#61 - Marc McKee

How often had you sent out Fuse before it was chosen for publication in 2011 by Black Lawrence Press?

Looking back at my submissions table, a quick count tells me that I sent out the manuscript to around 90 places over the course of four years.  In that time, it was a semi-finalist or finalist for about 20 contests or reading periods.  In fact, when Diane Goettel over at Black Lawrence Press emailed me to ask if they could publish it (it had been a finalist for both of their full-length collection prizes), I was right on the edge of retiring it and moving ahead with other manuscripts I had been working on.  The last year I sent it out, I sent it out to as many places as I could; it wasn’t a total carpet-bombing of contests and open reading periods, but it felt close.

Tell me about the title. Had it always been Fuse? Did it go through any other changes?

I first put the manuscript together over the course of doing my MFA at the University of Houston, and the original, working title was How To Stitch Flame.  This is the title of one of the poems in the first section (though who knows what part of the book it was in then).  I loved the hopeless absurdity of that notion, it seemed like a great aesthetic signal flare.  Later, though, I had my mind changed.  After meeting with Michael Dumanis over coffee to talk manuscripts, he convinced me that whatever the merits that title had in terms of the aesthetics at play in the collection, it might not be the most inviting one I could think of. Eventually, I came up with the title “Fuse” after a serendipitous encounter with the word in a dictionary my late maternal grandfather gave me.  Two of the definitions for that word struck me as being true to my original understanding of the “How To…” title, and these definitions found their way into the fulcrum poem of the book, “Serpentine Fuselage.”  The first definition describes fuse in the verb form as “to stitch by applying heat or pressure” and the second describes the noun form as “a continuous train of combustible substance enclosed in a cable.”  That choice did a lot to animate my attempts to order the book and make it cohere.

It seems like there’s a possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?

To start with, I’m proof that you don’t need to win a contest to publish your first book.  I’ve seen no little contention over the contest system (systems?) over the last decade or so (i.e., when I started paying attention), as we all have.  My humble take is that it might not be ideal, but it is a mechanism that helps support, if not totally sustains, a number of small presses.  As such, I have a hard time calling it out. I was primarily concerned with getting my book published.  It would have been lovely and validating to win a contest, of course, but my experience has been that having a book diminishes that concern.  If you’re lucky to have anyone think about your book beyond the year or two when it comes out, it seems beside the point and damaging to boot to imagine that they would identify it primarily as a “contest winner,” rather than on its own terms.  Or this is one of the lullabies I let pet me to sleep.

Whatever the case may actually be, my advice to poets sending their book out now (and forevermore) is to make their main concern the catalogue and reputation of the presses to which they offer up their work.  Once you’ve figured out those you respect and admire, send to them unceasingly, or at least as regularly as is largely painless to you and to those presses. In the end, sending over and over again to those presses, whether they had open reading periods or contests (especially those in which the presses were interested in publishing a finalist or two) worked out for me in a really satisfying way.  It took a while, but I’m very happy with the end result. 

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

The process of assembly was a long, semi-quixotic ramble.  I first started putting Fuse together while I was in Houston, and it eventually served as my MFA thesis.  I didn’t start sending it out as a collection regularly for a couple of years, and over that time it underwent about three significant revisions.  No, I’m not going to tell you about all the semi-quixotic parts except to say some are in the book or I’m liable to explain them at length should you buy me a drink or four.  Anyway, to me, “significant,” means largely that there were poems dropped and added, order changes, and large and small revisions for individual poems.  From the time I started sending it out to the time it was picked up, I revised it as a manuscript about seven times, though each time the revisions were more tunings with slight shifts of poem order and little tweaks on individual poems.  It took me what felt like forever to get the order to feel organic to me, but by the Black Lawrence took it, I really felt like I had carried it as close to being finished as I ever would.

How involved were you with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.? Did you suggest or have any input regarding the image that was used on the cover?

I didn’t have much say in the interiors, but then when I got the soft proof, I didn’t have too much to say: I loved it.  The font and layout felt really inviting, which was important to me since so many of the poems were long, and could have been challenging to sort out had the font and layout been more dense.  

When it came to the cover design, I was actually given quite a bit of input.  I was allowed to discover an image for myself, which can be a wracking process, since I didn’t really have anything in mind.  I sorted through some images searching for something that might represent the sensibility of the book, but I never really came across anything that was perfect.  Then my wife saw some paintings by Rob Funderburk, an old acquaintance of hers from Chicago, posted on a mutual friend’s Facebook page.  She thought they looked perfect, so she pointed me in the direction of Rob’s pieces, and when I saw them I instantly knew that I’d found what I was looking for.  I mean, do yourself a favor and visit his website.  He works in a wide spectrum and it’s all a wonder to behold.  Once I had gotten Rob’s permission to use an image of his painting, we looked at ideas from Black Lawrence’s design guy, Steven Seighman, and then Rob, my wife and I fiddled with how we thought the cover should look.  I decided I wanted the image to be of the whole painting, rather than just a detail, and that it would look good wrapped around the front and back, with the blurbs filling the leftover white space.  We sent back a mockup to Steven, and he put together a gorgeous cover, which to this day gives me a trill of excitement.

What about the publication of the actual poems in journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I didn’t have it in mind as a goal that all the poems in the manuscript should be taken.  When I started reading contemporary books of poetry, something I figured out pretty quickly was that in addition to being magnificent vehicles for collections of poems, they were also wonderful references for figuring out how poetry communities arrange and indicate themselves and their aesthetics.  I learned a lot by paying attention to the front and back matter (and I’m glad I did, as otherwise it would have taken me a long time to see the amazing colophon in Josh Bell’s No Planet Strike).  As I was figuring out how to submit poems and learning what journals supported the work I was trying to do, I was already subconsciously forming a goal for what an acknowledgments page would be able to tell someone who might pick up the book in a bookstore or a library.  In the end it was more important to me that I believed the poems in the book belonged there.  Since it took a while for my book to get picked up, I had plenty of time to send its poems around, and many of them got taken thanks to the generous and supportive editors I’ve come across.  There were a few that didn’t, however, and one in particular—“Serpentine Fuselage”—is central to the book.  Of course, that poem in the book is like 14 pages long and scattered; I never expected it to be taken.  But I would never for an instant have thought to leave it out of the book just because it hadn’t been pedigreed by publication.  It was just too important to what I understood the book to be.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its final proofing stage?

I think I probably went through about two close readings that resulted in a few little tweaks here or there.  I had spent so much time with it that I was largely satisfied, or at least, finished. The knowledge that it would actually be published changed the editing process, but not as much as I would have imagined. I lived with these poems for a really long time. I’ve read almost all of them at readings at one time or another.  The work I had left was basically straightening ties, brushing dirt off shoulders, making sure they had their lunches, and sending them off, trying not to worry too much and finally let them be.  I hope they aren’t getting into knife fights or voting Republican.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?

   

It actually came at night.  I was walking to a bar in downtown Columbia to have a few drinks with my friend Thomas when my wife called and told me that my book had arrived.  The bizarre thing is that at first, I felt like I’d just have a look at it when I got home—I was already most of the way to the bar, after all, and I am a ridiculous person.  Then, of course, the wise Camellia said, “Are you crazy?  You’re not going to come look at your book?”  It is approximately at this moment that I started walking back home.  Opening the box is a blur.  Looking at the cover and opening the book for the first time is a blur.  My wife’s smile watching me be happy is one of the clearest images of that night.  I’d had a chapbook published by New Michigan Press a couple of years earlier, which I thought would prepare me for this.  It didn’t, really.  I could say I carried it down to the bar or I could say it floated with me between my hand and my eye as I went down to the bar and I couldn’t tell you which is truer or more accurate.  There’s nothing quite like having a supportive and enthusiastic partner calling you home to the lovely product of over a decade of labor, there’s nothing like having a similarly enthusiastic friend who’s also a poet posted up in your favorite bar to make an experience like seeing your book for the first time become realized and elevated: I’m saturated with gratitude.  Even today, if you see me walk down the street, you can detect a slight limp.  That’s from gratitude.

How has your life been different since your book came out?  What have you been doing to promote Fuse, and what have those experiences been like for you?

It’s different in degrees.  The book itself offers you a legitimacy of sorts in our niche community, however putative or imaginary that legitimacy might be in terms of our larger culture, so having published a book feels… a little different.  On the other hand, at this stage in American poetry culture, having a first book doesn’t do too much to quantifiably change your life unless it’s one of those collections that manages to receive a great deal of attention.  As a poet whose collection has been acknowledged very kindly here and there, but not on a scale that could be called massive by most metrics, I feel like I can only hope that this is the beginning of building a change in my life—a hot air balloonic rise into the lower middle class, perhaps.  It has definitely played a role in broadening and diversifying my set of literary friends and acquaintances, which I love, and this is where I talk about how I promote the book, which means I talk about readings and give a casual nod to social media:

Readings.  Putting together readings that I’ve been invited to or invited myself into or have otherwise just utterly lucked into has been my biggest contribution to promoting Fuse, beyond Facebook (which has, of course, facilitated or helped facilitate many of the readings in question).  The readings have been pretty uniformly great, and each of them has been very different.  Over the past year I did a few readings in Columbia, including an insanely fun book co-launch with my friend Melissa, and then readings in St. Louis, Chicago, Houston, Austin, Brooklyn, Lawrence, and Akron, all with dear friends or acquaintances who are now friends.  All of those readings were good times for different reasons.  One of the things I was thankful for was the level of engagement at each venue, no matter what the size of the crowd was.  I hope that I’m right, and that engagement tells me just how hungry pockets of us are in the culture to chase meaning and significance.  I’m not claiming that my poems provide this, or are significant socially or historically or spiritually, or whatever, but it is what I would like to do… and when I see people at readings who talk to me afterward and ask me about the work or mention something they thought was cool or weird, I feel not alone.  For example, before the reading in Akron, I got to spend like an hour and a half with the other writers I was reading with, a close friend who made the drive up with me, and the awesome guys who put the whole reading series together basically having one of the most hilarious, riff-filled conversations of my life, and something like this happened at each reading.   I laughed a lot.  Short version:  Huge, shadow-punishing gifts, that’s been my experience. 

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

If I was in possession of my faculties plus two drinks, I’d probably say that the book is about a speaker trying to find a way to stitch as much of the vanishing, mutable world of experience and imagination together into bursts and blurts of musical talk that act for a reader/listener like batteries for empathy and excitement. 

Actually, now that I’m saying this, I have actually had this experience.  My wife and I were waiting for a flight to New York (for a poetry reading, as it happens) and trying to get something to eat in a crowded airport bar.  Eventually, we were seated at the same four-top as a guy who, it turned out, was doing oversight for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they were struggling to recover from the housing crash and the financial crisis.  At least, I think that’s what he was doing.  He was pretty cagey about it, though in a perfectly nice way.  At any rate, he asked me what kinds of poems were in the book.  I might have tried to explain for about five minutes, but it felt like thirty, and I could just feel any interest just drain away like watching time lapse photography of a campfire die down and disappear.  I should probably just say it has fire engines in it, and when there are no fire engines there is just fire.  Also, one of the poems is about a salad, but not in the way that you think.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

It’s advice I’m giving myself and still failing to take: if you’ve got time and means in the year or two before your first book comes out, be aggressive in finding places to read and finding ways to get your book into the hands of those angels that write about books in venues big and small.  We are all limited by time, money, circumstance, what-have-you, but find a way to get out on the road, find a way to read your work out loud to people who don’t know you.

What influence has the book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works?

Part of the happy influence Fuse’s publication has had on my subsequent writing is that I was encouraged to send more work to Black Lawrence Press, and they decided to publish my second full-length manuscript.  Bewilderness is scheduled for publication in early 2014, and I’ve spent a good part of the summer revising that and seeking blurbers, and looking once more for covers, which is a not-entirely-terrible kind of harrowing.  The other way that it’s influenced my subsequent writing is interesting: on the one hand, it gives me more confidence in the second manuscript I completed, Bewilderness, and also in the third manuscript I have, Consolationeer.  I tend to see these books as a loose kind of trilogy, so the publication of the first (and the imminent publication of the second) has given me the confidence that the third will be taken as well.  Having those projects largely finished, gives me the terrifying and good impetus to try to do something different, or at least to jump further out and get past my comfort zone.  It’s tough, as I adore being comfortable.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yep.  I feel like poetry, at its best, can make nothing actually happen, if I may recklessly misread the famous Auden quote.  It can hold fast to that which might otherwise slip from our attention, our memory, our consciousness, our capacity to contain multitudes.  It can intensify our relationship to the small and large things that make up this life and which might otherwise be consigned to oblivion.  Enough will be consigned to oblivion, and certainly some of it should be, but if we don’t manage to end humanity in the next hundred years, some kid may stumble onto a poem, or a book of poems, that tethers her to the world and sets her flying in a way she might only have feebly sensed before.  How does she pivot back into life with this new awareness?  How does life change because she has?  Look, poetry can’t save the world.  I don’t even know if people can, but if the world gets saved, it’s going to be by the people who see and hear things in different ways, who see something where everyone else saw nothing and who can make that something vivid and real.  Poetry can be anything, and anything can happen, and maybe it will.

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Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray.  Recent work appears in Sixth Finch, Jet Fuel Review, H_NGM_N, and Forklift, Ohio.   New work is forthcoming in Lumberyard and Barn Owl Review.  He is the author of What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008), Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and Bewilderness (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press, 2014).

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#60 - Erica Wright

How often had you sent out Instructions for Killing the Jackal before it was chosen for publication in 2011 by Black Lawrence Press?

I checked my records, and I sent out the manuscript thirty-five times. That’s weird actually because I thought it would be at least a hundred. It felt like I was getting rejection notices every week.

Tell me about the title. Had it always been Instructions for Killing the Jackal? Did it go through any other changes?

For a while, it was called Throwing Matches Around, which is from the Patty Griffin song “Icicles”: “There's always someone throwing matches around / Waving the shiny new knife.” I’m still attached to that title, but I wasn’t sure of the copyright laws. Plus, I wanted something that was my own. The violence in the Griffin lyric suits the type of violence in my poems—more resigned than shocking. But Instructions for Killing the Jackal feels right now. It gestures toward the mythological content that weaves its way into my work even when I don’t mean for it to. I can’t imagine the collection being called anything else. 

It seems like there’s a possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?

My advice is send to as many open submissions as possible. I absolutely don’t resent presses from charging reading or contest entry fees. I always thought of them as donations to organizations that I admire. At the same time, you shouldn’t have to choose between buying groceries and sending your book out.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

Oh, loads. For many years, I used sections, but they always felt arbitrary. Why does the wolf poem go in the “folklore” section and not the “animal” section? Where do the political ones belong? When I took out the sections, I felt a rush of relief. The book worked much better without the dividers.

How involved were you with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?

The editors at Black Lawrence Press are the loveliest. They let me have input on all the choices. The book designer at Dzanc, Steven Seighman, does exceptional work, so I would have felt comfortable letting him make the decisions. I picked the artwork, though. It’s a collage by Alexis Anne Mackenzie.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its final proofing stage?

More than I anticipated. I really thought the book was finished, but when it was accepted, I hadn’t reviewed the material in over a year. There were a few poems that were so glaringly wrong that I’m not sure how I missed them. So they were cut or replaced.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?

The books arrived just in the nick of time for my release party. In fact, I was losing hope that UPS would deliver them when my dad thought to check the shipping log. My super had signed for them in the morning. When I couldn’t find my super, I opened his storage closet, which I’m sure is against the building rules, but I needed those books! And there they were. I carted the box upstairs where my family was waiting, and my mom snapped pictures as I ripped open the package. I look dazed in the photos, and that seems about right.

   

How has your life been different since your book came out?

I figure when I die, my obituary will now say “author of Instructions for Killing the Jackal,” and that’s nice.

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

I actually don’t mind this question as much as some of my friends do. It’s a way for someone to show interest in you or your work. It’s a polite albeit impossible question. I usually just list a few things. Alligators and small towns. Tractors and shipwrecks. Ghosts and gods.

What have you been doing to promote Instructions for Killing the Jackal, and what have those experiences been like for you?

My promotional skills are woefully lacking, but I’ve done a lot of readings. I’ve had many warm welcomings, the warmest being from Malaprop’s in Asheville, North Carolina. If you are nearby (lucky you), I suggest visiting for a coffee or a book, preferably both. Preferably, buy all the coffees and all the books. I have also reached out to editors about reviews, which feels like asking strangers to help you change a tire. In spite of my awkwardness, Jackal has received some really thoughtful responses. 

What influence has the book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works?

I’m working on a new collection tentatively titled All the Bayou Stories End with “Drowned.” While it is not drastically different in tone from my first collection, I do try to avoid writing poems that are obviously Jackal poems. Sometimes I don’t want to give them up, but it’s time to move forward.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

It seems like we are living in particularly mendacious times. Poetry needn’t be beautiful, but it should be truthful. And people telling the truth about the world—whether their pursuits are artistic or otherwise—are the ones who can create change. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project reinforces this idea. The non-profit allows us to hear the voices of women silenced by their birthplace. Women risk their lives to write about their lives. Why would they do that if words weren’t important? Why would we listen? 

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Erica Wright is the author of Instructions for Killing the Jackal (Black Lawrence Press, 2011) and the chapbook Silt (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Crazyhorse, From the Fishouse, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor at Guernica Magazine. Find more at http://ericawright.typepad.com/

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#59 - Dean Rader

How often had you sent out Works & Days before it was chosen as the winner of 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State University Press?

I am asked this question often, and I never really know how to respond, because my own experience was very unusual. The T. S. Eliot Prize was one of the first contests I entered. I began what I assumed would be a lengthy process by sending out the manuscript to two contests that had an October 31 deadline—the Hollis Summers Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Of course, throughout November and December of that year I submitted the manuscript to other contests—a couple of which I became a finalist for but most others, it would appear, I didn’t even make the first cut.

When I found out in February that Claudia Keelan had selected Works & Days for the Eliot Prize I was beyond stunned. I actually thought it might be a mistake.

I had, though, been working on the book on and off for about ten years. So, it wasn’t like the book materialized overnight. More like overdecade.

Tell me about the title. Had it always been Works & Days? Did it go through any other changes?

As it happens, a few others were in the running. The contenders were

·      I Still Wear Galoshes

·      You Are My Tulip

·      Catt Butt

·      There’s No Me In Poem

In truth, as a book ready to be sent out into the world, it was always Works & Days. Early on, when I was thinking about assembling poems, I was tinkering around with something like One and Others, but because there are some poems about Hesiod, poems about the concept of work, and an entire section of poems written on or about my birthday, Works & Days provided an organizing structure for the book.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, I wanted the title to be an homage to poetry. Many of the poems sample other poets, reference other poems, and enter into conversation with other poetic texts—I wanted the title to reflect that conversation, that intertext.

It seems like there’s a possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?

The reality is that you generally have to win a contest if you want your first book published by a university press or a major independent publisher. I didn’t really care if my book won a contest, just as long as it was published by a good press. I did send out the manuscript to one or two open reading periods, but I had to withdraw it almost immediately.

When Poets & Writers did a piece on this topic a few months back, they asked me if I had any advice for folks submitting to contests, particularly if the identity of the judge is public. Some people think it can be useful to be familiar with a judge’s poetry or, if the poet has been a judge for a previous contest, to see what kind of book won. But, like many contests, in order to prevent targeted submissions, the Eliot Prize does not announce their judge until after the contest is over. I had no idea Claudia Keelan was going to be the judge the year I applied. I was thrilled because I love her work. But, the reality is, a different judge probably would have picked a different manuscript. I was like fifty leagues beyond fortunate.

If the judge does not rotate, if the press’s editor and staff picks the winner every year, then, obviously it is super important to know what kinds of books that press likes to publish.

My own experience is that the judge has a really, really impossible job, and they just go with their gut about the most interesting, exiting book. That said, I do think that right now, judges tend to pick books that have a theme or a thread rather than a random collection of poems.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

Somewhere near the end of 2008, I realized I had enough poems for a book, and perhaps even an organizing principle for a book. So, I spent most of 2009 writing poems, revising poems, and thinking about the manuscript as a cohesive unit. In early October of 2009 I was selected for this great faculty retreat sponsored on the Sonoma Coast by the University of San Francisco, where I teach. Almost as soon as I got to my room, I pushed the bed to the far wall and laid out every poem on the floor. I wanted to be able to see every poem at once. That was incredibly helpful because with all the poems visible in one space, it became like a map. I was a hermit for the next two days, slowly stitching the book together poem by poem. I sent it off to those first two contests almost immediately after that.

How involved were you with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?

One of the many great things about the T. S. Eliot Prize, Truman State University Press, and the wonderful editor Nancy Rediger, is the autonomy you get. I got to pick out the font for the titles of the poems as well as the font for the poems themselves. I also had total freedom with the cover, which my wife designed. I had a couple of email exchanges with the press’s poetry editor, Jim Barnes, about the order of the poems, which was helpful. They were really amazing to work with.

One of the best features of the prize is that the Press holds a spot in the publication queue for the Eliot winner. So, I found out in February of 2010 that I had won. I had to have a final clean copy of the manuscript to them by April. And the book came out—in both hardback and paperback—in November of that same year. It was an astonishing turnaround.

What about the publication of the actual poems in journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I had a small fear that the book might not be taken seriously if the poems in it had not been vetted in some objective way. Most of the poems had been published—I’d say 80% of them—and a couple had won prizes. But, it wasn’t like my work was appearing in The New Yorker or anything.

I always had in mind that I was writing poems to go in a book, but really, I was just trying to write one good poem at a time. I did that for over a decade, I think, sending out the poems for publication when I thought they were ready.

How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book would be published to its final proofing stage?

That’s a smart question.

A lot. I really went back through the book and honed the poems, changed a few titles, combined a couple of poems into one. Wrote a couple of new ones. Took out some that appeared in the original manuscript. I resisted the urge to replace all of my work with little known poems by Wallace Stevens and Terrance Hayes .  .  .

What do you remember about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?

   

Actually, I remember a lot more about events surrounding the publication of the book. The day I found out I won the award is particularly clear. I received the news that I’d won the T. S. Eliot Prize and that I had a pretty bad case of pneumonia within a couple of hours of each other. I also remember the day my editor called to tell me that the paperback edition had sold out and was going into a second printing. I was in the bathroom at my in-law's house. To me,  that news was even more improbable than getting the book published.

The day or moment I first saw the books is a bit of a blur. They were shipped to my office at USF and arrived a day before I was to leave on a mini book tour. So, I was relieved as much as anything. I do remember immediately thumbing through the book wishing I’d edited this line or that stanza. What sticks out most is how astonishingly excited I was that the book came out in hardback. I still am. The hardback version with the dust jacket is really beautiful, though I think it’s only sold like 7 copies. Mostly to me.

How has your life been different since your book came out?

You mean aside from the offers to appear on Leno?

My first response is: not much. But, I don’t think that’s quite true. I have this other career as a scholar and a columnist, so I didn’t need the book to get a job or to get tenure (although I was up for full professor when I got the news I had won the award). But, publishing the book and winning the Eliot award credentialed me as a poet to a population of people who didn’t know I existed. I have also been extremely fortunate that the book has been reviewed in a number of different venues. Scholarly works are not reviewed in the same way, so having my work closely scrutinized on different levels from different writers and reviewers has been both awesome and anxiety-making.

I always thought of myself as a poet, and I have been teaching poetry, and writing about poetry for years, but publishing the book has enabled me to be seen first and foremost—by a lot of people—as a poet. And that’s something new.

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

That has actually happened on a couple of occasions, though the most recent was in an airport bar. I tell them (and anyone else who asks) that I grew up in a farm town in Oklahoma, that my grandparents lived through the Dust Bowl, and that we still had the original family farm up until a few years ago. The poems are about how those experiences and the experiences of interacting with the landscape of various works (poems, paintings, philosophies, films) can create a kind of map of a person’s life. In so doing, the poems engage both high and popular culture; they are both traditional and experimental; both serious and funny. Lastly, I always tell people that I want the book to love the reader.

What have you been doing to promote Works & Days, and what have those experiences been like for you?

San Francisco is a great place to live as a poet. I’ve been doing a lot of readings here and elsewhere. I’ve done a few interviews and visited quite a few campuses and classes and read at a number of book festivals. Some of the most fun I’ve had has been on extended visits to campuses as part of their reading series. I usually get to visit classes, run workshops, give readings, meet students, work with graduate students, and hang out with faculty.

I’m not sure this falls under the official rubric of “promotion,” but an unexpected treat has been the response of students who have read my book in their classes. Students have written responses to my poems, composed centos from the poems of Works & Days, and some have even done Rader parodies. A graduate student from Northwestern emailed me recently to tell me that a friend was going to read one of my Frog and Toad poems at his wedding. It really just doesn’t get any better than that.

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

Perhaps worry less about how “good” people (including me) might think the book is and enjoy what having a book of poems out in the world means to me and others.

What influence has the book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works?

Well, I get solicited for poems more often now than in the past, so that is a pleasant surprise, as is being compared to Paris Hilton. That just never really happened to me before . . .

As for how it affected my writing, the book did slow down new poems. The intense process of bringing a book to press is aesthetically exhausting. I was tired of my voice for a while and wasn’t particularly interested in writing anything but criticism, reviews, and columns. I was also a tad worried that my best poetic work was behind me. That stuck with me for a while.

Thankfully, I’m very into what I’m working on now, which is a chapbook of poems that turn on how the language and ideas of art and poetry overlap—line, plane, form, figuration.

I’m also supposed to be writing a book on poetic craft, but I am embarrassed to admit how far behind I am on that . . .

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Wait . . . I thought it already did . . .

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Dean Rader’s debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, was a finalist for the 2010 Bush Memorial First Book Prize, and won the 2010 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award. He has been nominated for two pushcart prizes and will appear in the 2012 edition of Best American Poetry. He is the author of three other books and dozens of articles and essays. He reviews poetry for The Rumpus and The San Francisco Chronicle, he writes columns for The San Francisco Chronicle and The Huffington Post. He recently curated the blog 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco where he won the university’s 2011 Distinguished Research Award. You can read reviews, columns, essays, and poems at http://www.deanrader.com. 
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#58 - Christopher Hennessey

How often had you sent out Love-In-Idleness before it was chosen for publication in 2011 by Brooklyn Arts Press?

I’m guessing I sent the manuscript out to about twenty contests and a few other publishers who had open submissions. (I was a semi-finalist for two contests and a finalist for the Four Way Books first book prize. That was all so encouraging but was a two-sided coin. It kept me sending out the book. And on the other hand, it kept me sending out the book, which also meant more contest fees.) And I recall telling myself to set a limit on the number of contests. Of course, I don’t know that I had a plan B if I went past that number.

Tell me about the title. Had it always been Love-In-Idlesness? Did it go through any other changes?

One of the earlier titles I considered was “The Cicada Lessons,” which is also the section title for my first section of poems about growing up in Michigan. The “lessons” in the title didn’t seem right; it seemed to give the whole collection a pedantic quality when used as an overarching title. It also seemed a little pat. (It works as a section, I think, because it allows the poem called “The Cicada, And Other Lessons” to become a kind of heart for the other poems to revolve around.)
 

The title is one of the many common names for the pansy, or Viola tricolor. The pansy, of course, is an epithet for gay men. I chose it as a title because I think many of my poems straddle the two worlds the term calls to mind, the worlds of a gay subjectivity and of ‘living in the dirt’. And I chose it to point toward what I hope is central to my book, the ideas of naming—even those used to hurt us, like pansy, fag, homo—and identity.

It seems like there’s a possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?

I don’t honestly have a sense of what a contest gets you (besides more cash) that a good publisher might not also get you. I think it can be a stepping-stone, but I’ve also seen plenty of poets who win a contest and then struggle to get their sophomore effort published.

I did send out to many contests, and it’s thrilling to know your work is making the rounds of the contests and being viewed highly if you get a finalist nod. That can be important in keeping you going, as I said earlier.

Of course all that being said, who doesn’t want to have that “Winner of the…” attached to their book. But I came to the conclusion for me personally that it was more important to have the book published and to have someone who cared about the work, than to insist on sending it out until a prize materializes. That kind of thinking can be problematic, because as dedicated as one might be, there’s never a guarantee. When Brooklyn Arts Press (BAP) offered me a contract, I was so grateful.

I’m afraid I can’t give advice because it’s such a personal decision. I just know I’ve never once, not for a second, looked back. BAP has been a true gift to me as a poet. If you can find that, take it!  It’s worth so much more than cash. Okay, so apparently I can give some advice.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

The book had always had the three sections it currently has (poems about growing up gay in the Midwest; poems re-telling myth and other stories; and poems exploring desire and sex and an adult relationship and its conflicts and joys). There’s an arc that I saw there from the moment I had the poems spread out on my living room floor. My closest friend, who is also a poet (his name is Eric Schramm), helped me in the early stages, and throughout really, to get a sense of how I could order the poems within those sections. He was great at showing me what poems could resonate with other poems and how to make space for that interaction. My friend RJ Gibson, also a poet, suggested roughing up the order that I had (which at an early point in the process was a little too "neat") and that also helped in an important way.

Some poems moved from the third to the first or vice versa.  The biggest change was paring out poems that simply weren’t ready or that didn’t belong in some sense. Joe Pan, my editor at BAP, was key to that process and has such an amazing eye at knowing what poems can be rehabilitated and what simply needed to go.  In more than one case, he asked me to push a poem beyond where I had ended it. I did. Those poems now end with lines that are some of the most successful lines (if I can say that!) in the book.  “Anaphora” is an example.  “A Man Standing” is another. Joe made that possible. He’s a gifted editor.

The book went through a serious and sustained and rigorous editing process. Joe and I were communicating via email intensely over at least a month of back and forth edits. Poets: don’t fear this process and indeed embrace it. If you’re editor cares for you work even half as much as Joe cared for mine, your book will made so much better by it.

How involved were you with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.? Did you suggest or have any input regarding the image that was used on the cover?

I got to see two versions of the cover. I liked both and gave my input. But I really wanted BAP to take the lead. I don’t have a great aesthetic sense about these things. I was thrilled with how the book came out, and I can’t tell you how many people have commented on what a great job BAP did and how amazing the cover is.

There’s actually a great story about the cover. Can I share this from an interview Joe did with the Best American Poetry blog?

“A truly memorable experience came about when I was shopping for a cover artist for Christopher Hennessy’s Love-In-Idleness. On a lark, I googled “Best Cover Design Awards” and found the artist David Drummond’s name on several websites as one of the best in the business. (He’d just designed many of the new Richard Stark reprints). I knew I couldn’t afford him but I was curious about his rates. We’d never paid for a cover before, but all our artists were busy, and I was having trouble thinking up a design. So I emailed him, praising his work, which is truly amazing, and told him about BAP. I included a copy of Christopher’s manuscript so he could read it. When he emailed back, saying he’d love to do the cover and could work within our budget, I couldn’t believe it. We discussed budget. What was my budget? I sent him an email with a number, and an explanation of why it might seem low, as we were a small press with limited funds, and that I understood his time and skills were very valuable and passing on us would be, of course, understandable. He emailed me back with a mind-blower, agreeing to do the cover for the price of a single copy of the printed book. It was a considerably gracious gesture.”

What about the publication of the actual poems in journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I think it’s important to have ‘earned your stripes’ in a sense. To that end, I did want to show I had a fair number of publications in journals. But it was also important that I could show my poems had appeared in places that I felt were respected by poets I respected. I think it’s important to not just ‘rack up’ a list of names but to really publish in the journals you respect.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?

There was tremendous excitement (glasses of champagne, little dances, calling the parents, etc.), of course. But also there was fear: What would my family think? My partner? Would they understand that poems don’t always portray an autobiographical reality? But mostly there was an overwhelming sense of gratitude and feeling…well, blessed. I don’t think people realize how hard it can be to get a book of poetry published--- what it entails, the long road of it, how many of us are out there trying for so few spots, etc. If you know all of that (and who in the poetry world doesn’t?), then in my opinion you should be proud, sure, but you should also be grateful it happened to you. To pretend there’s not some element of luck or other factors is to be dangerously naïve.

How has your life been different since your book came out?

I’ve become closer to other friends who are or were trying to publish their first book. And I’ve been thinking intensely about how my first book can be part of a journey that leads to more!

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

I’d say: “Language, image, desire, sound, desire, the imagination, desire---or in other words living, being alive, my life and how to express those things.” And even though that’s a “true” answer to that question, I’d totally understand if they thought I was a jerk and asked to be seated somewhere else. We as poets all know that that question is simplifying and in some ways a trap, but when it comes down to it there’s nothing wrong with telling a prospective reader something true about theme, story, etc.  Some books do resist that kind of description, but even the most experimental poetry can be described with words like “Desire” or “Alienation” or any number of things readers can feel grounded by.  We shouldn’t necessarily fear answering that question. I think people somehow think if they’re able to answer that question they will somehow be seen as passé and even confessional. Nonsense. Talk about over-simplifying things!

Honestly, I would probably read them my publisher’s description. It works!

What have you been doing to promote Love-In-Idleness, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I’ve done a lot with social media and my blog. I’ve tried to do conferences, readings, as much as my schedule allows (I’m a Ph.D. candidate so that’s not always been easy.)  I was so thankful for the Thom Gunn finalist nod; I hoped that might help spread the word. BAP was wonderful in many ways, not the least of which has been keeping up an amazing website and having a table at the AWP book fair. That was huge!

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

I wish someone had really pushed me to write about the process at it was happening, to share what I was learning on my blog, for example. I think that would have been so much fun, would have been a great way to record the experience, and would have connected me with readers, even. I learned so much, but it would be nice to be able to go back and experience it all over again.  I wish more people would blog or tweet about the process; I think it’s something we could use. Maybe they’re out there and I just don’t know it.

What influence has the book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works? 

I am trying something completely different in terms of how I put together my first book. Instead of writing poem by poem, I’m trying to write poems circling a single concept (the idea of “belonging”).  So far it’s been very productive. I like having an umbrella under which I’m writing. Having a “project” can be motivating. And it’s allowing me to think about new ways of approaching form, narrative, persona and more.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

I wrote a poem about the killing of a young gay boy. (He was killed because he was gay. That’s important to know.) A young woman emailed me telling me she’d found the poem online and read it a vigil in his honor. I can’t think of a higher honor than that. And it was something that changed me forever. I can’t really be cynical any longer about that question. It would be a pose, and one I’m not willing to consider.

Here’s what I mean: With our ability to put poems out into the world whenever we please, and the possibility that someone who needs that poem will find it, what we have is a world where we can make connection. Connection is everything; it’s the beginning and the end. By someone hearing a poem and experiencing the most minute shift in their imagination, their ability to empathize with others, that can begin change. It might not be a direct line between a poem and the ending of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, but it can begin the process of connection. I firmly believe that.

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Christopher Hennessy is the author of Love-In-Idleness (Brooklyn Arts Press), which was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award.  He is also the author of Outside the Lines: Talking with Contemporary Gay Poets (University of Michigan Press). He earned an MFA from Emerson College and currently is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He was included in Ploughshares' special "Emerging Writers" edition, and his poetry, interviews, and book reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Verse, Cimarron Review, The Writer's Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Court Green, OCHO, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Wisconsin Review, Brooklyn Review, Memorious, and elsewhere. Hennessy is a longtime associate editor for The Gay & Lesbian Review-Worldwide. For more information on the book, visit http://www.brooklynartspress.com/Christopher-Hennessy.html
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#57 - Nick Courtright

Tell me about the title. Had it always been Punchline? Did it go through any other changes?

I worried at first that the book wasn’t “funny” enough to merit such a title, but now that I know the book better I do realize the humor in it, an optimistic but dark sort of humor.  The title Punchline had actually been the title for a short series of poems I wrote which were based off of the ends (the “punchlines”) of famous or notable quotes.  Then, when I wrote the manuscript that was to become the book, and I was looking for titles, these two distinct projects sort of ran into each other.  I feel pretty good about the collision, especially since it made me really think about what my book was about: the hilarity and absurdity of our awesome confounding existence here on this planet.

It seems like there’s a possible misconception among some poets who are trying to get their first book published: that they must win a contest. Were you concerned about winning a contest at any point? What advice would you give to poets sending their book out now regarding contests versus open reading periods?

I honestly don’t think it makes much of a difference, as long as your ego can withstand not being a “contest winner.”  I’ve known people who had good experiences with contests, and people who didn’t, and people who had good experiences with open readings, and people who didn’t.  When I first started, though, I did put a lot of extra emphasis on winning a contest, but I just realized later that it’s more about just finding a situation that’s going to work for you and your book, with the right amount of control and support that you want.  Being with Gold Wake, I’ve never once felt bad about not winning a contest.

What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?

I was very lucky in that this project wasn’t a patchwork job—I wrote it all in one fell swoop, 30,000 words in one month, then edited it down, and I think that compressed composition led to the work having an inherent but spontaneous narrative to it.  So, unlike with the frustrations I had at times with an earlier manuscript of “collected” poems, its flow was pretty natural and I didn’t have to constantly tinker with the arrangement of poems within it.  Of course, there were some adjustments, but the fact that I didn’t just have a bunch of discrete lyric poems to stitch together made for a much more organic organization.  The big challenge, though, was whittling that 30,000 words down to the roughly 6,000 that actually made it into the book.

How involved were you with the design of the book—interior design, font, cover, etc.?  Did you suggest or have any input regarding the image that was used on the cover?

Gold Wake Press gave me a great deal of liberty, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.  Jared Michael Wahlgren, the publisher, basically suggested that I could control the design elements that I wanted to control, and anything I didn’t want to worry about, he’d take care of.  So I was very involved in the interior layout, and, after several months of banging my head into the wall before admitting that I don’t know a damn thing about design, I asked Justin Runge, who runs Blue Hour Press, to do the design for me.  I know many (most?) other presses don’t lend such liberty, and I’m sure Jared would have stopped me if my ideas were horrible, but very I’m glad I got the chance to be such a big part of the design side of things.

What about the publication of the actual poems in journals and magazines prior to the book being published? Was there ever a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?

I love this question, because it’s another thing where my attitude on it changed a lot over the last few years.  I used to think you had to have all the poems, or at least a lot of them, published, and during that era I placed dozens of poems in good literary journals.  I think this actually might have hurt me, though, when it comes to writing an actual “book”: I was obsessed with making great individual poems, but was less concerned with making sure they all went together, or crafted a sensible narrative in the sense of an idea evolving over the course of the text.  And I lost that one-time viewpoint on accident, since I had all these published poems that I had stuck together in failing manuscripts, but then, ironically enough, Punchline was accepted for publication without a single poem in it being published.  This ended up providing an interesting opportunity, since it then let me semi-serialized the poems after the book was accepted for the explicit intent of previewing the book.

What do you remember about the day when you saw your published book for the first time?

  

I still couldn’t believe it.  When I got my proof copy, I just stared at it.  And the real shock was when I opened my front door one day, and there, on the front stoop, was a cardboard box.  I knew it was full of books, and I was almost afraid to open it—its existence was something I had been waiting for for so long that by the time it happened, I was almost in denial; it also seemed like I had an awful lot of work ahead of me.  But it was a good feeling, and it was a very good feeling when I found my book in a bookstore for the first time.  The order on the shelf was Billy Collins, Eduardo C. Corral, Nick Courtright, e.e. cummings…

If you struck up a conversation next to someone seated on an airplane, and after a few minutes you eventually told them that you were an author who had a book of poetry published, how would you answer their next question: “What’s the book about?”

Ah, the old elevator pitch.  I fretted about this immensely when the book was first accepted, mostly because I suppose I didn’t quite know yet what my book was about.  But I think I’ve figured it out, and I even have a one-sentence explanation: “The book is about the uncertainty in the world, and how we can find happiness and beauty even in the unknown.”  If the person on the plane asks about the title, I’ll say it’s about how all of us humans are part of the cosmic joke, and how the fact that we’re here, sitting down in a metal tube in the sky, traveling above clouds at hundreds of miles an hour, is pretty damn hilarious.

What have you been doing to promote Punchline, and what have those experiences been like for you?

I’ve done a bunch of readings, a bunch of interviews, been on the radio a few times, did a public tv show recording…it’s been good.  It is a lot of emailing, though, since most poets have to do much of the legwork arranging this sort of stuff themselves—unless you do win one of those huge prizes, the really huge ones, no one’s going to be banging down your down to promote your book for you.  So I’ve tried to make myself available when opportunities come up, and always try to make people glad they had me around.  After the last five months of trying to promote this book, though, I’m pretty glad that I can start relaxing a bit now, at least for a few minutes…

What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?

There are so many elements of publishing I could mention, but I think the biggest thing I wish I would have known years ago would be related to the idea that you should write a book, not just a collection of poems.  Like with a really excellent album of music, you want it to all be part of one grand statement or idea, not just a cobbled-together bunch of random singles.  That’s why greatest hits albums often suck, even though the songs were ones we loved in the context of a time period or an album.  After all, novels have to have everything fit together and not be piecemeal, so why not a book of poems?  I would give someone that advice as a means of thinking big picture, and I’d also say: have faith.  You have to have that, because it can be a long slog from drafting to publication.

What influence has the book’s publication had on your subsequent writing? Are there any new projects in the works?

Having Punchline published did vastly change my way of looking at things, mostly in terms of trying to learn from any shortcomings that book has, while also trying to recapture any of the magic I did stumble upon with it.  I also learned that poems in a book are fundamentally different than poems on an 8.5” x 11” piece of paper or word processor screen, leading me to ditch that unnatural size in my editing process.  And yes, I have a new project, and I’m pretty excited about it; it’s a kind of philosophical/scientific/religious manifesto defining “poetry,” so it’s a little insane and full of big claims. Punchline felt like a risky book, but this one’s shaping up to be even riskier, so I’m excited to keep working on it.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

Yes, I do.  It may not be a wave of eye-opening crashing through the cities of this earth, but I see it time and time again: a person being changed by a poem, even if the epiphany is only momentary.  Poetry is still one of the, if not the, most challenging and beautiful of arts, capable of the greatest profundity, and it can access the fusion of the emotional and the rational, the sensible and the intangible, better than anything else we in our language, language being our widest avenue for complex awareness, have at our beckoning.  Rather than get mad about millions of people not reading poetry, I’d rather be happy with the few new ones everyday who, as Moore says, “discover in it, after all, a place for the genuine.”

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Nick Courtright is the author of Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist published in 2012 by Gold Wake Press. His work has appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Iowa Review, and many others, and a chapbook, Elegy for the Builder’s Wife, is available from Blue Hour Press. He’s Interviews Editor of the Austinist, an arts and culture website based in Austin, Texas, where he teaches English, Humanities, and Philosophy, and lives with his wife, Michelle, and son, William.  Feel free to find him at nickcourtright.com.
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