable one day after school and then sat in the floor of my room in disbelief watching my own face melt. The first track on that record, “Advice from Christmas Past,” is a wild stretch of cacophonous, atonal, a-rhythmic racket—a song in complete negation, on the run from itself and music. It doesn’t have a lead vocal, but there is a voiceover done by a woman, which begins, “Why are you such a stupid asshole? Would you really like to know?” The track lasts a minute and some seconds, then immediately one hears the Kennedys’ drummer, D.H. Peligro, click his sticks and count off “Government Flu,” the record’s first real song. “1-2-3-4” BLAM! The first chord destroys everything. It’s like you’re being hit in the mouth with a skyscraper. And after a short midtempo intro, the song kicks into hyperdrive, and Jello Biafra begins his warble: “We gotta drug, we’re gonna try it out on you / It won’t make you die / It’ll getcha just a little sick.” From there, the whole record is rabid—speed-demon-intense, politically radical and dangerous.
What’s weird is that I remember having a similar experience as a listener the first time I heard Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up,” and I actually thought of the Dead Kennedys the first time I read John Clare’s “Lines: I Am”—specifically with regard to the bit about feeling “like vapours tossed into the nothingness of scorn and noise.” That’s about as good a poetic summary of what punk rock was all about as I can imagine, but, of course, punk used/expressed what Clare expresses differently—with a different kind of force and in different terms, more on par with Dada—into the scorn and noise of nothingness.
In addition to the annihilation/exhilaration of punk rock, there was also a communal aspect to it that I really responded to—and which I think is also present in poetry, and in my relationship to it. This seems especially true in the small-press world, which is largely a DIY adventure, and, as a result, also a subversion of the standard values of fame and fortune (values that are as prevalent in poetry as anywhere else).
DS: I’ve heard you read, not that long ago, your delightful sonnet sequence, which seems to share an engine, of collage and cut-up, with Ted Berrigan’s American Sonnets. How much of a role, if any, did such techniques play in your previous book and chapbook, Who’s Who Vivid and Revelated, respectively? And what, to borrow a phrase from the Chairman of the American Iron Chef television program, was your inspiration for doing so with the sonnet sequence?
MH: Berrigan is definitely a huge inspiration to me. In grad school I wrote my critical essay on his The Sonnets, and I think ever since then I’ve been trying to find a way to pay homage to them in my own work. That poem of mine that you refer to, Sonnet, I wrote really fast, the first 5 or 6 parts in one afternoon. I had been listening to the recordings of Berrigan reading his sonnets on Penn Sound, and my head was full of his music. I literally just sat down and wrote them. It was like they were already written—and, in a way, I guess they were, but without me and mine in them—my sky, my loves, my neuroses and life, the hawks swooping down down and down. I keep saying in Sonnet that “these are my poems,” but more than anything, saying that—writing it—was a way to keep going in the face of so much that was done for me/before me by Berrigan, Corso, Dean Young, etc.—all that is not my poems.
I feel the tradition of poetry looming over me every time I sit down to write, and, as a result, there’s a lot at stake for me personally, something to try and live up to (and fail at)—by which I mean with and against—which is a big part of why I often begin (as I mentioned before) procedurally—to take my mind off of writing and to give myself something in which to momentarily bury the hatchet. I’d say 60 or 70 percent of the poems in Who’s Who and Revelated began this way. For example, I’ve already noted the processes involved in writing “In Fifteen Minutes” and the animal poems… “Giant Traumatism” is both a structural translation of Apollinaire’s poem “Windows” and also (like his poem) a collage. Every line of “What’s Inside a Giraffe?” tried to answer the title’s question—a question which my friend’s two-year-old asked her in the middle of the night—“Mommy, what’s inside a giraffe?” “I Being Born of Skin and Undressed” is a refashioning of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “I Being Born a Woman and Distressed.” I could go on listing various strategies and parameters used in making the poems for a long time, but hopefully, in the end, they sort of disappear from the scene—that using them initially gives way to something unanticipated and resonant and charged, which isn’t the parameters themselves.
DS: You’re from Indiana, and you live in Cincinnati, Ohio. I mention this because location and setting do not appear to be very important in your poems, by which I mean that there’s often a rather general—that is, undefined—location where the poems are happening. One might say that the poems are happening chiefly in your head, or in the speaker’s head, but that seems too easy. To the extent that you’re conscious of it, how important is location/setting—and, related to that, temporality—in your poems?
MH: The straight answer here is that you’re right on the money: setting and location are not that important in Who’s Who Vivid and Revelated, though I wish I could say that it was more of a conscious choice than it probably actually was. I call it the “speaker in a room with objects syndrome.” It’s something I’ve been trying to contend with a bit in my more recent work—literally paying attention to everything around me as a strategy for writing, which has forced me to consider a lot more just where and when the hell I am. One of my new poems, in fact, is called “Cincinnati Poem” (after Lew Welch’s “Chicago Poem”). So perhaps the tide of dis-/un-locatedness is turning. But it’s definitely easier for me to reinvent the world than to face up to it as it is. In some sense, the poems I really like (and try to write) are ones that transcend their time and place—that escape the hullabaloo of living in a tar pit of particulars. Besides, for me, the hardest part is to stop reading or talking and start writing. The circumstances I have to work with (and in) are always less important (and problematic) than doing the work, which is largely a solitary adventure in a room with objects.
DS: In “Beautiful Burns” you say, “Nowadays / in everything the emphasis is on hipsterish / tragedy, but it’s all so fake my head hurts.” From a certain vantage point, I can’t really see any way to disagree with that. Would you care to play the philosopher and speculate why, nowadays, in everything the emphasis is on hipsterish tragedy?
MH: The phrase “hipsterish tragedy” implies something not tragic at all—a surface tragedy we move through and put on (along with hipsterish vision and joy and fabulousness). It’s the noise of culture and its thousand subcultures—its majors and minors. This noise is always sort of interesting on the surface, but one shouldn’t take it too seriously (nor wear it like a badge of honor or difference). Doing so means we wind up with too much too much: coolness and meanness and my own worst enemy, sentimentality—all of which amount to not much more than fireworks.
“Beautiful Burns” is, of course, a self-indictment more than anything else. I don’t want to drift or be slack, I want to live and exist actively. But I’m as guilty as anyone of buying into and participating in the manufacture and (yikes!) marketing of hipsterish self-consciousness—tragic and otherwise. You should see my nose ring, my Storm & Stress records, my reality TV. You should read my nowhere poems. The problem is cultural and systemic. I often get the feeling in talking with people of my own generation that responding to something imaginatively, creatively, expressively—in art or in life—isn’t allowed, because the perception (and theory) is that it isn’t any longer possible—that a real emotional reaction always looks fake, but emotional displays (which are fake) seem real—or at least they’re the only sort of emotional content that anyone will buy. The usual avenues of engagement—love, beauty, the common good, truth—have been blocked with a series of checkpoints—that were necessary in their day to combat the flow of pieties and pretense—but which now in this new day need to be o’erturned. Yes, “o’er.” Thus, one can only hope to stutter sincerely—send oneself out as a pulse, a broken signal, a set of squawks and beeps in hopes of making real contact and having real communion with others in the world and in the Vast.
To be an artist (that anyone cares about), one must have style. And in the 21st century, style is always a put-on: a function of the tools one employs and deploys in his or her work. In other words, one does not express oneself (the theories go), because there is no self to express, and yet things like Truth and Beauty are wholly subjective…? And while we can make the tools that generate style “new and improved,” we can’t really make ’em new, because everything is permitted. In the words of Jane’s Addiction, “Nothing’s shocking.” I don’t mean to sound pessimistic here. On the contrary, I think we owe it to ourselves to TRY both to “express ourselves” and to “make it new” in the face of its seeming almost impossible to do so. We have to emphasize the art over the artist, i.e., over the cult of personality—which is image, and brings us ever more strangely back to poetry. It’s difficult not to be sucked into the set of values where the artist’s style is more important than the art, the product/process more important than the creative engagement with other people and the world. I am worried about all of this. And also that I’m thinking about any of this. One has to be on the lookout for the drift (and by “one” I mean chiefly “myself”—this is the self-indictment paragraph after all), the inevitable falling into habits (“bewitchment”) off the cliff. The question is no longer “Is it art,” but given that anything can be art, so what? How does one infuse one’s work with humanity—empathy, faith, belief, even contradiction—even at the risk of looking sloppy or goofy or naïve. What other risks are there really to take?
Litmus Test in 7 Bluffs
Name Dropping: My Notes From Atlanta AWP 2007
By Ron Palmer
[Subtitled Note to Self/Reader: This is my diary-esque attempt to capture and maintain a self-designed semblance of writer/artist subject position along side my ‘real-life-role’ as corpo-slave member of a Fortune 50 company. Also: to document my flight from the academic/ teaching realm while trying to remain worry-free and genuinely happy living in beautiful and chaotic San Francisco during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.]
1. Voice of the Bread
C. Dale Young aka Delilah and her beau Jacob (Josie) Bertrand convinced me to go to Atlanta while drunk on divine wine in their living room in San Francisco so I couldn’t say no. It was too tempting to feel like a writer again. I wanted just one more day as a writer. Even with a Ph.D. a first book of poems and 6 years of teaching experience I panicked and escaped to the corporate world for dim security and inflated wages. I’m entrenched—
I’m in the ground now. The mind jumps out of the body after death. Not ground per say. Per se persuade. Not sky.
Blurriness of box-view, daze of consciousness after baseball bat cracks the nose bridge. Painless nevertheless I’m bored with death. Watch the living you guessed it we want your bodies. Slip behind the skin blink inside a pair of eyes. Soldiers join us like blue fog we fumble and flurry above the city. I loved the readings of Natasha Trethewey and Kevin Young as well as all the readers at the Emory panel. I think in poetry mostly so their names were already familiar. Wow, their poems were beautifully read, and in my opinion as an onlooker, powerfully received by the audience.
Mischievous witch I never falsify my witness to jigger the invisible lock. Don’t beef up the body just to put it in a box. Burn it. We prefer the ashes.
2. Survival is a Fact
I got blood in my meat. I got trunks in my treat. The hypocrisy of streets. The bland dichotomy of heat’s viscosity.
The sharp lobotomy of Beats.
The grand cacophony of Keats.
Worse than war you’ll regret your words everyone wants more. Never try to write if nothing arrives sobs out of you don’t force it the page will wither. What are we living for? Television? check Movies? check Hot Shower? check Lover’s Lips? check Good Food? check Orgasm? check Pay Day? check.
The truth is that Mark Bibbins’ students were so charming over Joe’s hamburgers and Martinis and smoky beer-batter-wood-soaked rafters with our diva-black-queen-waiter that I wanted to add to the babble.
When Nick Flynn kissed me on the cheek in the Hilton Hotel Lobby I zoomed back to the East Village in 1992 (Nick saying “me and Ron were the only straight guys in the program that year”) (hee hee he was kidding cuz I’m a big ol’ Mary) angry and sheepish: I was a roast-beefish sort clinging to a scowl and he was another one of the few non-Ivys. Now I’m an owl. I think that’s my disease. Or at least how it manifests itself verbally—
=I’m a jingling hyperbole.
In the efficacious womb—
A crawling a crumbling toward ecstasy.
In the foreground of boredom, a severing from the self. If only the ocean would take me clean me. If only the purpose were scrawled on the rocks, on the walls of the hotel bar where the retarded monkey girl danced like a Flintstones character. I’m afraid of the monkey girl he said into my noise-y ear. A big strapping blonde Atlanta Rugby type with a stubble goatee looking all gape-mouthed as we sucked our scorpion for the fifth round of turpentiney-gasoliney mouthfuls with long, white, play-fishing-rod straws. Erin Belieu’s boyfriend was sucking along with us: John the younger student writer had this agitated wince watching the dancing girl with gorilla coconut tits. All thinking, yikes she really is getting into her performance while his girlfriend Melinda danced on the chair.
The Blonde Atlanta man swayed closer to the fenced action thinking: I’d fuck that retarded monkey girl as she faked her suicide with a real banana.
Gitty-up playing horsey-poo in the hetero-panda paradise yet just as Miss Bibbins hopped off my lap I was semi-relieved even though this is a Tikki bar we still might be in danger of receiving a smack on the mouth from Atlanta stud even in my flash-frame-mind for enjoying too much boy-lovin’ levity.
Distracted from his feverish slow-mo dancer near the David Lynchian bongos. We all agreed she was creepily lascivious quirky-jerky and really too far into her role near the shaved headed drummer. I was spanking Bibbins who giddily bounced on my left leg. I dream that I tackle the monkey girl onto the drum set and her coconut bra lands on the drummer’s baldhead. Our job is to look for the invisible.
(Double-punch self in the face: spit out wine coughing pour wine on head).
3. We are all Afflicted
On elegy was my favourite (English Version of Microsoft Word only lets me spell this way) panel at Atlanta AWP. One presenter presented 3 elements of public mourning and offered that there are perhaps 4 structures of the elegy-(not limited to mourning):
1. (Generalized sense of loss) Embedded with implied love.
2. Mirrors speaker’s desire to transcend those things that are lost.
3. Serves as an occasion to consider many things.
4. Originates in longing to bring beloved back from obscurity. All the new thinking is about loss.
Shattered praise, newscasts present inauthentic grieving made into praise there evolves a sickening in between. Closes eyes on lose, forges a hip ironic swagger implicates a tone emotional texture splits the speaking voice. He said in a strong vibrato: all the new thinking is about loss, which rang true. Undecided now I cried while D. A. Powell read Thom Gunn’s “The Post Office”. Afterward I met Doug’s sweet new beau Haines (who by the way is adorable!) and I told him I cried to which he responded “O, pishaw!” which I had to look up in the dictionary. This is the type of self-conscious obsession I have.
Pishaw:
a general word or phrase, pishaw has no definition. It can be positive, negative, both, or neither. It does not fall under one category in terms of sentence parts. It is entirely without a standard meaning. It means whatever you want it to mean. It also has no set spelling (although this is the traditional one) and no set pronunciation.
1. I am filled with pishaw. 2. His hair looked very pishaw. 3. Anna and Catherine leap and pishaw over the fence. 4. Life is ever so pishaw.
Pushing the sentence further and further, he ended his panel discussion somewhere around the utterance: We’re all living a life sentence.
4. The Edge of Hoax
Rotgut. Sacrosanct. Atropos, she who cannot be turned Id-jit. id-it. id-pit. id-bit. Yippee! Yip-Hee! Sunned beef and cool-cocked liked not even you know what I mean. They’re like Pullu:Lating—
Chinaberry double first cousin of starvation! Vile Pantomime. Walkie-Talkie. I have two dads. Names that will sound weird in ten years:
Larry King (Live!)
Paris Hilton
Anna Nicole Smith
Iraq War
Britney Spears
Mark Wahlberg
80/20 rule: life limit: all average men fall into the sun. In the end Gods choke on paper. Even technology separated itself from the argument. Complicated saviour grew a sleeve of skin to treat the brick-less: the naïve celebrate the sickness of living in a sublime purgatory together in the loathsome elegance of time. A vile pantomime. I’ll see you later I have your number I’ll call you.
Render me rearranged by joy. Two decades blur everywhere I’ve arrived as the fun ran out even AIDS informed my play habits, restricted the now of desire. Slipped chaos into a viral storm: hello you missed the fun ended years ago bank accounts bursting, expensing extensive whores less pensive johns less defensive proceeding like a sparkler from the lost mind. Sit down and quiet long enough to listen. Next bonus: pay off bills: rent/student loan + write (in a circle!).
5. In: No: Sense: De: Fective
Love is sucking the anus clean every time. The skin is alive with greeting naked in the snow bleeding from the hoof: Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D major without the symbolic habit of weekend visits.
Irreversible density of music’s invitation: unthinking mindspace colorblocked in the breech of fantasy gone wrong. For example, Conan The Barbarian as Metrosexual Barbarella.
March 18th Sunday San Francisco’s Iraq Protest----->>> I’m just not a good Buddhist by principal. Lick Lick. (Demonstrates the clicking sound). Before each lick of his peanut butter open-faced sandwich. Lick Lick. CLICK-SLAP>
Here’s the set up: capture the present long enough the silver Bay Bridge all passive with trucks looking like hollow circus tents but rectangular. We wanted to rest in the shade look at something spectacular. This view would do: the boats on the bay the bridge brand new but then the LICK LICKER refused to chew. Instead he would do this lick-clicking licking noise that inconveniently nauseated the listeners. He licked and licked while little bear began to stew in his own disgust until his mind turned blue.
Sit down and quiet long enough to listen, then your patient observation of worry (puttering around like a putz). Kevin singing I like New York in June, how bout you? from his Friday afternoon tub filling with hot water and lavender crystals. I too am afraid to feel again the love drama of beginning: O beginnings O beginnings
O beg: in: nings!
Orange light from your mouth torso of a chopped god flung down on the bed. Another career in waiting on the planet of un-forgiveness. Is this not the only country that gives a pink dawn feeling while riding on a bicycle toward the sea, gulping down salt ripe stank air soulmemory—render me rearranged by a creeping joy: I hope it’s a boy.
6. A Tedium of Reasons
I dreamed on a co-worker, a woman, naked foetal hunched, knee-rocking sobbing into her knees on the mocha-brown close-cropped shag carpet outside her bathroom door.
Let’s begin with the tedium of reasons for wanting to escape to Europe or like the Buddha says it’s just the same suffering with the rotating stain on your memory. Two eyes two spirits the logic of depression evaporated memory Buoy me to the present I am birds spiked with dread pangs: singing to each other on the red feeder. Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky turning to hug me (I say something pretentious and embarrassing like “I’ll host you if you ever come to San Francisco!” which I’ll obsess over for weeks and feel like an eighth grader on acid) before they exit toward the parking lot.
7. Earth in much more Danger
The earth is in much more danger from human action than from natural forces. –Stephen Hawking
Ever since memory began I wanted a man. People ask when did you know and I think when did I not know this tell-tale sign this mentally-scanning this frankness do not flinch. What other ways are there of exploring the truth, potentially dramatic way of revealing meaning? Guilt for having lived: snapshots of the sorrowful world: disem-panelled.
Silence is a violence: piece together your understanding of the world. The young man in his army uniform said, “yeah this is my second tour” on his way back to Iraq. I sat in my airplane seat and I thought of how easy and kind of pathetic my life is right now. My eyes filled with tears of awe but I didn’t cry for the unknown soldier. His seat-mate kept saying “thank you, man, thank you for fighting for our freedom” and I couldn’t push away my thinking that oil thank you for fighting for our oil seemed a better response but I’m a hypocrite so I can’t say shit.
Note: Through the void and avoidance build a better rage. Concentrate on an over-emphasis on innocence. I sat on the hotel chair and stared at the crown of hot bulbs within the chandelier as the female speaker said: Sentimentality is an early arrival at innocence. You must earn the passage to innocence.
Interview with Jenny Boully
Writing in Code
Interview by John Deming
The second section of Jenny Boully’s second book is titled “He Wrote in Code.” Much the same could be said of Boully. Her pioneering first book, The Body¸ was written entirely in footnotes and its blend of vision and experimentation rendered it among the only books by contemporary young writers that can be deemed a collectors item—a used copy currently fetches about $100 on Amazon. Her experimental spirit and romantic largesse were continued, perhaps emboldened in her second book, [one love affair]*, among the best and most challenging must-owns published in 2006. With a third title on tap for 2007 and a reissue of The Body in the works, Boully here addresses her love affair with the footnote, the complexity of relationships, getting by as a poet, finding meaning among remains or fragments of a fallen something¸ and the layer cake that is [one love affair]*.
JD: First off, the footnotes. The Body, your first book, was written entirely in footnotes with no relative text. [one love affair]* is full of footnotes revealing many of your sentences are lifted or sampled from other pieces of literature. What function do footnotes serve for you, and do you anticipate abandoning them in your future work?
JB: My attraction to footnotes goes beyond what I think they might accomplish formally or in way of information giving. I'm attracted to them for their preciousness, their ability to appear vulnerable and in need. The Body, formally, I believe, needed footnotes. I was writing from a time when I had not yet developed the ability to speak on my behalf, if that makes sense. And, of course, I was quite in love with the notion of the metaphor of the footnote and the metaphysical questions it raises when a book is contrasted against an individual life. The footnotes in [one love affair]* function quite differently; they seem to me to help "locate" but not necessarily to place the reader in any closer relation to whatever is transpiring in the writing. The footnotes of [one love affair]* won't give you a surprising jolt, but they will give you a contrast--the academic end notes here against all of what takes place in the book may, taken as a whole, make the reader wonder just what is gained from reading academic papers. Why shouldn't this book hold up to any conference paper? Why is this "knowledge" devalued? I feel very tender towards the footnote, especially as it seems to get smaller and smaller in my mind. I don't think I could ever abandon it; I may think of different ways to relate to it, but I won't ever abandon it, I don't think.
JD: In the first note, you write, "when reading, our minds often supply another narrative. This book is thus the narrative that snuck in when reading various books, which are documented in subsequent footnotes." Would you say then that regardless of an author's intentions, it is impossible for a reader to avoid reading/imagining the book in his or her own way?
JB: I don't think we should give everything away ever. If there's anything I've learned about being in love and loving it's that the lover has an uncanny way of leaving just as soon as everything is revealed. I like to leave things slightly concealed, to give a space of wonder, so yes, I hope it's utterly impossible for a reader to read my books in my way. And, conversely, I do think it's impossible for a reader to not read a book in his or her own way. I've read Don Quixote, but there are others, I swear, who have read quite a different book, although they claim to have read it. They defame and insult Cervantes; I don't quite understand it at all. The only thing I can assume is that they were reading a different book or, because of their lack of a certain mental apparatus, could not read the same book I was reading. But perhaps I have disgressed and am, on top of that, biased.
JD: Much of this book is a transformation of other writers' language based on the imaginitive and emotional state of your narrator as she reads these writers. Was it at all your intention that the reader is then twice removed--in a sense, reading your book but supplying their own narratives?
JB: That would be wonderful--if somehow this book were like a layer cake without end. Hopefully, the reader would have written marginalia, marginalia with which another reader might come across and make further surmises. I love layering and the metaphor of layering, thinking about levels of thought, existence, understanding. Here we have the layer of the author reading books and then writing a book, a book that will be read by others, others who will, hopefully, think about their own narratives, another layer with which to make closer or more distant those relationships between author/book/reader.
JD: The book's third section is titled from a line by Gertrude Stein: "There is Scarcely More Than There Is." Is there scarcely more than there is? Are footnotes a way of acknowledging this metaphysical "more"?
JB: I love that line, "There is Scarcely More Than There Is." To me, it signifies having discovered that, in the end, there isn't any more; that's all there was and will be. The challenge here is to transverse that space between "what was" and "what is," a space that can, at times, seem to be without end. So, yes, there is scarcely more than there is. It's terrible, it's tragic, but it's true. I think of everything somehow passing out of our lives, and how there just isn't anything more than there is. My dear neighbor passed away last week, and I loved him dearly. I keep thinking that maybe someone will give me a photograph of him or a sweater that he wore, that I'll be able to somehow say goodbye to him. But there isn't anything more. I guess love stories are like that too. Even simple postcards will not come. You can try to make sense of whatever evidence you might have saved, and it will not, will never give you more than you had or help you to understand anything more than what you already knew. Footnotes to me are like afterthoughts, a way, I suppose, that those things we hold dear can have an afterlife of sorts, to make us believe, like hope or prayer might, that there might be more than there is.
JD: What was your early life like, where did you grow up, and when you begin to write and publish poetry?
JB: When I think back to my childhood, I think of it as a strange and complex thing. I grew up in San Antonio, Texas. My father worked three jobs, and I hardly saw him. I was always shy around him. When we was home, he slept. He went to work again. My mother was young and new to America and the English language. Yet, she taught me how to read and write. I had her accent, and I attended speech classes to correct this accent. There are still many words that I don't say correctly. Because it was difficult for others to understand me, I was an extremely shy and quiet child. I read a lot, but we didn't have any books in the house; I checked out whatever I could from the school library. We could only check out one book a week, so I had to reread a lot of books. I was very good in school. My parents were avid fishers and gardeners. I grew up among rows of vegetables and bodies of water. I would grow my own plants and catch my own fish. My sister and I didn't have very many toys, so we were taught very early to make our own toys. My mother sewed and she used to crochet lace on the tiniest of needles. She learned how to do this looking at books written in Japanese, although, being Thai, she didn't read Japanese. My father was also a maker. He made his own fishing weights and had carpentry skills. My sister and I made our own doll furniture, doll clothes, and paper dolls. If we wanted books, we made them ourselves. We illustrated them. Perhaps this girlhood led me to love the made thing, to cling to the finished object. Poems were the easiest to make. I could make them in class after I had finished my assignments. I could make them at home. I began writing poetry when I was in the first or second grade. I began to write it more frequently when I was in middle school. In high school, I wrote abundantly. I was editor of the school paper, I had a personal column in the paper, and I wrote poetry too. I had a few pieces published in the city newspaper and won several city poetry contests. I didn't know until my senior year of high school that I could go to college and study poetry. When I learned that, my whole idea of life changed. I published my first poem in a real literary journal when I was about 22 when I won one of the AWP Intro to Journals Awards in poetry. After that, I just kept sending my stuff out and trying. I don't think I was ever one to quit. This can lead to dangerous behavior.
JD: How apt are you to incorporate autobiography into your poetry? Do you feel the need to be accurate when doing so, or is it more rewarding to successfully reshape/reimagine one's personal life?
JB: I'm not sure if I believe in accuracy when it comes to memory. It seems to me that our memories, what we choose to dwell on, is encumbered by our poetic pathos of the time. I'm not saying that everyone approaches memory with pathos, but very often, we remember details that are embedded in metaphor and symbol. A spring of departures is more poignant for having remembered the way the lilacs smelt or the manner in which the dogwood blooms quickly left the trees--life's ironies, if you will. I'm a huge fan of the autobiographic, and I don't think I could hide very well and say that my work isn't autobiographical. The term "autobiographical" isn't fixed for me; I think of it as pliable and fluid, and I happen to believe in the dreaming-life, and two other types of experience I refer to as the "day-dreaming life" and the "future-imagined." I do think I try to recreate truly what an expereince was like to me, but sometimes, this means that you're getting a fragment that isn't entirely what it should be or really is. Writers should have allowances for obsession, I think, for living something over and over again under different guises.
JD: Somehow you've developed a way of pioneering new presses: The Body was the first of many books published by Slope Editions, and if I'm not mistaken, [one love affair]* was the first book published by Tarpaulin Sky Press. Could you comment on this?
JB: Starting a press is always a risky endeavor from what I understand, and I was very honored that two new presses chose my work as their flagship titles as it were. Publishing The Body with Slope was very quick and very dream-like. I felt as if the world was before me; I was young and impressionable. I think I was 23 when I got the book contract and 24 when the book came out. I stayed awake whole nights sometimes--that's how great my excitement was. I think that Ethan Paquin was able to devote a lot of time to my book, as it was his only one at the time. Reviews flooded in and then the book went out of print very quickly. I was a published writer, but with no book as it were. I have to applaud Christian Peet of Tarpaulin Sky Press for his utter bravery. He published a book with a crack pipe on the cover, and he did so willingly. He really listened to me and brought such creativity and energy to my book. Somehow, he knew I was never kidding about anything, and he was willing to entertain my playfulness. In many ways, [one love affair]* is a playful book. It's not a book that established presses would think of publishing--it's uncategorizable, it's creepy, it's absolutely crazed in its content and crumbling narratives. I don't think my first two books would have ever seen print were it not for new presses that were willing to publish my crazy work.
JD: Used poetry books can often be found on Amazon for fifty cents, but a used copy of your first book, The Body, fetches at least a hundred dollars. What do you think about the fact that, at least in the poetry world, your first book is something of a collector's item, and why do you think this is the case?
JB: I think that even when The Body was in print, it was difficult to get, and then suddenly you couldn't get it at all. I think the book went out of print in 18 months. Just as it was really getting attention, the book itself was nowhere to be found. Poets are always on the trail of the unattainable, no? Perhaps that is why the first edition has such a high price tag. I don't know. I do think it is such a pretty book, and it is such an odd book. If it weren't mine, I think I'd want a copy for my bookshelves too. The cream pages, the dreamy cover, the delicate font--they all make for something precious--a "keepsake," I think is how Ethan Paquin referred to it. Even rare book sellers in New York City were pricing their copies at over two hundred dollars, so I know the large price tag isn't a ruse developed by poor students or poets who are looking to sell their books. I have about 10 copies of the book. I don't know if anyone actually pays the high prices for the book or not (the copies in the rare bookstores seem to be gone), but at least I know that if I needed to, if I had absolutely nothing to eat, I could try to sell one. It will be interesting to see if the price of the Slope Editions edition drops when Essay Press reissues the book.
JD: Beginnings and endings are an important obsession in your poetry, evidenced by much of the text in [one love affair]* and by the fact that you have a new book coming out this year from Sarabande titled Book of Beginnings and Endings. Could you comment on this?
JB: I think I'm very attracted to the idea of coming upon pieces of something and having to reconstruct the scene, to find some meaning among remains or fragments of a fallen something. It occurred to me that so much of what life gives us we live outside of; we dream in beginnings and lament endings; hardly do we seem to give thought to the in-betweens, the interludes of things, and when we do, we can't help but think of the endings; it all makes for something hurtful and bittersweet. Suddenly, very simple things, even envelopes, bedsheets, mementos, become occluded by the weight of the beginnings and endings. It makes you wonder if you were ever really living at all, or if you were in some strange sense, merely preparing for the ending. It makes us wonder why it is that we want what we want, why it is that we bother with the giving away of ourselves at all. We hardly remember the meals in-between at all, the box of pasta, the sorry boiling, but we do remember the lovely wine and dine of the steakhouse-date, the champagne that glistened and bubbled like a sweet promise. And what is it toward the end? Toast, a bit of cheese, a rare pat of butter.
JD: Who would you regard as your biggest influences, and who are some contemporary writers you read regularly?
JB: It's a bit difficult for me to pinpoint one writer as my biggest influence, but the first one that comes to mind is Roland Barthes. I don't think I've disliked anything he's written, and I don't think I could ever stop rereading what he's written. Barthes is endlessly puzzling, endearing, and heartbreaking to me. His love of smallness and fleetingness, of the unnoticed is what endears me to him. I'm much more attracted to reading older works that aren't necessarily poetry, so I don't really follow any contemporary writers. I do, however, pick up books that look interesting, and I do try to keep up with what's being published.
JD: What to you is the most difficult thing about writing and publishing poetry in the 21st century?
JB: I think that ultimately, no matter what, you wake up most mornings and feel like a failure. To write and publish poetry in the 21st century is to oftentimes feel that you've given your life to something that isn't giving you much or anything in return, to realize that you, in this relationship, are the one who loves more. Poetry seems to love you less. You start to get older, and the youth of your twenties starts to slough and you look around and your friends are doing things with their lives. They're traveling to Europe, they're getting married, they're having children, they're buying houses, they're sitting on nice couches while you scour your neighborhood on trash days for ironing boards and bowls. Poverty and uncertainty are the most difficult things about writing and publishing poetry in the 21st century. The challenge is to fine-tune your imagination, to make-believe that life isn't as dreadful as it might seem. Luckily I live in a city full of museums and bizarre occurrences, and I've always been an avid daydreamer. The challenge is to surround yourself with metaphor and beauty, to not succumb to feelings of failure and dread. If you are a poet, it's very easy for you to be perfectly surprised and happy to see a perfectly cooked egg-over-easy. The rewards are small and few and far between. I had a poetry professor once tell me that in this business, you had better be enough for yourself. That's always stuck, and it's always what draws me to my desk to write--that, and the promise of make-believe, the thought that perhaps today I could write a perfectly cooked something.
The Year in Print: Winners Announced
Congratulations to all of our 2006 Coldfront Award nominees and winners!
Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006
(Award for a book of all new poems; any selected/collected is ineligible, regardless of how many new poems are included in the collection)
Winner:
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner
Other Nominees:
Shake, Joshua Beckman
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
Averno, Louise Gluck
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
God’s Silence, Franz Wright
Best First Book
(So many first book prizes. And more. Award for greatness in a poet’s first full-length)
Winner:
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg
Other Nominees:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
On the Side of the Crow, Christien Gholson
case sensitive, Kate Greenstreet
Who’s Who Vivid, Matt Hart
Best Second Book
(Award for greatness in a second book; lots of good stuff this year)
Winner:
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner
Other Nominees:
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
My Psychic, James Kimbrell
Best New Collection by a Canonical Figure
(Award for the best book of all new poems by a poet whose place in the canon seems secure, for the time being)
Winner:
Averno, Louise Gluck
Other Nominees:
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
Man and Camel, Mark Strand
Scar Tissue, Charles Wright
God’s Silence, Franz Wright
Best Selected/Collected
(More than run-of-the-mill Greatest Hits packages. Here are this year’s five most successful)
Winner:
I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Other Nominees:
Collected Poems, Robert Creeley
White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Donald Hall
The Sights Along the Harbor, Harvey Shapiro
Collected Poems, C.K. Williams
Best Poem in a New Collection
(Award for best individual poem in an all new collection.)
Winner:
“Didactic Elegy”, Ben Lerner (from Angle of Yaw)
Other Nominees:
“This is what’s been done to flesh...”, Joshua Beckman (from Shake)
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig (from Yes, Master)
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck (from Averno)
“Four Darks in Red”, Aleda Shirley (from Dark Familiar)
Best Author Photo
(Award for greatness in the field of Lookism. Images forthcoming-- um, that's "Fair Use" right?)
Winner:
Bill Zavatsky, Where X Marks the Spot
Other Nominees:
Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids
Mark Strand, Man and Camel
Henry Taylor, Crooked Run
C.K. Williams, Collected Poems
Best Response to Coldfront
(Award for greatness in reacting to America's favorite poetry review journal. Nota: titles our own.)
Winner:
“You Must Not Know About my Masters Degree: A Letter to the Editors”, Matt Mason
"[T]he review seems to go out of its way to point out lines which remind the reviewer of bad emo lyrics... when those lines are obviously TRYING to sound like bad emo lyrics to make the point the poems go for (something caught, certainly, by Literal Latte magazine who awarded "I May Not Know..." a nice check and first place in a contest as well as the readers and teachers in my masters program (UC Davis))."
Other Nominees:
“I Promised Myself I Wasn't Going to Blog About This”, Steve Mueske
http://accordingtoess.blogspot.com/2006/08/see-theyre-not-all-good.html
“Deferring to Deming”, Kate Seferian, Verse Magazine Online
"In his review of Upon Arrival, John Deming notes that 'the mania [Cisewski] is really indulging in . . . is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions--indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself'."
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-review-of-paula-cisewski.html
“Letter to the Editors Part 1: Reopening Old Wounds”, Franz Wright
“I'd like to straighten you out on those Poetry emails/letter--they were sent privately to the editor of the magazine in response to a private falling out we'd had. It was his decision to publish them, out of context, with the obvious intention of causing me to look like a lunatic and causing me to be ridiculed for about a year, and clearly he was quite successful. The fact that you find those letters "hilarious" (and you are certainly not alone) is disturbing to me... I've never, in public or private, attempted to defend myself or explain with regard to the Poetry humiliation--so this is my chance to get it out of my
system.”
“Letter to the Editors Part 2: Reconciliation”, Franz Wright
“[N]o one, absolutely no one--neither the sincere reviewers nor the witty and malicious assholes--has displayed anything remotely approaching your grasp of my intent in God's Silence. It is no exaggeration to say that reading your review restored, for a moment, my faith that there has to be SOMEONE out there who notices what I was trying to do. Rereading your review this morning nearly brought tears to my eyes.”
Best Overall 2006 Poetry Catalogue
Winner:
Copper Canyon
Other Nominees:
Farrar Strauss & Giroux
Fence Books
Knopf
Wave Books
Best Book Title
Winner:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Other Nominees:
A Useless Window, Carrie Olivia Adams
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Dog Star Delicatessen, Mekeel McBride
Ooga-Booga, Frederick Seidel
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Wayne Koestenbaum
Best Book Cover
|
Other Nominees: |
Green Squall, Jay Hopler (by Nancy Ovedovich) |
The Pitch, Tom Thompson (by Emilie Clark,
from the collection of the author) |
Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis |
Best Long Poem
(Award for a new poem at least 5 pages in length)
Winner:
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem
Other Nominees:
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“Love Had a Thousand Shapes”, James Kimbrell, from My Psychic
“Poem for the End of Time”, Noelle Kocot, from Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
“Didactic Elegy”, by Ben Lerner, from Angle of Yaw
Best Book-Length Poem
Winner:
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
Other Nominees:
inbox, Noah Eli Gordon
Three, Breathing, S.A. Stepanek
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Rain, JonWoodward
Best Opener
(Award for the best opening poem in a book)
Winner:
“Unslide the door,...” Joshua Beckman, from Shake
Other Nominees:
“This is How an Anvil Comes to You,” Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“In the Garden”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
“The Star’s Etruscan Argument”, Aleda Shirley, from Dark Familiar
“The Similitude of this Great Flower”, Elizabeth Willis, from Meteoric Flowers
Best Closer
(Award for the best closing poem in a book)
Winner:
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem
Other Nominees:
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“Persephone the Wanderer”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“The Blackbird of Glanmore”, Seamus Heaney, from District & Circle
“Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
Best First Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing opening lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)
Winner:
from “Mimosa,” opening section of Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]*:
She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way the Chaucer’s spring would never do.
Other Nominees:
from the untitled poem opening Joshua Beckman’s Shake:
Unslide the door,
uncap the lazy little coffee cup.
The pasty people must be part of the dinner.
And a city turns its incapacity in,
foolish city...
from “The Lightning”, opener for Linda Gregg’s In the Middle Distance:
The bell ringing has been a great pleasure
for her during these months. But she
has been confused by the many secrets.
The fragments of stories between
upstairs and down. Like when the woman
dressed in such a beautiful white gown
with only one shoe. And that one with
no heel. And the other woman upstairs
and down. Fragments of stories.
from “Begetting Stadia, opener for Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw:
Demands indefinitely specified,
demands incompatible with collective livingbeget stadia
with indefinite seating
delicately tiered.
from “Appalachian Farewell”, opener for Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue:
Sunset in Appalachia, bituminous bulwark
Against the western skydrop.
An Advent of gold and green, an Easter of Ashes.
Best Closing Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing closing lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)
Winner:
from “Prayer,” closer for Michael Earl Craig’s Yes, Master:
As I hold my head low
I see the many flecks of black pepper
on my placemat.
They look like horses
running away from me at a great distance.
Other Nominees:
from Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashbulbs:
I’m afraid of looking around from the perspective of being chased
& doing whatever it is the perspective of being chased urges.
from “Persephone the Wanderer”, closer for Louise Gluck’s Averno:
And in the time between
you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, closer for Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem:
as
we ran thru it, earth-sway swaddling
our
feet
from “The Hour of Blue Snow”, closer for David Young’s Black Lab:
Then I remember to breathe again,
and the blue snow shines inside me.
Technical Awards
(for innovation in the fields of):
Winner:
the self-writing book: inbox, Noah Eli Gordon
Other Nominees:
the footnote: [one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
the subject index: The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover
the epigraph: Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith
liquid paper: A Little White Shadow, Mary Ruefle
Best Thirteenth Poem
Frost said if he wrote a book of 12 poems then the 13th poem should be the book itself (or something like that). Here are some books whose small parts made a hell of a whole.
Winner:
The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover
Other Nominees:
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith
Whole Milk, Jim Goar
In the Middle Distance, Linda Gregg
National Book Critics Circle Awards
(or click here to find our most recent book reviews)
**Update: Congratulations to Troy Jollimore, who has pulled off a huge upset and taken home the 2006 NBCC for poetry!**
Feeling slightly underwhelmed, slightly mystified by the 2006 NBCC nominees in poetry? Here's a breakdown of this year's cast of characters...
The Good Old Boy W.D. Snodgrass, Not For Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions) The best of this collection comes from, perhaps not surprisingly, his 1959 Pulitzer Prize-winning first book, and from his kinda scary inside look at Hitler & co. in The Fuhrer Bunker. Some of the newest stuff was decent too. There is more here, though, and back in June our John Deming discussed why this is a pretty decent collection from a pretty important poet. |
 The Bad Old Boy Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) If you were a general-interest magazine in 2006 and you printed only one profile of a poet, it's likely that the subject was Frederick Seidel. And why not, he makes a good story—this wealthy and decadent Manhattanite writes unapologetically about riding Ducatis, assorted bodily functions, and the intricacies of humping. Recently Melinda Wilson examined Ooga-Booga for Coldfront, warts and all. |
 The Sentimental Favorite Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books) Currently in its eighth printing in his native Greece, this collection distills work from Sachtouris's first nine volumes, documenting the poet's development under facist dictatorship, Axis occupation, and their aftermath. Here, Karen Emmerich's translations give often achingly spare, clear, clean poems, intensely visual and intensely violent. Sactouris died in 2005, having never quite gotten the international recognition that he probably deserves. Consider him the favorite. |
 The Pretty Decent Safety Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh Press) Daisy Fried's lyrical work has been generally well received and this NBCC nod is one more in a rather respectable string of accolades. In September, David Sewell checked to see what all the fuss was about, and was left shrugging. |
 The Nice Guy Nobody Has Heard Of Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (Margie/IntuiT House) Troy Jollimore is a pleasant-looking Nova Scotian with a pleasant-sounding name; unsurprisingly, his first book is a dissertation on friendship. Thom Thomson in Purgatoryis mostly made up of an extended sequence starring Tom Thomson, a kind of hapless alter-ego for the poet, who allows himself to melt in and out of the action. Selected for the IntuiT Poetry Series by Billy Collins, Jollimore rounds out a marked preference in David Orr's NBCC poetry panel for clear, narrative, user-friendly work. Unfortunately, this is probably the nominee that no-one out there has actually read, likely due in large part to the difficulty for a tiny press to reach the masses. Until Tom Thomson gets out of distribution limbo, chances are the closest you'll get are these selections. Unless, I guess, you happen to run into Troy Jollimore, in which case I kind of feel like you might get a hug out of the equation, too. |
Interview with Daniel Brenner
Looking Back from the Perspective of Being Chased
Interview by John Deming
Daniel Brenner’s unique, perplexing first book The Stupefying Flashbulbs won the Fence Modern Poets’ Series last year. It is a short book full of short poems that, page after page, have a way of barely eluding capture. It is also unlike anything else published in 2006. Fuzzy author photo aside, we were able to track Brenner down to talk about his odd little book, about his influences, and about winning a first book award—on the first try.
JD: The poems in The Stupefying Flashbulbs are evasive; there is however an abundance of hints, subtleties, and repeated images/themes, and by the closing lines, being evasive—remaining hidden with the suspicion of being chased—almost seems the point. Could you comment on this?
DB: I like your take on it. I’m not sure if there’s any one right answer or one main point. I definitely see what you mean about being evasive. I feel that way a lot of the time. There’s something really satisfying about being evasive. I think it’s evasion, and also obfuscation.
JD: The “evil cube” makes repeat appearances in the book; what to you is the function of the repeated image, especially in this book, and where does the cube go during the latter half?
DB: It’s nice to have the cube there to sort of rope things together. To me, the function of the image is sort of like saying, I’m not messing around anymore, this is it. Here’s this cube, or maybe it’s a sphere. It sustains the attention. I don’t know what it means exactly. There are a few possibilities.
I think the cube is probably still there in the latter half. Sneaking around. It’s hard to say goodbye.
JD: The fact that you work with very short poems with that kind of repeated image reminded me somewhat of Matthew Rohrer and the “luminous fork” that appears in A Hummock in the Malookas; I was wondering if you'd read his work before.
DB: No, I haven't.
JD: Some biographical info? Where were you raised, what was your early life like, and when did you begin writing poetry? Who are some favorite writers?
DB: I was raised in central PA. My early life was pretty average. I started self consciously writing poetry when I was in high school, but I didn’t start submitting until after college. My favorite writers change around a lot. The best book I’ve read recently was by Kenzaburo Oe. I like Guilluame Apollinaire. Right now, I’m re-reading the Chuang Tzu.
JD: You must've been thrilled to win the Fence Modern Poets Series; was it very difficult to get this book published? How long had you been submitting it to presses/contests?
DB: I was shocked about winning. It was amazing. Then I was embarrassed. It was the first time I had sent the book anywhere. Rebecca Wolff rescued it from the slush-pile.
JD: Your bio mentions you're a contractor, and mechanics/underlying form play a role in this book—lots of spinning, generating energy, etc. Does your work inform your writing?
DB: No, not at all. I hope not.
JD: It's not uncommon to read someone's first book and find a smattering of unrelated poems with what comes across as arbitrary organization; what struck me about The Stupefying Flashbulbs was that it seemed very much a unit, very self-contained. Do you find yourself working by the poem, by the manuscript, or somewhere in between? Do you have any other completed manuscripts?
DB: Well, I repeat myself a lot. And I work by the file. When a file seems done, I start a new one. Sometimes I have to go back and shuffle new poems into an old file, though, or take poems out of an old file and put them in a new one. I don’t really have a single method.
I have one other completed manuscript, which I haven’t looked at in a few years.
JD: The book's title is of course taken from the end of the poem “Satellite Photography”; how long did it take you to settle on a name for the book?
DB: It didn’t take very long. I wanted to call it just “Flashbulbs” at first, but Rebecca didn’t like it. She’s the one who suggested “The Stupefying Flashbulbs.” Then I suggested “Flashbulbs in the Dark,” but then we both started laughing, because it sounded a little dramatic.
JD: Likewise, one of the most entertaining parts of reading this book is reading your
absurd titles—“Wonder Rocket 1840” comes to mind—but somehow they also come across, as the book jacket mentions, as “occasion-stained.” Could you describe the process of titling a poem, or comment on how crucial a fitting title is to one of your poems?
DB: I love making crazy titles. It’s my favorite part of writing. In terms of process, I usually write the title last, right after the last line is done. I’m conservative about the title reflecting on the last line, if possible. Some titles are crucial; others are more like candy-wrappers.
JD: And the obvious last question: what to you are some of the most difficult things about attempting to write and publish poetry in the 21st century?
DB: I guess back in the day, poetry was treated like less of a stepping stone. But in other ways it’s always been the same. Maybe it depends on if you idealize the past or not. One thing that’s difficult and timely, though, is writing a poem for a website and then having the website go under. Also, there's a lot more competition with other media. But that's sort of a dead horse.
The Year in Print
Well Ladies & Gentlemen it’s 2007, and thus time to take a quick glance back. A lot of great and not-so-great things happened in the world of poetry books this year, so we thought we ought to boil it down a little. Drawing from our reviews published and forthcoming, from the hundreds of other books we’ve read this year with immense pleasure and with vicious disdain, and from the thoughtful guidance of our readers, we present the nominees for the 2006 Coldfront Book Awards, designed to celebrate the best in small and big press poetry. It was a big year full of big books, and publishers were squeezing great stuff out until the bitter end. Ok, so we haven’t been able to touch on everything; but, well, we’re still pretty sure we nailed it. Agree? Disagree? Drop a note below to fill us in on what we got right and what we missed. And the nominees are...
Best Book of New Poetry Published in 2006
(Award for a book of all new poems; any selected/collected is ineligible, regardless of how many new poems are included in the collection)
Shake, Joshua Beckman
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
Averno, Louise Gluck
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
God’s Silence, Franz Wright
Best First Book
(So many first book prizes. And more. Award for greatness in a poet’s first full-length)
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
On the Side of the Crow, Christien Gholson
case sensitive, Kate Greenstreet
Who’s Who Vivid, Matt Hart
Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg
Best Second Book
(Award for greatness in a second book; lots of good stuff this year)
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
Yes, Master, Michael Earl Craig
My Psychic, James Kimbrell
Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner
Best New Collection by a Canonical Figure
(Award for the best book of all new poems by a poet whose place in the canon seems secure, for the time being)
Averno, Louise Gluck
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
Man and Camel, Mark Strand
Scar Tissue, Charles Wright
God’s Silence, Franz Wright
Best Selected/Collected
(More than run-of-the-mill Greatest Hits packages. Here are this year’s five most successful)
I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Collected Poems, Robert Creeley
White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Donald Hall
The Sights Along the Harbor, Harvey Shapiro
Collected Poems, C.K. Williams
Best Poem in a New Collection
(Award for best individual poem in an all new collection.)
“This is what’s been done to flesh...”, Joshua Beckman (from Shake)
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig (from Yes, Master)
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck (from Averno)
“Didactic Elegy”, Ben Lerner (from Angle of Yaw)
“Four Darks in Red”, Aleda Shirley (from Dark Familiar)
Best Author Photo
(Award for greatness in the field of Lookism. Images forthcoming-- um, that's "Fair Use" right?)
Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids
Mark Strand, Man and Camel
Henry Taylor, Crooked Run
C.K. Williams, Collected Poems
Bill Zavatsky, Where X Marks the Spot
Best Response to Coldfront
(Award for greatness in reacting to America's favorite poetry review journal. Nota: titles our own.)
“You Must Not Know About my Masters Degree: A Letter to the Editors”, Matt Mason
"[T]he review seems to go out of its way to point out lines which remind the reviewer of bad emo lyrics... when those lines are obviously TRYING to sound like bad emo lyrics to make the point the poems go for (something caught, certainly, by Literal Latte magazine who awarded "I May Not Know..." a nice check and first place in a contest as well as the readers and teachers in my masters program (UC Davis))."
“I Promised Myself I Wasn't Going to Blog About This”, Steve Mueske
http://accordingtoess.blogspot.com/2006/08/see-theyre-not-all-good.html
“Deferring to Deming”, Kate Seferian, Verse Magazine Online
"In his review of Upon Arrival, John Deming notes that 'the mania [Cisewski] is really indulging in . . . is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions--indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself'."
http://versemag.blogspot.com/2006/11/new-review-of-paula-cisewski.html
“Letter to the Editors Part 1: Reopening Old Wounds”, Franz Wright
“I'd like to straighten you out on those Poetry emails/letter--they were sent privately to the editor of the magazine in response to a private falling out we'd had. It was his decision to publish them, out of context, with the obvious intention of causing me to look like a lunatic and causing me to be ridiculed for about a year, and clearly he was quite successful. The fact that you find those letters "hilarious" (and you are certainly not alone) is disturbing to me... I've never, in public or private, attempted to defend myself or explain with regard to the Poetry humiliation--so this is my chance to get it out of my
system.”
“Letter to the Editors Part 2: Reconciliation”, Franz Wright
“[N]o one, absolutely no one--neither the sincere reviewers nor the witty and malicious assholes--has displayed anything remotely approaching your grasp of my intent in God's Silence. It is no exaggeration to say that reading your review restored, for a moment, my faith that there has to be SOMEONE out there who notices what I was trying to do. Rereading your review this morning nearly brought tears to my eyes.”
Best Overall 2006 Poetry Catalogue
Copper Canyon
Farrar Strauss & Giroux
Fence Books
Knopf
Wave Books
Best Book Title
A Useless Window, Carrie Olivia Adams
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey
Dog Star Delicatessen, Mekeel McBride
Ooga-Booga, Frederick Seidel
Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Wayne Koestenbaum
Best Book Cover
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My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, Daisy Fried |
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Green Squall, Jay Hopler (by Nancy Ovedovich) |
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The Pitch, Tom Thompson (by Emilie Clark,
from the collection of the author) |
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Meteoric Flowers, Elizabeth Willis |
Best Long Poem
(Award for a new poem at least 5 pages in length)
“Landscape”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“Love Had a Thousand Shapes”, James Kimbrell, from My Psychic
“Poem for the End of Time”, Noelle Kocot, from Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems
“Didactic Elegy”, by Ben Lerner, from Angle of Yaw
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem
Best Book-Length Poem
[one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
inbox, Noah Eli Gordon
Three, Breathing, S.A. Stepanek
Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk: A Poem in Fragments, Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Rain, JonWoodward
Best Opener
(Award for the best opening poem in a book)
“Unslide the door,...” Joshua Beckman, from Shake
“This is How an Anvil Comes to You,” Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“In the Garden”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
“The Star’s Etruscan Argument”, Aleda Shirley, from Dark Familiar
“The Similitude of this Great Flower”, Elizabeth Willis, from Meteoric Flowers
Best Closer
(Award for the best closing poem in a book)
“Prayer”, Michael Earl Craig, from Yes, Master
“Persephone the Wanderer”, Louise Gluck, from Averno
“The Blackbird of Glanmore”, Seamus Heaney, from District & Circle
“Feast of the Ascension, 2004. Planting Hibiscus”, Jay Hopler, from Green Squall
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, Nathaniel Mackey, from Splay Anthem
Best First Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing opening lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)
from the untitled poem opening Joshua Beckman’s Shake:
Unslide the door,
uncap the lazy little coffee cup.
The pasty people must be part of the dinner.
And a city turns its incapacity in,
foolish city...
from “Mimosa,” opening section of Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]*:
She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the very first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way the Chaucer’s spring would never do.
from “The Lightning”, opener for Linda Gregg’s In the Middle Distance:
The bell ringing has been a great pleasure
for her during these months. But she
has been confused by the many secrets.
The fragments of stories between
upstairs and down. Like when the woman
dressed in such a beautiful white gown
with only one shoe. And that one with
no heel. And the other woman upstairs
and down. Fragments of stories.
from “Begetting Stadia, opener for Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw:
Demands indefinitely specified,
demands incompatible with collective livingbeget stadia
with indefinite seating
delicately tiered.
from “Appalachian Farewell”, opener for Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue:
Sunset in Appalachia, bituminous bulwark
Against the western skydrop.
An Advent of gold and green, an Easter of Ashes.
Best Closing Lines
(Award for greatness in apt, absorbing closing lines that have a way of informing the book’s greater good)
from “Prayer,” closer for Michael Earl Craig’s Yes, Master:
As I hold my head low
I see the many flecks of black pepper
on my placemat.
They look like horses
running away from me at a great distance.
from Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashbulbs:
I’m afraid of looking around from the perspective of being chased
& doing whatever it is the perspective of being chased urges.
from “Persephone the Wanderer”, closer for Louise Gluck’s Averno:
And in the time between
you will forget everything:
those fields of ice will be
the meadows of Elysium.
from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 60”, closer for Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem:
as
we ran thru it, earth-sway swaddling
our
feet
from “The Hour of Blue Snow”, closer for David Young’s Black Lab:
Then I remember to breathe again,
and the blue snow shines inside me.
Technical Awards
(for innovation in the fields of):
the footnote: [one love affair]*, Jenny Boully
the subject index: The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover
the epigraph: Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith
the self-writing book: inbox, Noah Eli Gordon
liquid paper: A Little White Shadow, Mary Ruefle
Best Thirteenth Poem
Frost said if he wrote a book of 12 poems than the 13th poem should be the book itself (or something like that). Here are some books whose small parts made a hell of a whole.
The Stupefying Flashbulbs, Daniel Brenner
The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover
Swallows, Martin Corless-Smith
Whole Milk, Jim Goar
In the Middle Distance, Linda Gregg
Winners announced soon...in the meantime, THE 2007 SEASON HAS BEGUN
National Book Awards Valu-Pack
** Update: Nathaniel Mackey wins the 2006 NBA for poetry! **
our take on the winner & runners-up...
 Nathaniel Mackey's Splay Anthem  |
 Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw  |
 Louise Glück's Averno |
 H.L. Hix's Chromatic  |
 James McMichael's Capacity  |
