Take Down the Clouds

Tan Lin | May 1st, 2013

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:56:17 -0400

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

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:55:26 -0400

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

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 00:00:41 -0400

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.

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

I have a new book out called Rhyme Scheme that was focused on writing I’d been doing for many years back and am working on a new one focused on J. L. Austin’s philosophy that indicates where I might be going. In fact I’m working on a couple of books on this theme. Some creative some academic. Also some performance things. More collaboration with Elliott Sharp and working on some performance pieces that are solo and with my band.

3. Where do you write?

On my computer for creative writing. By hand for meditative writing.

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

I haven’t read for pleasure much lately. I’ve been confining myself to online reading, blogs and audiobooks as well as re-reading theories on performance, sound and poetics for various projects. All research-oriented and classroom-oriented.

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

I’ve been asked to write for a few newer presses, journals etc. I can’t say which in case they don’t publish the stuff I sent and it gets awkward… I’ve kinda followed my own path on the poetry route so I’m at the margins of new stuff coming out and who’s putting things out. These days, I feel like I’m mining older material that I’ve long had at my disposal but hadn’t explored. I guess another way of putting that is that I’m becoming a bit of a hermit.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

I do binges of TV shows to see how different actors negotiate narrative arcs. Sometimes they’re a waste of time, sometimes not. I take acting analysis seriously and also find great pleasure in watching strong performances. I also teach classes on Pop culture so I try to have a toe in that regularly.

Lately it’s been a lot about the show “Breaking Bad”. (I’m only about 5 years behind everyone else…) I love the show because it’s a character actor’s show. That’s the kind of acting I’ve always wanted to do. It’s also the reason why, I believe, the show’s so beloved by Hollywood. It features not “tv star/movie star” actors but the ones that plug in day after day, decade after decade. Character actor and good luck charm Danny Trejo gets a featured role and that confirms my theory. It’s a real actors’ lovefest.

It’s heartwarming the respect given to these craftspersons. I’m not a “method” performer or US-based in my training, but my goodness, I love to see American actors bring that drama. Giancarlo Esposito’s turn in this was luminous. All killer performances even by the more marginal players. It’s wonderful to watch folks “flex the technique”.

7. What are you looking forward to?

Being better at things. I’m working on it.

Bonus questions:

Why do you write?

I used to write because I felt this burning need, when I was a youngster. Now I write because I feel I have a responsibility to write things. I like to think that’s more mature, less mercurial than my original motivation. I feel calm when I write now, even when I’m frustrated at trying to get at something.

I realize that the only time I feel normal is when I write poetry. No other type of writing, no other type of performance or even theoretical work makes me feel normal. Other forms of expression and exploration give me pleasure (and pain, etc.) but the only time I feel normal is when I write poetry (including non-paged sound poems).

Not that I need to feel normal all the time, in fact it can be scary to have that balance, to accept that one can live in a state of balance. It’s funny. Meditation can punch up my consciousness, bring me focus, etc. I’ve also changed my diet and begun a journey into martial arts practice. All these things have helped me as a person. But normalcy? Only poetry.

Do you think much about your audience?

Not with page-based work. With sound poetry the audience is essential. Because the sound poems are improvised, I need the audience to inform the poem, to help me to improvise it. To understand what to do next. I have the structure but the audience helps me to inhabit the house of the improvised poem.

How important is music to you?

Quite. I sing with different folks as well as with my own folks. Music helps to ground me. I think all sorts of sounds inform my poetry and poetics. I’ve been performing with music almost from the beginning of performing poems in public. However, I consider singing a totally different use of voice and sound than my sound poetry. The framework of inspiration, concept is different. Although I love both poetry and music, with singing I feel that my material is music, with sound poetry my material is words and the atoms of words: phonemes et al.

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

Not really. I’m prone to self-flagellation so I see the mistakes first. My perspective is off-kilter and I know it. I do read from the books when reading publicly so there’s that, but after looking at the manuscript a bunch of times, I don’t really have it in me to read it for pleasure. I have the same issue with my singing and acting, too. I don’t read reviews, none of it. I guess I’m reviewing myself when I re-read my work so it gets uncomfortable. The older I get the less strained the relationship between me and my former selves becomes. So I guess there’s hope.

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

Peace. Comfort. That’s what we seek quiet for, isn’t it? Maybe to think things through and come to that state of peace? I hope I can leave the earth feeling I’ve found some comfort in myself.

Maybe I’m being a bit melodrama here. Essentially though, that’s it. There are lots of things that can make me feel that way and I suspect that I’ll change my mind about what gives me peace at various stages. That answer has certainly changed a few times in the past.

What are you afraid of?

Funnily enough, I have insecurities but few fears. I think I’ve faced quite a few. I’ve been at death’s door (not to be too dramatic I was just a very sickly kid). There are lots of things I don’t like but I really don’t fear much. I think I’ve embarrassed myself on so many occasions learning, growing as a person and as a performer that I’ve passed a lot of fear points. Fear, in my humble opinion, usually comes from the unknown and I know what humiliation, worry and all those things are like already. I accept that this comes with the whole package of living.

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

My family, as usual. They’re the ones who come.

My mom reminded me that when I had surgery many years ago, I wouldn’t allow my friends to come visit me. It was funny. I didn’t recall that. I don’t think it was an embarrassment/macho situation. It’s just that with my family I can be as down in the mouth as I can go and it not matter. I can be myself. With my friends I’d feel some weird, latent need to hostess. In other words, to perform. (That’s only in my mind, not in theirs.) I love *not* having to perform around my family, warts and all.

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

My criteria are high as I like a lot of audiobooks, the Jim Dale Harry Potter ones are my absolute favorites….

Maybe Ian McKellen reading the bible for the rich language. That would be pretty damn amazing.

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

Great question. I hibernate in the winter — or wish I could. I like warm, sunny weather. I’ve worked through my aversion to cold and clammy however because I go to London as often as I can. I had to write some creative work in London a few years ago and that cured me of my aversion to cooler, damper climes. Now I’m much more flexible.

What do you miss?

Not much. I don’t do a lot of regretting. I know things now that I didn’t know. One hopes that this is the case as one continues to live… If some things hadn’t been mistakes I wouldn’t have learned from them.

Regret, like worry, doesn’t equal love. They’re fake emotions often pretending to be love.

Where would you like to return to?

I get to go to most places I’d like to go to. I’d love to go back to a bunch of places I’ve been to, particularly Ghana and Kenya. Hopefully, that’ll happen. I try to go to Africa regularly but it’s been a while.

Where would you like never to visit (again)?

God, if I say it, I’ll probably end up having a gig there…

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

Huh. Well what’s in my will is private and rather mundane but I think I’ve done/written/performed enough that if people want to remember me or what’s important to me, they can find it in my work.

Instructions after I’ve died imply some sort of legacy, or need to remember what I want. That’s the work. The work’s out there. I don’t think I need to worry about anything. Those are “earthly” concerns.

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

Oh yeah! Most of my true self. I’m still discovering what all that might mean. My work is just a tiny part of myself. It’s a key to who I am, not who I am. My mind, my spirit, are who I am.

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

Shakespeare, always. The sonnets and plays. The Bible, I like. J.L. Austin, Erving Goffman, the sociologist. Rakim, the lyricist.

Since I’m biased toward writing I see lots of folks as writers who aren’t considered writers. I interpret their work as writing. Mostly “singers”. Bobby McFerrin, Mahalia Jackson and Sarah Vaughan fit into that category.

Actual writers who sing their text too: Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Nona Hendryx, Sade. Her minimalism is so crisp and she uses it to great effect.

I conflate these things because I’ve always had an inquisitive mind and also generally speaking, grew up in a neighborhood with a poor education system. The conflation of poverty and discrimination. So I couldn’t be too genre-precious about where my inspiration came from, where the sparks for my work come from. Necessity is the mother of interdisciplinarity.

Mathias Svalina | March 29, 2013

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:36 -0400

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

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:58 -0400

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

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:45 -0400

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

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:40 -0500

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

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:01:03 -0500

1. Where are you now?

At my sawhorse & found door desk in New Orleans.

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

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.

3. Where do you write?

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

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

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.)

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

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.

6. Care to share any distractions / diversions?

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?

7. What are you looking forward to?

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

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:00:52 -0500

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

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:37 -0500

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.

Farid Matuk | February 8, 2013

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:56 -0500

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

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 00:01:12 -0500

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

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:01:12 -0500

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

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:01:00 -0500

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

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

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

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:45 -0500

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

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:00:39 -0500

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

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:51 -0500

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

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 00:00:44 -0500

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

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:50 -0500

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—-