How often had you sent out They Sing at Midnight before it was chosen as the winner of the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Prize?
Countless times. I came in second in the Barnard New Woman Poets Series in 1988, and every year after that I sent to most of the national contests. I was a finalist in a bunch of them, some repeatedly, which gave me the encouragement to keep spending the entry fees.
What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
The first version was my undergraduate senior thesis. This version was more obviously influenced by music than later drafts; I had song lyrics in a column on the left, interspersed with the poems. I abandoned that by the next draft, which is the one that Barnard liked. After that, I kept revising poems and also writing new poems and taking poems out. By the time it was published, I had switched the poems so thoroughly, it was actually my second or third book.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?
A concern? I thought that would be a plus! I figured it would show editors that other editors liked me, as well as hopefully creating a readership for my work.
How much work did you do as far as editing the poems from the day you knew the book won to the day the book was in its final proofing stage?
By the time it was accepted, I had revised the book so many times, with input from so many people, that it was overcooked. I read it a few more times line by line and fiddled with line breaks, put commas in and took them out. I had finished any substantial revisions a few years earlier.
In addition to being a poet, you’re also a painter and a visual artist. What kind of influences do the visual arts have on the spoken word, especially with your own poetry?
That’s a big question! The relationship between the two has taken so many configurations throughout history—people who do both, like Blake, friendships between poets and painters, the influence of Cubism on Eliot, poems written about paintings, etc. In terms of my own work, I think that anything creative opens channels and keeps energy flowing. So painting inspires me to write and vise versa. When I was at art school, I wanted to make paintings that “went with” my poems, to combine them somehow. But abstraction was the prevailing style at my school, and the teacher was quite dismissive: “The illustration department’s down the hall, if you’d rather be there.”
There are a few ekphrastic poems in They Sing at Midnight ("On Display" and "Psyche" were stimulated by painting and sculpture, respectively), also "Swan Lake," which was inspired by a ballet. Recently I finished a sequence of poems in the voices of the Major Arcana of the tarot. That was the most intense and extended connection I’ve made between the two.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
I got home from work at 11:30, and the boxes were waiting in the entryway. I had a new baby and hadn’t slept in three months, so the whole time seems blurry and surreal. I do remember feeling a sense of “Wow, finally.”
The cover image is one of your own paintings. How long did it take you to decide on this particular painting? It seems to not only fit well with the poems in the book, but did it also save you money and the possible headache of finding the perfect art for your book cover?
I never thought about saving money; I just knew I wanted my art on the cover. I was very excited about The Stone Tarot, so I decided to use one of those images. The Moon symbolizes night, the emergence of what has been repressed, memory, fear, and the journey to change. That seemed to fit the themes of the book.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I had a fantasy—awards, packed readings, a teaching position. None of that happened, so I’m very lucky to have a creative non-poetry job that I love.
The most wonderful surprise is when, a few times, people would see the book or hear someone call me by name and say, “You’re Alison Stone? I remember your poems from Poetry.”
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I was able to get a few readings after the book came out (a local library, Barnes and Noble, a group NYQ reading.) I was also part of two book fairs for books published that year, one at Poets House and one at a museum in Nyack. Over the years, I’ve read at Brandeis, which was quite emotional for me, and several bookstores in MA. My mom lived in MA, and she would set things up for me. Recently MMM did a group reading and had a table at AWP. Hopefully I’m a better poet than I am a networker or promoter, because I still feel very unsure of how to go about the whole thing.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
Before the book arrives, find out from the press exactly what they are planning to do to promote it. Then make arrangements to do the rest yourself. And if you’re like me and have no idea of how to do that, ask someone who is good at it for advice. Also, try not to time having a baby for the same time the book is released.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?
It allowed me to finally close the Gestalt on that book and consider all new poems as part of a new book.
And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
I have a second manuscript finished. I had many of those poems written in rough drafts before They Sing at Midnight came out; and I revised most of them during one semester at the Pine Manor MFA program. It’s such a supportive and stimulating community. The book is tentatively titled Hair to Sky. I also have the sequence of tarot poems I mentioned earlier, which I might hold for a third book or publish as a chapbook, From the Fool to the World.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
If you believe in your book, then keep sending it out, no matter how long it takes.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Yes, because anything that changes one person changes the world. The process of writing, at its best, connects the writer to a fragment of truth and allows her or him to record it. Even if the poet isn’t tuned in in that way, the act of writing can help in working through an issue or emotion (Though the poems made this way often are not very interesting.) Then when a good poem finds its readers, they are moved in the process of reading. Any authentic contact creates change. At the same time, neither reading nor writing poetry frees us from the need for more direct world-changing actions, like political action, meditation, or practicing compassion in our relationships.
*******************************************************************************************
Alison Stone’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and a variety of other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin award. Her first book, They Sing at Midnight, won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award and was published by Many Mountains Moving Press. She is also a visual artist and the creator of The Stone Tarot.
*******************************************************************************************
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
#15 - James Allen Hall
How often had you sent out Now You’re the Enemy before it was chosen for The University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series?
Should I say I don't remember and appear nonchalant about this part of the process, a hipster saying, “I don't care if it ever gets published, man, it's the art that matters….”
Well, I won't, though it is the art that matters. I kept immaculate count. Now You’re the Enemy traveled to twenty-seven contests, open reading periods, and interested editors before it found a home. It finalized a few times for contests like the Whitman, which gave me hope that the manuscript yielded a compelling reading experience. I sent it out first in May of 2006, thinking it was done. It wasn't. Early readers and contests turned it away, sometimes with kindness.
By October, I knew the book was completely finished. I couldn't do anything more for it. Now You’re the Enemy confronts suicide, violent love, and self-excoriation at the same time that it points at the ways in which narrative can heal and empower. I didn't want to add more weight to those frameworks; I needed it to be stately without overwhelming the reader. In June '07, Enid Shomer, University of Arkansas' Poetry Series Editor, called to offer a contract.
I remember that moment: I pulled the phone away because I didn't want to shatter Enid's eardrum.
Had it always been Now You’re the Enemy or had it gone through different titles?
One former name carried the book through a manuscript workshop at the University of Houston. I hope my compatriots will do me the great honor of forgetting that awful title.
Another story, about the title, seems important to tell.
My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner.
Dustin said to me, "Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you're the enemy." It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I'd been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.
On your blog, you have a few links to poems in Now You're the Enemy. One of the things I noticed about some of those poems was the different forms that some of them take on (mostly dealing with the length of stanzas and the line-break and enjambment choices), which leads me to a question for some reason that I'm fascinated with: How "ready" should a poem be for publication when writers send them out to journals? And does the poem really become "final," then, with the book, and not with former publication in a journal or magazine?
You're asking me, Keith, about iteration and identity, my two favorite things.
No identity is stable. That's the short answer.
"The end" is a construct we need for stories to have shape, for the work of interpretation and reflection to begin. But there is no such thing as an ending. In "Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent," the speaker exiles the mother "out of my life forever." That "forever" sure is some damn hard wishful thinking. The line says more about longing than it does the fact of time.
There's a different kind of editing you do when you're: polishing a poem for its first read by friends or class; revising a poem to send out to journals; revising a poem so that it converses with the other poems in a book in an un/neighborly way; revising a poem for a forthcoming book in which, you feel at least, the last version of that poem will be iterated for all time.
If a journal wants you to change something about your poem, why not? Unless the suggestion is embarrassing or downright rude, you'll have another say in book form. But, then, I've always been energized by letting my poems live in different skins. The more radical re-envisioning the better. I love stories about writers who hound down their books in stores and stand in front of the stacks, making their revisions by hand, bending back the spines and doing that particularized surgery.
You must abandon the poem, knowing when it's able to speak on its own. Trust that the gaps in the saying are just as important; they are perhaps the most integral part of the subject matter.
I used to edit for Gulf Coast, a literary journal produced out of the University of Houston. I saw a lot of writing that could use some shelf time. Like any of us, art needs a disco nap before it can rock the party.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
I always felt that getting published was happening to someone I kind of knew, someone I kinda liked. He'd written this book and I was delighted for him, like you are when your friend gives birth.
After it was taken, I wanted to forget the book. I wanted the next one. I felt like a bad parent, stewarding the book into the world, then neglecting it. I want it to have its own life, and me its Auntie Mame. I'm still negotiating those feelings.
Publication gave me permission to move out of the dark world of Now You’re the Enemy to another place, one where people greet each other at the post office, where it's possible to believe in a love that doesn't utterly destroy you. I imagined I could finally stop grieving.
It changed everything, and it changed nothing. It changed what I imagine, but not how I imagine.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
I first saw my book at UA's AWP Book Fair booth. I remember thinking it was odd to hold in my hands what had been so long in my head.
A funny mix-up occurred five days earlier: a box of books had been sent to my apartment in Pennsylvania, where I lived at the time. My friend Julie and her girlfriend Angie were coming over that evening, by coincidence, and Julie had just been fascinated by the whole process. I let her open the box, and she handled the scissors almost tenderly.
What she pulled out was There When We Needed Him, a book on civil rights warrior Wiley Austin Branton. Copy after copy of that book. Mine nowhere to be found.
It was then I learned how appropriate it was to feel diminished ownership over Now You're the Enemy.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
The University of Arkansas Press staff was wonderful about this part of the process. They understand the intimate relationship a writer has with her or his poems, and so they solicited my input about cover art. After poring through Getty Images and contacting artist friends, I sent a selection of images to the Press.
The press liked a darker print, Dominic Rouse's Hanger: God, what a gorgeous image-maker Rouse is. But I worried that the color palate was too muted, and that the subject—a closet opened to reveal a noose—might limit the echoes the book makes.
In Houston, I once worked as the Poetry Curator for an independent literary bookstore. So, I had a pretty good idea of what kind of cover would stand out. When I submitted the images to the Press, I wrote a kind of apologia for the one I wanted, the Steve Casimiro photograph of a woman behind a blue screen. She's there to help you; she intends to hurt you. In the background, a palm tree tries to stay rooted in the earth. There's a hurricane on.
I can't say enough nice things about the University of Arkansas Press. They really did keep me involved and informed throughout the entire process. And they make beautiful books. Now, if only I could change my author photo. What was I thinking?
How has your life been different since your book came out?
The normal things have changed: I give readings. Sometimes people contact me on Facebook or email me out of the blue or say something about my book on a blog. Those kind of communiqués make me feel like I'm being seen for the first time in my life.
Since my book came out, I'm a lot less in love with my ex-boyfriend.
Since my book came out, I'm a little less in love with the poems that make the book. Toni Morrison has said that she writes because she wasn't reading the stories she wanted to read. It's a good sign, I think, to be searching for the new stories I want to hear.
Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I thought my little book would be ignored. I'm pleasantly surprised that hasn't been entirely the case.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I never met a spotlight I didn't like. I'm performative and outgoing. Truth be told, Keith, I'm a good time on two legs.
Now You're the Enemy confronts sexual and physical violence. When I first read from it, I almost broke down in tears. It's a raw book. I feel like I'm an exposed nerve every time I open it. The book is like reading a knife. I used to apologize for that: sorry, room full of listeners, for my sad little poems that break your heart. I think I was apologizing to myself more than the audience. It is painful to re-enter that book.
But it humbles and utterly sustains me to remember that there are loads of people out there for whom poetry matters. Poetry creates communities. Poetry brings us together, makes us feel less alone in our bodies. If I can add my voice to that, I'll suffer through the hacksaw on my aorta.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
Reading these first book interviews covered it. Seeing my friends steward their own books through the process really helped too.
In addition to poetry, you've also published some recent non-fiction pieces. A very personal piece, "Suicide Memorabilia," was recently published in Pebble Lake Review. Are you working toward a memoir with these pieces?
Yes, I'm making headway on a book called I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. The essays are about growing up with a Springer-esque family during the outlandish socio-political landscape of the 1980s and 90s. I've published pieces about A.I.D.S., my grandmother's predilections for nudity, my mother's suicide attempts, and a new essay about sexuality and terror, which includes a short anecdote about the time my brother was harassed by the FBI after making a pass at a man.
Speaking of "Suicide Memorabilia," I kept being reminded of certain events in poems from Now You're the Enemy. How hard is it to keep poetry separate from autobiography? Or is this something that you think should be embraced?
Louise Glück's penultimate sentence in her poem "Parable of the Dove" reads in part, "change your form and you change your nature."
I feel when you change the form, you alter the story entirely. Tonally, for instance, I find it easier to be lighthearted, arch-eyebrowed, and irreverent in prose.
Two weeks ago, my mother called me. She quoted my poem "The Enemy" back to me. Her vowels were sharp and her voice embittered as she finished. "So, when I say I love you," she said, "you feel like I'm your enemy." I said if she wanted to know how I felt, she'd have to wait for the memoir.
My poems take liberties, invent details, conflate characters. In regard to the spectrum of truth, poetry can negotiate a different contract with the reader. Nonfiction must always present itself as the truth.
How have these non-fiction pieces influenced your poetry writing?
Writing in two genres allows me to recharge my batteries for, say, poetry while I finish a personal essay. The two also inform each other. As a memoirist/poet, I rumple the well-made bed of narrative progression with an insistence on sonic texture and lyric structure. Even if/as I remain allied to dramatic situation. As a poet/memoirist, I allow my interests in queer theory, art history, and film to suggest strategies for the poems I'm writing. Even if/as I remain allied to vivid image.
Poets often seem to write memoirs, and though they're not necessarily inseparable, it's a genre toward which many poets eventually gravitate. Why do you think this is?
Because we want to make some money.
Well, that's flip of me. There are tons of reasons, of course, to write.
I remember Mark Doty saying, in a nonfiction class, that he began to write prose after his first husband's death from complications due to A.I.D.S. I think after such a deeply personal devastation like that—and reading his Heaven's Coast is enormously telling here—he found comfort? a way to move forward? in prose. It didn't have to be poetry; how could poetry exist in a world so bereft? There wasn't anything to sing. I'm paraphrasing badly here. Of course Mark Doty's prose is beautiful and lyric. He's incapable of ungorgeous lines. I'm saying that writing in that genre propelled him forward after facing the blank page—after making art—seemed insurmountable.
Maybe because poets want transformation: for us, metaphor is dope. So, why not transform genre?
Maybe because all poets don't feel narrative compulsion in poetry, and sometimes want to tell our stories. So why not go to a narrative form?
Maybe because stories exceed the boxes they're put in—so why not put the overflow in a different container?
I write nonfiction because it's fun to render without the silence that is integral in poetry. It's fun to make other shapes. It's fun to push the limits of image. It's fun to write dialogue and use footnotes…. The list seems endless.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any other new books or other projects on the horizon?
Publishing Now You're the Enemy cleared my head; I could begin writing poems again. Besides the memoir, I'm working on a second manuscript of poems, tentatively titled Hand of a Lover. Publishing a first book forces you to discover what else you are compelled to say.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
April Bernard: "You chose to be a writer, to say the difficult thing. Say the difficult thing."
Liam Rector: "Always Be Closing."
Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Write more syntactically interesting sentences."
Jorie Graham, quoting Frost?: "No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader."
Find your aesthetic. Then read the opposite, or adjoining, aesthetic. Read prose on poetry by poets. Wallace Stevens' "The Irrational Element in Poetry" changed the way I write. Ditto for Louise Glück's Proofs and Theories. I recommend a wonderful anthology called Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade.
If there's an opportunity to show your writing to other writers, take it. Everyone has something to teach you. Your job is to find what that something is, then to separate the useful from the useless (and sometimes detrimental). Seek out smart criticism, the most blunt, most honest that you can find. Pray that your teachers are hard on you, and let their voices into your process. As hard as they are on you, be even harder on yourself. When praise comes along, relish it half as much as critique, but twice as long.
Courtney Love: "I want to be the girl with the most cake."
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Yes, I believe poetry can change the world. Though it is both a great advantage and a great misfortune that the earth is possessed of no memory.
*******************************************************************************************
James Allen Hall teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Potsdam. His first collection of poetry, Now You're the Enemy, was a winner in the 2007 Arkansas Poetry Series and was a finalist that year for the Walt Whitman Award. He can see Canada from his house.
Should I say I don't remember and appear nonchalant about this part of the process, a hipster saying, “I don't care if it ever gets published, man, it's the art that matters….”
Well, I won't, though it is the art that matters. I kept immaculate count. Now You’re the Enemy traveled to twenty-seven contests, open reading periods, and interested editors before it found a home. It finalized a few times for contests like the Whitman, which gave me hope that the manuscript yielded a compelling reading experience. I sent it out first in May of 2006, thinking it was done. It wasn't. Early readers and contests turned it away, sometimes with kindness.
By October, I knew the book was completely finished. I couldn't do anything more for it. Now You’re the Enemy confronts suicide, violent love, and self-excoriation at the same time that it points at the ways in which narrative can heal and empower. I didn't want to add more weight to those frameworks; I needed it to be stately without overwhelming the reader. In June '07, Enid Shomer, University of Arkansas' Poetry Series Editor, called to offer a contract.
I remember that moment: I pulled the phone away because I didn't want to shatter Enid's eardrum.
Had it always been Now You’re the Enemy or had it gone through different titles?
One former name carried the book through a manuscript workshop at the University of Houston. I hope my compatriots will do me the great honor of forgetting that awful title.
Another story, about the title, seems important to tell.
My younger brother and I were talking one night while we cooked dinner. Dustin had met this beautiful man, they dated briefly, and we were analyzing the demise of the relationship over dinner.
Dustin said to me, "Whenever a man says I love you, the first thing I think is, Great. Now you're the enemy." It was the saddest and most lacerating statement; it nailed exactly the feeling of the poems I'd been fashioning—this book about loving a self-destructive mother figure, how that shapes subjectivity, and what happens when we find ourselves shipwrecked on the shores of Love Always Fails Us.
On your blog, you have a few links to poems in Now You're the Enemy. One of the things I noticed about some of those poems was the different forms that some of them take on (mostly dealing with the length of stanzas and the line-break and enjambment choices), which leads me to a question for some reason that I'm fascinated with: How "ready" should a poem be for publication when writers send them out to journals? And does the poem really become "final," then, with the book, and not with former publication in a journal or magazine?
You're asking me, Keith, about iteration and identity, my two favorite things.
No identity is stable. That's the short answer.
"The end" is a construct we need for stories to have shape, for the work of interpretation and reflection to begin. But there is no such thing as an ending. In "Portrait of My Mother as Victorine Meurent," the speaker exiles the mother "out of my life forever." That "forever" sure is some damn hard wishful thinking. The line says more about longing than it does the fact of time.
There's a different kind of editing you do when you're: polishing a poem for its first read by friends or class; revising a poem to send out to journals; revising a poem so that it converses with the other poems in a book in an un/neighborly way; revising a poem for a forthcoming book in which, you feel at least, the last version of that poem will be iterated for all time.
If a journal wants you to change something about your poem, why not? Unless the suggestion is embarrassing or downright rude, you'll have another say in book form. But, then, I've always been energized by letting my poems live in different skins. The more radical re-envisioning the better. I love stories about writers who hound down their books in stores and stand in front of the stacks, making their revisions by hand, bending back the spines and doing that particularized surgery.
You must abandon the poem, knowing when it's able to speak on its own. Trust that the gaps in the saying are just as important; they are perhaps the most integral part of the subject matter.
I used to edit for Gulf Coast, a literary journal produced out of the University of Houston. I saw a lot of writing that could use some shelf time. Like any of us, art needs a disco nap before it can rock the party.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
I always felt that getting published was happening to someone I kind of knew, someone I kinda liked. He'd written this book and I was delighted for him, like you are when your friend gives birth.
After it was taken, I wanted to forget the book. I wanted the next one. I felt like a bad parent, stewarding the book into the world, then neglecting it. I want it to have its own life, and me its Auntie Mame. I'm still negotiating those feelings.
Publication gave me permission to move out of the dark world of Now You’re the Enemy to another place, one where people greet each other at the post office, where it's possible to believe in a love that doesn't utterly destroy you. I imagined I could finally stop grieving.
It changed everything, and it changed nothing. It changed what I imagine, but not how I imagine.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
I first saw my book at UA's AWP Book Fair booth. I remember thinking it was odd to hold in my hands what had been so long in my head.
A funny mix-up occurred five days earlier: a box of books had been sent to my apartment in Pennsylvania, where I lived at the time. My friend Julie and her girlfriend Angie were coming over that evening, by coincidence, and Julie had just been fascinated by the whole process. I let her open the box, and she handled the scissors almost tenderly.
What she pulled out was There When We Needed Him, a book on civil rights warrior Wiley Austin Branton. Copy after copy of that book. Mine nowhere to be found.
It was then I learned how appropriate it was to feel diminished ownership over Now You're the Enemy.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
The University of Arkansas Press staff was wonderful about this part of the process. They understand the intimate relationship a writer has with her or his poems, and so they solicited my input about cover art. After poring through Getty Images and contacting artist friends, I sent a selection of images to the Press.
The press liked a darker print, Dominic Rouse's Hanger: God, what a gorgeous image-maker Rouse is. But I worried that the color palate was too muted, and that the subject—a closet opened to reveal a noose—might limit the echoes the book makes.
In Houston, I once worked as the Poetry Curator for an independent literary bookstore. So, I had a pretty good idea of what kind of cover would stand out. When I submitted the images to the Press, I wrote a kind of apologia for the one I wanted, the Steve Casimiro photograph of a woman behind a blue screen. She's there to help you; she intends to hurt you. In the background, a palm tree tries to stay rooted in the earth. There's a hurricane on.
I can't say enough nice things about the University of Arkansas Press. They really did keep me involved and informed throughout the entire process. And they make beautiful books. Now, if only I could change my author photo. What was I thinking?
How has your life been different since your book came out?
The normal things have changed: I give readings. Sometimes people contact me on Facebook or email me out of the blue or say something about my book on a blog. Those kind of communiqués make me feel like I'm being seen for the first time in my life.
Since my book came out, I'm a lot less in love with my ex-boyfriend.
Since my book came out, I'm a little less in love with the poems that make the book. Toni Morrison has said that she writes because she wasn't reading the stories she wanted to read. It's a good sign, I think, to be searching for the new stories I want to hear.
Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I thought my little book would be ignored. I'm pleasantly surprised that hasn't been entirely the case.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I never met a spotlight I didn't like. I'm performative and outgoing. Truth be told, Keith, I'm a good time on two legs.
Now You're the Enemy confronts sexual and physical violence. When I first read from it, I almost broke down in tears. It's a raw book. I feel like I'm an exposed nerve every time I open it. The book is like reading a knife. I used to apologize for that: sorry, room full of listeners, for my sad little poems that break your heart. I think I was apologizing to myself more than the audience. It is painful to re-enter that book.
But it humbles and utterly sustains me to remember that there are loads of people out there for whom poetry matters. Poetry creates communities. Poetry brings us together, makes us feel less alone in our bodies. If I can add my voice to that, I'll suffer through the hacksaw on my aorta.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
Reading these first book interviews covered it. Seeing my friends steward their own books through the process really helped too.
In addition to poetry, you've also published some recent non-fiction pieces. A very personal piece, "Suicide Memorabilia," was recently published in Pebble Lake Review. Are you working toward a memoir with these pieces?
Yes, I'm making headway on a book called I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well. The essays are about growing up with a Springer-esque family during the outlandish socio-political landscape of the 1980s and 90s. I've published pieces about A.I.D.S., my grandmother's predilections for nudity, my mother's suicide attempts, and a new essay about sexuality and terror, which includes a short anecdote about the time my brother was harassed by the FBI after making a pass at a man.
Speaking of "Suicide Memorabilia," I kept being reminded of certain events in poems from Now You're the Enemy. How hard is it to keep poetry separate from autobiography? Or is this something that you think should be embraced?
Louise Glück's penultimate sentence in her poem "Parable of the Dove" reads in part, "change your form and you change your nature."
I feel when you change the form, you alter the story entirely. Tonally, for instance, I find it easier to be lighthearted, arch-eyebrowed, and irreverent in prose.
Two weeks ago, my mother called me. She quoted my poem "The Enemy" back to me. Her vowels were sharp and her voice embittered as she finished. "So, when I say I love you," she said, "you feel like I'm your enemy." I said if she wanted to know how I felt, she'd have to wait for the memoir.
My poems take liberties, invent details, conflate characters. In regard to the spectrum of truth, poetry can negotiate a different contract with the reader. Nonfiction must always present itself as the truth.
How have these non-fiction pieces influenced your poetry writing?
Writing in two genres allows me to recharge my batteries for, say, poetry while I finish a personal essay. The two also inform each other. As a memoirist/poet, I rumple the well-made bed of narrative progression with an insistence on sonic texture and lyric structure. Even if/as I remain allied to dramatic situation. As a poet/memoirist, I allow my interests in queer theory, art history, and film to suggest strategies for the poems I'm writing. Even if/as I remain allied to vivid image.
Poets often seem to write memoirs, and though they're not necessarily inseparable, it's a genre toward which many poets eventually gravitate. Why do you think this is?
Because we want to make some money.
Well, that's flip of me. There are tons of reasons, of course, to write.
I remember Mark Doty saying, in a nonfiction class, that he began to write prose after his first husband's death from complications due to A.I.D.S. I think after such a deeply personal devastation like that—and reading his Heaven's Coast is enormously telling here—he found comfort? a way to move forward? in prose. It didn't have to be poetry; how could poetry exist in a world so bereft? There wasn't anything to sing. I'm paraphrasing badly here. Of course Mark Doty's prose is beautiful and lyric. He's incapable of ungorgeous lines. I'm saying that writing in that genre propelled him forward after facing the blank page—after making art—seemed insurmountable.
Maybe because poets want transformation: for us, metaphor is dope. So, why not transform genre?
Maybe because all poets don't feel narrative compulsion in poetry, and sometimes want to tell our stories. So why not go to a narrative form?
Maybe because stories exceed the boxes they're put in—so why not put the overflow in a different container?
I write nonfiction because it's fun to render without the silence that is integral in poetry. It's fun to make other shapes. It's fun to push the limits of image. It's fun to write dialogue and use footnotes…. The list seems endless.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any other new books or other projects on the horizon?
Publishing Now You're the Enemy cleared my head; I could begin writing poems again. Besides the memoir, I'm working on a second manuscript of poems, tentatively titled Hand of a Lover. Publishing a first book forces you to discover what else you are compelled to say.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
April Bernard: "You chose to be a writer, to say the difficult thing. Say the difficult thing."
Liam Rector: "Always Be Closing."
Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Write more syntactically interesting sentences."
Jorie Graham, quoting Frost?: "No discovery for the writer, no discovery for the reader."
Find your aesthetic. Then read the opposite, or adjoining, aesthetic. Read prose on poetry by poets. Wallace Stevens' "The Irrational Element in Poetry" changed the way I write. Ditto for Louise Glück's Proofs and Theories. I recommend a wonderful anthology called Women Reclaim Poetry edited by Molly McQuade.
If there's an opportunity to show your writing to other writers, take it. Everyone has something to teach you. Your job is to find what that something is, then to separate the useful from the useless (and sometimes detrimental). Seek out smart criticism, the most blunt, most honest that you can find. Pray that your teachers are hard on you, and let their voices into your process. As hard as they are on you, be even harder on yourself. When praise comes along, relish it half as much as critique, but twice as long.
Courtney Love: "I want to be the girl with the most cake."
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Yes, I believe poetry can change the world. Though it is both a great advantage and a great misfortune that the earth is possessed of no memory.
*******************************************************************************************
James Allen Hall teaches creative writing at the State University of New York at Potsdam. His first collection of poetry, Now You're the Enemy, was a winner in the 2007 Arkansas Poetry Series and was a finalist that year for the Walt Whitman Award. He can see Canada from his house.
- Visit James's Blog
- Buy Now You're the Enemy at Amazon
- Read "Family Portrait" at Verse Daily
- Read "Wedding Dress" in West Branch
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
#14 - Alison Pelegrin
How often had you sent out The Zydeco Tablets before it was accepted for publication by Word Press? Was this a contest or an open reading period?
I had been sending out The Zydeco Tablets for years—long before it was ready. The last version was a revision I worked just before the birth of my first son—instead of the nesting instinct, I had the revision bug.
How did you decide on the order and structure of the book?
You know, it has been so long since I was ordering that book (December 2001) I had to look at the sections. I am not one to fret in an extreme manner over the order poems appear in a book. I mean, I think about it, but I don’t lose sleep over it, one reason being that I almost never read a book of poems in order. Looking back at The Zydeco Tablets, I can say I don’t really know what I was thinking—it seems self conscious to me now, and too many. Maybe my next book will have no sections.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
I didn’t pick it up and smell it or feel giddy, as so many authors have described. I was a little afraid of it, and I was grieving the death of my father, who never knew about the book though he informed it in so many ways. Also, I had a nine month old at the time, and was four or five months pregnant, and the idea of finishing a poem again—much less a book, seemed utterly impossible.
(In a footnote to this comment, I’ll add that after the initial elation I felt this grief with Big Muddy as well. It contained everything—I had nothing in reserve. After a few months, though, I was ready to move on to the next project.)
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices? It’s not often that you see a black and white cover with such a wild design for a book of poetry.
I had a lot of input on the cover image. At the time, Word Press was doing only black and white covers, and I did not want to go the black-and-white-photo-of-Louisiana-cliché route. The book was a lot about music, and I wanted the cover to reflect that, for it to look like a sign you’d see stapled to a light pole advertising a show at Tipitina’s or something. I communicated this to an artist, and this is what she came up with. The ooh la la! was my idea.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
Yes, I did expect my life to change! And yes, there is still a small part of me who wishes that the rock star image and lifestyle (you know, dark glasses, a driver, and life in a hotel room) were part of my existence as a poet.
How has your life been different since your book came out?
Externally, my life has not been noticeably different since my book—either book—came out. On the inside, I did feel pretty excited.
Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
The biggest surprise to me was how hard it was to get the book in stores. At the time my book was published, Word Press went from a traditional print run to POD. This was a move they did to make it easier to get the book into chain book stores, but I found that larger chains were not at all receptive to POD books. I do not know how other Word Press authors have dealt with this. I’ve never seen a copy of The Zydeco Tablets in a big chain store, and with smaller sellers, I mostly sold the books on consignment—my discounted copies sold at the same discount to the seller.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I sent letters to books stores and libraries, and I believe that Word Press sent out a mailing. I read everywhere I could. I always sell copies after a reading, and I travel with copies of my books in my trunk.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
I wish someone would have told me to hold out until you find what you want. Don’t be in such a rush to get the first book out, especially if you have copies of a chapbook you can sell at readings.
Booze plays a prominent part in your work, yet it’s tastefully amidst everything that’s going on in poems, never becoming a parody or a vice necessarily. Whether it’s Li Po arriving drunk as an inspiring muse, or the narrator having a drink to take the edge of, it’s done without force, and is used both playfully and seriously in the poems, sometimes at once. Is this the real Alison Pelegrin drinking to inspire the muse, or is the poet Alison Pelegrin, and why is there so much alcohol flowing through these poems?
I grew up around drinking—the good, the bad, the ugly. Thanksgiving time is the anniversary of my first drunk—off of watered down port wine snuck to me by my grandfather. I passed out under the table in media meal and experienced tunnel vision. As far as the drinking in the poems, I should say that before I finished Big Muddy River of Stars, the working title of the book was Three Sheets. I am clumsy at discussing such things, but it was meant to be a metaphor for drinking and for the writing process. If you’ve read anything about the ancient Chinese poet Li Po, about whom there are several poems in the second book, you may have read the story of how he (supposedly) would write poems that came to him, and then send the pages floating down the Yangtze River. I would never do that myself, but I liked the idea. Also, I was living on a river myself while I was writing those poems, very much the outsider in Livingston Parish (Once some visitors to the property next door had a cigarette boat named “The Blown Job"), and I felt that Li Po could just rise up out of the mist and watch herons with me on the dock.
I’m struck by the almost tour-de-force third section in Big Muddy River of Stars, where the poems seem to be written post-Katrina. They almost seem to have been written out of necessity, to get through living after the hurricane, to find one’s place in the world again, both as poet and mother looking after her family. In that respect, I want to ask how the book was constructed, as the third section is such a vital part of the book, yet it does seem extremely cohesive and deliberate as a whole.
Thanks. It makes me happy to hear people say they enjoy the third section of the book because it hits so close to home—I have never been so directly personal as in those poems about the aftermath of Katrina. That was such a dark time for me, in so many ways. I accepted food stamps. I lied to find a place to stay. There was one day when I couldn’t get a dinner together for my children. And comparatively, I was one of the lucky ones.
As for cohesive and deliberate—I can’t take credit really. It just happened. I couldn’t put the new poems with the old poems from that book—my world, and the landscape informing the book—was permanently altered. The title Big Muddy River of Stars came to me after a particularly fitful night on the air mattress, and the poems came a few months later.
After Katrina my life was a blur—I was displaced with my family and my mother and brother, and my days were so taken up with technicalities and depression. No comfort food. No zoo to take my kids to. No Christmas lights. I felt no room or desire for poetry in those early months. It wasn’t until May and June of 2006 that I sat down at my kitchen room table while the final repairs that we could afford were going on around me and was I able to put it into some sort of perspective. Even so, when I read those poems now, I don’t know what happened. Or, I guess I could say—I can’t believe those things happened to me.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Learn everything you can about the presses you submit to, and don’t let yourself think about the odds.
Do I believe poetry can change the world?
Yes I do. Sometimes when I get really excited about a poem in front of a class, I catch myself waving the anthology around, and I think I must look like a preacher at the pulpit trying to convert the masses. This is a good metaphor, because poetry feels like my religion. In good or bad times, I am as likely to turn to poetry as to prayer. I think the best prayers are poetry—like the Psalms, which in my Episcopal congregation are sung in unison. Riding my bike on a gorgeous fall day like today, I am just as likely to think “The brain is wider than the sky,” as “My cup runneth over.” Either way, my world is altered.
*******************************************************************************************
In addition to Big Muddy River of Stars, Alison Pelegrin is the author of The Zydeco Tablets (Word Press, 2002) as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in dozens of literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the NEA, she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives in Mandeville, Louisiana with her family.
I had been sending out The Zydeco Tablets for years—long before it was ready. The last version was a revision I worked just before the birth of my first son—instead of the nesting instinct, I had the revision bug.
How did you decide on the order and structure of the book?
You know, it has been so long since I was ordering that book (December 2001) I had to look at the sections. I am not one to fret in an extreme manner over the order poems appear in a book. I mean, I think about it, but I don’t lose sleep over it, one reason being that I almost never read a book of poems in order. Looking back at The Zydeco Tablets, I can say I don’t really know what I was thinking—it seems self conscious to me now, and too many. Maybe my next book will have no sections.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
I didn’t pick it up and smell it or feel giddy, as so many authors have described. I was a little afraid of it, and I was grieving the death of my father, who never knew about the book though he informed it in so many ways. Also, I had a nine month old at the time, and was four or five months pregnant, and the idea of finishing a poem again—much less a book, seemed utterly impossible.
(In a footnote to this comment, I’ll add that after the initial elation I felt this grief with Big Muddy as well. It contained everything—I had nothing in reserve. After a few months, though, I was ready to move on to the next project.)
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices? It’s not often that you see a black and white cover with such a wild design for a book of poetry.
I had a lot of input on the cover image. At the time, Word Press was doing only black and white covers, and I did not want to go the black-and-white-photo-of-Louisiana-cliché route. The book was a lot about music, and I wanted the cover to reflect that, for it to look like a sign you’d see stapled to a light pole advertising a show at Tipitina’s or something. I communicated this to an artist, and this is what she came up with. The ooh la la! was my idea.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
Yes, I did expect my life to change! And yes, there is still a small part of me who wishes that the rock star image and lifestyle (you know, dark glasses, a driver, and life in a hotel room) were part of my existence as a poet.
How has your life been different since your book came out?
Externally, my life has not been noticeably different since my book—either book—came out. On the inside, I did feel pretty excited.
Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
The biggest surprise to me was how hard it was to get the book in stores. At the time my book was published, Word Press went from a traditional print run to POD. This was a move they did to make it easier to get the book into chain book stores, but I found that larger chains were not at all receptive to POD books. I do not know how other Word Press authors have dealt with this. I’ve never seen a copy of The Zydeco Tablets in a big chain store, and with smaller sellers, I mostly sold the books on consignment—my discounted copies sold at the same discount to the seller.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I sent letters to books stores and libraries, and I believe that Word Press sent out a mailing. I read everywhere I could. I always sell copies after a reading, and I travel with copies of my books in my trunk.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
I wish someone would have told me to hold out until you find what you want. Don’t be in such a rush to get the first book out, especially if you have copies of a chapbook you can sell at readings.
Booze plays a prominent part in your work, yet it’s tastefully amidst everything that’s going on in poems, never becoming a parody or a vice necessarily. Whether it’s Li Po arriving drunk as an inspiring muse, or the narrator having a drink to take the edge of, it’s done without force, and is used both playfully and seriously in the poems, sometimes at once. Is this the real Alison Pelegrin drinking to inspire the muse, or is the poet Alison Pelegrin, and why is there so much alcohol flowing through these poems?
I grew up around drinking—the good, the bad, the ugly. Thanksgiving time is the anniversary of my first drunk—off of watered down port wine snuck to me by my grandfather. I passed out under the table in media meal and experienced tunnel vision. As far as the drinking in the poems, I should say that before I finished Big Muddy River of Stars, the working title of the book was Three Sheets. I am clumsy at discussing such things, but it was meant to be a metaphor for drinking and for the writing process. If you’ve read anything about the ancient Chinese poet Li Po, about whom there are several poems in the second book, you may have read the story of how he (supposedly) would write poems that came to him, and then send the pages floating down the Yangtze River. I would never do that myself, but I liked the idea. Also, I was living on a river myself while I was writing those poems, very much the outsider in Livingston Parish (Once some visitors to the property next door had a cigarette boat named “The Blown Job"), and I felt that Li Po could just rise up out of the mist and watch herons with me on the dock.
I’m struck by the almost tour-de-force third section in Big Muddy River of Stars, where the poems seem to be written post-Katrina. They almost seem to have been written out of necessity, to get through living after the hurricane, to find one’s place in the world again, both as poet and mother looking after her family. In that respect, I want to ask how the book was constructed, as the third section is such a vital part of the book, yet it does seem extremely cohesive and deliberate as a whole.
Thanks. It makes me happy to hear people say they enjoy the third section of the book because it hits so close to home—I have never been so directly personal as in those poems about the aftermath of Katrina. That was such a dark time for me, in so many ways. I accepted food stamps. I lied to find a place to stay. There was one day when I couldn’t get a dinner together for my children. And comparatively, I was one of the lucky ones.
As for cohesive and deliberate—I can’t take credit really. It just happened. I couldn’t put the new poems with the old poems from that book—my world, and the landscape informing the book—was permanently altered. The title Big Muddy River of Stars came to me after a particularly fitful night on the air mattress, and the poems came a few months later.
After Katrina my life was a blur—I was displaced with my family and my mother and brother, and my days were so taken up with technicalities and depression. No comfort food. No zoo to take my kids to. No Christmas lights. I felt no room or desire for poetry in those early months. It wasn’t until May and June of 2006 that I sat down at my kitchen room table while the final repairs that we could afford were going on around me and was I able to put it into some sort of perspective. Even so, when I read those poems now, I don’t know what happened. Or, I guess I could say—I can’t believe those things happened to me.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Learn everything you can about the presses you submit to, and don’t let yourself think about the odds.
Do I believe poetry can change the world?
Yes I do. Sometimes when I get really excited about a poem in front of a class, I catch myself waving the anthology around, and I think I must look like a preacher at the pulpit trying to convert the masses. This is a good metaphor, because poetry feels like my religion. In good or bad times, I am as likely to turn to poetry as to prayer. I think the best prayers are poetry—like the Psalms, which in my Episcopal congregation are sung in unison. Riding my bike on a gorgeous fall day like today, I am just as likely to think “The brain is wider than the sky,” as “My cup runneth over.” Either way, my world is altered.
*******************************************************************************************
In addition to Big Muddy River of Stars, Alison Pelegrin is the author of The Zydeco Tablets (Word Press, 2002) as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac, and in dozens of literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. The recipient of fellowships from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the NEA, she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives in Mandeville, Louisiana with her family.
- Buy The Zydeco Tablets from Amazon
- Buy Big Muddy River of Stars from Amazon
- Read two poems at Blackbird
- Read a poem at Verse Daily
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
#13 - Sarah Vap
Yours is an interesting situation regarding the idea of a first book, mainly since you had two come out within the same amount of time. How often had you sent out Dummy Fire before it was chosen as the winner of the 2006 Saturnalia Book Prize? And how often had you sent out American Spikenard before it was chosen as the winner of the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize?
I don’t remember, exactly. I had probably sent Dummy Fire to about 15 or 20 contests over the course of about two and a half years, and it was finalist a few times before Saturnalia took it. I’d been sending it out about a bit longer than American Spikenard, which I sent to, I would guess, about 15 contests over the course of a year and a half or two. It was also a finalist in a few competitions before it was taken by Iowa.
Which one would you consider your true “first book” and why?
I consider Dummy Fire my first book. I wrote almost all of it before I wrote American Spikenard, though for a couple of years I was working on both simultaneously… revising Dummy Fire and beginning American Spikenard.
American Spikenard came together faster. Though the roots of many of its poems, too, were years old.
How long were both books in the making? Did they happen quickly, or were they written over a number of years? Were you working on them both together? If so, did you know you were writing two separate books at the time the poems were coming into place?
It took six or seven years for both of the books to come together, with some of those years overlapping—especially the revision years. Though really, it’s hard to know, because seeds and roots and images and first drafts of some of the poems from both books were older than that.
I did know that these were two separate books. I’d already pulled the poems from Dummy Fire into a manuscript, to work on together, before the majority of American Spikenard poems came into form as real working drafts. Though for a long time, I didn’t think of the individual poems from American Spikenard as a manuscript, either. I do write poem to poem. Or, I always believe that I am, though there has been, in retrospect, a strong continuity between poems for each of my manuscripts and books.
Who are some of your poetic influences for these books?
Celan, Michael Burkard, Laura Jennings, Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Norman Dubie, Jean Valentine. Off the top of my head.
Though they certainly feel like separate books, there’s a very distinct style to your writing. Can you talk about how you begin to write the poems and your process of revision?
I begin poems… there are so many ways to answer this. I suppose I begin poems with a feeling in my chest or gut or throat. Usually chest. A feeling back behind the solar plexus. It is a feeling I associate with sound, with color, with tone. If I don’t have that feeling, I don’t try to write. Maybe some other kind of writing work, but not writing. Never a first draft. If I do have that feeling, and I sit down, I go to my notebooks, and I know what to use. I know what to pull out. I know what to try, or what will try to end up together, though usually I never know how it will work together.
When I sit down to write, I don’t know what I’m going to say, and I don’t know what it will look like, and I don’t have any hopes for what kind of poem it should turn into. I’m usually so entranced by the process of writing which, when it happens, feels beyond good. Or beyond sad. Or beyond… whatever. I am usually relieved and grateful simply to be there.
Revising is similar, but much more conscious, for me. And it happens later. After I’ve felt good and protectively unconscious about a poem for some time. I am very protective of early drafts, for myself, for my students, for anyone. They’re little babies that can so easily be thrashed and bullied and ruined. Usually by me.
But my process for revision… is different with every poem. I go back to that particular feeling behind my solar plexus for that particular poem. I try different things, always testing each one against that feeling. That note. That hum. I go back to poems, off and on, sometimes for years. Sometimes hardly at all. They either show themselves, or they don’t. I can either find them, or I can’t. That hum either continues, intact, across the months and years, or it becomes silent.
I used to be very superstitious and ritualistic about writing. I had a table a friend had given me when I moved to Arizona that I painted bright orange, and that was my desk. I could only write there. In the morning. With a very, very strong cup of coffee and a glass of water. And no one else could be in my minuscule apartment, except my cat, who was required to lie next to me on the drafts strewn about the floor (I called this “blessing” my poems). She always agreed. That was the only time and way I could write. I could read, do other writing work, later in the day or in other ways. But writing was its own.
I’ve lost that routine for the past couple of years, between having our first son and moving away from Arizona—which was, for me, a completely magical place. I still have the orange table, though. And I’m still writing. It’s just soggier and more sporadic.
In both books, I noticed that some of the titles are in lowercase, some are in capital letters, and some are a mix of both. Is this a conscious choice, and if so, why is there so much difference, sometimes from poem-to-poem?
I don’t know how to answer this yet.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished books for the first time? Which did you receive first?
I received Dummy Fire first. I actually felt dread when I first saw my book. Committed. Like something, some secret, had moved beyond my control. I cried. I shut them all in the box they were mailed to me in. I could hardly look at it. A few weeks later I received American Spikenard, and was more prepared for that feeling. Had spoken with a couple of very dear teachers of mine, who were generous in helping me understand my response. I thought that I had made a huge mistake, they reassured me that actually a lot of people feel this way after first seeing their books. I’d imagined that everyone else was confident and ecstatic.
After a few weeks, the dread and regret subsided. And my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. A burden had been lifted—something that I had been tending I didn’t have to tend to anymore.
Very soon after that, I realized that I love both of those books. And I love both of those books now. They both feel absolutely true, and sincere, about different times in my life. Different people I was. Different ways I struggled to move through and to understand this world. That’s the best I can do, that’s the standard to which I hold myself.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover(s)? Or were you offered choices?
I suggested the image on Dummy Fire. I had spent the summer at an artists colony in Lithuania a few years before and met a Brazilian painter there, Bruno Sipivicius, whose work I loved. Whose friendship was important to me. I was working on Dummy Fire at the time, though I didn’t know it. And if any visual art I’d seen ever matched the tone of those poems, to me, it was his work.
Iowa found the image for the cover of American Spikenard after they initiated several conversations with me about how I perceived the book and the poems. I thought they found the perfect cover.
In completely unique ways, both presses were heavenly to work with.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
Iowa called me to tell me that I’d won on the very day that our first son, Oskar, was born. I was holding this new baby in my arms, I’d just been through drug-free labor, drug-free forceps, and an emergency C-Section. I was loaded with tenderness and trauma and hormones and, finally, with drugs. My love, Todd, was getting ready to call our parents and friends with our happy news, and happened to check the message on the phone. It was Holly Carver at Iowa. He called her back for me, and learned the news about my book. It was absolutely wonderful, of course. But more than that, it was as surreal as the rest of my day had been.
Compared to what I had just been through… did I think it would change my life?
Yes, I thought my life would change. My life had changed. My life is completely different now. But I’m not sure I can attribute this to the book.
Two weeks later we were driving, and Todd checked the messages again. I had a nearly word-for-word identical message from Henry Israeli at Saturnalia, asking me to call him back because he had good news about my manuscript. Todd and I just knew what he was going to say—and, maybe because I was slightly less medicated than the first time, the news of a second book was even more surreal.
I did feel like I’d given birth to triplets for a while. Yes, I imagined that my life had changed. But I didn’t know if it was the books. The books were part of it.
How has your life been different since your book(s) came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I didn’t know about the relief. I didn’t realize how relieved I would feel to have those two books “done”. Publishing them has cleared space and time in my heart and mind to work on other things. To write and read other things. To spend most of my time with my son without feeling as isolated as I might have from poetry, or worrying that I might never find my way back through to the poetry world now that I am a mother.
Though I do still feel isolated from poetry, and I do worry I might never find my way back to the poetry world, now that I am a mother. A kind of soul-saving list-serve that I am part of, started by Arielle Greenberg for poet-moms, did come into my world as a result of publishing those books.
I thought that publishing a book might, as they say, open doors. But what happened instead was that a couple of months after my books came out, we moved away from all the doors we’d ever known. We moved away from a beautiful and active and supportive community of friends and writers in Phoenix. We moved away from more jobs teaching poetry than we could accept each semester. We moved away from health insurance and support and teachers and twenty or thirty amazing visiting writers a year. And we moved to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, with no prospects.
We had a first-birthday party for Oskar surrounded by all of our dear friends, packed up our U-Haul, and then headed from the middle of the desert to the middle of the rainforest. We have hunkered down here for the past year in a sweet little cabin at the end of a valley that floods us in for days or weeks at a time. Right now, in the middle of the rainy season, instead of the main road out of the valley, I drive the logging roads back and forth to my job teaching English 101 in a town 40 miles away where no one has any idea or cares about my books. That’s sure as shit not a door. Or, not the kind of door that I’d imagined.
What we do have is rain, which I love. And a garden. And a creek. A salmon run once a year. A flock of chickens that Oskar loves to chase. Some family nearby. And quietness. I remind myself that we chose this, because I really do miss Phoenix and often feel lonely here. I remind myself of the traffic, and that Oskar would never have been able to play outside if we had stayed in downtown Phoenix. I remind myself that I really love what I’m writing here, and that I wouldn’t have written these particular things in Phoenix. I appreciate the forced focus, in this new life, on the things that really are most important to me. I’m generally not a graceful transitioner, so I’m sure this is part of my slow, awkward falling-in-love-with-the-place-dance.
But no, I didn’t imagine that I’d publish two books and then dive headfirst into a muddy abyss.
What have you been doing to promote the book(s), and what have those experiences been like for you?
I have done hardly anything. I did a couple of readings right after the books came out-- one in Phoenix and one in Philadelphia with Forrest Gander, who chose Dummy Fire. I did a couple of little readings in Atlanta outside of AWP. And since we moved from Phoenix to the Olympic Peninsula, I have done a few more readings. I haven’t gotten the hang of the promoting quite yet. I’ve forgotten to bring books to half of the readings, for example.
I do love to read, though, and especially now that Oskar is a bit older, have been able to do a few more.
I have been very focused on mothering. And moving. And reading and writing. The books seem to be doing really well. Because of the other circumstances of my life, I just have to trust them on their own out there for a little while.
And I do trust them. They are doing beautifully.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book(s) came out?
I wish I had known how quickly contest books come together. I thought that once the books were taken, I’d have plenty of time to consider cover art, revisions, acknowledgments, and so on. But contest books come out once a year, so they make them quickly. I found myself (on a huge amount of painkillers post my emergency C-Section-with-complications, plus nursing a new baby along the 120 degree Phoenix summer days) simultaneously editing and choosing artwork for two different books that represented two totally different times in my history—each of them requiring a quick turnaround. It was the most bizarre few weeks of my life.
And I really was on a lot of drugs.
Plus I was nursing a newborn. Plus it was 120 degrees.
The best advice I was given was to let the art directors, the book artists, the publishers for whom editing and creating books is a passion—to let them do their good work. In both cases, I left most of the details in the hands of Saturnalia and Iowa, and they were brilliant.
What influence has the books’ publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
My third collection of poetry, Faulkner’s Rosary, is coming out from Saturnalia in 2010. (Plenty of time to consider cover art!) My fourth is finished, and I will start submitting this in earnest soon. I am writing essays and poems right now, to what end I’m not sure. I’m also pregnant with our second son, who is due in 5 weeks… so that is the biggest project on our horizon.
I don’t know if the books have had much of an effect on my subsequent writing. Like I said, I dove into the mud as soon as possible after they came out. I have had a few readings. My editors have forwarded a few reviews. But it’s not like the glory has paralyzed me.
The isolation out here has given me, probably, a connection to my own quiet path through my poems. A sort of forced integrity, which I appreciate. In some ways, I feel like I’m starting all over each time I try to write. And for an audience that is so far away from me. For me, this is probably a pretty true approach to writing.
How, if at all, has your experience as an editor for 42opus influenced your writing? Would you suggest that aspiring writers try to gain editorial experience as they continue to learn about writing and publishing?
I don’t know if or how 42opus has affected my writing, exactly. I love it immensely because I love working with the two other poetry editors, Brian Leary and Caroline Klocksiem. I love it because I love having a platform with which I can support work that I believe in. I love it because, over the years, it has begun to form a small community around itself, because the website that Brian has created is beautiful, because the work we have published is fantastic.
But editing is so much work. I would only suggest aspiring writers work in editing if they really do love it, are passionate about some part of it. It’s a position in which people trust you with their work, with bits and pieces of their hearts and lives. I think the poems need to be treated respectfully (timely, generously, with attention). It weighs on me when I feel I’m not doing right by them, which happens too regularly. Editing is wonderful for many reasons, but it isn’t necessary to edit in order to learn about writing and publishing.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Don’t edit the fiery gorgeous life out of your first manuscript during the months or years you’re submitting it. Be warmly indignant if your book isn’t taken, then send again.
Time your submissions with having babies.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Absolutely. With all my heart.
*******************************************************************************************
Sarah Vap is the author of American Spikenard, which received the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dummy Fire, which received the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her third collection, Faulkner's Rosary, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her partner, Todd Fredson, and their son. She is the poetry editor at 42opus.
*******************************************************************************************
I don’t remember, exactly. I had probably sent Dummy Fire to about 15 or 20 contests over the course of about two and a half years, and it was finalist a few times before Saturnalia took it. I’d been sending it out about a bit longer than American Spikenard, which I sent to, I would guess, about 15 contests over the course of a year and a half or two. It was also a finalist in a few competitions before it was taken by Iowa.
Which one would you consider your true “first book” and why?
I consider Dummy Fire my first book. I wrote almost all of it before I wrote American Spikenard, though for a couple of years I was working on both simultaneously… revising Dummy Fire and beginning American Spikenard.
American Spikenard came together faster. Though the roots of many of its poems, too, were years old.
How long were both books in the making? Did they happen quickly, or were they written over a number of years? Were you working on them both together? If so, did you know you were writing two separate books at the time the poems were coming into place?
It took six or seven years for both of the books to come together, with some of those years overlapping—especially the revision years. Though really, it’s hard to know, because seeds and roots and images and first drafts of some of the poems from both books were older than that.
I did know that these were two separate books. I’d already pulled the poems from Dummy Fire into a manuscript, to work on together, before the majority of American Spikenard poems came into form as real working drafts. Though for a long time, I didn’t think of the individual poems from American Spikenard as a manuscript, either. I do write poem to poem. Or, I always believe that I am, though there has been, in retrospect, a strong continuity between poems for each of my manuscripts and books.
Who are some of your poetic influences for these books?
Celan, Michael Burkard, Laura Jennings, Whitman, Dickinson, Rilke, Norman Dubie, Jean Valentine. Off the top of my head.
Though they certainly feel like separate books, there’s a very distinct style to your writing. Can you talk about how you begin to write the poems and your process of revision?
I begin poems… there are so many ways to answer this. I suppose I begin poems with a feeling in my chest or gut or throat. Usually chest. A feeling back behind the solar plexus. It is a feeling I associate with sound, with color, with tone. If I don’t have that feeling, I don’t try to write. Maybe some other kind of writing work, but not writing. Never a first draft. If I do have that feeling, and I sit down, I go to my notebooks, and I know what to use. I know what to pull out. I know what to try, or what will try to end up together, though usually I never know how it will work together.
When I sit down to write, I don’t know what I’m going to say, and I don’t know what it will look like, and I don’t have any hopes for what kind of poem it should turn into. I’m usually so entranced by the process of writing which, when it happens, feels beyond good. Or beyond sad. Or beyond… whatever. I am usually relieved and grateful simply to be there.
Revising is similar, but much more conscious, for me. And it happens later. After I’ve felt good and protectively unconscious about a poem for some time. I am very protective of early drafts, for myself, for my students, for anyone. They’re little babies that can so easily be thrashed and bullied and ruined. Usually by me.
But my process for revision… is different with every poem. I go back to that particular feeling behind my solar plexus for that particular poem. I try different things, always testing each one against that feeling. That note. That hum. I go back to poems, off and on, sometimes for years. Sometimes hardly at all. They either show themselves, or they don’t. I can either find them, or I can’t. That hum either continues, intact, across the months and years, or it becomes silent.
I used to be very superstitious and ritualistic about writing. I had a table a friend had given me when I moved to Arizona that I painted bright orange, and that was my desk. I could only write there. In the morning. With a very, very strong cup of coffee and a glass of water. And no one else could be in my minuscule apartment, except my cat, who was required to lie next to me on the drafts strewn about the floor (I called this “blessing” my poems). She always agreed. That was the only time and way I could write. I could read, do other writing work, later in the day or in other ways. But writing was its own.
I’ve lost that routine for the past couple of years, between having our first son and moving away from Arizona—which was, for me, a completely magical place. I still have the orange table, though. And I’m still writing. It’s just soggier and more sporadic.
In both books, I noticed that some of the titles are in lowercase, some are in capital letters, and some are a mix of both. Is this a conscious choice, and if so, why is there so much difference, sometimes from poem-to-poem?
I don’t know how to answer this yet.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished books for the first time? Which did you receive first?
I received Dummy Fire first. I actually felt dread when I first saw my book. Committed. Like something, some secret, had moved beyond my control. I cried. I shut them all in the box they were mailed to me in. I could hardly look at it. A few weeks later I received American Spikenard, and was more prepared for that feeling. Had spoken with a couple of very dear teachers of mine, who were generous in helping me understand my response. I thought that I had made a huge mistake, they reassured me that actually a lot of people feel this way after first seeing their books. I’d imagined that everyone else was confident and ecstatic.
After a few weeks, the dread and regret subsided. And my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. A burden had been lifted—something that I had been tending I didn’t have to tend to anymore.
Very soon after that, I realized that I love both of those books. And I love both of those books now. They both feel absolutely true, and sincere, about different times in my life. Different people I was. Different ways I struggled to move through and to understand this world. That’s the best I can do, that’s the standard to which I hold myself.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover(s)? Or were you offered choices?
I suggested the image on Dummy Fire. I had spent the summer at an artists colony in Lithuania a few years before and met a Brazilian painter there, Bruno Sipivicius, whose work I loved. Whose friendship was important to me. I was working on Dummy Fire at the time, though I didn’t know it. And if any visual art I’d seen ever matched the tone of those poems, to me, it was his work.
Iowa found the image for the cover of American Spikenard after they initiated several conversations with me about how I perceived the book and the poems. I thought they found the perfect cover.
In completely unique ways, both presses were heavenly to work with.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
Iowa called me to tell me that I’d won on the very day that our first son, Oskar, was born. I was holding this new baby in my arms, I’d just been through drug-free labor, drug-free forceps, and an emergency C-Section. I was loaded with tenderness and trauma and hormones and, finally, with drugs. My love, Todd, was getting ready to call our parents and friends with our happy news, and happened to check the message on the phone. It was Holly Carver at Iowa. He called her back for me, and learned the news about my book. It was absolutely wonderful, of course. But more than that, it was as surreal as the rest of my day had been.
Compared to what I had just been through… did I think it would change my life?
Yes, I thought my life would change. My life had changed. My life is completely different now. But I’m not sure I can attribute this to the book.
Two weeks later we were driving, and Todd checked the messages again. I had a nearly word-for-word identical message from Henry Israeli at Saturnalia, asking me to call him back because he had good news about my manuscript. Todd and I just knew what he was going to say—and, maybe because I was slightly less medicated than the first time, the news of a second book was even more surreal.
I did feel like I’d given birth to triplets for a while. Yes, I imagined that my life had changed. But I didn’t know if it was the books. The books were part of it.
How has your life been different since your book(s) came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
I didn’t know about the relief. I didn’t realize how relieved I would feel to have those two books “done”. Publishing them has cleared space and time in my heart and mind to work on other things. To write and read other things. To spend most of my time with my son without feeling as isolated as I might have from poetry, or worrying that I might never find my way back through to the poetry world now that I am a mother.
Though I do still feel isolated from poetry, and I do worry I might never find my way back to the poetry world, now that I am a mother. A kind of soul-saving list-serve that I am part of, started by Arielle Greenberg for poet-moms, did come into my world as a result of publishing those books.
I thought that publishing a book might, as they say, open doors. But what happened instead was that a couple of months after my books came out, we moved away from all the doors we’d ever known. We moved away from a beautiful and active and supportive community of friends and writers in Phoenix. We moved away from more jobs teaching poetry than we could accept each semester. We moved away from health insurance and support and teachers and twenty or thirty amazing visiting writers a year. And we moved to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, with no prospects.
We had a first-birthday party for Oskar surrounded by all of our dear friends, packed up our U-Haul, and then headed from the middle of the desert to the middle of the rainforest. We have hunkered down here for the past year in a sweet little cabin at the end of a valley that floods us in for days or weeks at a time. Right now, in the middle of the rainy season, instead of the main road out of the valley, I drive the logging roads back and forth to my job teaching English 101 in a town 40 miles away where no one has any idea or cares about my books. That’s sure as shit not a door. Or, not the kind of door that I’d imagined.
What we do have is rain, which I love. And a garden. And a creek. A salmon run once a year. A flock of chickens that Oskar loves to chase. Some family nearby. And quietness. I remind myself that we chose this, because I really do miss Phoenix and often feel lonely here. I remind myself of the traffic, and that Oskar would never have been able to play outside if we had stayed in downtown Phoenix. I remind myself that I really love what I’m writing here, and that I wouldn’t have written these particular things in Phoenix. I appreciate the forced focus, in this new life, on the things that really are most important to me. I’m generally not a graceful transitioner, so I’m sure this is part of my slow, awkward falling-in-love-with-the-place-dance.
But no, I didn’t imagine that I’d publish two books and then dive headfirst into a muddy abyss.
What have you been doing to promote the book(s), and what have those experiences been like for you?
I have done hardly anything. I did a couple of readings right after the books came out-- one in Phoenix and one in Philadelphia with Forrest Gander, who chose Dummy Fire. I did a couple of little readings in Atlanta outside of AWP. And since we moved from Phoenix to the Olympic Peninsula, I have done a few more readings. I haven’t gotten the hang of the promoting quite yet. I’ve forgotten to bring books to half of the readings, for example.
I do love to read, though, and especially now that Oskar is a bit older, have been able to do a few more.
I have been very focused on mothering. And moving. And reading and writing. The books seem to be doing really well. Because of the other circumstances of my life, I just have to trust them on their own out there for a little while.
And I do trust them. They are doing beautifully.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book(s) came out?
I wish I had known how quickly contest books come together. I thought that once the books were taken, I’d have plenty of time to consider cover art, revisions, acknowledgments, and so on. But contest books come out once a year, so they make them quickly. I found myself (on a huge amount of painkillers post my emergency C-Section-with-complications, plus nursing a new baby along the 120 degree Phoenix summer days) simultaneously editing and choosing artwork for two different books that represented two totally different times in my history—each of them requiring a quick turnaround. It was the most bizarre few weeks of my life.
And I really was on a lot of drugs.
Plus I was nursing a newborn. Plus it was 120 degrees.
The best advice I was given was to let the art directors, the book artists, the publishers for whom editing and creating books is a passion—to let them do their good work. In both cases, I left most of the details in the hands of Saturnalia and Iowa, and they were brilliant.
What influence has the books’ publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
My third collection of poetry, Faulkner’s Rosary, is coming out from Saturnalia in 2010. (Plenty of time to consider cover art!) My fourth is finished, and I will start submitting this in earnest soon. I am writing essays and poems right now, to what end I’m not sure. I’m also pregnant with our second son, who is due in 5 weeks… so that is the biggest project on our horizon.
I don’t know if the books have had much of an effect on my subsequent writing. Like I said, I dove into the mud as soon as possible after they came out. I have had a few readings. My editors have forwarded a few reviews. But it’s not like the glory has paralyzed me.
The isolation out here has given me, probably, a connection to my own quiet path through my poems. A sort of forced integrity, which I appreciate. In some ways, I feel like I’m starting all over each time I try to write. And for an audience that is so far away from me. For me, this is probably a pretty true approach to writing.
How, if at all, has your experience as an editor for 42opus influenced your writing? Would you suggest that aspiring writers try to gain editorial experience as they continue to learn about writing and publishing?
I don’t know if or how 42opus has affected my writing, exactly. I love it immensely because I love working with the two other poetry editors, Brian Leary and Caroline Klocksiem. I love it because I love having a platform with which I can support work that I believe in. I love it because, over the years, it has begun to form a small community around itself, because the website that Brian has created is beautiful, because the work we have published is fantastic.
But editing is so much work. I would only suggest aspiring writers work in editing if they really do love it, are passionate about some part of it. It’s a position in which people trust you with their work, with bits and pieces of their hearts and lives. I think the poems need to be treated respectfully (timely, generously, with attention). It weighs on me when I feel I’m not doing right by them, which happens too regularly. Editing is wonderful for many reasons, but it isn’t necessary to edit in order to learn about writing and publishing.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Don’t edit the fiery gorgeous life out of your first manuscript during the months or years you’re submitting it. Be warmly indignant if your book isn’t taken, then send again.
Time your submissions with having babies.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Absolutely. With all my heart.
*******************************************************************************************
Sarah Vap is the author of American Spikenard, which received the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize, and Dummy Fire, which received the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her third collection, Faulkner's Rosary, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula with her partner, Todd Fredson, and their son. She is the poetry editor at 42opus.
*******************************************************************************************
Thursday, December 25, 2008
#12 - Mark Wunderlich
How often had you sent out The Anchorage before it was chosen for publication by The University of Massachusetts Press?
The manuscript was in circulation for about three years. I was very eager to have it published—no surprise there—but that eagerness blinded me to some of the manuscript’s flaws. I had an early version of the book which I had worked on as my MFA thesis at Columbia, and I promptly got that into the mail. The first year out, that manuscript became a finalist for the NPS. There is something particularly cruel about that contest in that finalists are notified of their status months in advance. The next many weeks morph into a looming preoccupation with the tedious business of poetry contests. I remember it as a time of wild fantasy and hope—all of it built on an incredibly teetery foundation. I didn’t win, though I learned one of the judges had chosen it as a runner up, and had gone with the more mature writer, thinking (and this may be apocryphal—I was told this all second-hand) that I would have my chance eventually, and the older writer should have her due. I found bitter comfort in that news, and in the next couple years my manuscript got knocked out of that competition early on, which was discouraging. Ultimately it was for the best. That same year I received a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and I moved to Cape Cod to spend three seasons writing new poems and making the manuscript sharper, smarter and more substantial. The place and those months changed my work and my life and helped me make The Anchorage a better book..
What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
The book found its shape rather early on. I had the bones of it in place while I was in graduate school and had it divided into four sections. Lucie Brock-Broido had just arrived at Columbia, and we spent a couple late nights at her kitchen table, smoking, and making decisions about the order of poems. I kept much of that as it stood.
I very much liked the process of assembling the poems into an order. Making a book is its own discrete task. One reads the poems and begins to shape a kind of narrative that exists somewhere above the individual poems. A new life emerges, somehow—one created by the book itself. I saw a new self emerge from it like a twin that was of me, but not me at all. It’s an odd experience, and one I found very heady and engaging.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?
I wanted the poems to be in journals, and the manuscript to find a publisher. I was tremendously ambitious and organized about the whole matter. I funneled all the anxiety about my invisibility in the world of arts and letters into the administrative details of keeping work in circulation. Publishing individual poems was always exciting—it still is. At this point in my career, I’m a little embarrassed by the ambition I had, and by my desire for recognition. I’m more embarrassed of the feelings of loathing I felt at the success of others whom I deemed less talented or deserving. I think competitiveness is a mainstay of the world of writing, and it tends to live a subterranean and nocturnal life, replaced in the public discourse with pieties about the noble pursuit of art. The reality is more complicated, and more painful for most who write. I try to let my students know that the real pleasure—the enduring pleasure of writing— is the act itself. The other great pleasure is in reading and understanding the work of others. The other stuff just makes your soul smaller. How’s that for piety?
The book is in four sections, but the third section is entirely comprised of prose poems. Was it planned like this, or did you see them fitting as a section of the book later in the process?
The prose poems weren’t written as a group, but were added piece by piece while I worked on other poems. When I began to shape the book, it fell into quarters and it made sense to me to keep the prose poems together as a group. I have always loved reading letters, and the letters of writers are one of my favorite sorts of books to read. I thought of that section as a collection of letters—like a pack of them you’d find in a desk drawer. The prose poems were conceived as letters to the Beloved who was a figment and a conflation and a missing body, all at once.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
The book was so pretty! It was such a beautiful object! The pages had that excellent library smell! The cover was gorgeous! There was no part of it I did not love. I had one hour of pure, uncomplicated happiness. I thought my elementary school librarian would have been so proud. As the day went on, my mood was punctuated by flickers of doubt, until the reality of the situation came crashing down upon me: What had I done? I was utterly unprepared for the day when I got the one thing I wanted more than anything else. And so I took to my bed. I was in a funk for weeks, feeling both exposed and embarrassed by publication.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
I had one of those rare experiences in that I got just what I wanted for the cover. The image, a photograph of a Roman bronze sculpture of a soldier, was taken by an Italian photographer named Mimo Jodice. As soon as I saw the photograph, I knew it would be perfect. UMass press encouraged me to contact the photographer directly to ask permission, which I did. A friend of mine who spoke Italian wrote to the photographer in my behalf, and a deal was struck. The press had a small sum of money available to pay for the image. When I found out how much it would cost (too much), I wrote a second letter that aimed to both flatter and beg. The photographer’s wife, who managed these affairs, liked the idea of helping a young poet, and so the price was reduced, a slide was packed up and mailed to Amherst and it became the cover.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
The degree and extent to which I anticipated that moment can hardly be fathomed; that state of anticipation was marked by an extraordinary degree of psychological naïveté. In short, I wanted to be (in the small way poets are) famous. How embarrassing it is write that, but it’s true. Granted, I think that urge may have been somewhat less shallow than that which drives people to become contestants on Temptation Island or Fear Factor or The Amazing Race, but not by much. Anyone who writes and publishes has to believe that they are worthy of being heard by more people than can be reached with a simple phone call. A big part of writing is really a narcissistic urge.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
Some really lovely things happened as a result of the book being published. I got letters from people who read it and liked it, and were moved to write to me. I did a book signing at the Grolier Bookstore in Cambridge and when I arrived the window of the store was filled with copies of my book—a huge display. I was invited to take part in an arts festival in San Francisco. For the event I was paired in a reading with Adrienne Rich and, in addition to reading my own work, I was asked to introduce her. She is, of course, a poetry rock star, and there were 500 people at the reading to see her, and as the opening band, they heard me too. It was such an honor to share a stage with her and a bit of an out-of-body experience. Each of those things surprised me. I sometimes marvel at the good fortune of all that.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
I can’t really think of anything that, had it been said to me, I would have had the sense to listen to. Why give anyone advice? Each publication experience is different. I was particularly lucky in that the book got attention. Most first books of poems don’t get a great deal of attention (actually most poetry books, period). The best advice would be to Lower Your Expectations, but who wants to hear that? Why not let someone anticipate good things and hope for the best?
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?
The Anchorage was, for a first book (actually for any book of poems) quite widely reviewed. I know writers who make a point of never reading their reviews lest they read something wounding or debilitating. I am not that person. I poured over my reviews, memorized them, practically. There were a couple very nice ones, more mixed-positive reviews and many more rotten ones than I could fathom. There was a tone in several reviews that seemed bent on bringing me down to size, deposing me from whatever cushy, well-funded clusterfuck they imagined I inhabited. I was just a guy in his 20’s who published a book and didn’t have health insurance and was struggling to work and pay rent and have friends and write poems, and I realized that what I had was coveted and resented in the same way I had periodically resented and envied the achievements of others. Although my first reaction to these bad reviews was defensive, I also knew that much of what they said might be true. Every review has a subtext, a position or world view they support, and then there is the text of the thing itself—the intersection of taste and rhetoric. In some way I internalized those reviews and thought about them as I wrote new poems. Instead of stopping me, they helped me. They certainly made me tougher and more resolved.
Your second book, Voluntary Servitude, was published a few years ago, and I’d like to talk a little bit about that. First of all, there seems to be more utilization of white space, and a more highly compressed style of poetry than The Anchorage. Was this a natural progression in the years after The Anchorage, or was there a conscious effort at this compression of language and style for the book?
After publishing The Anchorage I soon hatched the idea of writing a book of poems around An Idea; I decided that what I needed was a project. I started writing these historical poems, poems based on folk tales, and they were just plain bad. Dead on arrival. Zombie poems dug from the grave of my first book. There was no urgency in them—they read like a project. All Haunt and no House. I printed the manuscript out one night, went to sleep, and when I woke and read it in the sober morning light, I knew it was shite. I took the manuscript, walked it down the hall of my apartment building in the Mission District, and chucked it down the garbage chute.
Voluntary Servitude was born, many months later, on the back of a post card I wrote to myself in Provincetown. I had withdrawn there for a month to read, go to the beach and chase boys and one day while writing a postcard, I penned a line that read to me like a line of a poem. I wrote a few more lines and soon the card was full. I wrote my own address on it and mailed it to San Francisco. Over the next few days I wrote more of these, and when I returned home and opened my mailbox, out fell these cards with the fragmented beginnings of poems. Those became the core poems of VS. I saw in these postcards a terseness, a tighter and more compressed line, and I knew that the more declamatory, self-assured voice of The Anchorage had been exterminated. In my early 30’s I found myself marveling at the self-assurance conveyed by those earlier poems. Voluntary Servitude was partly an effort to put that particular unmediated voice to rest, and, if that weren’t quite possible, I at least wanted to complicate matters. I knew also that I wanted the book to move from beginning to end with no pauses or breaks to enact a single gesture.
One of the reasons I’m glad you decided to do an interview was the fact that I haven’t seen any of your work in recent journals or magazines, and I’d like to know if you could shed some light on that. Are you working on a new book?
I am working on a new book and made good progress on it this last summer. My work slowed down when I got a real job. I teach at Bennington College, and though there are many marvelous things about this job, small colleges also demand a great deal from their faculty members. (The whole point of sending your kid to one of these places is to get them lots of individual attention which means demanding a lot from the faculty). I am just now getting my footing and finding time to get my own work done. Also, my partner and I bought an old, deeply messed-up house a few years ago and have become a gay cliché by pouring our energy into its tasteful restoration. That has often been more compelling to me than sitting with my own thoughts and writing. That being said, I’ve got a manuscript nearing completion I’m pretty excited about.
Why haven’t we seen any of these poems in journals or magazines?
These new poems, although not at all in the confessional mode, seem very personal to me. As a consequence I have been rather protective of them. I was in no hurry to have anyone read these poems, and have instead kept them home, not allowed them to date. Some of the poems meditate on ideas of faith and God and I find even typing that here to be a difficult confession. At some point I had a sense that the poems may actually be bad, though I don’t care anymore if they are. I’m compelled by them and want to keep writing them, and maybe someone will want to read them. I have a small group of coming out in Poetry, and others will, with any luck, be on the way soon.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
I have been a reader and judge for a number of contests, and I can’t stress enough the need to get the reader’s attention from the get-go. A boring first poem is often enough to get your manuscript tossed. A boring second poem almost certainly will. Be audacious. Surprise the reader and whatever you do, don’t think you know what the judge is looking for based on some notion you might have of their taste, as in, “She would never like my work, so I’m not going to send my manuscript.”
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
That depends how you define change. If you are thinking of change in terms of political policy, or inciting riots, or shaping political movements, the answer is no. And thank goodness. Those ideas of change are real, but also pedestrian, common, worldly and as the Quakers used to say, “of the Creature,”—not the province of the imagination. Political change is basically about hard work. It’s dull, often frustrating, relies on absolutes, and you have to have an appetite for it to do it successfully. If by change you also mean small movements of the spirit, or an expansion in one’s mind which tunes it to the possibilities of language and human yearning, if by change you mean bringing the voices of the dead back to life, or being able to imagine someone else’s world or experiences, if by change you mean making the impossible imaginable by rendering it into language, then yes—poetry creates change. The changes it creates are mostly invisible and impossible to measure but they are, in the end, the kinds of changes that make us more expansive, more tenderly human, more capable of love, less lonely, more generous. Any attempts to belittle those kinds of changes, or dismiss them are typically generated by sad, narrow, rigid, bullying minds. Good poetry resists stupidity.
*******************************************************************************************
Mark Wunderlich’s first volume of poetry, The Anchorage, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999 and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second volume, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 1994. He is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the NEA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Amy Lowell Trust. His work has appeared in journals such as the Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Poetry, Ploughshares, among others, and his poems have been widely anthologized. He has taught at Stanford and Barnard College and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, San Francisco State University and Ohio University. As an arts administrator, he served as the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and has worked for the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, Inc., the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he was an Arts Administration Fellow. He is currently teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
*******************************************************************************************
The manuscript was in circulation for about three years. I was very eager to have it published—no surprise there—but that eagerness blinded me to some of the manuscript’s flaws. I had an early version of the book which I had worked on as my MFA thesis at Columbia, and I promptly got that into the mail. The first year out, that manuscript became a finalist for the NPS. There is something particularly cruel about that contest in that finalists are notified of their status months in advance. The next many weeks morph into a looming preoccupation with the tedious business of poetry contests. I remember it as a time of wild fantasy and hope—all of it built on an incredibly teetery foundation. I didn’t win, though I learned one of the judges had chosen it as a runner up, and had gone with the more mature writer, thinking (and this may be apocryphal—I was told this all second-hand) that I would have my chance eventually, and the older writer should have her due. I found bitter comfort in that news, and in the next couple years my manuscript got knocked out of that competition early on, which was discouraging. Ultimately it was for the best. That same year I received a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and I moved to Cape Cod to spend three seasons writing new poems and making the manuscript sharper, smarter and more substantial. The place and those months changed my work and my life and helped me make The Anchorage a better book..
What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
The book found its shape rather early on. I had the bones of it in place while I was in graduate school and had it divided into four sections. Lucie Brock-Broido had just arrived at Columbia, and we spent a couple late nights at her kitchen table, smoking, and making decisions about the order of poems. I kept much of that as it stood.
I very much liked the process of assembling the poems into an order. Making a book is its own discrete task. One reads the poems and begins to shape a kind of narrative that exists somewhere above the individual poems. A new life emerges, somehow—one created by the book itself. I saw a new self emerge from it like a twin that was of me, but not me at all. It’s an odd experience, and one I found very heady and engaging.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?
I wanted the poems to be in journals, and the manuscript to find a publisher. I was tremendously ambitious and organized about the whole matter. I funneled all the anxiety about my invisibility in the world of arts and letters into the administrative details of keeping work in circulation. Publishing individual poems was always exciting—it still is. At this point in my career, I’m a little embarrassed by the ambition I had, and by my desire for recognition. I’m more embarrassed of the feelings of loathing I felt at the success of others whom I deemed less talented or deserving. I think competitiveness is a mainstay of the world of writing, and it tends to live a subterranean and nocturnal life, replaced in the public discourse with pieties about the noble pursuit of art. The reality is more complicated, and more painful for most who write. I try to let my students know that the real pleasure—the enduring pleasure of writing— is the act itself. The other great pleasure is in reading and understanding the work of others. The other stuff just makes your soul smaller. How’s that for piety?
The book is in four sections, but the third section is entirely comprised of prose poems. Was it planned like this, or did you see them fitting as a section of the book later in the process?
The prose poems weren’t written as a group, but were added piece by piece while I worked on other poems. When I began to shape the book, it fell into quarters and it made sense to me to keep the prose poems together as a group. I have always loved reading letters, and the letters of writers are one of my favorite sorts of books to read. I thought of that section as a collection of letters—like a pack of them you’d find in a desk drawer. The prose poems were conceived as letters to the Beloved who was a figment and a conflation and a missing body, all at once.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
The book was so pretty! It was such a beautiful object! The pages had that excellent library smell! The cover was gorgeous! There was no part of it I did not love. I had one hour of pure, uncomplicated happiness. I thought my elementary school librarian would have been so proud. As the day went on, my mood was punctuated by flickers of doubt, until the reality of the situation came crashing down upon me: What had I done? I was utterly unprepared for the day when I got the one thing I wanted more than anything else. And so I took to my bed. I was in a funk for weeks, feeling both exposed and embarrassed by publication.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
I had one of those rare experiences in that I got just what I wanted for the cover. The image, a photograph of a Roman bronze sculpture of a soldier, was taken by an Italian photographer named Mimo Jodice. As soon as I saw the photograph, I knew it would be perfect. UMass press encouraged me to contact the photographer directly to ask permission, which I did. A friend of mine who spoke Italian wrote to the photographer in my behalf, and a deal was struck. The press had a small sum of money available to pay for the image. When I found out how much it would cost (too much), I wrote a second letter that aimed to both flatter and beg. The photographer’s wife, who managed these affairs, liked the idea of helping a young poet, and so the price was reduced, a slide was packed up and mailed to Amherst and it became the cover.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
The degree and extent to which I anticipated that moment can hardly be fathomed; that state of anticipation was marked by an extraordinary degree of psychological naïveté. In short, I wanted to be (in the small way poets are) famous. How embarrassing it is write that, but it’s true. Granted, I think that urge may have been somewhat less shallow than that which drives people to become contestants on Temptation Island or Fear Factor or The Amazing Race, but not by much. Anyone who writes and publishes has to believe that they are worthy of being heard by more people than can be reached with a simple phone call. A big part of writing is really a narcissistic urge.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
Some really lovely things happened as a result of the book being published. I got letters from people who read it and liked it, and were moved to write to me. I did a book signing at the Grolier Bookstore in Cambridge and when I arrived the window of the store was filled with copies of my book—a huge display. I was invited to take part in an arts festival in San Francisco. For the event I was paired in a reading with Adrienne Rich and, in addition to reading my own work, I was asked to introduce her. She is, of course, a poetry rock star, and there were 500 people at the reading to see her, and as the opening band, they heard me too. It was such an honor to share a stage with her and a bit of an out-of-body experience. Each of those things surprised me. I sometimes marvel at the good fortune of all that.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
I can’t really think of anything that, had it been said to me, I would have had the sense to listen to. Why give anyone advice? Each publication experience is different. I was particularly lucky in that the book got attention. Most first books of poems don’t get a great deal of attention (actually most poetry books, period). The best advice would be to Lower Your Expectations, but who wants to hear that? Why not let someone anticipate good things and hope for the best?
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing?
The Anchorage was, for a first book (actually for any book of poems) quite widely reviewed. I know writers who make a point of never reading their reviews lest they read something wounding or debilitating. I am not that person. I poured over my reviews, memorized them, practically. There were a couple very nice ones, more mixed-positive reviews and many more rotten ones than I could fathom. There was a tone in several reviews that seemed bent on bringing me down to size, deposing me from whatever cushy, well-funded clusterfuck they imagined I inhabited. I was just a guy in his 20’s who published a book and didn’t have health insurance and was struggling to work and pay rent and have friends and write poems, and I realized that what I had was coveted and resented in the same way I had periodically resented and envied the achievements of others. Although my first reaction to these bad reviews was defensive, I also knew that much of what they said might be true. Every review has a subtext, a position or world view they support, and then there is the text of the thing itself—the intersection of taste and rhetoric. In some way I internalized those reviews and thought about them as I wrote new poems. Instead of stopping me, they helped me. They certainly made me tougher and more resolved.
Your second book, Voluntary Servitude, was published a few years ago, and I’d like to talk a little bit about that. First of all, there seems to be more utilization of white space, and a more highly compressed style of poetry than The Anchorage. Was this a natural progression in the years after The Anchorage, or was there a conscious effort at this compression of language and style for the book?
After publishing The Anchorage I soon hatched the idea of writing a book of poems around An Idea; I decided that what I needed was a project. I started writing these historical poems, poems based on folk tales, and they were just plain bad. Dead on arrival. Zombie poems dug from the grave of my first book. There was no urgency in them—they read like a project. All Haunt and no House. I printed the manuscript out one night, went to sleep, and when I woke and read it in the sober morning light, I knew it was shite. I took the manuscript, walked it down the hall of my apartment building in the Mission District, and chucked it down the garbage chute.
Voluntary Servitude was born, many months later, on the back of a post card I wrote to myself in Provincetown. I had withdrawn there for a month to read, go to the beach and chase boys and one day while writing a postcard, I penned a line that read to me like a line of a poem. I wrote a few more lines and soon the card was full. I wrote my own address on it and mailed it to San Francisco. Over the next few days I wrote more of these, and when I returned home and opened my mailbox, out fell these cards with the fragmented beginnings of poems. Those became the core poems of VS. I saw in these postcards a terseness, a tighter and more compressed line, and I knew that the more declamatory, self-assured voice of The Anchorage had been exterminated. In my early 30’s I found myself marveling at the self-assurance conveyed by those earlier poems. Voluntary Servitude was partly an effort to put that particular unmediated voice to rest, and, if that weren’t quite possible, I at least wanted to complicate matters. I knew also that I wanted the book to move from beginning to end with no pauses or breaks to enact a single gesture.
One of the reasons I’m glad you decided to do an interview was the fact that I haven’t seen any of your work in recent journals or magazines, and I’d like to know if you could shed some light on that. Are you working on a new book?
I am working on a new book and made good progress on it this last summer. My work slowed down when I got a real job. I teach at Bennington College, and though there are many marvelous things about this job, small colleges also demand a great deal from their faculty members. (The whole point of sending your kid to one of these places is to get them lots of individual attention which means demanding a lot from the faculty). I am just now getting my footing and finding time to get my own work done. Also, my partner and I bought an old, deeply messed-up house a few years ago and have become a gay cliché by pouring our energy into its tasteful restoration. That has often been more compelling to me than sitting with my own thoughts and writing. That being said, I’ve got a manuscript nearing completion I’m pretty excited about.
Why haven’t we seen any of these poems in journals or magazines?
These new poems, although not at all in the confessional mode, seem very personal to me. As a consequence I have been rather protective of them. I was in no hurry to have anyone read these poems, and have instead kept them home, not allowed them to date. Some of the poems meditate on ideas of faith and God and I find even typing that here to be a difficult confession. At some point I had a sense that the poems may actually be bad, though I don’t care anymore if they are. I’m compelled by them and want to keep writing them, and maybe someone will want to read them. I have a small group of coming out in Poetry, and others will, with any luck, be on the way soon.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
I have been a reader and judge for a number of contests, and I can’t stress enough the need to get the reader’s attention from the get-go. A boring first poem is often enough to get your manuscript tossed. A boring second poem almost certainly will. Be audacious. Surprise the reader and whatever you do, don’t think you know what the judge is looking for based on some notion you might have of their taste, as in, “She would never like my work, so I’m not going to send my manuscript.”
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
That depends how you define change. If you are thinking of change in terms of political policy, or inciting riots, or shaping political movements, the answer is no. And thank goodness. Those ideas of change are real, but also pedestrian, common, worldly and as the Quakers used to say, “of the Creature,”—not the province of the imagination. Political change is basically about hard work. It’s dull, often frustrating, relies on absolutes, and you have to have an appetite for it to do it successfully. If by change you also mean small movements of the spirit, or an expansion in one’s mind which tunes it to the possibilities of language and human yearning, if by change you mean bringing the voices of the dead back to life, or being able to imagine someone else’s world or experiences, if by change you mean making the impossible imaginable by rendering it into language, then yes—poetry creates change. The changes it creates are mostly invisible and impossible to measure but they are, in the end, the kinds of changes that make us more expansive, more tenderly human, more capable of love, less lonely, more generous. Any attempts to belittle those kinds of changes, or dismiss them are typically generated by sad, narrow, rigid, bullying minds. Good poetry resists stupidity.
*******************************************************************************************
Mark Wunderlich’s first volume of poetry, The Anchorage, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999 and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second volume, Voluntary Servitude, was published by Graywolf Press in 1994. He is the recipient of fellowships from Stanford University, the NEA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Amy Lowell Trust. His work has appeared in journals such as the Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Poetry, Ploughshares, among others, and his poems have been widely anthologized. He has taught at Stanford and Barnard College and in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, San Francisco State University and Ohio University. As an arts administrator, he served as the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and has worked for the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, Inc., the University of Arizona Poetry Center and the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he was an Arts Administration Fellow. He is currently teaches literature and writing at Bennington College in Vermont, and lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
*******************************************************************************************
#11 - Brian Brodeur
What was the process like assembling Other Latitudes? How many different versions did it go through before it was chosen as the winner of the 2007 Akron Poetry Prize? Had it always been called Other Latitudes or had it gone through different titles?
For better or worse, I revise endlessly. Over the course of four years, Other Latitudes went through about twenty major transmogrifications before it was finally published. If it hadn’t won the Akron Prize, I’d still be tinkering.
After fifty or so duds, I came up with the current title during a month-long residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. This sounds very romantic, but I was there in winter. At night you’d walk out of your studio and find the air so cold your nose hairs would freeze to the sides of your nostrils.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?
About half of the poems in the book are previously unpublished. But, yes, I’ve certainly experienced the anxiety that many young poets feel about seeing individual poems appear in reputable journals, anthologies, websites, blogs . . . printed on the sides of hot-air balloons, branded into the flanks of show ponies . . .
As I write and submit new work, that anxiety hasn’t diminished. In fact, it may have intensified. There’s also a new anxiety: trying to outdo myself, write better poems than those in my first book.
How much of the book comprised your MFA thesis at George Mason University? It seems now there are more younger poets publishing books that comprised the majority of their creative thesis. Was this the case for you?
Yes and no. About a third of the poems in the book appeared in my MFA thesis, which I finished in August of 2005. The earliest poem in the book was written in 2003, the latest in 2007.
The book is in three sections, with the middle section comprising one poem, “Figure Drawing,” made up of nine sections. Was “Figure Drawing” always in the middle? How did this become the centerpiece of the book?
The idea to use “Figure Drawing” as the centerpiece came from a friend of mine, Sally Keith. In the fall of 2007, she agreed to read a draft of the manuscript and meet me at a bar to discuss it. At that point I felt I had written all of the poems I needed to form a competent manuscript, something I wouldn’t be ashamed to submit for publication, but I didn’t know how to arrange the poems. When Sally made the suggestion of having three sections with a “proem” at the beginning and an epilogue poem at the end, sticking “Figure Drawing” in the middle seemed the most organic way to go.
I always had a group of “core” poems that survived each drastic gutting of the manuscript, poems I considered to be my strongest. Basically, I built the book around them. In an early manifestation, I ordered the work thematically, placing nature poems beside nature poems, family poems beside family poems. But this seemed too simplistic a way to construct a collection of poetry, dishonest in some way, not at all evocative of how I see the world.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
Joy. Whiskey. Nothing much after that.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
No.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
A few strangers have e-mailed me to say they’ve enjoyed the book, which I’ve found intensely gratifying. A book is worthless until a reader connects with it. As Auden said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Instead, it’s “a way of happening, a mouth.” Poems live within the minds and bodies of sympathetic readers. Discovering notes in my Inbox from people I’ve never met has enabled me to preserve my illusion that the book is actually being read, that it has taken on a life of its own, a life apart from mine.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I’ve been giving public readings to support the book, scheduling events in Akron, OH, Salem, MA, Washington, DC, Blacksburg, VA, Cullowhee, NC, among others. Basically, I’ll read wherever I’m asked.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
What did Eliot say to the young Donald Hall when he asked for advice on living abroad in Oxford? Wear long underwear.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
Well, I’m writing, revising, and submitting new work to journals and magazines, hoping that these poems will somehow cohere into a second manuscript. But I have no idea what shape this manuscript would take.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Keep a calendar, pay attention to who’s judging particular contests, submit religiously, and don’t forget to write new poems. I should also say that persistence is half the battle. Even a poet of middling talent can publish a book, as long as she or he keeps at it. Whether you think this is encouraging or discouraging, we see it all the time.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
If more people read poetry and took it seriously, yes, I believe it could, but only on an individual level. I’m thinking of the famous quote from W.C.W.’s “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” For the poet and reader both, poetry is a private act, written in isolation, read alone. Yet love, death, birth, beauty, injustice, sex—all the human facts of the world that link us as a species through language—are only a few examples of “what is found there.”
We should also remember that “Asphodel” is a love poem to Williams’s wife, Flossy, written towards the end of their lives. Like the asphodel, the flower of hell, love becomes the one human force that triumphs over darkness and rises above death. The best poems, for me, share this ambition.
*******************************************************************************************
Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, judged by Stephen Dunn, and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, River Styx, and Verse Daily. Brian lives and works in Fairfax, VA.
For better or worse, I revise endlessly. Over the course of four years, Other Latitudes went through about twenty major transmogrifications before it was finally published. If it hadn’t won the Akron Prize, I’d still be tinkering.
After fifty or so duds, I came up with the current title during a month-long residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. This sounds very romantic, but I was there in winter. At night you’d walk out of your studio and find the air so cold your nose hairs would freeze to the sides of your nostrils.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript?
About half of the poems in the book are previously unpublished. But, yes, I’ve certainly experienced the anxiety that many young poets feel about seeing individual poems appear in reputable journals, anthologies, websites, blogs . . . printed on the sides of hot-air balloons, branded into the flanks of show ponies . . .
As I write and submit new work, that anxiety hasn’t diminished. In fact, it may have intensified. There’s also a new anxiety: trying to outdo myself, write better poems than those in my first book.
How much of the book comprised your MFA thesis at George Mason University? It seems now there are more younger poets publishing books that comprised the majority of their creative thesis. Was this the case for you?
Yes and no. About a third of the poems in the book appeared in my MFA thesis, which I finished in August of 2005. The earliest poem in the book was written in 2003, the latest in 2007.
The book is in three sections, with the middle section comprising one poem, “Figure Drawing,” made up of nine sections. Was “Figure Drawing” always in the middle? How did this become the centerpiece of the book?
The idea to use “Figure Drawing” as the centerpiece came from a friend of mine, Sally Keith. In the fall of 2007, she agreed to read a draft of the manuscript and meet me at a bar to discuss it. At that point I felt I had written all of the poems I needed to form a competent manuscript, something I wouldn’t be ashamed to submit for publication, but I didn’t know how to arrange the poems. When Sally made the suggestion of having three sections with a “proem” at the beginning and an epilogue poem at the end, sticking “Figure Drawing” in the middle seemed the most organic way to go.
I always had a group of “core” poems that survived each drastic gutting of the manuscript, poems I considered to be my strongest. Basically, I built the book around them. In an early manifestation, I ordered the work thematically, placing nature poems beside nature poems, family poems beside family poems. But this seemed too simplistic a way to construct a collection of poetry, dishonest in some way, not at all evocative of how I see the world.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
Joy. Whiskey. Nothing much after that.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
No.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
A few strangers have e-mailed me to say they’ve enjoyed the book, which I’ve found intensely gratifying. A book is worthless until a reader connects with it. As Auden said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Instead, it’s “a way of happening, a mouth.” Poems live within the minds and bodies of sympathetic readers. Discovering notes in my Inbox from people I’ve never met has enabled me to preserve my illusion that the book is actually being read, that it has taken on a life of its own, a life apart from mine.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I’ve been giving public readings to support the book, scheduling events in Akron, OH, Salem, MA, Washington, DC, Blacksburg, VA, Cullowhee, NC, among others. Basically, I’ll read wherever I’m asked.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
What did Eliot say to the young Donald Hall when he asked for advice on living abroad in Oxford? Wear long underwear.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
Well, I’m writing, revising, and submitting new work to journals and magazines, hoping that these poems will somehow cohere into a second manuscript. But I have no idea what shape this manuscript would take.
Do you have any additional advice for poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Keep a calendar, pay attention to who’s judging particular contests, submit religiously, and don’t forget to write new poems. I should also say that persistence is half the battle. Even a poet of middling talent can publish a book, as long as she or he keeps at it. Whether you think this is encouraging or discouraging, we see it all the time.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
If more people read poetry and took it seriously, yes, I believe it could, but only on an individual level. I’m thinking of the famous quote from W.C.W.’s “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” For the poet and reader both, poetry is a private act, written in isolation, read alone. Yet love, death, birth, beauty, injustice, sex—all the human facts of the world that link us as a species through language—are only a few examples of “what is found there.”
We should also remember that “Asphodel” is a love poem to Williams’s wife, Flossy, written towards the end of their lives. Like the asphodel, the flower of hell, love becomes the one human force that triumphs over darkness and rises above death. The best poems, for me, share this ambition.
*******************************************************************************************
Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, judged by Stephen Dunn, and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, River Styx, and Verse Daily. Brian lives and works in Fairfax, VA.
- Buy Other Latitudes from Amazon
- Read a Conversation with Brian at Barn Owl Review Online
- Read two poems at storySouth
- Read "Narcissus" at Verse Daily
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
#10 - Suzanne Frischkorn
How often had you sent out Lit Windowpane before it was chosen for publication by Main Street Rag Press?
Main Street Rag was the first press I sent Lit Windowpane to and also the only press I sent it to until the day it was accepted—I had to withdraw it from a contest I had entered that morning. An earlier manuscript went out about 24 times and was named a finalist or semi-finalist many times.
What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
Initially I found it overwhelming. I had already published several chapbooks and had a lot of work that had never been collected. I had spent many years writing poems and not working towards a book. I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a collection made of chapbooks. And I knew I wanted a collection that had an arc, but it was very difficult to sort through all that work and find one.
It took about a year to draft the first manuscript. Once I felt confident that it was complete I began to send it out and I was happy when it started placing in contests. I remember the distinct feeling of closure and felt that I had moved on. I was writing new poems, poems that didn’t belong in the manuscript. Eventually the finalist notes began to lose their charm.
I went back to the manuscript and took it apart. Then I put it back together. Up to this point I hadn’t shared the manuscript with anyone since the early draft stage and the thought of sharing it with anyone besides an anonymous reader made me feel nauseous, still I knew I needed an objective viewpoint so I sent it to a friend. His feedback helped everything fall into place. All the new poems I had been writing, the ones where I had “moved on,” are in Lit Windowpane. Now that I look back it’s a little strange to realize that while I was putting together and submitting what I thought would be my first book I was writing what would become my first book.
As for the poems in the original manuscript some of them went on to become the chapbook, American Flamingo, and the others may make an appearance in my next manuscript.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript, or was the focus primarily on assembling the manuscript without worrying about previous publication?
Credits weren’t a consideration when arranging the manuscript—the book was the main thing.
Often poetry books, first or not, can feel long. There are 47 total pages of poetry in Lit Windowpane. Most contests and open reading periods call for a 48-page minimum. Was there always such a focus on brevity when you assembled the manuscript?
In manuscript form there were 50 pages and during the layout of the book the page count changed. The book felt complete to me at that length, it wasn’t an intentional focus on brevity. My main focus was not to sacrifice the integrity of the book as a book and perhaps that’s where brevity comes in.
Not only that, but it seems like the majority of the poems in the book are very short, yet they don’t feel short. Who are some of your influences, and do you set out to write shorter poems, or do many of poems naturally seem to turn out that way by the end?
Thank you, what a nice compliment. My poems are definitely not long and are most often referred to as spare. Occasionally I try to write against this inclination and make attempts at a more lush, discursive type of poem, but eventually find myself reverting to the shorter poem.
It’s difficult for me to point to a specific influence because I believe everything you read influences the way you write and I read a tremendous amount. Some of the poets that I return to often are Dickinson, Ammons, Stevens, Bishop, and Auden. I also read a lot of contemporary poetry either in book form or in journals.
The book includes no sections—it starts with the first poem and ends with the last poem continuously—rather than multiple sections like a lot of first books. Was it always this way?
Yes. Once I started to assemble Lit Windowpane I discovered that each poem led to the next and felt sections would stop the momentum.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
All I remember is finding the box of books on the porch, carrying it in, setting it down, and staring at it a lot longer than a normal person would before I finally opened it. I had already seen galleys, but I wasn’t prepared for how lovely the book looked in person. I loved the cover, the way the poems faced each other, the scent of the book’s pages. I walked around for a week, picking the book up, looking at it, and setting it down, over and over.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
Scott Douglass at MSRP let me pick out the cover art with the understanding that MSRP had the final say. Once I started looking for cover art I quickly realized I didn’t want something too literal, and that I would prefer an illustration rather than a photograph, or a painting. I found one by the artist Bodhi Hill I really liked, but wasn’t quite sure if it was right for the cover. When Scott sought Hill out he found his website and thought there were others in his portfolio that would suit the cover better. I went over to take a look and fell in love with the illustration we selected for the cover. I am really happy with the way it resonates with the poems.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
No. I knew too many poets with first books who had readily and quickly disabused me of that notion. One of my friends said it best, “You publish your book and nothing happens. You’re still the same person.” In retrospect I’m glad I was prepared for nothing to happen.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
There have been some surprises. A lot of people have expressed an interest in reviewing the book and there have already been two generous reviews from people I didn’t even know were planning to review it. Verse Daily featured one of the poems and I’ve had requests for more interviews, and invitations to read.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I went all out with online promotion: emails, on my blog, and on Facebook. It felt dirty and necessary at once. As a poet publishing with a small press it was important to promote the book as much as possible. I had to do all I could to help MSRP sell the book. I’ll continue to promote the book through readings.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
Tom Colicchio, one of the judges on Top Chef, often tells the chefs competing “You need to bring it. This is a competition.” I could have used a little of that attitude, and I encourage anyone else sending out a manuscript to take Colicchio’s advice.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
I’m not so sure it’s had a difference, although I do find myself returning to my first love, the essay, maybe that’s a difference or maybe that would have happened anyway. I’m also putting together another collection of poems, and working on the New Haven issue I’m editing for LOCUSPOINT.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Remember that you are more than your poems. Do not allow the submission process to turn you into a mass of dejection.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Yes.
*******************************************************************************************
In addition to Lit Windowpane, Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of several chapbooks most recently: American Flamingo (MiPOesias Press, 2008) Spring Tide, (Aldrich Museum, 2005) and Red Paper Flower, (Little Poem Press, 2004). Her poems appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Ecotone, Indiana Review, MARGIE, Poet Lore, and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf, 2007). She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award, and an Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.
Main Street Rag was the first press I sent Lit Windowpane to and also the only press I sent it to until the day it was accepted—I had to withdraw it from a contest I had entered that morning. An earlier manuscript went out about 24 times and was named a finalist or semi-finalist many times.
What was the process like assembling the book? How many different versions did it go through as you were sending it out?
Initially I found it overwhelming. I had already published several chapbooks and had a lot of work that had never been collected. I had spent many years writing poems and not working towards a book. I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a collection made of chapbooks. And I knew I wanted a collection that had an arc, but it was very difficult to sort through all that work and find one.
It took about a year to draft the first manuscript. Once I felt confident that it was complete I began to send it out and I was happy when it started placing in contests. I remember the distinct feeling of closure and felt that I had moved on. I was writing new poems, poems that didn’t belong in the manuscript. Eventually the finalist notes began to lose their charm.
I went back to the manuscript and took it apart. Then I put it back together. Up to this point I hadn’t shared the manuscript with anyone since the early draft stage and the thought of sharing it with anyone besides an anonymous reader made me feel nauseous, still I knew I needed an objective viewpoint so I sent it to a friend. His feedback helped everything fall into place. All the new poems I had been writing, the ones where I had “moved on,” are in Lit Windowpane. Now that I look back it’s a little strange to realize that while I was putting together and submitting what I thought would be my first book I was writing what would become my first book.
As for the poems in the original manuscript some of them went on to become the chapbook, American Flamingo, and the others may make an appearance in my next manuscript.
What about the publication of the actual poems prior to the book being published? Was there a concern for you to have the majority of the poems published before you were sending out your manuscript, or was the focus primarily on assembling the manuscript without worrying about previous publication?
Credits weren’t a consideration when arranging the manuscript—the book was the main thing.
Often poetry books, first or not, can feel long. There are 47 total pages of poetry in Lit Windowpane. Most contests and open reading periods call for a 48-page minimum. Was there always such a focus on brevity when you assembled the manuscript?
In manuscript form there were 50 pages and during the layout of the book the page count changed. The book felt complete to me at that length, it wasn’t an intentional focus on brevity. My main focus was not to sacrifice the integrity of the book as a book and perhaps that’s where brevity comes in.
Not only that, but it seems like the majority of the poems in the book are very short, yet they don’t feel short. Who are some of your influences, and do you set out to write shorter poems, or do many of poems naturally seem to turn out that way by the end?
Thank you, what a nice compliment. My poems are definitely not long and are most often referred to as spare. Occasionally I try to write against this inclination and make attempts at a more lush, discursive type of poem, but eventually find myself reverting to the shorter poem.
It’s difficult for me to point to a specific influence because I believe everything you read influences the way you write and I read a tremendous amount. Some of the poets that I return to often are Dickinson, Ammons, Stevens, Bishop, and Auden. I also read a lot of contemporary poetry either in book form or in journals.
The book includes no sections—it starts with the first poem and ends with the last poem continuously—rather than multiple sections like a lot of first books. Was it always this way?
Yes. Once I started to assemble Lit Windowpane I discovered that each poem led to the next and felt sections would stop the momentum.
What do you remember about the day when you saw your finished book for the first time?
All I remember is finding the box of books on the porch, carrying it in, setting it down, and staring at it a lot longer than a normal person would before I finally opened it. I had already seen galleys, but I wasn’t prepared for how lovely the book looked in person. I loved the cover, the way the poems faced each other, the scent of the book’s pages. I walked around for a week, picking the book up, looking at it, and setting it down, over and over.
Did you suggest the image that was used on the cover? Or were you offered choices?
Scott Douglass at MSRP let me pick out the cover art with the understanding that MSRP had the final say. Once I started looking for cover art I quickly realized I didn’t want something too literal, and that I would prefer an illustration rather than a photograph, or a painting. I found one by the artist Bodhi Hill I really liked, but wasn’t quite sure if it was right for the cover. When Scott sought Hill out he found his website and thought there were others in his portfolio that would suit the cover better. I went over to take a look and fell in love with the illustration we selected for the cover. I am really happy with the way it resonates with the poems.
Before the day you ripped open that box and saw your book for the first time, did you imagine that your life would change because of it?
No. I knew too many poets with first books who had readily and quickly disabused me of that notion. One of my friends said it best, “You publish your book and nothing happens. You’re still the same person.” In retrospect I’m glad I was prepared for nothing to happen.
How has your life been different since your book came out? Were there things you thought would happen that didn't? Surprises?
There have been some surprises. A lot of people have expressed an interest in reviewing the book and there have already been two generous reviews from people I didn’t even know were planning to review it. Verse Daily featured one of the poems and I’ve had requests for more interviews, and invitations to read.
What have you been doing to promote the book, and what have those experiences been like for you?
I went all out with online promotion: emails, on my blog, and on Facebook. It felt dirty and necessary at once. As a poet publishing with a small press it was important to promote the book as much as possible. I had to do all I could to help MSRP sell the book. I’ll continue to promote the book through readings.
What advice do you wish someone had given you before your first book came out?
Tom Colicchio, one of the judges on Top Chef, often tells the chefs competing “You need to bring it. This is a competition.” I could have used a little of that attitude, and I encourage anyone else sending out a manuscript to take Colicchio’s advice.
What influence has the book's publication had on your subsequent writing? And are any new books or other projects on the horizon?
I’m not so sure it’s had a difference, although I do find myself returning to my first love, the essay, maybe that’s a difference or maybe that would have happened anyway. I’m also putting together another collection of poems, and working on the New Haven issue I’m editing for LOCUSPOINT.
Do you have any additional advice for first poets sending out their first books to contests and open reading periods?
Remember that you are more than your poems. Do not allow the submission process to turn you into a mass of dejection.
Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?
Yes.
*******************************************************************************************
In addition to Lit Windowpane, Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of several chapbooks most recently: American Flamingo (MiPOesias Press, 2008) Spring Tide, (Aldrich Museum, 2005) and Red Paper Flower, (Little Poem Press, 2004). Her poems appear in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Ecotone, Indiana Review, MARGIE, Poet Lore, and Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series (Knopf, 2007). She is the recipient of the Aldrich Poetry Award, and an Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.
- Visit Suzanne's Website
- Visit Suzanne's Blog
- Read two poems at Diode
- Read a poem at Verse Daily
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)