Take Down the Clouds

Farid Matuk | February 8, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

In a salon armed with dozens of pics on my phone of white boys with impossibly gorgeous hair. 

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

Working on sonnets. Trying to learn something from what Bernadette Mayer did with them and also trying to learn from John Wieners.  I’m in love with qualities I see in both: a light touch and sense of music and compressed intelligence and sheer presence of mind. Also reading about 19th century stage performers of color, trying to find out about agency. 

I have a chapbook coming out with Ahsahta in April 2013 called My Daughter La Chola. It’s maybe half of a longer project. The chap opens up a bunch of concerns I think need a second half to come together: Glory, as in the supposedly unmistakable presence, according to the gospel of John, of divinity in Jesus; photographic and document archives of lynchings in California and the way stories and histories simultaneously appear and are subsumed by the archive; the birth of my daughter and the way she is subsumed by my projections onto her and how she appears nonetheless; economic crisis, impending and constant, and trying to trace how imagination can wander free nonetheless; the Golden Girls and the construction and questioning of genders.  

3. Where do you write?

In my notebook.  Laying down.  We have three couches in our house.  When she visited, Kate Greenstreet, who had no couches in her house, said she didn’t know who she’d be with so many couches.  I also write in my head, not well, but sometimes work is like what I imagine prison to be, I have to use what I can carry and hide.  

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

A beautiful poem in progress by Rosa Alcala.  And Susan Briante’s brilliant new manuscript, Ghost Numbers.  Both so good.  And like I said, I keep reading Mayer’s Sonnets and John Wieners, specifically, A New Book From Rome that Bootstrap put out a couple of years ago.  I read a great piece on surviving family abuse by Lisa Bogart in Salon a few days ago, one of the many things I read b/c it comes up on my facebook feed.  I loved it.  I’m interested in some basic stuff about telling stories, just the power of saying something you’re not supposed to say.  So retrograde or simple humanist or whatever, but, you know, everyone dies.  

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

I’m more excited by discovering Hardy Girls, Healthy Women, a nonprofit that supports girls and their feminist educators.  http://www.hghw.org/

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

No; they’re too awful.  

7. What are you looking forward to?

The haircut is done now and styled.  It looks good to me.  I look forward to learning how to use all those styling products on my own. 

Amaranth Borsuk | February 1, 2013

1.     Where are you now? 

In my home office, at my desk, facing east.

I recently moved to Seattle, and I now have a home office with a window that looks out on a tree (my window in Somerville looked at the brick wall of a neighboring preschool building, so I kept the shades closed most of the time). It’s night now, so I can only imagine the tree, but I can hear rain faintly hitting its leaves and the side of the house.

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

I am working on a collaboration with the writer Andy Fitch and visual artist Roger White that involves a long-term audio project of Andy’s that Roger and I get to interlope in. We’re trying to play with notions of control in collaboration, each of us giving over a text to the next and then returning to it collaboratively. I don’t want to say too much, since it’s still taking shape, but it involves a process of redaction in which I try to make space for my own voice in Andy’s text.

I have several fun pieces forthcoming, including an outtake from Between Page and Screen in Cordite Poetry Review that will change the animation that plays when readers show the cover of their books to their webcams (or the sample marker on our postcards and website).

I have an English to English translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 103 in the upcoming Telephone anthology, which was really fun to do.

I also have a hybrid piece in an anthology of language art called The Dark Would that UK writer and artist Philip Davenport is putting together. The anthology is going to be issued in both print and Kindle formats, and Phil encouraged contributors to play with the conjunction of the two platforms. My piece is an homage to Christian Bök and Micah Lexier’s “Two Equal Texts” in which my two anagrammatic texts make reference to the medium in which they each appear while also obeying a few other constraints, both inherited from Bök and Lexier and self-imposed.

There are also a few selections from Abra, my collaborative writing and performance project with Kate Durbin, forthcoming in 1913 and Peep/Show.

3. Where do you write?

Mostly here, at my desk, but I was in transition for most of the summer, first traveling for conferences, then moving, so I had to be creative about where and how I wrote. I spent quite a bit of time at kitchen tables this summer and fall.

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

My bookshelves are an absolute wreck—I haven’t organized anything since moving in, and I’ve been acquiring books at a dangerous rate. However, I have been reading several things with pleasure lately.

I am half way through Rosamond Purcell’s Owl’s Head, which is a kind of ars poetica relating the collector’s and the artist’s impulse. It’s a chronicle of her visits to an antique and scrapyard in Maine that has, over the years, provided the materials for much of her work. The shop’s owner, a widower who is by turns attached and utterly unsentimental about the goods he has acquired (mountains of parts, rubber tires, window frames, you name it) serves as both foil and mirror. She is fascinated and perplexed by him and by his control over this world of objects she wants to enter. I found out about the book when I heard Purcell speak at Flying Object, a wonderful book store and printing collective in Massachusetts, this past spring. She talked about finding all of these decrepit books that had been nested in by mice or chewed through by book mites—books that were like memorials to the idea of the book—books that had been consumed in the most literal sense. Yet even as she found these illegible books, she also found book-like objects everywhere—stones, stains, and shards shaped like open books. I am fascinated by this illegibility and by these books that foil our desire for access. I’ve become interested in works of art that are designed not to last, so this impulse to somehow preserve the decay, to celebrate it, seems like terrain worth exploring. Purcell has done a lot of work with photography of decay (she took a gorgeous series of photos of Ricky Jay’s decaying dice collection). The fact that she takes things out of the junkheap and into the studio and transforms them by recontextualizing them puts her practice in line with found art or conceptual writing, but the impulse is so affectively freighted—so not neutral—that you can’t place it in those categories. I’m interest in the curatorial impulse that encompasses both amassing and isolating objects. I grew up wround antiques, so I think it speaks to something deep in my psyche.

I’m also returning to Terri Witek’s gorgeous Exit Island, a kind of enfolding of Ariadne’s myth with that of a contemporary traveler to Brazil, and it is laced with visual poems like islands in a sea of words. The book melds collage with erasure with photography. It was issued as a fine press edition (bound by book artist Amy Borezo) and trade edition last year, and I got to leaf through the fine press version wearing white gloves. A nicely opposite image to Purcell sifting through the junk at Owl’s Head. I’m planning to write about it when I can get my head around it.

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

I got my hands on a couple of beautiful Trafficker Press chapbooks a couple of weekends ago at a conference in Reno: Ariel Goldberg’s The Photographer Without a Camera and E. Tracy Grinnell’s Leukadia. I am excited to read both—they are beautifully designed and crafted pamphlet-style books.

I just last night read Birds and Bees (http://trollthread.tumblr.com/), a new chapbook by my colleague Sarah Dowling that was published by Troll Thread, a press that publishes work simultaneously in free pdf and Lulu chapbook form. It totally knocked the wind out of me. The poems have a language all their own that melds Frank O’Hara and Frank Ocean, Aaliya and the Temptations. It’s conceptual and yet lyrical in the sense that it is musical, with repetitive lines spliced from pop music and academic discourse. It’s intense and overwhelming in the way only 21^st-century love can be. And it feels like the poems voice something forbidden that is at once erotic and scary, a commentary on the culture of shame around sex and sexuality in America. I reacted really viscerally to the work, which I heard Sarah perform at the Convergence on Poetics we had at UW Bothell in September. I’ll definitely be returning to it in the coming months and exploring the Troll Thread backlist, which looks great. The collective gave a multi-part interview with CA Conrad this past summer, which I am looking forward to watching: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/05/caconrad-interviews-the-troll-thread-collective/.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

The Public Domain Review: Impeccably curated and endlessly fascinating, a treasure trove of visual and textual works that are out of copyright presented in an informative way.

Things Organized Neatly: For those of us with the collector’s impulse…and who doesn’t feel it these days? Even the minimalists featured here.

What Should We Call Poets: Thank you, Michelle Detorie, for making animated gifs I can relate to.

MIT Gangnam Style: Watching this made me remember how incredible it was to teach at a place where a crowdsourced music video could get everyone from Noam Chomsky to the glass blowing club involved.

7. What are you looking forward to?

The postscript exhibition in Denver.

The Quay Brothers exhibition in New York.

The Elles exhibition in Seattle.

Seeing my friends Ben and Mia and their daughter Zoë next week.

Craig Dworkin | January 25, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

In the high alkali desert along what was once the receding shoreline of pluvial Lake Bonneville.

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

I’m working on a book of poetry that in some ways is about that very landscape, actually — it has four long sections focusing, in turn, on salt, aridity, crystalline rocks, and things that fall (literally and figuratively: love and sleep, say, as both things we think of “falling” into).

And coming out in the next couple of months: a scholarly, critical book titled No Medium from MIT Press. Each chapter focuses on works of ostensibly “blank” media (clear film, erased pages, silent music, smooth phonograph discs, etc.) by way of trying to think about what media are (or, for that matter, to try and decide whether there are even such things as media at all).

3. Where do you write?

Wherever I can. Often at a desk under Bob Grenier’s Cambridge M’ass and with a sideways view across the valley to the Oquirrh Mountains. Though particular sentences or lines are often worked out (or worried) while walking or hiking or cross-country skiing.

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

Julio Cortázar’s La Prosa del observatorio.  I almost didn’t read it because it’s about eels (or half about eels, and half about an eighteenth-century Indian observatory), but it’s filled with amazing, sometimes hallucinatory prose and ultimately makes a magical argument about epistemology.  Plus the whole book seems to be generated from a sort of paragrammatic matrix, which it never explicitly states but continually weaves itself around: the French idiom “Il y a anguille sous roche [roughly: there’s something fishy around here]”.

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

Siglo Press, which has just made two of my bibliographic dreams come true: Sophie Calle’s The Address Book and a collection of Jess material that includes the Tricky Cad works. 

Also Boo-Hooray Press, which has been doing really interesting facsimile editions, as has Kyle Schlesinger’s Cuneiform Press — and his MimeoMimeo projects (with Jed Birmingham) keep developing in exciting new ways as well.  And I’ve also been recently thrilled with the direction Michael Cross’ Compline Press is taking — his previous imprint was one of my all-time favorites.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

I can divulge my big distraction — my six-year-old boy — but I wouldn’t want to share him!  He’s too much fun and we barely get enough time together as it is. We read to each other and make little books together and spend a lot of time at the playground inventing games.

7. What are you looking forward to?

Reading Fred Moten’s Hughson’s Tavern in my seminar next week: it’s the best poetry book I’ve read in years, and it totally kicked my ass — I can’t wait to see what the students make of it.

Oliver de la Paz | January 18, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

I live in the Foothills of Mt. Baker, about 25 miles outside of Bellingham, Washington, and about 20 minutes away from the Canadian/US Border.

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

I’m concurrently working on three book manuscripts at the moment. One manuscript is a series of inter-related prose poems that are loosely based on the Theseus/Minotaur myth, the second manuscript is a series of ekphrastic poems informed by the work of Eadweard Muybridge who pioneered many inventions that were seen as the precursor to motion pictures, and a series of epistolary prose poems currently entitled my “Dear Empire,” poems. I tend to write in long sequences and when I get stuck or bored with a sequence, I jump to another project. I’ll intermittently jump between projects to keep things fresh in my brain. When I find that I’m spending less and less time jumping back to a project, then I figure that it’s time to work on structure and send the work out.

3. Where do you write?

I used to have an office inside the house, but since the birth of our third son, I had been migrating from the living room couch to the kitchen table to the kitchen counter. My son kicked me out of my old office that we converted into a nursery. However we recently took out a loan and constructed a garage/office space which is roughly thirty yards away from the main house. I finished tiling, installing drywall, and installing shelving this past August, so that’s my new writing space. It’s really a great space. The office is about 12x12 with wall-to-wall shelves and an unreliable internet connection.

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

I just finished Kevin Prufer’s In A Beautiful Country which was a book I had been meaning to read but didn’t start until my teaching quarter began again. I also finished Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins and Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning. All great books and all are books I’m teaching in my courses this Fall quarter.

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

For journals, I really like what Jonathan Farmer is doing with At Length Magazine. I tend to write in sequences and series—longer forms, and At Length has been publishing longer sustained pieces. I’m also a fan of Memorious. As far as poetry discoveries are concerned, I’ve been reading the work of Sawako Nakayasu recently. I’m really interested in the way she sustains her concerns over the duration of a book. I’ve also been really interested in what Gold Wake Press is publishing these days.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

When the kids are awake, I’m a full-time dad. Basically all my attention is devoted to my three boys. When they’re asleep, my biggest distractions are Facebook and video games. I just finished playing Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City. I’ll probably stay away from the video games for awhile, though. The teaching year is starting to get very busy.

7. What are you looking forward to?

I’m looking forward to AWP in Boston. I haven’t been back to Boston since the late 80s. I’m looking forward to the Spring. We’ve just entered the rainy season and it’s been cold and blustery. I’m looking forward to having my four-year old moved into Kindergarten because he’s currently in a half-day of pre-kindergarten and I spend my mornings with him before the bus picks him up to go to school. Once he’s in kindergarten, I’ll have more time in the morning to catch up with all the house work!

Bonus Questions:

How important is music to you?

I’ve always listened to music while writing. I bought a pair of Sendheiser headphones for my son who needed them for his music therapy (he’s on the autistic spectrum and one of the therapies is desensitization to sound). I liked them so much that I bought myself a pair. And what’s great about them is they’re not noise-cancelling, but they’re noise and sound enhancing. They allow me to hear all the little clicks, hisses, and incidental sounds that a pair of noise-cancelling headphones would otherwise mute out. Anyway, I put these headphones on and listen to ambient music—Balmorhea, Explosions in the Sky, some Boris, The Dirty Three, The Books, and The Rachel’s—all bands that I listen to while I’m writing. I’ll also listen to classical jazz by Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelonius Monk.

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

Not really. I’m more interested in creating new work than I am revisiting old work. I will read one or two poems from the older books for a featured reading, but generally I find myself steering away from the older stuff.

What are you afraid of?

All my fears are fatherly and familial. I’m afraid for my son who was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome this past Spring. We’ve been hopping between daycare situations and haven’t been able to find an ideal situation for him. He wants to be in school, but he has so much difficulty associating with kids his age. I’m afraid of my debts which are not insurmountable, but are slowly increasing due to the therapies we’ve been enrolled in for our son. I’m afraid of neglecting the other two boys while spending so much time with my child with special needs. I’m afraid of neglecting my relationship with my wife. You know, family and fatherly stuff scares me the most.

Noah Eli Gordon | January 11, 2013

 1. Where are you now?

I’m in Denver, CO.

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

Learning to live close to the earth. Today, hours from now, my baby will be three weeks old. Things are all beautifully diminished for me right now. They’re grunts, squeaks. They’re reactionary, exclamatory rejections of complexity. Binaries. It’s all in the digestive track. And then, well, it’s all out. Refuse is a noun & a verb, no? So, close to the earth it is. Abstractions just seem unimportant. Although, I did learn to play Warren Zevon’s Carmelita a few days ago. That B7 took me a while to master. Other things on hold, which I hope to unhold soon include: a long, digressive essay on pornography, the history of the lyric, Super Mario Bros, Bashō, and violence; this is going to fold into a book I’ve been writing off & on for the last five years called Dysgraphia (some samples are linked here: http://www.noaheligordon.com/writing); I’ve also begun a work tentatively, preposterously titled An Index to Noah Eli Gordon’s Next Eight Hundred Works. It’s a sort of homage to Édouard Levé’s Oeuvres, a book I’ve only been able to read a few pages of in a really rudimentary and poor translation via Google Translate. As for the imminent stuff, there are a few books in the pipelines, the first of which, The Year of The Rooster, will appear in May of 2013 from Ahsahta Press. But working mostly, when I can, on helping to usher other’s work into the world: editing reviews for The Volta’s Friday Feature page, on & off the phone with folks at places like Friesens & Bookmobile, since I’m currently operating levers behind both Letter Machine Editions and Subito Press. And then there are the diapers. Three weeks ago, I hadn’t ever in my life changed one.  

3. Where do you write?

I write prose on the computer, poems mostly in small notebooks, although I’ve written only a handful of poems in the last several years. I’m recalibrating something. Reconsidering something. When I was little, I wanted to be an entomologist, but I hated actually touching insects. That’s allegorical enough, isn’t it?   

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

I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.

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

Decades into this thing and I think it becomes more about filtering. I recently taught a course on poetry criticism, more or less on writing reviews of recent poetry books, the ancillary work associated with that, along with the publishing course I teach annually, and the numerous review copies that continue to roll in the door for The Volta means I’m pretty much drowning in this stuff. It’s daunting as much as it’s exhilarating. I mean all these books, so much lifeblood, so much energy & enthusiasm, and, honestly, so much grappling in the dark, shouting in the void, umm, what’s the cliché I’m looking for here? Well, whatever it is, you know what I mean. Who has the time? And funny (or not), when one does actually sit with the stuff, most of it, at least that that isn’t immediately recycled (e.g. Finishing Line Press), really is worth it.   

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

I have a little baby.

7. What are you looking forward to?

The collected Ceravolo! Actually, I’ve got an uncorrected proof copy right here. The highlight thus far in a previously unpublished long poem called “Interior of the Poem,” which he purportedly dictated to his wife while painting the kitchen. 

Shelly Taylor | January 4, 2013

1. Where are you now? 

Wednesday:  Tucson International Airport, on way to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to give a reading & hang out with poet Abraham Smith.    

Now, post-reading, desert home, thinking of grading 80 comp essays lying on floor, yet watching the “The Real Housewives of New York City” Reunion, biting nails, drinking hot tea, not wanting to grade said essays; Sawako Nakayasu’s nothing fictional… is by my desk so I’ve flipped through it a couple times tonite so as not to grade comp essays; recovering from bigass lasagna din that my pal & I just ingested.  It’s Monday.

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

Just finishing up second book—-Lions, Remonstrance—-& have poems out recently in Pinwheel, Phantom Limb, & Dusie’s “Radical Vernacular” Issue.  I’ve started giving thought into book three:  historical/fictional lyric novella thing set in territorial Tucson times, that gun slinging, that leg slung over the front railing kind of thing.

3. Where do you write?

Home, at desk by window, in Barrio Viejo, Rubio, little desert alley street.  I write best in my little cottage in southern Georgia on family farm.  Also Key West does me well.

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

Currently reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which is just what I need this season in my life.  So many recent good things:  Maggie Nelson’s Bluets & Jen Denrow’s California are pretty damn great, as well as Mara Vahratian’s chapbook, Soaptrees, out from Dancing Girl Press—this lil chap is spectacular & I recommend it to everyone.  A friend gave me James Welch’s Riding the Earthboy 40 which has some nice moments:  “Time is clean / and brief for girls in a wild time / past for ladies up like smoke in narrow wind.” 

I always read Letters to Yesenin.  Each year too, since teenage years, I reread Harrison’s Dalva & The Road Home.  I recently read Alyssa Nutting’s Unclean Jobs for Women & Girls & thought it fine.  On my bedside table is a stack of books I am reading at the moment—-my “short stack” as Barbara Cully’d say, work that is feeding the writing in some way or another; they are Lynda Hull & James Schuyler’s Collected poems, Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, CD Wright’s Rising, Falling, Hovering, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, & Stanford’s Battlefield…which constantly gets my attention.  My alarm clock sits atop all these books on my little nightstand a high rise. 

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

Pinwheel—lovely Stephen Danos & Dolly Lemke, hard working good people—debut issue dropped two weeks ago.  BWR is always good—-recent editor poet AB Gorham is amazing—-just discovering her work which is fantastic & out in numerous journals.  Poet Joseph Mains just recently took over Octopus Mag, & I can’t wait to see what he puts together in his debut issue as editor.       

I want to read Mark Leidner’s Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me.  We know each other from southern Georgia, teenage years—-I think I remember him chilling on my porch in Tifton & have heard his work is stellar. I’m needing to get The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein, as my mentor Steven Salmoni & dear friend Tim Peterson both have essays there.  Still can’t get over Controlling Interests—-just love it; all Bernstein has the ability to jolt.  Goodmorning Menagerie is a chapbook press that’s making good looking books-—they put out a Laura Sims collection this past AWP 2012.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Horses.  I try to ride every week with my friend Ralph out in Avra Valley—out past Marana, deep desert AZ.  Ralph is a team roper & my horse for years is Max, a big ole Quarter Horse that I just love.  I like to go out to music quite a bit; my pal Dan books pretty much all Tucson shows so I get the luxury to waltz right on in a lucky girl.  Dinners out & big red wines are important to break monotony of teacher grind—-that living too much on earth.  I’m sometimes a bartender which can be a diversion from writer/teacherly life & gives me a lil change in my pocket.  Solitary road trips are a must—-esp to the Navajo Reservation a couple times a year.     

7. What are you looking forward to?

Trying my best hand at living abundantly on a daily basis.  Traveling to Spain this coming summer.  Finishing grading 80 comp essays on the floor staring up at me…grrr.  I’m going this weekend to my sister’s in LA for my niece Lyla G-Bear’s third birthday, a costume party.  My granny & mama will be out there too, so it’s going to be fantastic as fam time = good times.

As per writing, I’d like to get a real start on this new book—-not linger too long in the space between: just throw the self to it & in it.  I look forward to researching actual historical side of content-—stretching further into anti-genre, lyric-novella-type space, whatever that might mean.

Lynn Xu | December 28, 2012

1. Where are you now? 

Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

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

I am working on a few things, but these things have yet to find their form.

My first book (Debts & Lessons) will be published by Omnidawn this spring.  I also have some poems forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, though I’m not sure which issue. 

3. Where do you write?

I prefer to write on large tables, the larger the better. 

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

Cao xueqin’s Shitou ji (Story of the Stone), better known as: Hong loumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber).  I do not hesitate to say it is the best thing I have read in years.  A total of 120 chapters, it stretches across five volumes (the last 40 chapters we do not attribute to the author, but to the editors: Gao E and Cheng weiyuan).  John Hawks’ translation takes liberties, but it is the best; there is no way to repair the verse parts in translation, nor reproduce the extraordinary range of punning and play.      

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

Presses: Atticus/Finch, Wakefield Press and Private Line.  Poets: Charlotte Smith, Erasmus Darwin and H.D.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Ping-Pong matches against Josh, long walks in the surrounding woods, exploring the woods, biking to the lake, drinking in the beer garden overlooking the lake, looking for mushrooms and writing long letters.     

7. What are you looking forward to?

I look forward to being able to keep time differently, released from the supervision of “deadlines” and the well-worn illusion of “efficiency.”

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

I like bright almost-blinding days filled with sun, or the black of nighttime.  When a cloud rolls in and the day dims my first instinct is certainly to protest it.  In the arc of half-light (pacific northwest winter) I feel seasick and nauseous, and cannot think.  I like abrasive weather, with seasons that show marked change.  To add to the last question, I look forward to spending a proper German winter with equal parts snow and darkness.  

Craig Santos Perez | December 21, 2012

Where are you now? 

I live in Kailua, O’ahu—a five-minute walk to the beach. I can feel Moana Nui, the Pacific Ocean, breathing from where I sleep. I teach Creative Writing and Pacific literature in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. I can hear the living breath of Pacific literatures pulsing everytime I go to work, and I have the pleasure of being surrounded by the vibrant voices of so many talented Pacific poets and scholars.

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

I recently finished a draft of my third book of poems, titled from unincorporated territory [guma], a continuation of my multiple book series from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing 2010). My editor, Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn Publishing, is currently reading the manuscript and I very much look forward to working with her on carving the manuscript into its final, ocean-ready form.

Where do you write?

At the beach, mostly. Words tend to break onto the page between waves. There is a copious amount of sand in my writing journal. And the scent of coconut oil on pen and paper.

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

Michelle Naka Pierceʻs Continuous Frieze Bordering Red.

What journals, poets, presses have you discovered lately?

Mana Magazine, a journal dedicated to Hawaiian issues that regularly features Hawaiian poets and writers. Also, FLUX HAWAII magazine features many articles that have a poetic flare. Lastly, the Honolulu Weekly has been publishing some wonderful stories relating to food in Hawaiʻi.

Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Excuse me while I snack on my Facebook newsfeed. Iʻll be right back to answer your last question. If you friend me, I will share my diversions for you to like. My facebook is an open life.

What are you looking forward to?

Engaging with my students. Attending several Pacific literature and studies events this semester. Going to Puerto Rico next month for the American Studies Association conference. Having fun at the on-campus Kava Festival this weekend. Exercising. Vacationing sometime soon. 

J. Michael Martinez | December 14, 2012

1. Where are you now? 

Spatially:

Sitting at my desk in my one bedroom apartment in Denver, CO.

Temporally (season):

Autumn: cloudy—light leaking leaden through the ash black curtain—blustery as a day in the 500 Acre Woods.

Textually:

a) Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorksy, pg. 48: “When the hierarchy is out of order or one element is out of proportion, the cuts lose their vibrancy.  The aliveness of the cinematic space collapses.”

b) Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, pg. 63 (Book Four, 2): “Take no enterprise in hand at haphazard, or without regard to the principles governing its proper execution.”

c) Modern Art In Africa, Asia, and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms; ED. Elaine O’Brien, Everlyn Nicodemus, Melissa Chiu, Benjamin Genocchio, Mary K. Coffeey, and Roberto Tejada. This fantastic work situates modern art on a global scale as opposed to a particular Eurocentric historiography. I skip around in it.  Hopscotch reading.

d) The Glimmering Room by Cynthia Cruz: amazing. Beautiful.  

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

The Ph.D. work takes quite a bit of my time but I try to work on a number of projects at once: in addition to editing poetry manuscripts for Noemi, I’m in the midst of writing an article on Craig Santo Perez and his poetics (the brother’s work is an example of what is foundational and revolutionary in 21^st century poetries), writing an article responding to claims by certain of our elders on the state/(de)construction/epistemological structuring of 20^th century poetics.  I wrapped up my final edit of a new poetry manuscript called In the Garden of the Bridehouse.  I’m starting to send it out; I’m hoping it finds a home. 

I’ve recently become completely obsessed with my new project: a novella/graphic novel with essays, children’s book, video and a soundtrack.  I love books like The Little Prince and The Prophet.  And I love the novels of Herman Hesse, particularly Narcissus and Goldmund…and growing up work comic books like Kabuki and Squee were essential readings.  I wanted to combine these forms and do visual art again.  And write music.  I’ve been spending what free time I have from Ph.D. stuff working on painting and writing this book. 

The book (I might make it an ‘app’) is called The Invention Machine: I had a dream about a year and a half ago where I was in my room/workshop constructing a dollhouse.  It is a massive structure and, when opened, the doll house’s rooms were organized to correspond to a human body: two large libraries occupy the place of the lungs, the living room is where the heart would be placed; where the sexual organs would be situated, the doll house had a baby doll house growing within it; in the dream, you could open up the baby doll house and see its even smaller organ matched interior.  In the dream, I finished working on the architecture and, looking up, saw a children’s book: I began to read it.  Long story short, The Invention Machine is the book I read in my dream.  When I woke I remembered it entirely.  This dream-story helped pull together a number of writings I’d abandoned because I couldn’t think of a way to make them work.  All in all, the novel-esque portions are situated in one man’s memories and the graphic novel portions are situated in the gaps governing the architectural boundaries of recollection.  The main character writes children’s books and I’m including a few of those.  This is My Science of Why. 

3. Where do you write?

I’ve turned my apartment into a workshop: my little dining area holds my amps, guitars, keyboard and mics; in the living room, I trashed my couch the other day so I could have room for my painting supplies, drafting table and other art stuff; on the other side of my living room, I write at a pretty massive desk I got cheap off of Craig’s List; all other spaces are crowded with books.

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

Denver has become such a gift: writers are visiting and reading veritably everyday at some gallery or bar.  Dot Devota and Brandon Shimoda were just here for The Bad Shadow Affair and I’m crushing on their work; Carmen Gimenez Smith’s new book Goodbye, Flicker is gorgeous. 

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Music:

Steven Gutheinz “Cracking Shadows”

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!”

P.M. Dawn, “The Best of P.M. Dawn”

Mint Julip, “Save Your Season”

Grouper, “Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill”

Abandoned Pools, “Sublime Currency”

Gliss, “Hunting E.P.”

Belong, “October Language”

The Netflix:

Breaking Bad

Supernatural

Doctor Who

Sherlock

7. What are you looking forward to?

The compact silence of snow, tomorrow morning’s coffee, the crackling kiss of winter air.  I will not apologize for sentimentalities.

EXTRA QUESTIONS:

(Question by J.C.)

8. How does curiosity fit into your life?

I think I still have the curiosity of my five year old self: I get excited at the prospect of…most things…I’m naturally an optimistic person; if you know me, you know what I mean.  Moreover, I try to live by an ethos put forward by James P. Carse.  I read his book in my late teens and it has guided my perceptions for a very long time, check it out: Infinite and Finite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility.     

(Question by E.C.)

9. If you talked down the clouds rather than took them down, what would you say to convince them to come down?

I’d hide a flower behind my back and whisper to the clouds that they have a love child they’ve never met.

(Question by J.Cr)

10.  What do you love most about your body?

The manner in which it keeps record.

(Question by K. M.)

11. True or False: Glasses are sexy?

Truer than gravity.

(Question by S. M.)

12. Where is a wound? And how does it manifest?

The wound is the flower behind my back and the manner in which it keeps record: it whispers to the clouds they have a love child they’ve never met and it visions life as a season of play where light leaks leaden through the ash black and, in that aliveness, space collapses.  The wound is where you love your body and glasses are sexy and what you look forward to is how curiosity fits into your life.

Forrest Gander | December 7, 2012

1.    Where are you now? 

 I’m in my office at Brown, just after a reading by the Canadian writer and translator Erin Moure, looking at your email as the last of the day’s light thunks through the window onto my rock collection.

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

What’s just out are two books: Watchword, poems by Pura López Colomé. This book won the Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico’s Pulitzer. And Redstart: An Ecological Poetics, a mixed genre collaboration with Australian poet John Kinsella. I’m at work on a big anthology, 15 Essential Poems from Latin America, selected by Raúl Zurita. And I’ve enlisted some hot Japanese translators to help me put together Alice, Iris, Red Horse: Selected Poems by the great avant-garde poet Gozo Yoshimasu (http://forrestgander.com/Gozo-yoshimasu.html)

3.    Where do you write?

Almost exclusively at my desk in the barn at home. Where I never, fucking alas, am.

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

Have you ever read a book so astonishing, so unforeseeable and breathtaking that you hesitated to tell everyone about it? Maybe once every twenty years, right? I just read one. (Published in German in 1945, mixed genre). But I only want to share it at the intimate level. Otherwise, and really good: Kurt Beals’ translation of Anja Utler, Engulf- Enkindle. Dan Beachy-Quick’s Circle’s Apprentice. Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart. And Lucas Klein’s translation of Xi Chuan, Notes on the Mosquito.

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

 Asymptote is my favorite online journal. It’s edited by a bunch of youngbloods who can really sniff out great work from all over the world. Favorite print journal is Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry and Opinion. Stonecutter is terrific. I’m also always eating up Mandorla whenever a new issue comes out. Presses. Terrific poetry titles coming out steadily from OmniDawn, Nightboat, Ahsahta, Action Books. And they always feel like discoveries.

6.    Care to share any distractions / diversions?

Those who haven’t ever seen, live, the post-butoh movement artists Eiko & Koma are missing something extraordinary and unforgettable. You can get the barest (and still electrifying) idea of what they do at their website: http://www.eikoandkoma.org

7.    What are you looking forward to?

The Mexican poet Coral Bracho says it for me:

“give me a wafer of time; the flickering

and flaking ember of time; its exultant

core; its fire, the echo

under the deepened labyrinth.”

I haven’t written anything of my own for too long and I look forward to that holy wafer—-