Take Down the Clouds

Tan Lin | May 1st, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

 in my office, which is also a closet, in NYC. 

2. What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

I am finishing an index to the photographic work of Diana Kingsley and an article on Warhol’s connections to second order cybernetics theory and disco. Convolution is publishing the former and Criticism the latter, for a special issue on Warhol edited by Jonathan Flatley and Anthony Grudin.

3. Where do you write?

in my office

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

I am reading  Milad Doueihi’s Digital Cultures and a short essay by Michael Witmore entitled “Text: A Massively Addressable Object” on his blog site. They’re both excellent.

5. What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

Well I have been going thru all of the Gauss PDF files, all the Troll Thread material. And all the Frank Kuenstler I have managed to order online. Got a bunch of Sam Falls and B. Wurtz books yesterday and am leafing thru them this morning with my grapefruit and tea and watermelon. I have been eating a lot of watermelon and Chinese anti anxiety tea made with a flower whose name I cannot pronounce. Also reading some articles by Susan Herring on Twitter and blogging. Let’s see what else: oh I have just started Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain and I read the first and last chapters of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells and Wade Guyton’s Black Paintings book. Oh and I reread Kathy Acker’s Toulouse Lautrec pamphlet that TVRT did—I just got it from Printed Matter. Oh and a bunch of Maggie O’Sullivan, the earlier stuff.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

see above. I have been playing quite a bit of tennis recently

7. What are you looking forward to?

finishing a novel. I am doing a lot of research for it now.

Brian Teare | May 1, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

The turn of the year, a kind of hinge. The neighbor’s door opened and closed all night, very loud, the interval between click and slam voicing the party going on inside their apartment. Each iteration startled the cat until 3AM, when in silence he settled into sleep. I was reading Robert Duncan’s final book, Ground Work II, especially its last poem, “After a Long Illness”–

No faculty not     ill at ease

lets us

begin where I must

from the failure of systems…

That was last year. This year the neighbors’ door is closed and I can hear birds in the holly in the courtyard—and the wind a thin whistle over the lip of a green glass beer bottle. It is 34 degrees at 3PM in Philadelphia, everything else outside a sort of aluminum, rigid but shivering. The cat sighs like the heater does, a bit of steam. I am reading Joanne Kyger’s Again: Poems 1989-2000 –

So who do you go to

       for help in confusion,     seeing

what all humans see.

2. What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

I am working on: healing three gastric ulcers, planning spring syllabi, balancing my gastrointestinal flora, writing critical prose for Boston Review and Jacket2, meditating more regularly, and taking notes for poems for my fifth book The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. 

Recently out: three chapbooks: Paradise Was Typeset (DoubleCross Press), Helplessness (Goodmorning Menagerie) and Black Sun Crown (Fact-Simile). + poems in the anthologies The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare.

Coming out: my fourth book Companion Grasses will be out in April from Omnidawn, and a digital chapbook from Floating Wolf Quarterly will also be released around then. This spring season will also see Albion chapbooks from Frank Sherlock, Rachel Moritz and Juliet Patterson, CAConrad and Jean Valentine.

3. Where do you write?

Between sweeping the floor and writing emails and binding books. In the archive. After meditating. On foot. While reading a book. At my desk. Very late at night. In the woods. After acupuncture. On a bench in the art museum. During insomnia. In the one tolerable café. While roasting potatoes. On the trolley. After a long walk. In the big black chair.

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

Where best means most helpful, beautiful, profound, informative, funny or wise, or even the most impressively obscene, but not the work of a friend: Franco Berardi’s The Soul At Work, Susan Briante’s Utopia Minus, Helen Carr’s The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D., and the Imagists, Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s My rice tastes like the lake,Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madame D, David Hinton’s Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape,Kay Larson’s Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists,Michael Leong’s The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-Composition as Explanation: A Poe and Stein Mash-up,Carole Maso’s Mother and Child,Sina Queyras’ Expressway,Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature,Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: Prose,Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetic and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Cecilia Vicuña’s Spit Temple,Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, and Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert.  

5. What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

Zach Barocas’ Cultural Society.

Brooklyn Copeland: Siphon, Harbor.

Michael Cross’ Compline.

Craig Dworkin: Motes.

Crane Giamo’s Delete Press.

Chris Glomski: The Nineteenth Century and Other Poems.

David James Miller’s journal SET.

Dawn Pendergast’s textile series at Little Red Leaves.

Jared Shickling’s journal ecolinguistics.

Sun Yung Shin: Rough, and Savage

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Anti-fracking legislation. Jay Defeo. Chinese and Homeopathic medicines. The Walking Dead.

7. What are you looking forward to?

Because the future always seems to me quite uncertain, full of possibilities equally felicitous and unfortunate, I don’t “look forward to” it in the traditional sense of the phrase. Mostly I have hopes: to be able to spend time with loved companions, spend days in beloved places, write poems and read poems by others, continue to heal a compromised body, do good where and when I can, and become more balanced and accepting of Being in all its manifestations. If I were able to “look forward to” futurity in an idealistic sense, I suppose I would look forward to a redistribution of wealth, environmental policies that foster a sense of the earth as a companion and not a commodity, an end to wars and colonial occupations, and a shift toward citizenship as a mode of collaboration, participation, and compassion. But like I said, in the meantime I mostly have hopes.

Tracie Morris | April 5, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

In Brooklyn. In fact, I’m always in Brooklyn, no matter where I’m at. The adage about taking the ____ outta ____ is true in my case.

Mathias Svalina | March 29, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

One house leads into every other house, each door propped up by other doors. The puddle of spilled milk on the kitchen floor, edges drying, just beginning to smell, is so deep one could step into it & emerge as a weekend in February. I was in love with someone but no one told me who, so when I met anyone I would look in love so they might love me. The problem of youth is that it doesn’t need to fuck itself, & then it dies without a plan. I’ve been stuck in this airport so long that I’m going to have to have that conversation I’ve been inventing.

2. What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

I’m not human, but I hunt human women, but not for killing. I make my scales of tin cans & trowels, my fire of fire, my days answered like baseball cards in shoeboxes. There is nothing from The Body Shop that I do not smell like. There is no fried shrimp I have not touched. For the first day I had human words I had a human heart & I set my heart to understanding & to chastening before the pits of molten women & language. And one, like the similitude of the thesaurus, touched my lips: my sorrows are turned upon me. I have only the strength of appearance. They come for my words or not at all. No new days lurk in last year’s Far Side Daily Tear-Off Calendar. No grass grows in the insulation. I am not human. I am the three-thousand three-hundred and thirty-five days.

3. Where do you write?

I got a gun pregnant with my fingerprints. It was a tragedy, like El Cid, like that episode of Family Ties when Michael Gross shows the bed of eels on which he fucks Meredith Baxter-Birney. There were so many hands pushing out of the elastic waistband of my gym shorts—inevitably something had to make me a target. We were only having fun, hanging the Bunny Man in every tunnel, making new names with soap on bathroom mirrors. The gun wanted to keep the baby & I wanted an understanding of what minimalism meant to me. It wasn’t like I intended to memorize the lyrics to “American Pie,” they were just sitting there, like a fresh scoop of potato salad. I could not understand the difference between an answer & an ambulance. Then it arrived in little-bird form, how the CCD books pictured it, the holy-spirit: a girl across the lunchroom leaned over & her loose shirt buckled at the collar, opening wider & wider in that finicky slo-mo of antipathy, revealing the compressors & turbines & blades that make the engine go.

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

In the culture of plastic or plastic we go us-against-them against them-against-them; as in I was really feeling it when I wrote that poem about a tiny flower growing valiantly through the crack in the cop’s skull. Fill your mouth with lighter fluid & let it eat the enamel off your teeth. Get all Army/Navy Surplus Store on Them & their always-wet newspapers they make you wear. That age is best which is the first, when the TV’s always on all night. For having lost but once our prime, we will forever work the fry station at the Chesapeake Bay Seafood House.

5. What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

(written w/ Elisabeth Reinkordt & Dave Carillo)

We always under the overpass at 8th & O, others’ names on the blue bench. We always in cars at Holmes Lake compressing bodies into bruises & for hours on cheap gas, our breaths with vice grips. Always swimming in the well, our skin, our hate & epics without endings. Always “& then it happened”

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

(By Dave Carillo)

First there’s the scar on my wrist from checking the chorizo in the broiler two years ago. Then the postcard showing a cage half-full of hermit crabs for sale, all clinging to the wires: wish you were here in this cage with these crabs, it says & you know the roller coaster called The Comet that fell from the pier into the sea, the lift hill still visible above the crashing waves:  not that, but also that.  Additionally, the memory of those acres of sand & scrub & thin trees beyond the cul-de-sac where Grodberg lived that everyone called the pits.  Lighting fires beneath a radio tower in a wheat field I can’t find.  The frogs now leaping into ditches.  The north of Europe.  Moving up-river over the ice, repeating blackberry into a megaphone.  Whole chapters on azaleas. Holding the throat of a nebula. The book of universal codes for chirping. The endless white ash I saw falling over the woods.

7. What are you looking forward to?

Manuel disappeared. Some feared him dead. Others did not notice. The stools emptied one-by-one, day-by-day in my third-period Chem class. Then it was just me & the bald & shiny teacher. Can I ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you, I said. Shoot, he said. He leaned against his table. Your hair, the bald thing, is it from an accident? Like a burn? He looked around the room at the no one else in the room. He nodded. He said, come on back here & walked to his office. I walked to his office. I’d never been in a teacher’s office other than my mom’s. I imagined my mom in there & it was imaginable. Close the door, he said. I closed the door. Turn the light off, he said. I turned off the light. With no windows, only thin light outlined the closed door. Look here, his voice said. I looked. There was a small light in the shape of man’s hands. You see, he said. No, I said. But I did. His hands, they were burning, soft as Saran Wrap. I turned the light back on & he blinked. I looked around the office, looked at his hands, opened the door & walked out. I walked straight to the lab’s door. I did not look back for permission. All of this, I thought, as I walked through the hallways, empty as birthday presents, all of this touched & yearlinged.

1. Where are you now? 

I do not love a rose fashioned out of a VW Bug. Advice I got from an adult:  Always smile. No one likes a fat kid who’s sad too. Rumor had it Penguin Feather sold you weed if you asked for the right record & I wondered if I might one day ask for the right record by mistake; instead they went out of business & a Popeyes opened in that spot. Having never before tried to look inconspicuous, it was difficult to look inconspicuous at the cigarette machine in Magruders, dimes & nickels tinkling into its metal stomach. I was baffled by the choices, that it wasn’t simply “cigarettes.” In my landscape of florescence & burning plastic straws in red eye of the car’s pop-up lighter every aberration was an artifact.

2. What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

I had to repeat everything I said six or seven times to get it right. No ideas, exactly, more a dialogue, an exhaustion of beggings. First taught the alphabet & then producing the alphabet in ink spots & butter. I had an inside & an outside, but without my outside there’d be no inside. 

3. Where do you write?

Turn on the TV to see the actors applying their make-up, startled you arrived so soon. Switch to the news to see the factories where the bombs are manufactured, assembly lines proceeding in their Beatles album way. The first computer game I ever played was based on Olympic track & field. In each game one had to press the space bar at exactly the right moment. I was no good but I always wanted to play. I was a doll, a film shot from the POV of someone who never thought about me. Now I’m a doll with rusted joints. Nobody understands anything until it’s spoiled. And if it’s spoiled we must have spoiled it & therefore we must be spoiled.

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

I used to know some verses appropriate for this taking of advice. But the priests, with their root beers & chapped lips, walked away, a nod as a goodbye. We were tightrope-walking, but on the sidewalk. These joint contractions & muscle mechanics, these alleged bodies, forcing themselves in to smaller & smaller boxes of theater, reaching out a marble hand for a green pear, sweeping pine needles from the kitchen floor. Police cars everywhere like wicker cradles, lifeguards with mirrored sunglasses watching each corner. Past the county line it was landfills all the way to the sea. Trailer parks crowded out for green spaces. Smiling fathers attempting to rape their daughter’s friends, only to fall asleep mid-crime. It is necessary to indulge the weaknesses of our friends, to shit beyond the campsite. But isn’t it so interesting to repeat every word that is spoken to you. Pour what’s left of the wine into one of the glasses & then distribute it evenly between all three. Summer was unfortunate, waiting for the first drops of rain to hit the hot asphalt, for the first cats to disappear. Every child a Janus, a day a factory for the flower shops. Bare pink lips are best. 

Gillian Conoley | March 22, 2013

1.    Where are you now? 

  On an airplane on my way to Austin for Thanksgiving.  Aisle seat. It’s not so bad. 3 /1/2 hours of undivided time.  And no one is screaming yet.  And now I am on returning flight, editing this for brevity. And finally, in an armchair, home, 12 miles from the Golden Gate, north.

2.    What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

  Working on two books.   Peace is my new collection of poems, a strange title, I know, but everyone who has read it agrees that is the title.  Peace will be out with Omnidawn in spring 2014.  It is finished, but I tend to revise and tweak right up to production.  An airy, floating quality to the poems—a shifting going on, there are long long poems and short ones—the manuscript questions/explores how peace and war can be concurrent, interloping presences/experiences, seeing as how now they will have to be if we are to have any peace at all.

     The other book is a translation of three Henri Michaux texts, these are more  unusual texts than the Michaux we know, and none of them brought into English before. Quatre cents homme en croix, (Four Hundred Men on the Cross) in which Michaux brings his dual visual and verbal practices together within the text itself––the poems find themselves in shapes and forms, sometimes buried within one another. Second is one of his mescaline texts­­–– Paix dans les brisements (Peace in the Breaking)—this was written just after Miserable Miracle, part prose and part poetry. I just finished that one, and now I’m working on the last text Vigies sur cibles (Watchtowers on Targets), very interesting to translate since it’s unedited and unrevised (though Michaux did publish it), and has narrative jumps and slips usually not associated with Michaux.  It’s a collaboration he did with the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, in which they took turns responding to one another’s work. 

      My title “Peace” and the Michaux title “Peace in the Breaking” are completely incidental and unrelated. Surprised me when I saw that. Anyway these three Michaux will be a book together— in negotiation with a publisher for them at the moment but I am not supposed to talk about it yet, so I won’t.

3. Where do you write?

My favorite place is in an armchair in my living room when no one is home. White spruce tree with branches that move a lot like a willow’s. Birds of paradise. Sun.  Something trance-like about that spot.  Otherwise in my office/studio, a closed-in side porch.  Also in bed. Anywhere really. I don’t do so well writing in public, but there are two libraries with quiet rooms that I frequent and love a lot.  I just got some sound barrier headphones.  I am hoping they will help me in public. I want to be able to write anywhere, since I hate the preciosity of having a certain place where “I write,” and I get restless and like being out and about.

3.    What’s the last best thing you’ve read?  

 Italo Calvino’s A Baron in the Trees, which most everyone’s most likely already read, but somehow I’d missed it. A gem. An enchantment from beginning to end. I read his Six Memos for the Millenium often. Norma Cole’s Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Gail Scott’s fine new book Obituary.  I’m also on a quest, with some close friends, to read all six volumes of Proust, Moncrieff translation. I had not made it past Swann in Love before. Alice Notley’s Grave of Light, and Reason and Other Women.  The all of Larry Eigner Stanford put out recently.  I want to get the Shakespeare sonnets app I saw advertised in NY Times today. Also reading Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, in a 1921 edition—I was reading it and loving it, and then I looked it up and discovered it won the Nobel Prize in 1920–– and I thought I’d made some secret discovery!  Well, a discovery nonetheless. It’s elemental and of the earth.

5. What journals, poets, and presses have you discovered lately? 

kathryn l. pringle’s fault tree.  Stephen Motika’s Western Practice.   I love Dawn Lundy Martin’s chapbook Albion Books did (Brian Teare’s chapbook press), also Lisa Fishman’s chapbook from the same press. Also Fishman’s Flower Cart. Andrea Rexilius’s Half of What We Carried Flew Away.   I think we are living in an utter and full-blown renaissance of small press publishing that is sustaining and impressive.  I don’t like all the natter-nattering about too many presses, too may poets. If the alternative is to time-travel back to Eliot holding practically all the publishing reins, I’d rather stay right here. Bring it on.  I’m grateful for so many presses. 

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions? 

Just saw the Lee Miller/Man Ray exhibit at the Legion of Honor in SF.  That’s why we look so happy in the photo, my friends and I. That’s poet Dale Going on the left and Laura Mullen on the right.   Carol Snow took the photo. ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC SHOW.  And the emphasis was more on Lee Miller than Man Ray, which wasn’t what I expected. Nothing against Man Ray, of course, I just think I prefer his paintings.  The early part of show has many photographs utilizing the solarizing technique they discovered/invented/used together, and often, even after they split up— this created by chance when Lee Miller was developing in Man Ray’s dark room and a mouse ran over her foot, and quick! she turned on the lights and then Man Ray turned off the lights and grabbed the paper out of the solution and into a fixer—a haunting, almost electrified effect resulting in which the figures look eerily outlined.  And then her war correspondent photograph of Hitler’s dead SS soldier floating in a river.  And the photographs of Hitler’s workers who committed suicide in their offices, somehow Lee Miller was right there, she walked right in and took photographs of them draped over their desks—unlike anything— absolutely no way to describe them.

Today saw the Jay DeFeo Retrospective at SFMoma.  Also just knocked out by that. Her “The Rose” is a masterpiece.

7. What are you looking forward to?

A really quiet, sweet holiday with my family. And then the empty luxurious weeks following.  Lots of laughing and cooking. Also want to read the John Cage biography Where the Heart Beats, by Kay Larson.  Everyone says it’s great.

I also want to turn off all the lights in my bedroom and turn on the recording of Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  I found this in a Facebook post, of all places.  I should be better with Facebook, because every once in a while someone posts something that just blows you away.  I think it may have been Ron Silliman who posted it. I listened to the first few paragraphs and then had to work or something and haven’t gotten back to it.  Had never heard her voice before.  It is something else.   Anyway I promised myself I was going to create a sort of sensory deprivation tank in my bedroom by turning off all the lights and making it pitch-black as possible, and then climb under the covers, and just listen to her read that story. 

Adriana X. Jacobs | March 15, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

I am in New York City, in my bedroom, which also doubles as my office space.

2. What are you working on and what have you got coming out? 

For the past two years, I’ve been pretty focused on academic publication and working on a book project on the economy of translation in contemporary Israeli literature. I just finished revising an article on the figure of the poet-translator, which should come out next year in The Blackwell Companion to Translation Studies. I also have two academic chapters that just came out—one on digital anti-war poetry in Israel (unsettling timing given recent events in Israel and Gaza) and the other on the poetics of Hebrew-Yiddish translation.  On the translation front, I’m translating into English the Hebrew poems of Hezy Leskly (1952-1994),

specifically his last book Dear Perverts (1994) (some of these translations will appear online in Truck) and contemplating a project involving the work of Luisa Futoransky.  In April, a friend invited me to participate in an intensive poetry exchange that proved to be very productive, so I have drafts of poems that I actually like and may nudge into the world.

3. Where do you write?

I write where I can and always on my laptop.  I have a two-hour commute to work so I end up doing a lot of writing on the train (see #2).  

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

I just finished Fawn McKay Brodie’s exhaustively researched biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History (1945).  Brodie makes a convincing case for reading the Book of Mormon as one of the major works of American literature.  Smith reportedly “translated” the text using special stone glasses, and Brodie’s description of this process is vividly and humorously staged.  I am slowly reading and savoring Mani Rao’s translation of Bhagavad Gita (Autumn Hill Books, 2010), which is—hands down—the greatest thing I’ve read all year.

5. What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately? 

Discovery is a tricky claim—there are poets, like Susan Howe, Caroline Bergvall and Don Mee Choi, who I started reading this year and feel very new to me, even though I was very aware of their work.  The same is true for Anna Rosen Guercio, who I first got to know as a translator (same goes for Don Mee).  Anna’s chapbook By Way of Explanation came out this year from Dancing Girl Press and contains one of my favorite poems of the year. This summer, I was reading Imanhattan, the online journal of NYU’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish, and the poems of Karen Sevilla really stood out.  In Hebrew, I’ve been reading Tal Nitzan’s poetry—again, this is a poet who has been around for a long time but I just started to pay attention, which is maybe another word for discovery.  On Twitter, I follow the International Institute of Modern Letters, the creative writing program at the University of Victoria; through its channel (@modernletters), I get an almost daily infusion of contemporary New Zealand poetry. In fact, a lot of new writing comes to my attention via Twitter.  And I always look forward to a package from Ugly Duckling Presse—I’ve been a subscriber for the past several years and it’s been a great source of new writing and new translations. 

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

I love a good (and/or trashy) zombie/vampire apocalypse novel, and if it’s part of a trilogy, all the better.  And if a film adaptation is in the works, even better.

7. What are you looking forward to? 

I started this questionnaire in my room and now I’m in my university office, about to close shop, and looking forward to getting home. 

8.  Where are you now?

I’m home.

Kimberly Koga | March 8, 2013

Where are you now?

I’m sitting on the couch at home a few blocks from the beach more with my feet resting on the coffee table since it’s more comfortable than my legs dangling off the edge – looking at the sun coming in the screendoor at 301pm. Waiting. Feeling quite antsy since this weekend feels long, but I don’t want to think about the weekend since that inevitably leads to Monday and I don’t want to go back to work.

What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

I’ve been trying to NaNoWriMo just to get myself writing more. However, I decided to not engage in a traditional sense, but just to write a draft a manuscript – not a traditional novel, but something more lyric-essay-like or poetic or something more of a novella length. I’m collection characters in my head but characters that don’t exist in space – only in the world I create for them and they’re bleeding into a human space, but rejecting it at the same time. There is a girl girl, a skinbag, a pink pink, a horse, a pig, and a hole… I’m not sure where it’s going at the moment but I’m more so trying to write through the text. I have a couple poems coming out in Jaded Ibis Press’ Dirty Dirty Anthology next year.

Where do you write?

Lately I have been writing on the train to and from work (when I catch train) – it seems to be the only time I have to write anymore (sadly). With more time I love to write in bed at night…sometimes writing in the morning or middle of the night in bed is good too – whenever something comes into my head that needs writing…

What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

I’ve been reading Johannes Goransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place which has incredibly rich language and characters/people – the images are really inspiring…. I feel like it has more if city-scape in there some place as opposed to the pastoral. Perhaps it’s more of an urban pastoral? Something a little more necropastoral. There is definitely this sense of death, but also of meatculture and birth without birth. I also started reading Olivia Cronk’s Skin Horse, however I got so excited that I stopped reading it because I wanted to savor it instead of reading multiple books at once. I’m also reading A Thousand Plateaus which twists nicely in my brain and swerves in an out of consciousness as I work.

What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been rather isolated lately - if lately encompasses a large time frame: Poetry International, Paisley Rekdal, and Bhanu Kapil.

Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Definitely food. I love to cook and bake (when I have time). I”m also vaguely working on designing 2 blogs and trying to write posts for them in my head. I am definitely distracted by watching tv shows online as well, especially as I cook and do the dishes and laundry. My day job is a huge diversion – chasmic. Strangely, though I work in publishing it’s the furthest away from creative and inspired than I have ever been.

What are you looking forward to?

I am looking forward to getting a portable dishwasher! I am looking forward to someday not having a day job and actually filling my time with things that I enjoy: writing more, publishing more and cooking/baking more.

Lisa Pasold | March 1, 2013

At my sawhorse & found door desk in New Orleans.

I’m working on a comedic novel set in Paris; comedy is a shiny new challenge for me, as I’m not usually particularly funny. I have a review coming out on Truthdig http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/  in the new year. My book of poetry Any Bright Horse came out a few months ago & was just nominated for the Canadian Governor General’s Award, so mostly I’m reveling in that.

Wherever I am. Home is good, but borrowed kitchen tables, other writers’ desks, coffehouse counters, trains, and sidewalks are sometimes even better.

The Ink Dark Moon - Love Poems by Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani. (came out in 1990, but I’ve only just discovered it.)

Poet Bill Lavender & his latest book, Memory Wing, from Black Widow Press. The journal Entrepôt, from New Orleans, and the Oxford American, which poet Kristin Sanders has just given me—I’m sort of catching up on various publications here in the South, after living in France for years.

Cooking with new mysterious greens. How many edible bitter greens does Louisiana grow, really, and what sort of conspiracy is at work, that these leaves keep turning up in my kitchen?

A slew of friends & family visiting over the next month or so. Most immediately, today, eating a praline, dropping by a friend’s ceramic sale at Byrdie’s on St. Claude, and seeing my partner’s vaudeville performance, The Chaser, tonight. And by the end of the year, I’m looking forward to wrapping up a version of this current manuscript and turning to some new poetry.

Rachel Zolf | February 22, 2013

Photo by Brian Adams

Take Down the Clouds, Rachel Zolf

1. Where are you now? 

In front of a screen, on a blue chair, in a little house, on Sunnyhill Lane, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

2. Where do you write?

Because of a number of overwhelming things, I wrote no poetry for over two years. Then I went on a 10-day residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts this past December and 65 pages poured out. I felt like I had a body again, a container for uncontainable things. Then I remembered I wrote most of my third book on short jaunts from reality to New York. So maybe I write – away.

3. Why do you write?

As a means to live. Not make a living, live. As fully embodied as possible.

4. Is there any part of you that cannot manifest itself in your work?

There is a deeply held part that I am trying to reach. As a means to live. As fully embodied as possible.

5. How important is music to you?

So important it sometimes hurts to listen.

6. Do you think much about your audience?

Very much. I want the reader/listener’s encounter with my work to spark feeling, any feeling, even hatred and disgust. I was talking with a student recently about making poems using phrasal fragments, what remains, in response to disaster; and I showed her a poem I put together in which a Palestinian man is forced by an Israeli soldier to fuck a donkey. As we were slowly travailing through the shattered lines, she suddenly turned away, “I can’t look at it.” Something happened there. That’s all I ask.

7. Whom do you wish would come visit you in the hospital?

Besides my lover Audrey, who would help me feel safe, Melissa Buzzeo, who would read my palm and help me feel strong; and Alex Gratsas, who would make me laugh at myself.

8. What do you find yourself hoping for when things get quiet?

For things to remain quiet. So the noise can breathe.

9. What are you afraid of?

Less than I used to be. I am thankful for that. Failure, but I am developing a poetics of failure. Being unliked, but that can go with the territory. Loss of loved ones, but. Giving up.

10. Do you return to your books after they’re published?

Not often. The shame overwhelms me. Have to get over that.

11. Who are the writers you return to again and again and again?

M. NourbeSe Philip, Kathy Acker, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Gail Scott, Akilah Oliver, Juliana Spahr, Bhanu Kapil, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler. I could go on, because there is no real list.

12. What book would you like (if any) to be read aloud to you?

Edmond Jabes’ The Book of Questions, Volume One, “The Book of Questions.”

13. What do you miss?

Right now I miss lying around with good friends and red wine in Brooklyn.

14. Where would you like to return to?

Water.

15. To those who survive you, what instructions do you have on your death?

Sit with me for a little while. Ash to dust on water. Be. Fight. Be.

16. Where would you like never to visit (again)?

The Swiss Alps. The rumours of monstrosity are true, sans the sublime effects. Unfortunately, I have to return once more for school, then never again.

17. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, by Daniel Coleman. His figures of the Muscular Christian, the Enterprising Scottish Orphan, and the Maturing Colonial Son are helping me as I write a kind of deranged, I mean deracinated, poetry that interacts with the ongoing colonization project that is Canada. And Laura Elrick’s Propagations, its insistent light and sound particles, its re-percussions, thrusting maximal minimal flowers flower breast whiskers.

18. What is the effect of weather on your mood and on your ability to write?

Here in the west, the cliché holds true – big blue sky, bright sun, beautiful light: they hold you upright. I am generally happy in spite of my best efforts. It continually astounds me.

19. What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

Since (for better or worse) I have an academic salary for a little while, I bought a subscription to BookThug, so have all their titles. But, unfortunately, since (for better or worse) I have an academic job for a little while, I have had no time to read the books in the BookThug box. Mark Goldstein’s Form of Forms is one in the box I’d like to explore, as I know he worked on that personal project for a long time with Betsy Warland, who was also an important mentor of mine, always pushing her charges to ask unanswerable questions, while breathing and scoring the body of the page.

And this is no discovery, but I’m very glad to see Tonya Foster’s first book, Swarm of Bees in High Court, finally coming out soon with Belladonna Books. Tonya is a superbly talented U.S. poet, and a brilliant, lovely being, whose first book is way overdue. Can’t wait to read it.

20. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

I unwind from the stupidities of the academy by watching stupid racist, sexist, etc. (where do the commas go in that list?) shows like Homeland, American Horror Story: Asylum, and Nashville. What can I say? I agree with Samantha Giles that Claire Danes’s facial expressions are addictive; I’ve got a thing for crazy people and Chloe Sevigny; and uh, I’ve got a thing for Connie Britton too, ever since I got addicted to that maudlin Texas football drama, Friday Night Lights. “Who knew, eh?” mutters the Canadian so-called “feminist academic poet”—and that’s a double scare quote for you.

21. What are you working on and what have you got coming out?

In the two years not writing poetry, I did write a screenplay for a film, The Light Club of Vizcaya: A Women’s Picture, directed by NYC artist Josiah McElheny, that premiered at Art Basel Miami Beach this past December. Josiah commissioned me to write this utopian pseudo-documentary about pre-WWI queers bathing in light, and I resisted at first, saying I couldn’t do character or narrative (and didn’t really feel like I could write at all). But after lots of hard archival work, the voices eventually emerged, in a sort of (non-Fichtean) narrative curve. The Light Club script was published in the book accompanying Josiah’s retrospective at the Wexner Center for the Arts that opened last month.

I also wrote a weird little Steinian play in (again, commissioned) response to my friend Cheryl Sourkes’s brilliant webcam artwork. Winnipeg’s Platform gallery, which showed Cheryl’s work in November, is publishing the play, “Nothing and all,” in a book called Palimpsest this spring.

But the new book that is starting to emerge is called Janey’s Arcadia and explores contact zones between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canadian settler texts as revelatory moments of cultural violence and misrecognition. Among other techniques, I use the errors I find in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) digital scans of early Canadian settler literature to insert ruptures in poems that enact the complex ethical affects and effects of the face-to-face encounter with the “Other” – bringing disavowed knowledges and errors of recognition of colonization to the surface. The book’s central character, Janey Settler, is drawn from a relatively famous purple-prose character, Janey Canuck (herself a proto-feminist response to Johnny Canuck, a comic figure in early Canadian nationalist lore, supposed to be the younger cousin of Uncle Sam and John Bull), with a healthy dose of Kathy Acker’s Janey Smith thrown in because she fits. Janey Settler’s hot to trot!

22. What are you looking forward to?

Witnessing how the Idle No More Indigenous rights movement unfolds in its next stages. It’s been amazing to see how this revolutionary social movement sparked by four women in Saskatchewan has had such an important impact not just in Canada but worldwide. And it’s just starting.

Kate Greenstreet | February 15, 2013

1. Where are you now?

I’m in a little cottage near the sea, on the southwest coast of Ireland.

2. What are you working on now and what have you got coming out?

My new book Young Tambling will be out in January from Ahsahta Press.

Lately what I’ve been writing most are emails to American poets, as I get deeper into booking a reading tour for 2013.

3. Where do you write?

Right now I’m sitting in front of a window that looks out on a green field, our back yard, where some black & white cows are visiting from up the road.

4. What’s the last best thing you’ve read?

I have only one book with me here at the cottage. Max and I sold our house last summer and set off. We went to great lengths to travel light and I promised that I’d bring along no books at all. In the months before we moved, I let go of more than 20 big boxes of books and when I was done, I still had quite a few books! Packing my last box for storage, I put in Cole Swensen’s newest, Gravesend. I hadn’t had a chance to read it. I took it back out of the box then, just to look at it a minute. I started reading and forgot about packing. Time went by. The box got taped up and Gravesend got squeezed into my laptop bag.

Wondering what I’d like to say about Gravesend (by now I’ve read and reread it—it’s my favorite book!) I picked it up for a brief look through. Without meaning to, I started reading and forgot about these questions. Time went by.

5. What new journals, poets, and presses have you discovered lately?

It’s been a period of isolation, these past six months or so, and I’ve been out of the stream of what’s new.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Between me and the guitar, it’s been on again off again for decades. Mostly off. When Max and I started making short pieces of music for videopoem soundtracks, a desire began to grow in me to really learn how to play: to understand the instrument and to see if I could, you know, be a guitar player. I decided to start over from scratch. Before we left the States, I downloaded a series of instructional videos and bought an inexpensive electric guitar, a kid-sized Squier—a guitar I wouldn’t have to worry about at all while traveling. I like it. And I like being a beginner. Currently, I’m getting to know the fretboard by practicing scales while saying the names of the notes.

7. What are you looking forward to?

Sometime in the next week or two, we plan to take the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, see Antony Gormley’s installation “Another Place” at Crosby Beach, then drive a few hours north to have tea with artist Alec Finlay. I’m looking forward to that, to exploring more of Ireland, and to making an extended visit to the States to tour. And then? Who knows. I’m looking forward to finding out.