tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43947370792489796112024-03-05T02:01:55.054-05:00Nancy Chen Long[75% poetry + 25% food] +/- .01 % miscellanyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger55125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-49625844858450183242019-09-16T15:10:00.000-04:002019-09-16T15:12:09.224-04:00Manuscript Selected as Contest Winner<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SAuhNQnyVhY/XX_dFdTxE0I/AAAAAAAAC5Q/5YkZkhSSSqYxhvx_I4BjlBfsy-SbzKZ4QCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/DiodeP2b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1257" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SAuhNQnyVhY/XX_dFdTxE0I/AAAAAAAAC5Q/5YkZkhSSSqYxhvx_I4BjlBfsy-SbzKZ4QCNcBGAsYHQ/s640/DiodeP2b.jpg" width="500" /></a></div>
<br />
I'm over the moon that my manuscript <i>Wider than the Sky</i> was one of the manuscripts selected by Diode Editions in their annual contest! An excerpt from it was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America <a href="http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/awards/annual/winners/2019/award_4/?" target="_blank">Robert H. Winner Award</a>. The manuscript’s title is from Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—For—put them side by side.” The manuscript itself explores memory and its role in identity, how the physiology of the brain impacts who we are, the role of the senses in the formation of memories, how the human brain is wired for story, and how who we are—both individually and as a society—is, in one sense, a narrative.<br />
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It's an honor to be part of the Diode Editions family. Congratulations to the other winners! You can read the entire announcement here: <a href="https://www.diodeeditions.com/post/coming-soon-from-diode-editions-1">https://www.diodeeditions.com/post/coming-soon-from-diode-editions-1</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-55945341065454273852019-04-01T10:56:00.000-04:002019-04-01T10:56:00.126-04:00Interview with Poet Robert Walicki<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cD4TvqktMEE/XJ_rZeKFi-I/AAAAAAAACoI/IFryE2VCK6Y2HtT3K71YPTDSLIVitAloACLcBGAs/s1600/RobertWalicki2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1396" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cD4TvqktMEE/XJ_rZeKFi-I/AAAAAAAACoI/IFryE2VCK6Y2HtT3K71YPTDSLIVitAloACLcBGAs/s400/RobertWalicki2.jpg" width="345" /></a></div>
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<i>The first time your body broke was to sound.</i><br />
- from "B-Boy Meets Future Self" by Robert Walicki</div>
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/robertwalickipoet/" target="_blank">Robert Walicki</a>’s work has appeared in over 40 publications including <i>Fourth River, Stone Highway Review, Red River Review,</i> and others. He is the author of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Black-Angels-Robert-Walicki/dp/1989305008/" target="_blank">Black Angels</a></i> (Six Gallery Press, 2019), and two chapbooks: <i>A Room Full of Trees</i> (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and <i>The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</i> (Night Ballet Press, 2015), which was nominated to the 2016 Poet’s House List of Books in NYC.<br />
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<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS1yWPloxGukK9JU1H0-6VyywOIioXKMwG3FabPJHJxtQ-8Yn5gX_aC8nYgJuUiSoYJp3gJL4cmGpAYoHpUHnwUNJmfVTpAW4EE7Z_jlwwEBpIB30z24jET5TBem0NTLTuNsyh03reIiOq/s1600/RobertWalick_BlackAngels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS1yWPloxGukK9JU1H0-6VyywOIioXKMwG3FabPJHJxtQ-8Yn5gX_aC8nYgJuUiSoYJp3gJL4cmGpAYoHpUHnwUNJmfVTpAW4EE7Z_jlwwEBpIB30z24jET5TBem0NTLTuNsyh03reIiOq/s200/RobertWalick_BlackAngels.jpg" width="133" /></a>Robert Walicki and I have been acquainted for several years. I wrote a blurb for his chapbook <i>The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</i> and had the wonderful pleasure of reading with him and Angele Ellis at City of Asylum in Pittsburgh. It was a delight interview him about poetry and his debut book <i>Black Angels.</i> <br />
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<b>Praise for <i>Black Angels</i>: </b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In <i>Black Angels</i>, Robert Walicki says, "...men will want to break you, / like they've been broken." These poems jackhammer us with compassion, asking over and over: What does it mean to be a man? The haunted details shift from the scarecrow to the dying fish, from Bowie to Prince, as the voice professes its burning love: "I caught a fish but didn't / want blood." ~Jan Beatty, author of <i>Jackknife</i></blockquote>
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<b>Still Falling</b> by Robert Walicki<br />
(a poem from <i>Black Angels</i>)<br />
<br />
<div style="line-height: 34px;">
like the air from a door when it's closing<br />
strip of light revealing keys<br />
on a table, crayons, finger paints, glitter on the floor<br />
like air in the restaurant between us<br />
I was talking about your children, <br />
this strip of life this sudden whatever <br />
like the air this sudden door<br />
you kept talking <br />
like the rain<br />
from a summer when rice hit your dress <br />
against the door of your car as they drove you<br />
away like a door closing <br />
into air before your children came <br />
like rain changing over <br />
this sudden whatever <br />
I kept talking about children <br />
this weather of you <br />
leaving</div>
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<br />
<b>Congratulations on the publication of your debut book <i>Black Angels</i>! Please tell us a bit about it. How did you decide on the title?</b><br />
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RW: Thanks! Well, <i>Black Angels</i> is the title of one of the poems in this collection that I think best represents what this book is about. At it's heart, "Black Angels" is about blue collar life and survival. Other poems move outside the identity of the speaker, and aim to represent the working class experience as a whole. There's something pure and transformative about these hard experiences and the characters that live in this imperfect world. These are the "Black Angels".<br />
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<br />
<b>In a 2012 Poetry Society of America series called <a href="https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/" target="_blank">Poets on Politics</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fady-joudah" target="_blank">Fady Joudah</a> writes: “The political in poetry is always born out of the incessant assault [that] systems of power and knowledge impose on the individual spirit, on ways of seeing, and on speaking truth to power.” How do you define political poetry? I was wondering, since one of the themes in <i>Black Angels</i> is shining a light on, and interrogating, the circumstances of the working class, do you consider your poetry political?</b><br />
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RW: I don't like to use the word "political" as I find it limiting, but when we write about the human condition, our work inherently becomes political. It has always been important to me to only write from personal experience first and foremost. The poems need to have an authenticity to them, and this is usually the barometer from which I start from. I usually don't intend to write a "political" poem, or a poem that has a direct agenda from that perspective. It's usually a byproduct
of the poem's subject. That said, working conditions is a subject that I'm very passionate about. I've seen many individuals whose lives and health were gravely
compromised, or even killed, as a result of dangerous working conditions brought on by the abuse, apathy and the greed of individual in positions of power over them. Most of the time, I want to simply take a snapshot of these experiences and invite the reader into the conversation. There are times however, when we are charged with taking a stand in this life, and poems like "Writing Political Poems at the Squirrel Hill Cafe" are a good example of the responsibility we have as poets and writers to speak about the climate of injustice, intolerance and hate we currently live in.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Poet Philip Levine was known for writing about the working class and had been called “Voice of the Workingman” (<i>New York Times</i>, 8/9/2011.) In the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-levine" target="_blank">Poetry Foundation’s entry for Levine</a>, they write that “Levine’s poetry for and about the common man is distinguished by simple diction and a rhythmic narrative style” and offer an argument by author Charles Molesworth “that Levine’s work reflects a mistrust of language; rather than compressing multiple meanings into individual words and phrases as in traditionally conceived poetry, Levine’s simple narratives work to reflect the concrete and matter-of-fact speech patterns of working people.” Do you find the same thing in your own work? How did you navigate between the two impulses of lyric and narrative? </b><br />
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RW: Absolutely, language for me, falls into that category of authenticity. If these experiences are to be at all believable, they have to reflect the grit and the concrete
details in the narratives. This is a very tactile world I'm writing about. It's not an academic or conceptual world. It's a mindset that's ruled by what
is experienced by the senses. There may be a misconception however, that
there's not a lot of subtlety in this type of writing, but there's always
another layer to the onion in a lot of these poems. There's always more going
on there for me, than what is on the surface. That's not to say that there
isn't a lyrical component to the poems. Sometimes it's present more in some
poems than it is in others. It really depends on the poem, and I try to get out
of the way when writing and let the poem lead me.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Balance
though, between the lyrical and the narrative, is still very important. I can
usually tell when I start writing a poem where that balance will strike. There
has to be some music in every poem, but the music can be rough edged. It
doesn't have to have an obvious beauty to it. In fact, I prefer that it
doesn't. I often fight against the urge to be lyrical. I want the tension and
the struggle between the narrative and the lyrical to be there. I think it
gives the poems energy and keeps them from being one dimensional. Most
importantly, I want the poem to feel as if it's been lived. Everything else is
secondary.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>You worked full-time while writing Black Angels. How do you make time for your writing?</b><br />
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RW: It's a juggling act. I go through long periods where I write copiously and other periods when I'm fallow.Lately, I've been trying to work on a regimen where i'm writing at least twice a week, but even that doesn't always work out. I've learned to not be so hard on myself though. Even the times when we aren't writing, we actually are. We're constantly absorbing experiences that come out in our writing eventually.<br />
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<b>What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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RW: The poem, "Black Angel" is definitely one of the most crucial poems in this collection, but I think I'd like to include the poem, "Real Men", as it not only encapsulates those construction themed work poems that are the heart of this book, this poem bridges the gap between family, identity,and how the memories of our past shape who we are now. Here is the poem:<br />
<br />
<b>Real Men</b><br />
<br />
Say it loud in a huff.<br />
Shoot off their mouths and heavy guns,<br />
drag bloody deer, leave their hearts on the ground.<br />
<br />
Real men roll their sleeves up,<br />
a handful of chips, edge of a mouth,<br />
dripping with sauce, give you shit.<br />
<br />
Real men screw tool boxes down to floors,<br />
put rocks in your hubcaps, lock you in porta johns, tip them over,<br />
<br />
Real men call you <i>sissy</i> and <i>bitch</i>,<br />
quick as a fist bump, a punch in the gut at break<br />
Say, <i>I thought you’ve done this before?</i><br />
Water break, gas leak, jack hammer between your balls<br />
<br />
in some grandma’s basement. Say this breaking is necessary—<br />
flaking concrete, ears and shoulder, burning.<br />
So, when the ground opens, grab a shovel<br />
<br />
and get down on your knees, keep moving as if this is your religion,<br />
your hands, the cuts and blood,<br />
the men standing above you in hard hats, laughing.<br />
Every man you’ve ever met resembles the father you couldn’t know.<br />
<br />
The father, heavy, as the shadows that fall over you, <br />
6 feet of leaning earth, this ditch line, crumbling<br />
into the shape of a body, your body, learning.<br />
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<b>In publishing Black Angels, were there things you thought would happen, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen? </b> <br />
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RW: Well, after publishing two chapbooks, I thought it would be a much smoother road, publishing this one, but that really wasn't the case. I knew I had something special with this book, and I can't thank Nathan Kukulski enough, from Six Gallery Press enough for believing in this manuscript and bringing this out into the world. He did a beautiful job! I'd also like to give a shout out to the amazingly talented poet and photographer, Rebecca Clever who did a phenomenal job with the cover, and last but certainly not least, I especially wanted to thank my poet friend Rick St. John for reading this manuscript and offering his insightful and invaluable help in early drafts! I would say that was the most unexpected thing that happened. I can't express how grateful I was in having an incredibly gifted poet like Rick mentor me and guide me through the daunting experience of putting a book together.<br />
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<b>When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you? </b><br />
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RW: Many. My first big mentor was my high school English teacher who blew the top of my head off exposing me to 20th century poetry and literature. It was the moment I fell in love with the written word. I didn't know poetry could relate to me in such a personal way until she exposed me to writers and poets like Franz Kafka, T.S Eliot, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.<br />
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<b>So which poets would you say have influenced you?</b><br />
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RW: This is always an evolving list, but the poets who have influenced me the most would have to be: Jan Beatty, Dorianne Laux, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, and too many others to list! I would say that more than any other trait, these poets gave me permission to write frankly, and with restraint, about working class living with a kind of hard, edged beauty that I keep trying to aspire to.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>When you write, do you imagine a reader?</b><br />
<br />
RW: I didn't initially, but when I began presenting my work in front of people, I tried to imagine the kind of audience whom my work might resonate with. One memorable night comes to mind after a reading, when a heavy equipment operator, who was the husband of one of my co-readers, came up to me after the reading, really inspired and validated by my work poems. I felt like what I was doing mattered at that moment, that I was making a meaningful connection with someone who didn't write about the experience, he lived it.<br />
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<b>Generally speaking, how do you approach revision?</b><br />
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RW: Several ways. It's usually a process. I ALWAYS compose on the computer. It's very helpful in seeing line breaks, assonance, consonance, lyricism. Oddly, I edit as I go, for the most part. I would venture to guess that most poets just write and "get it out" first, but for me, editing actually fuels my creativity. I also like to read drafts aloud alone. It helps me "hear" more of what may work and doesn't work. Where I'm being too wordy, or prosy.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
<br />
RW: Actually, I just learned that my latest manuscript, "Fountain" was just accepted for publication at Main Street Rag, so I'm currently putting the finishing touches on that. I'm really excited about this book as well, but for different reasons. In the new collection, there's a bit more emphasis on language and lyricism. The grounded blue collar aesthetic is still there, but I'm trying to stretch the boundaries out, see where they take me.<br />
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<b>Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?</b><br />
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RW: Read, read, read, not only work you enjoy, but work that challenges you and that you aren't naturally drawn to. Some of the most inspiring poems that have really stirred my imagination have been from poets whose work I wasn't initially interested in. If I had any other advice to give, I'd say that other than continuing to write, the most important practice one can have is to join workshops and to share your work with others. I've been fortunate to live in a community like Pittsburgh that not only is supportive, but offers a lot of opportunities for folks starting out in terms of free, peer led workshops for writers and poets of all levels. We aren't meant to do this in a vacuum. If I've grown at all as a poet, it's been because of the guidance, support and friendships of fellow poets I've shared my work with.<br />
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<b>Listen to Robert</b>:<br />
- on <a href="https://grcmc.org/theatre/node/35445/electric-poetry-bob-walicki" target="_blank">Electric Poetry</a><br />
- on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdnSv8085xk" target="_blank">YouTube</a><br />
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<b>Find Robert online</b>:<br />
- Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/walicki_robert">https://twitter.com/walicki_robert</a><br />
- Facebook: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/robertwalickipoet/">https://www.facebook.com/robertwalickipoet/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">All poems printed or quoted in this post © Robert Walicki <i>Black Angels</i> (Six Gallery Press, 2019)</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-87351787127815387972019-03-06T19:30:00.000-05:002019-09-21T18:52:56.153-04:00Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vt0Tu752gZk/XX_a_kuNk4I/AAAAAAAAC40/KukGmicHQMgdx3F29MuSgVoTejhoKv6MQCNcBGAsYHQ/s1600/PSA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="235" data-original-width="816" height="115" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Vt0Tu752gZk/XX_a_kuNk4I/AAAAAAAAC40/KukGmicHQMgdx3F29MuSgVoTejhoKv6MQCNcBGAsYHQ/s400/PSA.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
WOW, pinch me! I am honored and excited to have an excerpt of my second manuscript <i>Wider Than the Sky</i> selected as the winner of the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. I am so grateful to Patricia Spears Jones for selecting the poems and for her kind words about them, and to the PSA for all they do to promote poetry. Only one other person so far has seen this second manuscript, and I've been doubt-riddled. Receiving the award is such good news. A sample poem from the manuscript is included here: <a href="https://poetrysociety.org/award-winners/2019-individual-awards/robert-h-winner-memorial-award" target="_blank">https://poetrysociety.org/award-winners/2019-individual-awards/robert-h-winner-memorial-award</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-49821758253072948362018-05-11T14:13:00.000-04:002018-05-11T14:44:12.973-04:00Gaudy Boy Poetry Book PrizeGaudy Boy, a new independent press, is holding its inaugural Poetry Book Prize. The prize will be awarded annually for an unpublished manuscript of original poetry written in English by an author of Asian heritage residing anywhere in the world. No proof of Asian heritage will be required—they operate on the honor system. Below are details for the contest, <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4394737079248979611#about">as well a bit more about the press and the publisher</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0wqD6IYzPV4/WvXCN-BeAFI/AAAAAAAACbU/777Joz-9whgomSX75kBBMCwRfj280TiWwCLcBGAs/s1600/GuadyBoy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="169" data-original-width="316" height="212" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0wqD6IYzPV4/WvXCN-BeAFI/AAAAAAAACbU/777Joz-9whgomSX75kBBMCwRfj280TiWwCLcBGAs/s400/GuadyBoy.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>PRIZE</b>: Book publication and $1,000<br />
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<b>DEADLINE</b>: May 31, 2018<br />
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<b>FEE</b>: $10<br />
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<b>ELIGIBILITY</b>: Open to emerging and established poets of Asian heritage residing anywhere. No proof of Asian heritage is required. Manuscripts should be written in English and be between 50–100 pages.<br />
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<b>HOW TO SUBMIT</b>: Email Jee Leong Koh at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org. Include a cover letter in the body of your email, as well as the poet's name, mail address, and email address. Attach manuscript in PDF or Microsoft Word format.<br />
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<b>JUDGE</b>: <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wong-may" target="_blank">Wong May</a><br />
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<b>ADDITIONAL GUIDELINES</b><br />
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<ul>
<li>Number the manuscript pages.</li>
<li>Include a title page, table of contents, and an acknowledgments page for any previously published poems.</li>
<li>The poet's name, mailing address, and email address should not appear anywhere in the manuscript. </li>
<li>Submit the $10 entry fee via PayPal to Jee Leong Koh (jkoh@singaporeunbound.org). Manuscripts will not be considered until the entry fee is received.</li>
<li>Multiple manuscripts may be submitted and require a separate entry fee for each manuscript. </li>
<li>Simultaneous submissions are allowed. Notify Gaudy Boy immediately if the manuscript is accepted by another publisher.</li>
</ul>
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For more information about the book prize, visit the <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/opportunities/" target="_blank">Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize section on the Opportunities page of their website</a>.<br />
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<h3 id="about">
ABOUT THE PRESS AND PUBLISHER</h3>
Gaudy Boy is a new independent literary press based in New York City that publishes writers of Asian heritage residing anywhere in the world. Their name is taken from the poem “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=0mqJBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153" target="_blank">Gaudy Turnout</a>” by Singaporean author Arthur Yap, about his time abroad in 1970's Leeds, UK. The name is also from Latin <i>gaudium</i> meaning <i>joy.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI-9fATrx2NflmUCH2Pu5JSoOz0bMhWyVu8lxOlaHsLQb6vtdVF_aZPEIDKW58M6mc3E3q8Wq_bGT1MbqRowRLzpSQjcoHtwUrIWyOG8Hsbuxlo6_iDLGtisTm9vnFGxIEciXK6czd4i-h/s1600/MS_COVER_RGB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="750" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI-9fATrx2NflmUCH2Pu5JSoOz0bMhWyVu8lxOlaHsLQb6vtdVF_aZPEIDKW58M6mc3E3q8Wq_bGT1MbqRowRLzpSQjcoHtwUrIWyOG8Hsbuxlo6_iDLGtisTm9vnFGxIEciXK6czd4i-h/s200/MS_COVER_RGB.jpg" width="125" /></a>One mission of the press is to bring literary works by authors of Asian heritage to the attention of the American audience. Last month, the press published its inaugural title <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0982814232/ref=sr_1_1" target="_blank">Malay Sketches</a></i> by Alfian Sa'at. <i>Malay Sketches</i> is a short-story collection that opens a prismatic window into the doubly-minoritized Malay-Muslim community in Singapore. Longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the book has been called "pitch-perfect" by Harold Augenbraum and "terse and profound" by Gina Apostol.<br />
<br />
Gaudy Boy is part of the nonprofit literary organization <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SingaporeUnbound/" target="_blank">Singapore Unbound</a>. Launched in 2016, Singapore Unbound organizes the biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC, the monthly Second Saturday Reading Series, and offers other literary opportunities, including fellowships for writers and book reviews on <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/sp-blog/" target="_blank">their blog</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://jeeleong.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html" target="_blank">Jee Leong Koh</a> is the founder and organizer of Singapore Unbound, as well as the publisher at Gaudy Boy. Koh is a Singapore poet and essayist living in New York City. He is the author of <i>Steep Tea</i> (Carcanet), named a Best Book of 2015 by UK's Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in 2016. He has published three other books of poems and a book of zuihitsu. His work has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, and Latvian. Educated at Oxford University and Sarah Lawrence College, Jee teaches English at a private school in Manhattan. You can read more about him in an <a href="http://www.theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-a-conversation-with-jee-leong-koh-the-adroit-journal/" target="_blank">interview he did with Jennifer Wong at <i>The Adoit Journal</i></a>.<br />
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One of the reasons Koh started Singapore Unbound was to build a cultural and literary exchange between Singapore and the US while championing freedom of expression and fair opportunities for all artists. A natural extension of that mission is the establishment of a US-based, independent press that publishes Asian voices from anywhere in the world. The team at Gaudy Boy consider diversity and representation to be crucial in the world's literature and are delighted to be able to contribute to the conversation.<br />
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Gaudy Boy plans to eventually publish poetry books other than the contest winner. In addition, they run a poetry contest for individual poems to be published on their blog. The contest awards $100, $50, and $20 for first, second, and third place. There is no entry fee. The individual-poem contest is called the Singapore Poetry Contest and, interestingly, is open to everyone who is NOT a Singaporean citizen or permanent resident in Singapore. For the Singapore Poetry Contest, Gaudy Boy is looking for poems that include the word “Singapore” (or its variants) in some creative manner. They prefer that the poems NOT be about Singapore, but instead, use the word “Singapore” in a way significant to the poems’ own subject and method. The deadline for that contest June 15, 2018. For more submission guidelines and more information on the Singapore Poetry Contest, visit the <a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/opportunities/" target="_blank">Singapore Poetry Contest section on the Opportunities page of their website</a>.<br />
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LINKS</h3>
<i>Gaudy Boy</i><br />
<a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/gaudyboy/" target="_blank">Website</a><br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/GaudyBoySU/" target="_blank">Facebook</a><br />
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<i>Singapore Unbound</i><br />
<a href="https://singaporeunbound.org/" target="_blank">Website</a> <br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/SingaporeUnbound/" target="_blank">Facebook</a><br />
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<i>Jee Leong Koh</i><br />
<a href="http://jeeleong.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html" target="_blank">Website</a> <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-56323903431068108902018-02-08T15:30:00.000-05:002018-02-08T16:59:52.948-05:00Chapbook Chat: mcmxciv by Nate Logan and JJ Rowan<br />
For this edition of Chapbook Chat, in addition to an <a href="https://nancychenlong.blogspot.com/2018/02/chapbook-chat-mcmxciv-by-logan-and-rowan.html#interview">interview with the poets</a>, I'm delighted to offer a micro-review of <i><a href="https://shirtpocketpress.weebly.com/store/p44/mcmxciv._by_Nate_Logan_%26_JJ_Rowan_.html" target="_blank">mcmxciv</a>.</i><br />
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—Nancy Chen Long<br />
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<i><a href="https://shirtpocketpress.weebly.com/store/p44/mcmxciv._by_Nate_Logan_%26_JJ_Rowan_.html" target="_blank">mcmxciv</a></i><br />
by <a href="http://nateglogan.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Nate Logan</a> and JJ Rowan<br />
<a href="https://shirtpocketpress.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Shirt Pocket Press</a>, 2018</h3>
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<b>xxi.</b><br />
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i’m having numeral anxiety to<br />
which the internet is a bad<br />
bandaid. the administration<br />
claims i is in my toolbag but<br />
they could just as easily buy<br />
that info from aol. seven times<br />
i’ve been a healthy scratch.<br />
here’s something taped on<br />
my skin to simulate healthcare.<br />
here’s a good example of a<br />
bad example. there’s where i<br />
kicked the asphalt to tell you<br />
my bucket list had a hole<br />
in the bottom the size of a zero<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">“xxi,” © Nate Logan and JJ Rowan <i>mcmxciv </i>(Shirt Pocket Press, 2018)</span><br />
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<i><a href="https://shirtpocketpress.weebly.com/store/p44/mcmxciv._by_Nate_Logan_%26_JJ_Rowan_.html" target="_blank">mcmxciv</a></i> is a collaborative chapbook of contemporary sonnets by Nate Logan and JJ Rowan. If the sonnet form is a box as some say, the sonnets in <i>mcmxciv</i> demonstrate that it’s a flexible one: The poems in Logan and Rowan’s sequence make use of the basic fourteen-line structure of the sonnet and most poems can be said to have a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_(literature)" target="_blank">volta</a>. However, the poets also freely play with meter and there is no standardized rhyme scheme. Most, but not all, follow sentence syntax and punctuation. Indeed, on the page, the sonnets in <i>mcmxiv</i>
resemble a box—each poem is a single block of fourteen lines without any stanza breaks and all of the poems are in lower case.<br />
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As one who has a keen interest in math and numbers, I was delighted to find that numbers / numbering is prominently featured in <i>mcmxiv</i>. The title of the chapbook itself is a number, the Roman-numeral equivalent of 1994. [Aside: And some of the poems feel as if they take place in the year 1994, with the mention of AOL and answering machines. The first poem puts us there as well, “standing in line / at a ferris wheel in 1994.”] Returning to numbers: The titles of the poems are also Roman numerals, although they are not in numerical order and there are gaps in the numbers. For example, the collection begins with “x”, but there are no poems “i” – “viii”. In some poems, numbers are directly named, such as the mention of the year in the first poem. In addition to actual numbers, things and activities related to numbers make their way into the poems, for example “try counting / to learn about failure. try numbering pages / to learn about sex” from the poem “xv.”<br />
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My favorite use of numbers is in the last two lines of the last poem “xxiii,” which begins with “entered your figure in the search / bar” and proceeds through various things that had been entered, which in itself is interesting, since, as the last poem, it is exiting. As the poem iterates through the various ways of entering, an error occurs (“invalid. error. error. entered / a column as a row. claimed entry.”) The last two lines of the poem come after that declaration of an error and consist of a series of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number" target="_blank">binary numbers</a> that translate into (computer) ASCII codes that in turn translate into letters that spell the word <i>french</i>. For me, ‘french’ here takes on multiple meanings. It suggests that the one and zeroes might as well be another language. Secondly, if the last two lines are the speaker replying to the computer in its native machine language, then the last two lines suggest that the speaker is swearing at computer, as in “pardon my French.” Or the last two lines could simply be a memory dump by the computer that gives the illusion of making sense by spelling a random, potentially human-recogizable word.<br />
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In <i>mcmxciv,</i> the authors create a world that hints at hyperreality and technoculture, a world in which simulation and reality blur, but one that is at the same time intimate and personal. The theme of simulation and stand-ins can be seen in the first poem, “x.” There’s a building used for an activity that becomes a stand-in for the actual human activity (“the hockey rink that doubles as actual hockey”), a person-as-icon-or-cursor on a computer screen (“see you blinking on the page”), a phone call that does not occur, but if it had, the speaker knows s/he would not have been speaking to a person, but to a machine instead (“another hour / almost call to your answering machine.”) References to technology are peppered throughout these sonnets. For example, in addition to “internet,” “aol,” “answering machine,” “cell service,” and “search bar” already mentioned, in “xli,” the speaker demonstrates “bravery by tearing a pixel / wishbone from the night sky.” That simulated experience and technology pushes against the personal and conjures an impersonal, almost lonely space. Then we have those many numbers and acts of numbering and calculating that introduce even more distance to the personal. Amid this swirl of numbers and technology, the speaker says “i saw you across the / room / disembodied.” And I do experience the speaker as disembodied, existing in a seeming virtual, simulated world. However, even in the face of all of these numbers and all of this technology, the voice in the poems is intimate. The poems are like monologues or notes to a friend or lover, of a person sharing private thoughts, for example “unless you’re a fuck-up like me” (“xlviii”), “it’s june but i’m tired / of being brave” (“xxii”), “i try not to want or be” (“xxxvii.”)<br />
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In “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/03/to-sonnet-to-son-net-tuscon-net-" target="_blank">To Sonnet, to Son-net, Tuscon Net</a>,” Sina Queyras writes “It’s a challenge to make [the sonnet] lively, to not feel you’ve handed yourself over and let its history have its way with you: are you writing the sonnet, or is the sonnet writing you?” In <i>mcmxciv</i>, Logan and Rowan have not handed themselves over—they have made the form their own. Their sonnet sequence creates a fluid, asynchronous, stream-of-consciousness world that uses structure sparingly. Rigidly following form, syntax, and capitalization, as well as the use of numbers, are all ways of imposing structure and order. Logan and Rowan’s choices in applying the sonnet form, coupled with the lack of punctuation, the way they use fragmentation and numbers, all work towards releasing the need to be in total control, instead embracing fluidity and spontaneity, an appreciation for surprise. In this chapbook of fourteen fourteen-lined poems, Logan and Rowan create an intimate world through the voice of a disembodied speaker, a sense of logic and wholeness rooted in the unexpected. In one slender sequence, they share with us a world where you can feel the air “falling tenderly against / technology’s faux-romantic whir.”<br />
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<b><a href="http://nateglogan.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Nate Logan</a> </b>was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He's the author of <i>Inside the Golden Days of Missing You</i> (<a href="http://magichelicopterpress.com/" target="_blank">Magic Helicopter Press</a>, Fall 2018). He's editor and publisher of <a href="http://spookygirlfriendpress.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Spooky Girlfriend Press</a>.<br />
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JJ Rowan is a poet and dancer living in Southern Oregon. Her previous chapbooks include <i><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/eric-mohrman/prospectors/paperback/product-23117855.html" target="_blank">so-called weather</a></i> (<a href="http://www.moriapoetry.com/locofo.html" target="_blank">Locofo Chaps</a>, 2017) and <i>the selected jesus</i> (<a href="https://shirtpocketpress.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Shirt Pocket Press</a>, 2015). Her <a href="http://www.dreampoppress.net/jj-rowan/" target="_blank">VisPo</a> recently appeared in Dream Pop Journal #2.<br />
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<span style="color: #990000;">
An Interview with Nate Logan and JJ Rowan</span></h3>
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i>mcmxciv</i>. </b><br />
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<i>Nate: </i>mcmxciv<i> (1994) is a collaborative chapbook of sonnets written over a distance of 2,000 miles. </i><br />
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<i>JJ: *Over* 2,000 miles! ;) The fine folks at Shirt Pocket Press recently published it.</i><br />
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<b>How did you decide on the title. The poems are numeric numbers as well, and out of order. Could you say a bit about the poems titles? </b><br />
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<i>N: JJ chose the title. I remember she specifically asked me how to write “1994” in Roman numerals. As far as the poem titles, it wasn’t clever at all. We started our collaboration by giving Roman numeral titles to the poems in the order we wrote them.
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<i>J: I remember having a lot of very minor Roman numeral anxiety. I could never quite get them right and asked Nate to check them a lot of the time. I am pretty sure our book is from 1994.
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<i>N: Haha. This is true, but it’s also funny because once we were in the 20s, I looked up the Roman numeral equivalent for every poem I had to start. I definitely didn’t know off the top of my head. </i><br />
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<i>J: And I was weirdly stubborn about figuring them out off the top of my head. </i><br />
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<i>N: I was more worried about how I was going to follow JJ’s great lines when it was my turn with whichever poem we were working on.</i><br />
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<b>I struggle with sonnets and admire that your wrote a chapbook of them. Are sonnets a form you normally write? If so, what draws you to it? If not, what did you like about writing them? What did you find difficult? Some writers insist a sonnet must follow the rules for a known type of sonnet, e.g. Shakespearean, others say it’s a sonnet if the poet says it is. To you, what makes a sonnet a sonnet? </b><br />
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<i>N: I wouldn’t say I normally write sonnets, but right now I do usually write shorter poems. I think we chose to write sonnets because it was easier to devise a scheme on how we would be writing them together, as opposed to another form or having no form at all. What was particularly challenging and fun was to follow JJ’s lines in a way that kept the poems together. These aren’t really <b>my</b> poems, or hers. This is a third voice somewhere between us. And as far as what makes a sonnet, I say 14 lines. The rest can be played with. </i><br />
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<i>J: I absolutely struggle with sonnets. I write long messy things -- I feel like sonnets are the opposite of that. Nate, the form was your idea, right?
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<i>N: I think maybe I suggested it first, yeah.
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<i>J: It ended up being a great scaffolding for collaboration. The definition we were working with was 14 lines and we mostly stayed within a certain shape. I expected, actually, to have trouble with the form but I ended up really comfortable in it. For me, I think writing them with Nate was key -- I’m not sure I’d write sonnets on my own.</i><br />
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<b>One way that I experience these poems is as call-and-response pieces. What was your writing process for these poems?</b><br />
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<i>J: Nate got into this a bit in the last question -- every poem is from this place between the two of us, this third voice. I like that idea of call-and-response. I’d say every poem is the call <b>and</b> the response. It’s definitely a conversation of sorts. </i><br />
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<i>N: Yes, these are definitely conversations. The nuts and bolts answer to this question is this: JJ - 4 lines, me - 4 lines, JJ - 4 lines, me - 2 lines, 4 lines of the next poem, and so on. </i><br />
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<i>J: So we’d alternate who started and finished each sonnet, which was really the most control either of us had at any given time. And we were always taking cues from each other, and sometimes fucking with those cues, setting out on unexpected paths.</i><br />
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<b>Writing can be such a solitary experience. In addition, for some writers, their personal artistic vision would not be able to tolerate the cooperation and mutual concessions that collaboration can require. How did the original idea for your collaboration come about? How did you find the experience rewarding? Difficult? </b><br />
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<i>N: I approached JJ originally and asked if she’d be interested in writing together. I wanted to do something to break me a little from that solitary experience. And it was rewarding exactly for that reason: JJ’s influence helped give me a booster shot I was looking for.
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<i>J: Well, I’m laughing at myself right now because I keep thinking collaboration was my idea. I love collaborating -- it’s not always easy (and not everyone is the right partner) but when it works it’s amazing. Nate suggested this when I’d been writing solo for a while and really needed it, too. It has been extremely rewarding for me. We’re very different writers on our own and I think it made the work more interesting. Sometimes I’d finish my lines with a clear idea of where the sonnet was going and then Nate would take it somewhere else. I loved that.
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<i>N: It could’ve been JJ’s idea! We can go back in the archive and see. I also think the excitement of not knowing where a sonnet was going kept me on my toes. Any “idea” I had was silly because I had no control, really.
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<i>J: I looked :) It was you! Good job!</i><br />
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<b>What kind of world do you think your chapbook creates?</b><br />
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<i>N: This is a really good question, Nancy, and even after some days of thinking about it, I’m not quite sure how to answer.
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<i>J: For me, this question feels more personal coming from a collaborative space than it would if I was writing alone, I think. In the last question you mentioned writing as “a solitary experience” -- and I don’t think that idea necessarily goes away in collaboration. I feel like a world this chapbook creates (maybe there is more than one?) is the space where that third voice lives, especially when that voice is made up of two voices who are in reality quite far away from each other. I think that world is a sprawling space trying to make itself smaller or closer. I can’t seem to separate the idea of distance from everything else going on in the poems. I feel like Nate and I were, inside of the sonnets and in general, often talking about miles.
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<i>N: While I don’t have a concrete answer, I think distance has something to do with the world here. Almost like a mile scale on a map. An inch will represent lots of miles, but it’s also an inch. Maybe this chapbook is that inch? Does this even make sense? </i><br />
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<i>J: Yessss, that.</i><br />
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<b>Which poem in your chapbook has the most meaningful back story to you? What’s the back story? </b><br />
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<i>N: For me, “xiii.” JJ started this poem and I would’ve been happy to stall and not add to it.
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<i>J: Ohh, I adore that one. And I’m wicked glad you didn’t stall forever! Some of the sonnets feel like we’re standing next to them and some feel like we’re standing inside of them. I think we might live in that one. For me, and this is a <b>really</b> hard question, it’s “x.” Maybe that’s why I was so enamored of “mcmxciv.” as a title for the collection. A lot of the sonnets I know immediately who began and who ended -- if I really sit with it I can figure this one out, but it’s not immediately apparent and I love that. It’s a very clear third voice to me. I know that’s not really a back story.
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<i>N: Haha, I just wanted to linger in those lines for a while. Like JJ says, I really like those places where I don’t remember who wrote what, too. I think that’s where a lot of the magic lays. But even places where I know who wrote what, it’s fun to see what both of us came up with in response to each other. I don’t think I could fully do that when we were writing them.</i><br />
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<b>What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook? </b><br />
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<i>N: All the best lines are JJ’s :)
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<i>J: No! Not true. I kind of can’t believe we got this far in the interview without saying anything about being a Capricorn and a Virgo. That seems important. Also! The full sonnet sequence is actually 100 sonnets. We got a little obsessed :)
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<i>N: And also! Our fiftieth and one-hundredth sonnet are double sonnets! Maybe they will be out there in the world in the future.</i><br />
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<b>What kinds of writing (comics, dictionaries, magazines, novels, etc.) that aren’t poetry help you to write poetry? </b><br />
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<i>N: I’m not sure I’d say non-poetry writing helps me, but I’ve had songs inspire my writing and I do listen to music when I write, which seems to be a thing not a lot of poets do. </i><br />
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<i>J: Reading my horoscope! For real. I’m pretty obsessive about Chani Nicholas and Gala Mukomolova (Galactic Rabbit). I think what actually helps me write poetry the most, though, is movement. I have a fairly obsessive dance practice and that has become an essential part of my writing practice.</i><br />
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<b>What advice would you offer to aspiring chapbook authors? </b><br />
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<i>J: I know it isn’t for everyone, but I would absolutely recommend collaboration. It doesn’t have to be anything more than a practice or an exercise, but I think it’s a really great way to learn more about your solo writing practice and shake up your routine. </i><br />
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<i>N: I would say resist the urge to compare yourself to others. There are so many small presses today, there’s probably more than one out there that would love to showcase your work. Be as organic as you can.</i><br />
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<b>If you have any other chapbooks or books, please tell us a bit about them.</b><br />
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<i>J: Ok, I really want to take this opportunity to yell: Nate’s first book is coming out from Magic Helicopter!!!
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<i>N: JJ is too kind! Yes, my first book is scheduled to be released this fall. Last year, I had an anti-T___p chapbook published by Locofo Chaps as part of their series of political chapbooks. I know JJ has at least one other chapbook out there, right?
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<i>J: Yep. I also had chapbook in that series from Locofo (there were a ton of us!). Previous to that I had a solo chapbook with Shirt Pocket.
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<i>N: I’m starting a petition to get JJ a full-length collection. Her work is <b>so great</b> and deserves the breadth of a collection!
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<i>J: See, we’re sort of each other’s superfan. </i><br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<i>N: I’m just doing my sacrilege once a week writing routine (I know, I know).
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<i>J: Though Nate and I wrote our sonnets in a shared space online, I have a pretty staunch write-by-hand practice. I do this daily for the most part. I recently finished a poem sequence of shorter poems (which our sonnet practice influenced for sure) and am in the middle of a long prose poem sequence. And we’ll be sending more sonnets out into the world, I hope.
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<i>N: Yes! More sonnets out into the world. And who knows? We may get the itch to write some more together.
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<i>J: That could definitely happen.
</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-41645772456268134302017-06-15T10:57:00.000-04:002017-06-15T19:14:08.829-04:00Chapbook Chat: Trish Hopkinson Discusses Footnote<br />
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<a href="http://www.lithicpress.com/index.php/our-catalog/76-footnote" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Footnote</a></h3>
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Author: <a href="https://trishhopkinson.com/" target="_blank">Trish Hopkinson</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.lithicpress.com/index.php" target="_blank">Lithic Press</a><br />
Publication date: 2017<br />
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<b>Waiting Around</b> by Trish Hopkinson<br />
<i>after "Walking Around" by Pablo Neruda </i> <br />
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It so happens, I am tired of being a woman.<br />
And it happens while I wait for my children to grow <br />
into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks<br />
of summer sun have gone,<br />
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drained between gaps into gutters,<br />
and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes<br />
cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied<br />
if I could draw from language<br />
the banquet of poets.<br />
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If I could salvage the space in time<br />
for thought and collect it<br />
like a souvenir. I can no longer <br />
be timid and quiet, breathless<br />
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and withdrawn.<br />
I can’t salve the silence.<br />
I can’t be this vineyard<br />
to be bottled, corked,<br />
cellared, and shelved.<br />
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That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth,<br />
growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat.<br />
It claws its way through the edges of an age <br />
I never planned to reach<br />
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and diffuses my life into dullness— <br />
workout rooms and nail salons,<br />
bleach-white sheets on clotheslines,<br />
and treacherous photographs of younger me<br />
at barbecues and birthday parties.<br />
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I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage. <br />
I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick<br />
and I gamble on what’s expected. <br />
And what to become. And how<br />
to behave: mother, wife, brave.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">originally appeared in <i><a href="http://voicemailpoems.org/post/115947410891/waiting-around-after-walking-around-by-pablo" target="_blank">Voicemail Poems
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>* * * * *</b></i></span>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpg16xPykcjhshViOyOkUEGceTTnBaGJqY593K_yYLbZBAhWc-HEOcLKc_qODZdROPHVK8khyphenhyphenWHGTTuTgZGV_GSGcXVaYc7hBBNE8qCFoj6FRWWg_HWuPlymonyaQjeP4RadcUJ3v8yeKM/s1600/TrishHopkinson-web.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Author photo of Trish Hopkinson" border="0" data-original-height="1195" data-original-width="1600" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpg16xPykcjhshViOyOkUEGceTTnBaGJqY593K_yYLbZBAhWc-HEOcLKc_qODZdROPHVK8khyphenhyphenWHGTTuTgZGV_GSGcXVaYc7hBBNE8qCFoj6FRWWg_HWuPlymonyaQjeP4RadcUJ3v8yeKM/s640/TrishHopkinson-web.jpg" title="Author photo: Trish Hopkinson" width="544" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo credit: Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen</td></tr>
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Trish Hopkinson has always loved words—in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. A Pushcart nominated poet, she has been published in several anthologies and journals, including<i> Stirring, Pretty Owl Poetry</i>, and <i>Chagrin River Review</i>; and her third chapbook is forthcoming from Lithic Press in 2017. Hopkinson is co-founder of a regional poetry group, <a href="https://rockcanyonpoets.com/" target="_blank">Rock Canyon Poets</a>, and Editor-in-Chief of the group’s annual poetry anthology entitled <i><a href="http://rockcanyonpoets.storenvy.com/products/17027067-orogeny-volume-2" target="_blank">Orogeny</a></i>. She is a product director by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at <a href="http://trishhopkinson.com/" target="_blank">http://trishhopkinson.com/</a>.<br />
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<i><b>Author Facebook page: </b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/trishhopkinsonpoet/" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/trishhopkinsonpoet/</a><br /><b></b></i>
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<i><b></b><b>Twitter:</b> <a href="https://twitter.com/trishhopkinson" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/trishhopkinson</a></i><br />
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<i><b>Author blog: </b><a href="http://trishhopkinson.com/" target="_blank">http://trishhopkinson.com/</a></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in June 2017.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about <a href="http://www.lithicpress.com/index.php/our-catalog/76-footnote" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Footnote</a>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: <i>Footnote</i> is my first official chapbook published by a real press! It’s a collection of response poems as homage to some of my favorite artists. Most of the poems have been published in literary magazines over the last few years, and I’m honored to have them all put together in such a striking way by Lithic Press.<br />
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<b>How did you arrive at the title?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: Originally, the title was the same as the final poem “Footnote to a Footnote.” When Lithic began working on a design for the cover, they suggested simply Footnote, which was perfect, since each poem in the collection indeed includes a footnote in reference to the original artwork that inspired the poem.<br />
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<b>You mentioned that your chapbook contains response poems—poems inspired by other artists, whether poets, writers, or filmmakers. When you brought up “by other artists,” the first thing I thought of was ekphrastic poetry. While the common understanding of ekphrasis is poetry in response to visual art, in a 2008 essay “<a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/notes-ekphrasis" target="_blank">Notes on Ekphrasis</a>” by Alfred Corn, he mentions that poetry in response to “works of music, cinema, or choreography might also qualify as instances of ekphrasis.” Do you consider some of the poems in <i>Footnote</i> to be ekphrastic?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: While I think that most of these poems are closer to the tradition of response poetry or found poetry, in which poems are written to respond to another text or artist’s work, I do think some of these poems are ekphrastic, specifically the poems in response to films. For example, “From Her to Eternity” is a poem that encompasses not only the story of the Win Wenders and Peter Handke’s film <i>Wings of Desire</i> but its origins in Rilke’s Duino Elegies—and even the soundtrack, with lyrics from Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s song as the title of the poem. There’s definitely some gray area within all of these definitions.<br />
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<b>Tell us a bit about your writing process in forming a response. What techniques did you use? For example, did you write replies to a poem in a call and response sort of way, use a part of the poem as an epigraph, imitate or echo the forms of a poem, etc. “Waiting Around,” the poem at the beginning of this interview, is after Pablo Neruda. Tell us a bit about how the poem is “after” Neruda. </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: “Waiting Around” is a great example of one way to approach response poetry. One way to respond to a poem is to write your own version from a different perspective, line by line or stanza by stanza. For “Waiting Around,” I responded line by line to Neruda’s poem “Walking Around” using a female speaker, rather than the original male speaker. Another one of my favorite approaches to found poems is to take the original poem, reverse the order of the lines (the last line first, the first line last), and then do an erasure. This technique has a tendency to reverse the meaning from the original to something opposing within the newly created poem. I used this technique in “Reconstructed Happiness,” which is in response to “I am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His original poem is quite somber, while the result of the erasure in reverse has an uplifting, empowering feel.<br />
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<b> In a 2011 essay “<a href="http://www.pw.org/content/thinking_like_an_editor_how_to_order_your_poetry_manuscript_0" target="_blank">Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript</a>,” April Ossmann writes “[T]he biggest mystery to emerging and sometimes even established poets is how to effectively order a poetry manuscript.” How did you order Footnote? Was it something you had in mind early in the writing process, for example or did you write the poems with a strategy in mind? What were some of your considerations?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: Honestly, I think selecting and ordering poems for a poetry book manuscript is the most challenging part of the process. These poems were written over a few years, and after teaching a community poetry writing workshop on response poetry, I realized I had quite a few response poems. So in this case, the collection was a surprise waiting for me in already completed work. I gathered them together, printed them out, and tried to order them in such a way that each poem connected in some way to the one that followed, while also paying attention to starting and ending with one of my favorite pieces. It never hurts to start strong and end strong. Once the collection was accepted by Lithic Press, there was some tweaking to the order to flow smoothly page wise (two-page poems on facing pages, etc.) and I swapped out a couple of the poems for stronger poems during the editing. It’s hardly an exact science, and the order of any collection will often be affected by the theme, style, variety of format, white space, and physical limitations of the book itself. I’ve ordered the poems for a few anthologies as Editor-in-Chief for <i><a href="https://rockcanyonpoets.com/poetry-store/" target="_blank">Orogeny</a></i>, and it’s interesting to see how poems from several different poets often connect into a final collection. That said, it’s never easy, but can be fun and surprising. <br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: There are several poems in this collection that I love, mostly because they are a reflection of some other artwork that is important to me, but there is one that stands out and has a more personal meaning. “In a Room Made of Poetry” is a found poem based on the tradition of cento poetry and consists of several complete lines from Laura Hamblin’s book <i>The Eyes of a Flounder</i>. Hamblin is a dear friend and was one of my poetry professors during my undergrad at Utah Valley University. She introduced me to many of the poets featured in my book, including Neruda and Rilke, and her classes were where I learned so much about how to deeply appreciate not only the poetry of others, but other art as well. I was thrilled when Lithic chose a portion of this same poem as part of the cover design, which to me, became a dedication to her. The timing couldn’t have been better; she is retiring and teaching her last poetry class this summer when <i>Footnote</i> is being released.<br />
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<b>In a Room Made of Poetry </b><br />
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Think how loss pulls language from us until <br />
it swallows everything, <br />
like undiagnosed cancer,<br />
the accumulated past—<br />
less eye, less mouth, less heart.<br />
We had, not much—<br />
thin coffee, thin socks. Here you can<br />
wait, with desire, with<br />
roots exposed <br />
for an open womb. That heart-balm<br />
as hope. The raw<br />
bent—a bowl of fruit<br />
in a language I never knew . . .<br />
without tails, crosses of ts. The autonomous dot of a<br />
blackness answers, There are only ifs.<br />
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Source: Hamblin, Laura. <i>The Eyes of a Flounder.</i><br />
(originally published in <a href="http://volumeeight.foundpoetryreview.com/in-a-room-made-of-poetry/" target="_blank"><i>The Found Poetry Review</i>: Issue 8</a>)<br />
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<b>Please tell us a bit about your use of found poetry in the chapbook.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: As a lover of all things words, found poetry is not just a way to respond to another text but it’s often word play as well. There are many different techniques that can be used to “find” a new poem in an existing text. I mentioned one above, erasure, which is also often referred to as “blackout poetry,” and even when doing an erasure, I often like to apply other methods to change it up a bit. Another fun approach is to sort the words by length and then create what’s called a “snowball” poem by ordering specifically selected words from shortest to longest. My poem “Strange Verses” employs this technique to create a set of reverse snowball poems from <i>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland</i>. The result was pretty cool—I ended up with four columns/stanzas that can be read in many different directions and angles.<br />
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<b><i><a href="http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/" target="_blank">The Found Poetry Review</a></i> has this quote by Anne Dillard about found poetry:</b><br />
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<b>By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.</b></blockquote>
<b> </b><b>In the found poems in the chapbook, did you find yourself ‘doubling’ the original text’s context in one or more of them? If so how? If not, what relationship do you see between the original text and the poem(s)?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: I think so. The way I often describe this to others is as a “palimpsest,” in which the original text is erased/removed and a new text is written in its place while still leaving remnants of the original. In this sense, I think it is a form of doubling, or a way to contribute to the larger conversation in which we as writers participate. Response poetry is my way of communicating with both the original texts and the reader.<br />
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Sometimes, I nerd out on this whole poetry/writing thing a bit much and well, thinking through these responses resulted in my creation of this Venn diagram:<br />
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<b>I imagine the topics that you responded to varied widely. Even so, did you find yourself coming back to the same handful of themes, despite what it was you were responding to? I’m thinking of writer obsessions, perhaps in grand themes like love or death, or even images or words. For example, I’ve discovered, to my surprise, that dust, particles, dots, and related sorts of things pop up frequently in my writing. Tony Hoagland, in his book <a href="https://yuanfields.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/obsession-tony-hoagland/" target="_blank"><i>Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft</i> (p82)</a>, wrote “In the work of a good poet, it is usually possible to discern one or two characteristic emotional zones in which he thrives: melancholy, rage, pity, vengeful rationality, seduction.” How did those obsessions reveal themselves to you? Did you find yourself surrendering to it? </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: Since this book was sort of a surprise collection based on the discovery that I tend to respond to other poets/art in my writing, the only other theme I think often emerges is one of feminism. I think that most of these poems reflect my feminist slant to poetry in general.<br />
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<b>What was the final poem you wrote or significantly revised for the chapbook, and how did that affect your sense that the chapbook was complete?</b><br />
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Most of the poems were previously published and felt finished. One that still felt incomplete was a Plath response poem entitled “Daddies.” I have reworked and reformatted the poem several times and toward the end of the editing process, I dug in hard and finally was able to revise the poem into what I feel is a finished state. (At least for now.) Once I sent that poem off, it did feel like the final edits were complete and the book was ready to be sent to print<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">TH</span></i></b>: I’m aiming toward a full-length collection someday, but I feel like I need much more material before pulling together a new collection. I’ve tried piecing a few different projects together with poems I’ve written in the last couple of years, and there’s just not a nice, organic set making itself visible to me. Ultimately, I need to write many more poems to help my next collection materialize. Other than that, I’m always working on my poetry blog, which has become such an important part of my interaction with the larger poetry community. <a href="http://trishhopkinson.com/" target="_blank">My blog</a> was also a surprise and started as just a way to keep track of poetry resources, submission calls, etc. I started sharing it on social media and found there was definitely a need. Since October of 2014, my blog following has continued to grow and I’ve been honored by the turn out! It’s been a pleasure to interact with fellow poets, writers, editors, artists, etc. who are all looking for an easy way to access and share information. Sometimes, the things we never intend to create become the greatest of gifts. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-19047763713859699982016-12-13T12:47:00.002-05:002016-12-20T20:16:02.457-05:002017 NEA Fellowship<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Absolutely over the moon to be a recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry. I'm in amazing company! <a href="https://www.arts.gov/literature-fellowships-list/by-year/2017?litfellows_type=1" target="_blank">Here's a list of who was selected.</a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-71311762261100071412016-11-23T00:03:00.000-05:002016-11-27T10:36:08.715-05:00Chapbook Chat: Sonja Johanson Discusses Trees in Our Dooryards<br />
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<a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/content/trees-our-dooryards" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Trees in Our Dooryards</a><br />
Author: <a href="http://www.sonjajohanson.net/" target="_blank">Sonja Johanson</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/" target="_blank">Red Bird Chapbooks</a><br />
Publication date: 2016<br />
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<b>Maple Triptych II, Introduced</b><br />
by Sonja Johanson<br />
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<i>Acer platanoides</i><br />
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Those maroon lollipops, they looked so crass<br />
Lined up along the manicured lawns<br />
In their perfect circles of orange mulch,<br />
Dressing the landscape in middle class uniforms.<br />
They seemed so vain and garish<br />
Wearing button down shirts and ties,<br />
Pinstriped suits of bark, chartreuse nosegays.<br />
Leaving their poor relations to scrape by<br />
In abandoned lots and waste places,<br />
Pock marked with nasty black spots<br />
Scarred carriers of tree measles. <br />
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<i>Acer pseudoplatanus</i><br />
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No known maple could ever grow,<br />
Much less thrive, so close to salt spray,<br />
On that moonscape of scree and broken pavement.<br />
The only plausible explanation<br />
For this fat, vigorous trunk<br />
Weaving through the fence like a python<br />
For those broad, rippled leaves<br />
Like the great polydactyl claws of some predator<br />
For the bizarre samaras, not proper pairs<br />
But triplet seeds, strange as a third eye,<br />
Must be that some distant planet exploded<br />
Sending debris hurtling through the galaxy.<br />
Somewhere in the meteorite that smashed into this shoreline<br />
Nestled one alien seed<br />
Which found favor with this new soil,<br />
Forgiving atmosphere, fortunate distance from our sun.<br />
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<i>Acer palmatum</i><br />
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At first, I felt sorry for them-<br />
Those kept plants, the geisha trees.<br />
Too thin skinned and delicate to stand a real winter<br />
Without breaking out in frost cracks.<br />
But, over time, my own blood thinning<br />
From this milder latitude<br />
I began to notice the painted patterns<br />
On their long fingers.<br />
Their modest way when leafing out.<br />
I could see how a sponsor<br />
Might shape their development.<br />
Here, cull a reverting limb.<br />
There, place a thinning cut<br />
To open the gracious form.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">originally appeared in <i><a href="https://dandelionfarmfall2012.wordpress.com/sonja-johanson/" target="_blank">The Dandelion Farm Review</a></i></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_EWx-0AfFtWP3_BBMA7z4THQdbKd7xTlPbBJqe2iFAub33rLIymqHxIdjlL1Y8ZK5rj2Y32gdOkDM3Fi3p6v6rNN0ALQDTZ3MF0Mm0_dcgsDT1xH3iP4Oy_zu0-qGbWEfr5xigNVsgkV0/s1600/JohansonS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_EWx-0AfFtWP3_BBMA7z4THQdbKd7xTlPbBJqe2iFAub33rLIymqHxIdjlL1Y8ZK5rj2Y32gdOkDM3Fi3p6v6rNN0ALQDTZ3MF0Mm0_dcgsDT1xH3iP4Oy_zu0-qGbWEfr5xigNVsgkV0/s400/JohansonS.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.sonjajohanson.net/" target="_blank">Sonja Johanson</a> has work appearing in or forthcoming at <i>BOAAT, Outlook Springs</i>, and <i>The Writer’s Almanac</i>. She is a contributing editor at <i>The Found Poetry Review</i>, and the author of <i>Impossible Dovetail</i> (<i><a href="http://www.silverbirchpress.com/ides_chapbooks.html" target="_blank">IDES</a></i>, Silver Birch Press, 2015), <i><a href="http://damonone.com/product/all-those-ragged-scars/" target="_blank">all those ragged scars</a></i> (Choose the Sword Press, 2015), and <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/content/trees-our-dooryards" target="_blank">Trees in Our Dooryards</a></i> (Redbird Chapbooks, 2016). Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.<br />
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<b>Author website: </b><a href="http://www.sonjajohanson.net/" target="_blank">http://www.sonjajohanson.net/</a><br />
<b><br /></b><b>Author Facebook page: </b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/sonjajohanson10" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/sonjajohanson10</a><br />
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<b>Twitter:</b> <a href="https://twitter.com/sonjajohanson" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/sonjajohanson</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in November 2016.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/content/trees-our-dooryards" target="_blank">Trees in Our Dooryards</a></i>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: <i>Dooryards</i> is a selection of poems based in my home state. Underneath the placed based stories, and the desire to connect and write poetry that would be meaningful to people I know, I’m also writing about a sense of loss. Those rural areas, and those lifestyles, are passing us by, and I want to capture them while I still can. <br />
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<b>You mentioned that your chapbook is a love letter to your home state of Maine. I imagine aspects of <i>place</i> feature prominently your chapbook. Maxine Kumin wrote “In a poem one can use the sense of place as an anchor for larger concerns, as a link between narrow details and global realities. Location is where we start from” (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/DEEP-Country-Essays-Maxine-Kumin/dp/0670814318/" target="_blank">In Deep: Country Essays</a></i>). Does this ring true for you? Do the poems in <i>Trees in our Dooryards</i> tend towards the geographical-location and natural-environment aspect of place? Or are they more engaged with the history of the area or its current cultural or political landscape?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: Yes. Yes. Yes. Chuckle. That’s kind of an unfair way to respond, but human ecology teaches us that humans are not separate from the environment, we’re part of it. Our landscape shapes us, geography shapes our culture, history affects our politics, and our politics in turn affect the environment. So the poems touch all of those areas. One poem begins with the history of itinerant painters and ends with the loss of species we are currently experiencing. Another imagines a (quite fanciful) solution to the storm destruction occurring on coast lines everywhere. A childhood spent outdoors plants the seeds of a future environmental ethic; years spent working in the tourist industry ensure a connection to people, as well as place.<br />
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<b>I see you’re a Lifetime Master Gardener of the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association. Poet Stanley Kunitz was also a passionate gardener. In <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wild-Braid-Reflects-Century-Garden/dp/0393329976" target="_blank">The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden</a></i>, his collections of essay on poetry and gardening, he wrote: </b><br />
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I conceived of the garden as a poem in stanzas. Each terrace contributes to the garden as a whole in the same way each stanza in a poem has a life of its own, and yet is part of a progressive whole as well.<br />
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The form provides some degree of repose, letting our mind rest in the comparatively manageable unit of the stanza, or terrace. Yet there is also a need to move on, to look beyond teh stanza, into the poem as a whole.<br />
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Often, when you finish reading a poem, the impulse is to revisit the beginning now that you’ve been all the way through it, and then each subsequent trip through the poem is different and colored by having seen the whole thing.
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Does Kunitz’s parallel consideration of poetry and gardening resonate with you? How does your love of gardening impact your writing and your poetry?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: What a lovely way to look at a poem! Classic estates were often set up with garden “rooms”, each distinct, yet connected and contributing to the grounds as a whole. Not only does this metaphor work for a poem, I think it extends perfectly to a set of poems within a book – each discrete, with its own focus and feel, and yet related and falling under a unifying theme.<br />
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As to gardening and poetry, there’s no better meditation than weeding, and the quiet time is often when a lot of writing happens in my head. <br />
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Oddly, despite being a Master Gardener, it isn’t really gardens that I am passionate about – it’s individual plants. I’m fascinated by their survival and reproductive strategies, and I’m somewhat more drawn to wild plants than domestic ones. It’s anthropomorphizing, of course, but I’m charmed by the oak’s preference for squirrels as a reproductive partner over humans. The apple made a different decision, and threw its lot in with us, but oak trees retain some wildness for not using us as seed dispersers. It’s the same with weeds over our tame garden plants – they choose the hardscrabble, the unwanted liminal places, and the strategies they use to be successful in doing so are varied and amazing. I know weeds and trees much better than the inhabitants of your average perennial garden.
This does make me reflect, though, on a particular difficulty I have with my writing; it’s different all the time. My form, my voice, my subjects can be all over the place, which is like my gardening – one summer I’m into growing heirloom watermelons, another it’s peanuts in New England, another summer I decide I just have to have a forest pansy. So my gardens are a patchwork of whatever catches my interest, and my writing can be that way too. It’s fun, no regrets, but it takes me a while to acquire enough cohesive material to pull together a themed book.
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<b>You also mentioned that most of the poems in <i>Trees in our Dooryards</i> came out of a 30-poems-in-30-days event sponsored by <a href="http://www.writersdigest.com/" target="_blank">The Writer’s Digest</a>. What was that experience like for you? How did you come to realize that you might have a chapbook? Tell us a bit about what you did to shape the poems into a cohesive whole.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: That was the first 30-30 I ever did, and I found it to be exhausting! I’m a very slow writer; I’ve been told it’s called “bathtub writing”. I’ll mull something over in my head, work on it while I’m driving, or running, or gardening (apparently some people do this in the bathtub). Then one day I’ll sit down and write the whole thing out, in what is pretty close to its finished form. With the 30-30 I would wake up in the morning, read the prompt first thing, spend the day ruminating on it, and write it come evening. It was a lot less time than I was accustomed to having, and quite a few of the pieces were not really worth saving. The ones that were, though, were in a very plain voice, and tended to be memories and observations.<br />
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Writer’s Digest does two Poem-A-Day Challenges every year, and the November one is a chapbook challenge, so that was already the idea. Fifteen of the poems that ended up in the final chapbook were from this project; I could hear that they had a similar tone and related to one another. As time went along and I found others that seemed to fit in as well, they went into the file, and eventually I had enough pieces for a full chapbook.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: My personal favorite in this collection is the closing poem, “Back to You”. Each line takes me to a very specific place and moment, though those are pieced together from disparate years – the top of a mountain on a winter day, that same mountain from below, streets and fields I’ve walked in forgotten farm towns. For me, it’s a love poem to my home, and then simply a love poem that anyone might relate to, and finally it’s about coming back to writing after almost twenty years of thinking that part of my life was over.<br />
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<b>Back To You</b><br />
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Days, I smile endlessly out the windshield<br />
looking up, those on the bright <br />
mountain looking down to where<br />
this bridge splits the water<br />
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Stone walls stumble along corn-liquor lines<br />
I keep watch for wedding maples – both trees<br />
hardly ever survive the crush of asphalt<br />
or the salted winters, so we plant again<br />
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Seeing the land fall away<br />
while the sky opens up<br />
before the road, now I know<br />
my heart does more than beat<br />
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<b>In a Feb 2014 essay “<a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetry-place-james-wrights-secret-light" target="_blank">The Poetry of Place: James Wright’s “The Secret of Light</a>,” James Galvin offers as one reason why a poet would write of specific place: </b><br />
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<b>[T]he poet of place situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it. Poetry of place is actually a poetry of displacement and self-annihilation. The poet replaces self with situation, turning himself, as in were, inside out, so that the center of “knowing who you are” becomes the circumference of uncertainty. The poem as locus mirrors this dynamic, since it is a measured place, possibly with stanzas (rooms), which has an infinite capacity to contain everything outside it, including the poet. To have identity means to be alone. Loneliness is the anxiety that compels us to identify with an other or with otherness. To disappear into a place. To empathize.</b></blockquote>
<b>Many poets live in one area for years, yet don’t write about the place where they live. What do you think of Galvin’s comments regarding why a poet would write poems rooted in a specific place?
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: Hmmm…my first response is that writing from place is very much “write what you know”, and with our increasing awareness of the problems around cultural appropriation, it’s critical to do that. I may be deeply concerned with Native American rights, or inner city class struggles, but those are not my stories to tell. I get to tell about the loss of culture or environmental connection from where I stand, and if I do it successfully, perhaps it will remind the reader of your place and the changes you are experiencing – maybe you know how that feels even if we’ve never seen each other’s homes. So in that sense we do have death of the author, which I think is what Galvin is talking about.<br />
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I do really like the line “to disappear into a place”. I think we all know that feeling, when immersed in the landscape, of being both irrelevant and indescribably large. It is absolutely a moment of deep loneliness, but also one of profound connection. We matter, and we don’t matter in the slightest, and it’s all very wonderful and humbling.<br />
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<b>In addition to the motif of place, what are some of the other themes, metaphors, and elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: Themes of the environment and class are inescapable for me – that’s my particular set of filters. All these poems are simple free verse, and as a writer I place tremendous importance on accessibility. That’s not to say that all poems, or even all writers, need to be accessible to all readers, but some definitely do if we want poetry to succeed more widely as an art form. One of my most meaningful experiences as a writer actually happened during a reading. I opened my reading with a piece about/not about ice fishing, and a man at the table near the door stood up at the end and said “I been there” in a heavy Maine accent. I wanted to hug him; I was incredibly nervous, but felt instantly reassured by that familiar voice offering support. At the end of the evening, the host told me that he and his friends sometimes came to the reading series to heckle the poets – but instead, I reached him, and he reached me. We have to find a way to do that if poetry is going to connect with an audience outside of ourselves.<br />
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<b>To what degree did you collaborate on the cover image and design of your chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: The editors at Red Bird Chapbooks did ask me if I had preferences regarding my cover, but I don’t happen to know a whole lot of artist, so I let them offer up suggestions. They sent me two, and I have to say that I’m quite in love with this one!<br />
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<b>Is there a poem you consider to be a “misfit” in your collection? If so, why is it a misfit?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: That’s such a good question – I really do have a misfit in there. It’s “North Alder River Pond.” I included it because it’s about a pond where my family has a small summer camp, and which also makes an appearance in some other pieces, but the voice and tone are profoundly different from any of the other poems. That piece was probably my first foray into found poetry. I was reading a history of the pond, and used a lot of found language from that little history in the first part of the poem; in particular I would select family names from the area and use them simply as words in the text – Rod, Linwood, Ransom, Reward, Warr. It’s the one poem in the collection from which I, as the narrator, am really absent, and it’s just the place talking.<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">SJ</span></i></b>: Well, I’m working on applications for an MFA, which is kind of dry, but I’m also working on a couple of different poem series. The first is a series of poems which personify people in my life as body parts – "My Stomach Gives Me Honey", "Binge-Watching Netflix with My Spine." The second is a series of prose poems about social justice couched as “spells” – "Spell for Giving a Selfish Person Empathy," "Spell for Putting the Shape of a Wife in the Wall," etc. These are a far throw from my place based poems, so I guess I’m still working out what my voice is! Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-20774761473901542322016-08-18T00:03:00.000-04:002016-08-18T10:48:34.272-04:00Light into Bodies wins the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Overjoyed to report that my first book <i>Light into Bodies</i> has been selected as the winner of the 2016 <i>Tampa Review</i> Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from University of Tampa Press! More information <a href="http://tampareview.blogspot.com/2016/08/nancy-chen-long-wins-2016-tampa-review.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-3614629928254999222016-08-08T14:46:00.000-04:002016-08-13T15:07:07.300-04:00Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone: Interview<div style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; line-height: 19.32px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thanks to <a href="https://chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Speaking of Marvels</a> for this interview about my chapbook <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/CloudsAsInkblotsForTheWarProne" target="_blank">Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone</a> </i>(Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). Below is an excerpt from the interview. <span style="background-color: transparent;">You can read the interview in its entirety here: <br /> </span><a href="http://chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/nancy-chen-long" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; color: #365899; cursor: pointer; line-height: 19.32px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">chapbookinterviews.wordpress.com/2016/08/08/nancy-chen-long</a><span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 19.32px;">"My arrangement of the manuscript was subsequently changed by the editor. She saw the arc in a slightly different—and better—way. (I cannot emphasize enough what a pleasure it is to work with a good editor.) She suggested that the manuscript open with an ekphastic poem titled “Lament for Icarus” that was inspired by an 1898 paint</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; line-height: 19.32px;">ing of the same name by Herbert Draper. In that way, Icarus and the associated myth would be the guiding force that propels the reader through the narrative. She also suggested ending with a poem called “Seeking Asylum,” which brings the reader back to Icarus at the end through the image of the falling sparrows that end the poem. She also commented that the ending image of falling sparrows alludes to the sparrows in the Hall of Souls (the Chamber of Guf in Jewish mysticism), which, to her, further enforced another thread that runs through the chapbook, that of the dangers/ pitfalls of human hubris."</span></span></blockquote>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-36273017164866397342016-07-19T16:22:00.000-04:002016-07-19T16:24:08.406-04:00Chapbook Chat: Katie Manning Discusses A Door with a Voice<br />
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<a href="http://www.sundresspublications.com/agape/adoorwithavoice.pdf" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">A Door with a Voice</a><br />
Author: <a href="http://www.katiemanningpoet.com/" target="_blank">Katie Manning</a><br />
Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.sundresspublications.com/agape/" target="_blank">Agape Editions - A Sundress Publications Imprint</a><br />
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Publication date: 2016<br />
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<b>The Book of Calm</b><br />
<i>all that remains of Malachi</i><br />
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the day is coming<br />
like a furnace<br />
every<br />
day<br />
will set<br />
you<br />
on fire<br />
you will go out and frolic like<br />
ashes<br />
on the day<br />
that<br />
dreadful day<br />
when<br />
the LORD<br />
will come and strike the land with<br />
children<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">originally appeared in the <i><a href="http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2016/apr/20/poetry-katie-manning/#" target="_blank">San Diego Reader</a></i></span><br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pJ6lI32Vu1o/V46A6R9TBFI/AAAAAAAABhE/yWywOR79QiEh9k7XpkkGI-31iHgYkCGLACLcB/s1600/KatieManning25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="287" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pJ6lI32Vu1o/V46A6R9TBFI/AAAAAAAABhE/yWywOR79QiEh9k7XpkkGI-31iHgYkCGLACLcB/s400/KatieManning25.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Katie Manning is the founding Editor-in-Chief of <i>Whale Road Review</i> and an Associate Professor of Writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Bleeding-Woman-Poems-Point/dp/1625640978" target="_blank">The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman</a></i> (Point Loma Press, 2013), and her first full-length poetry collection, <i>Tasty Other</i>, is forthcoming in November as the 2016 winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.<br />
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<b>Author website: </b><a href="http://www.katiemanningpoet.com/" target="_blank">http://www.katiemanningpoet.com/</a><br />
<b><br /></b><b>Author Facebook page: </b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/katiemanningpoet/?fref=ts" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/katiemanningpoet/?fref=ts</a><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Twitter:</b> <a href="https://twitter.com/iamkatmann" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/iamkatmann</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in June 2016.]</span><br />
<br />
<b>Please tell us a little bit about <i><a href="http://www.sundresspublications.com/agape/adoorwithavoice.pdf" target="_blank">A Door with a Voice</a></i>.</b><br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: This chapbook is a selection of poems from a larger project, in which I'm taking the last chapter of each book of the Bible as a word bank and creating poems. For this chapbook, I selected the poems that focused on women, especially mothers, and children. The title is from the closing lines of one of my favorite poems in the collection, "The Song of Sons." <br />
<br />
[<a href="http://www.sundresspublications.com/agape/adoorwithavoice.pdf" target="_blank"><i>A Door with a Voice</i> is available from the publisher via free download</a>.]<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>You mentioned that one of the reasons you started working on the poems was because you were tired of people taking language from the Bible out of context and using it as a weapon against other people, so you started taking language from the Bible out of context and using it to create art. Is the Bible a sacred text for you? How does religion/faith factor into your writing?</b><br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: The Bible is a sacred text for me, which is why I think it is worth spending the time to study it and to consider the larger contexts of the passages and books it contains. Some people selectively read scripture in ways that affirm (or ignore) their own behavior while conveniently condemning whoever it is they want it to condemn. That seems to me a poor way to treat a sacred text.<br />
<br />
I don't think I can ever escape my own identities and concerns when I'm writing poetry. Even if I'm not explicitly writing about the Bible, it's part of me. Even if I'm not writing explicitly about myself, I'm writing as a feminist, a mother, a wife, a daughter, and more. All of my experiences and roles have shaped the way I perceive the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>In a 2012 <i>Kenyon Review</i> article “<a href="http://www.kenyonreview.org/2012/11/erasure-collaborative-interview/" target="_blank">The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft</a>,” Andrew David King asks the following: </b><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>
Usually, the literary self seems to be a positive construction, but erasure challenges that notion, expropriating and subtracting in lieu of adding. Do you think it’s still possible to excavate an identifiable self from your erasures? What about your work is distinctly “you,” if anything?</b></blockquote>
<b>
Here are excerpts from the interviewees responses:</b><br />
<ul>
<li><b>Janet Holmes (<i>The ms of my kin</i>)</b>: “Why does there need to be an “identifiable self” in the poems? … The concerns of the resultant text are my own, and I think are identifiable as such in the context of my other writing, but I did not explicitly seek to create “a self” that could be identified as me, and have the erasure speak its words.”<br /> </li>
<li><b>Srikanth Reddy’s (<i>Voyager</i>)</b>: “When you erase a text, you’re “unearthing” possibilities of phrasing, voicing, and thinking that are already embedded but somehow buried or hidden within the language. Oddly, though, I did find that as I erased Waldheim’s book, with its ghastly bureaucratic language, I kept finding “my” voice within it.” <br /> </li>
<li><b>Travis Macdonald (<i>The O Mission Repo</i>)</b>: “[T]he act of erasure leads toward the discovery of otherness. … My own role as poet in this process has more closely resembled that of an archaeologist much more than that of an architect.”<br /> </li>
<li><b>Matthea Harvey (<i>Of Lamb</i>)</b>: “Erasure is like any other form—it shapes the content and also leads you to say things you wouldn’t have said without its strictures, but I think some very distinct particles of “you-ness” get caught in that sieve.”<br /> </li>
<li><b>David Dodd Lee (<i>Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere</i>)</b>: “But it also felt possible I might craft something, using Ashbery’s work as source material, that sounded nothing like Ashbery. I mean, I had no idea, at first, what would happen, which was partly the point… But then, after a while, the poems started to seem like they were mostly mine (I just started feeling that they were).”<br /> </li>
<li><b>M. NourbeSe Philip (<i>Zong!</i>)</b>: “If I were to discern traces of what is “distinctly” me in <i>Zong!</i>, it is to be found less in the writing itself and more in the willingness to risk—to sail in the dark with no compass. With only one’s heartbeat to accompany one.”</li>
</ul>
<b>Which one(s) of the above, if any, resonate with you and why? How would you answer King’s question?</b>
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: Several of these resonate with me, but especially the answers from Janet Holmes and Matthea Harvey. I didn't set out to read myself into the biblical texts that I used as word banks, but my concerns certainly crept into the language that I selected and the ways that I formed my poems from those limited words. This project was a self-assignment that kept me writing after I became a mother, finished my dissertation, and started a full-time job--a chaotic time when it would've been easy to stop writing poetry. Without intending to, I wrote several poems for the larger project that focused on mothers and children, which happily led to this unexpected chapbook. I imagine that these poems would have a different focus if I'd written them at a different time of life.<br />
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<b>One of the attractions of chapbooks as a form is that they can be beautiful, limited-edition works of art, poetry-as-artifact. <i><a href="http://www.sundresspublications.com/agape/adoorwithavoice.pdf" target="_blank">A Door with a Voice</a></i> is an e-chapbook, which means it’s digital. Why did you choose the e-chapbook as a form for your manuscript? How does the e-chapbook form benefit your work?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: Honestly, I was hesitant about publishing an e-chapbook at first, but Fox Frazier-Foley (Editor of Agape Editions) "got" my project and was so excited about these poems, and she wants to publish chapbooks digitally to make the work more widely available to readers. I love getting to share my project with anyone who wants to download it, and it's a relief that I don't have to sell anything! <br />
<br />
At the same time, I love the hand-bound and limited edition chapbooks that I had published by Boneset Books and Yellow Flag Press in 2013. They are special. I also love my chapbook <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-Bleeding-Woman-Poems-Point/dp/1625640978" target="_blank">The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman</a></i>, which is perfect-bound and widely available through Wipf & Stock, Amazon, and elsewhere. I'm so glad there is this great variety in chapbook publishing.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: As I already mentioned, one of my very favorite poems in this chapbook is "The Song of Sons." It was so fun to work with the language from Song of Songs, which is very familiar to me, and to make the words feel new. I love how the language of lovers in the original book shifts into an unspoken language of love-longing from a nursing infant to his mother in my poem. Since I have two sons, this poems feels especially close to me.<br />
<br />
<b>The Song of Sons</b>
<br />
<i>all that remains of Song of Songs</i><br />
<br />
if I found you<br />
I would<br />
drink<br />
the nectar of <br />
head<br />
and <br />
arm<br />
<br />
wake<br />
mother<br />
<br />
place me <br />
over your heart<br />
<br />
your arm<br />
is <br />
strong as death<br />
unyielding as<br />
love<br />
<br />
a<br />
breast<br />
is a door<br />
with <br />
a<br />
voice<br />
<br />
let me hear<br />
<br />
(first published in <i><a href="http://queenmobs.com/" target="_blank">Queen Mob's Teahouse</a></i>) <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>You shared that you started working on the manuscript because you needed a prescribed project in order to keep writing poems: You’d just finished your dissertation, given birth to your first child, and started a new full-time professor gig. (WOW!) What was it about working on these poems that kept you engaged?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: I'm still sick of people causing harm by taking verses from the Bible out of context, so that motivation never left me, but I was also driven to keep writing by the strictures of the project: I always knew what to work on next. The words were right there for me to use, which was especially handy in the throes of new motherhood and sleep deprivation. Getting enthusiastic feedback from writer friends also kept me going, especially when I got partway through the first drafts and wondered if anyone else would ever want to read these weird poems. <br />
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<b>Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: Yes, I've read them to a variety of audiences: to a small group of friends, at a pop culture conference, and even in my Jesus costume at a <a href="http://www.nicelledavis.net/the-poetry-circus/" target="_blank">Poetry Circus</a>! Since I was so earnest in my writing of these poems, and since I was afraid no one else would want to hear or read them, I was shocked the first time I shared them and people laughed! I was certainly not expecting people to laugh or to be moved by them, but I've gotten really enthusiastic feedback every time I've shared these poems. <br />
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<b>What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?</b><br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>:
I've already said a lot about myself and my poems, so let me say that I'm thrilled to have David Adey's art as the cover image for <i>A Door with a Voice</i>. He's one of my very favorite artists, and I think of my Bible word banking project as a kind of "kindred art" to his work with magazine covers and ads. You can check out more of his work at <a href="http://www.davidadey.com/" target="_blank">http://www.davidadey.com/</a><br />
<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
<br />
<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KM</span></i></b>: I've just completed a full revision of the larger Bible word banking project, which still needs a title. I'm also working on a series of poems that use board games as a starting place to explore relationships and memory, and I'm working on a series of prose poems that are addressed to my late granny (and that also explore relationships and memory... perhaps these sequences will merge). Thanks for asking! Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-11708572634768696242016-07-04T21:20:00.005-04:002016-07-04T23:31:43.390-04:00Broadsides<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dcmA8xW_ZNc/V3sJKh0fJ2I/AAAAAAAABgo/k5uimzUCD4IUJVSLNdyM-HPqOTR_RdLDACKgB/s1600/110-SecondFallacy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dcmA8xW_ZNc/V3sJKh0fJ2I/AAAAAAAABgo/k5uimzUCD4IUJVSLNdyM-HPqOTR_RdLDACKgB/s640/110-SecondFallacy.jpg" width="494" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"<a href="http://www.broadsidedpress.org/qa/2014/04april.shtml" target="_blank">The Second Fallacy</a>"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Poetry broadsides are single poems printed on one side of a sheet of paper, sometimes with artwork, sometimes not. I think of them as a cross between written work and artwork because they're usually beautiful and suitable for framing. It's not uncommon for a literary journal or press to publish a broadside from one of their publications, such as the broadside of <a href="https://www.tupelopress.org/books_broadsides.php" target="_blank">"Good Bones," by Maggie Smith from her book book <i>Weep Up</i> published by Tupelo Press</a>. It's not uncommon for broadsides to be signed by the poet, for example the letterpress limited-edition prints from the <a href="http://www.hsc.edu/Poetry-Review/Broadside-Series.html" target="_blank">Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review Broadside Series</a> and <a href="http://poets.myshopify.com/collections/broadsides" target="_blank">those offered by the Academy of American Poets</a>.<br />
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You can make your own broadside. You can use plain paper if you wish. I like to use card stock or paper with a finish, such as linen. While broadsides can be larger, such as poster size, 8.5 x 11 and postcard are more common sizes. You can print them yourself or have them printed at an office store or local printer. If you're looking for free artwork, trying searching for images in the public domain or the Creative Commons. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources" target="_blank">Wikipedia has a list of public-domain image resources</a>. And the <a href="https://creativecommons.org/" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> (CC) has created a wonderful portal that will let you search various sites for CC images, e.g., Google, Wikimedia, and Flickr each have a Creative Commons component. Here is the CC portal: <a href="http://search.creativecommons.org/" target="_blank">http://search.creativecommons.org/</a><br />
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If you're interested in broadside contests and publishers, I've listed some contests and publishers below. And for more information about poetry broadsides in general, see:<br />
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* Babcock Books: "<a href="http://www.babcockbooks.com/broadsides.php" target="_blank">What is a Broadside</a>?"<br />
* Kyle Schlesinger: "<a href="http://www.thevolta.org/ewc29-kschlesinger-p1.html" target="_blank">A Look At Some Contemporary Poetry Broadsides</a>"<br />
* Maureen E. Doallas: "<a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_2028464374"></span>Poetry Broadsides Roundup<span id="goog_2028464375"></span></a>"<br />
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<h2>
Broadside Contests</h2>
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<h4>
Heartwood Broadside Series Contest</h4>
<ul>
<li>Prize: $500, plus 25 copies of a letterpress broadside of the poem</li>
<li>Contest runs from Apr 1 - Jun 1</li>
<li>Entry fee: $15, includes a mailed copy of the winning broadside</li>
<li>Submissions must be previously unpublished and can be one poem or flash prose piece (fiction or nonfiction) of 250 words or less</li>
<li>Previously published work allowed: <b>No</b></li>
<li>Winner selected by July 1</li>
<li>See website for complete details: <a href="http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/contest/" target="_blank">http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/contest/</a></li>
</ul>
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<h4>
Hit and Run Press Annual William Dickey Broadside Contest</h4>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Prize: $1,000, plus the publication of a limited edition of letterpress broadsides</li>
<li>Contest runs from Sep 1 - Nov 31</li>
<li>Entry Fee: $10. One entry per poet</li>
<li>Poems must between 12-30 lines</li>
<li>Previously published work allowed? <b>Yes</b></li>
<li>See website for complete details: <a href="http://www.mrbebop.com/annual-broadside-contest/" target="_blank">http://www.mrbebop.com/annual-broadside-contest/</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<h4>
Littoral Press Poetry Prize</h4>
<ul>
<li>Prize: 50 letterpress-printed broadsides of the winning poem</li>
<li>Contest runs until Aug 12.</li>
<li>Entry fee: $10 for the first poem, $5 for each additional poem</li>
<li>Poems must be no more than 30 lines (This line count includes lines for stanza breaks.)</li>
<li>Previously published work allowed? <b>Yes</b></li>
<li>Winner announced in September</li>
<li>See website for complete details: <a href="http://littoralpress.com/web/current-events/" target="_blank">http://littoralpress.com/web/current-events/</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Omnidawn Publishing Single Poem Broadside Poetry Prize</h4>
<ul>
<li>Prize: $1,000, plus 50 copies of a letterpress broadside of the poem, and publication in <i>OmniVerse</i>, Omnidawn Publishing's online journal.</li>
<li><div>
Contest runs from Aug 1 - Oct 17</div>
</li>
<li>Entry fee: $10 for the first poem, $5 for each additional poem</li>
<li>Poems must be between 8 and 24 lines (This line count includes lines for stanza breaks.)</li>
<li>Previously published work allowed? <b>No</b></li>
<li>Winner announced Apr 2017</li>
<li>See website for complete details: <a href="http://www.omnidawn.com/contest/poetry-contests.htm#broadside-contest" target="_blank">http://www.omnidawn.com/contest/poetry-contests.htm#broadside-contest</a></li>
</ul>
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<h2>
Broadside Publishers</h2>
<br />
<a href="http://www.broadsidedpress.org/index.shtml" target="_blank">Broadsided Press</a> selects poems to publish. See their website for submission guidelines.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thrushpress.com/broadside-submissions.html" target="_blank">Thrush Press</a> selects poems to publish. See their website for submission guidelines.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.smokeyroadpress.com/" target="_blank">Smokey Road Press</a> will print your poem as a broadside. See their website for fees and other information.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-34739566242801598592016-03-13T20:11:00.000-04:002016-07-03T09:48:55.152-04:00Chapbook Chat: Kelly Fordon Discusses The Witness[trigger warning: child abuse]<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_sFQzqCRNO165mllV6XMsVAXsXFnqWNQM-3GxbTS62J-L9kCycNeWJh9z04-xjrQ_TRxb6k9pFGNaHj88jnD-xT_IuEGKtptp3i1Hxt6MfNL8EW-hSbDNgOuNXVRoAY6Og-gb8fbwd61/s1600/FordonKelly_TheWitness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk_sFQzqCRNO165mllV6XMsVAXsXFnqWNQM-3GxbTS62J-L9kCycNeWJh9z04-xjrQ_TRxb6k9pFGNaHj88jnD-xT_IuEGKtptp3i1Hxt6MfNL8EW-hSbDNgOuNXVRoAY6Og-gb8fbwd61/s400/FordonKelly_TheWitness.jpg" width="255" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://kattywompuspress.com/shop/books-and-chapbooks/the-witness-by-kelly-fordon/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Witness</a><br />
Author: Kelly Fordon<br />
Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://kattywompuspress.com/" target="_blank">Kattywompus Press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2016<br />
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<b>The Witness #2</b><br />
<br />
The Witness is just like you and me.<br />
Most days he doesn’t feel like saying <br />
anything antagonistic. Most days <br />
he’s happy with toast and tea, a little<br />
bit of television, a stroll, but every<br />
now and then The Witness is struck <br />
down mid-jaunt. Every now and then,<br />
The Witness tumbles down the stairs.<br />
The water in the shower comes out<br />
scalding hot. The Witness’s hair <br />
falls out in clumps. The Witness <br />
can’t remember his name, he can’t <br />
even get out of bed. Shake it<br />
off? There is nothing he would like<br />
more. If you run into The Witness <br />
at a dinner party, he will not bring <br />
it up. He’ll listen to your suburban saga<br />
politely. He’s been known to suck <br />
down a shot of vodka, a snort or two. <br />
In other words, he could be you.<br />
If you had witnessed it. If you <br />
were on your merry way one day <br />
when you were very small and everyone<br />
around you was very very tall.<br />
The Witness can not talk about this<br />
like a normal person, which is why<br />
they sometimes lock him up, <br />
they keep him under observation. <br />
Like a faucet that’s lost a clot, <br />
he can’t seem to make the images stop.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">originally appeared in <i><a href="http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/index.html#index_top" target="_blank">Mudlark</a></i></span><br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ccjZY857wMc/VuCqywlKzNI/AAAAAAAABcg/lrzUbcoS_Kk/s1600/FordonKelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ccjZY857wMc/VuCqywlKzNI/AAAAAAAABcg/lrzUbcoS_Kk/s400/FordonKelly.jpg" width="297" /></a></div>
Prior to writing fiction and poetry, <a href="http://www.kellyfordon.com/" target="_blank">Kelly Fordon</a> worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry and book reviews have appeared in T<i>he Boston Review</i>, <i>The Florida Review</i>, <i>Flashquake</i>, <i>The Kenyon Review (KRO)</i>, <i>The Montreal Review</i>, <i>Rattle</i>, <i>Red Wheelbarrow</i>, <i>The Windsor Review</i> and various other journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, <i><a href="http://www.kellyfordon.com/product/street-where-we-live" target="_blank">On The Street Where We Live</a></i>, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, <i><a href="http://www.kellyfordon.com/product/tell-me-when-it-starts-hurt" target="_blank">Tell Me When it Starts to Hurt</a></i>, which was published by Kattywompus Press in May 2013 and <i><a href="http://kattywompuspress.com/shop/books-and-chapbooks/the-witness-by-kelly-fordon/" target="_blank">The Witness</a></i>, released by Kattywompus Press in January 2016. Her short story collection, <i><a href="http://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/garden-blind" target="_blank">Garden for the Blind,</a></i> was published by Wayne State University Press in April 2015 and has been chosen as a Michigan Notable Book. She works for the Inside Out Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.<br />
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<b>Author website: </b><a href="http://www.kellyfordon.com/" target="_blank">http://www.kellyfordon.com/</a><br />
<b><br /></b><b>Author Facebook page: </b><a href="https://www.facebook.com/kellyfordonAuthor/" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/kellyfordonAuthor/</a><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>LinkedIn profile:</b> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-fordon-aa095a10" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-fordon-aa095a10</a><br />
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<b>Twitter:</b> <a href="https://twitter.com/kfor24" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/kfor24</a><br />
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<b>Instagram:</b> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/kfor2260/" target="_blank">https://www.instagram.com/kfor2260/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in March 2016.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about <i><a href="http://kattywompuspress.com/shop/books-and-chapbooks/the-witness-by-kelly-fordon/" target="_blank">The Witness</a></i>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: This book was written in response to my personal experiences as well as the 10,000 pages of testimony provided by survivor’s of sexual abuse at the SNAP network (<a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/" target="_blank">http://www.snapnetwork.org/</a>) , as well as the Center for Constitutional Rights (<a href="http://www.ccrjustice.org/category/project/snap" target="_blank">http://www.ccrjustice.org/category/project/snap</a>).<br />
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<b>As the title suggests, these poems, written in response to the testimony of those abused by Catholic priests, bear a lyrical witness. Please tell us a bit about your process of creating poetry out of another person’s story or testimony. In her essay “Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art” (Poetry, May 2011), Carolyn Forché wrote “In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation.” Is that the case for you?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: Generally speaking I would think twice about co-opting another person’s experience, even if I felt I was doing it with the best intentions. In this case, I am very close to the material because I was raised in the Catholic Church and I was an altar girl. However, this chapbook is not about “me” in particular or my personal experiences, and I don’t want my personal experiences to cloud anyone’s reading of this work. Anyone who wants to read about the genesis for these poems should refer to the <a href="http://www.snapnetwork.org/" target="_blank">snapnetwork.org </a>website and the <a href="http://www.ccrjustice.org/category/project/snap" target="_blank">Center for Constitutional Rights website</a>.<br />
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<b>You also mentioned that a good number of the poems are written in the voice of a “witness,” and it got me to thinking about persona poems. In a March 2015 <i>Girls Write Now</i> post “<a href="http://www.girlswritenow.org/2015/03/challenges-rewards-in-persona-poetry-a-mentee-mentor-perspective/" target="_blank">Challenges & Rewards In Persona Poetry: A Mentee-Mentor Perspective</a>,” Cindy Chu, in an interview with Katie Zanecchia, writes: </b><br />
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<b>At its core, persona poetry forces poets to better identify themselves in order to take on another’s perspective. After all, how do you become someone else without defining who you are, in addition to who they are? While poets construct poems from the view of their chosen characters, the resulting poetry is their own. Whether through use of vocabulary, syntax, or punctuation, poets shape others’ voices into wholly unique works of art. Therefore, persona poetry says as much about the poet as it does her subject. The way that personas are presented on paper provides great insight into poets’ sense of self. </b></blockquote>
<b> Did you find the above true for you? Please tell us a bit about voice and persona in your poems.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I wrote an earlier chapbook called <i>On the Street Where We Live</i> which includes persona poems in the voices of imagined women on “my” street. They were not, in reality, the women I knew, but an amalgamation of all of our experiences—divorce, abuse, loss, career aspirations, motherhood, etc. In those poems I had the sense that I was writing someone else’s story and trying to ascertain what it felt like to be going through the experience of domestic abuse or estrangement etc.<br />
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In this new chapbook, I was overtaken by the witness; I felt completely merged with the witness, and the voice materialized out of that rage. I hired <a href="http://www.lauravanprooyen.com/index.html" target="_blank">Laura Van Prooyan</a> as a manuscript consultant (she is excellent by the way!) and she said “Did you mean to mention the white robes and the penitent’s belt so many times?” <br />
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I did.<br />
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If I had been writing the poems with my poet hat on I would have looked for different images, but it is true to this witness that the white robe and the penitent’s belt come up over and over again. The witness is obsessed and the repetition is organic to the voice.<br />
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<b>What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I have not had a problem publishing the poems. Both William Slaughter at Mudlark and Sammy Greenspan at Kattywompus Press have been very supportive. I have only read the poems once at a conference in Windsor. Several people who were affected by the scandal came up to me afterwards, including Mary Ann Mulhern, a former nun and poet, who published <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/When-Angels-Weep-Mary-Mulhern/dp/0887534457" target="_blank">When Angels Weep</a>,</i> a poetry collection about the Father Charles Sylvester sexual-abuse case in Canada. <br />
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That being said, I feel tentative about presenting this work in public and if/when I do readings, I always begin with a content warning in order to allow people to leave the room if they need to—it can be very hard to hear. It’s also difficult to broach this material with my Catholic friends and family some of whom may see these poems as an attack on the church. There’s nothing I can do about that, unfortunately.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I like "The Victim’s Testimony." It’s one of the more graphic poems, but it illustrates how I feel about the whole debacle—angry, frustrated, violated, and dismissed. The image of the filing cabinet door closing on all of the 10,000 pages of victim testimony (some estimates are now at over 100,000 victims worldwide) felt like an apt metaphor.<br />
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<b>The Victim’s Testimony</b><br />
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I’m stuck in this file cabinet.<br />
Who wants to finger me?<br />
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My words are onion paper thin.<br />
Easily crumpled, easily tossed.<br />
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In French class I say, <br />
“S'il vous plaît ne faites pas ça.” <br />
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Shower me with holy water <br />
and I scream like Asmodeus.<br />
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The first robe is always white <br />
but the outer one changes <br />
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like his performance. It was purple<br />
that day to remind us of our sins.<br />
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As if I could forget.<br />
As if God could. The light<br />
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above my box is always red,<br />
which means <i>stop</i>, a word <br />
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I use more than any other.<br />
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(published in <i><a href="http://www.thenewpoet.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-new-poet-5.html" target="_blank">The New Poet</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/index.html#index_top" target="_blank">Mudlark</a></i>)
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<b>Please discuss the choice for a chapbook. For example, why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I wrote these poems in a very short period of time when I was immersed in reading the SNAP testimony. When I was finished, I had around twenty poems. I have published with Kattywompus before and so I naturally sent the work to Sammy. She said yes right away and I was happy they found a home and an advocate. I am still working on the full-length collection, but I have had to take some breaks along the way because the material is hard to face day in and day out. There have been periods when I can’t do it and then I come back to it a month or two later.<br />
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<b>What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>:
I would like the survivors who have given testimony to know that they have made a real difference in people’s lives. I for one, will keep advocating. The film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/" target="_blank"><i>Spotlight</i></a> highlights how many people were complicit in the cover-up—no one wanted to challenge the Catholic Church, even though there were children’s lives at stake. How scary is that? Hopefully now people realize silence is reprehensible.
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I’m working on a full-length poetry collection and a novel.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-49250042215495013802016-02-07T16:13:00.000-05:002016-02-11T09:08:23.168-05:00Chapbook Chat: Janet MacFadyen Discusses In the Provincelands<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uWREz-JagDg/VrNzZCBh8RI/AAAAAAAABa8/LePRH0AwPF8/s1600/JanetMacFadyen_InTheProvincelands.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uWREz-JagDg/VrNzZCBh8RI/AAAAAAAABa8/LePRH0AwPF8/s400/JanetMacFadyen_InTheProvincelands.jpg" width="275" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://www.slateroofpress.com/books/in_the_provincelands.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">In the Provincelands</a><br />
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Author: Janet MacFadyen<br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.slateroofpress.com/" target="_blank">Slate Roof Press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2012<br />
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<b>The Future Melts</b> by Janet MacFadyen<br />
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You could hold it in your mouth<br />
like chocolate.<br />
What comes of this is desire, and if you taste it<br />
what comes is plenty, it is so sweet.<br />
Then what comes<br />
is that point of stillness inside the body.<br />
That is why cats are so liquid.<br />
That is why the leaf<br />
floats down and down in the warm air though it is fall,<br />
and thoughts slow like a train<br />
coming to a halt in the middle of a cornfield,<br />
at night, in October, leaves glinting on the ground.<br />
You could get off here in the darkness with the<br />
others, quietly talking and looking up at the stars,<br />
whose light has traveled from so far away<br />
and so long ago.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">originally appeared in <i>The Daily Hampshire Gazette</i></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi7WS88bTOSvhBVM8t4nFpsGgjJXb77LuHjVRbXh6dZyvXxM4zc7l5Qk6YayU1oLerWFBC3nZTSAV8Y2qYbyM2lM_1VNVW9uU8a8r26slMOwyAvn1RdFdvYakOidfcmeNgCb5-BUeP8WC/s1600/JanetMacFadyen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOi7WS88bTOSvhBVM8t4nFpsGgjJXb77LuHjVRbXh6dZyvXxM4zc7l5Qk6YayU1oLerWFBC3nZTSAV8Y2qYbyM2lM_1VNVW9uU8a8r26slMOwyAvn1RdFdvYakOidfcmeNgCb5-BUeP8WC/s320/JanetMacFadyen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Janet MacFadyen is the author of three works of poetry, including her Slate Roof Press chapbook, <i><a href="http://www.slateroofpress.com/books/in_the_provincelands.html" target="_blank">In the Provincelands</a></i>, a full-length work, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Newfoundland-Journal-Janet-MacFadyen/dp/1897174373" target="_blank">A Newfoundland Journal</a></i> (Killick Press), and an earlier chapbook <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/In-Defense-Stones-Janet-MacFayden/dp/B000JEWTTW" target="_blank">In Defense of Stones</a></i> (Heatherstone Press). A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has published widely, including in <i>Poetry, The Atlantic, The Southern Poetry Review, Rosebud,</i> and <i>Malahat</i>, and is forthcoming in <i>Crannóg</i>. Janet has held a seven-month residential fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, as well as writing residencies at Cill Rialaig (County Kerry, Ireland), and at the Fowler and C-Scape dune shacks in Provincetown. She lives in woods of Shutesbury, MA, with her husband, the photographer Stephen Schmidt.<br />
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<b>Author's LinkedIn profile:</b> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-macfadyen-4864b637" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/janet-macfadyen-4864b637</a><br />
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<b>Slate Roof Press Collective Facebook page:</b> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/slateroofpress" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/slateroofpress</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in February 2016.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: <i><a href="http://www.slateroofpress.com/books/in_the_provincelands.html" target="_blank">In the Provincelands</a></i> is the fruit of my work with <a href="http://www.slateroofpress.com/" target="_blank">Slate Roof Press</a>, a small western Massachusetts publishing collective established in 2004. Somewhat like Alice James, or Sixteen Rivers in San Francisco, collective members work for several years before, during, and after the publication of their chapbooks. The poems are vetted by the collective in advance (these days we run an annual chapbook contest). Also we are fortunate to have a wonderful letterpress printer as a permanent member, who works with each of us in the production of the book. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say my chapbook is a beautiful object. In addition to the special papers and hand-sewn binding, the cover has a die-cut sliver moon, which grows to a full moon on the fly leaf and title page, behind which is a full-color impressionistic photo, shown here:<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O_gD7vW91I0/VrepizoAgiI/AAAAAAAABbk/Y4skS2VeIGQ/s1600/JMacFadyen_interior%2Bphoto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="576" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O_gD7vW91I0/VrepizoAgiI/AAAAAAAABbk/Y4skS2VeIGQ/s640/JMacFadyen_interior%2Bphoto.jpg" width="389" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">Photo credit: Stephen Schmidt </span></td></tr>
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<b>You mentioned to me earlier about the themes of the book, “…food, the body, animals, and merging of self/confusion of self.” Having read in your <a href="https://themassachusettspoetryfesti2015.sched.org/speaker/janetmacfadyen" target="_blank">speaker bio</a> for the 2015 Massachusetts Poetry Festival that you were dubbed the Vegetable Queen of Poetry, I had to smile when you told me you identify with root vegetables sometimes more so than you do with being human, which I think I see reflected in your poem “<a href="http://www.sweetlit.com/4.1/poetMacFayden.php" target="_blank">Fetch</a>” (<a href="http://www.sweetlit.com/4.1/poetMacFayden.php" target="_blank">http://www.sweetlit.com/4.1/poetMacFayden.php</a>, the last poem on the page.) Could you expand on some of the themes of the chapbook a bit more for us? And I’m curious, about your title <i>Vegetable Queen of Poetry</i>, and especially curious: Why root vegetables?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>:I have never fully disentangled from the sense that vegetables are not so different from people. If you look at DNA, we share much of our genomes with vegetables and are a lot more closely connected to a cabbage than we might wish to think. But I also am playing out an old family drama in my poems set in the kitchen, where I watched the food getting chopped, diced, boiled, roasted; and witnessed the power that women wielded there (I grew up in the 50s, when the kitchen was a female domain). It seems to me a grotesque system that nature has put into place, where we must eat other living plants and animals in order to remain alive. So I have always wanted to know why: why, in order for some people to prosper, do others have to be destroyed? Why are some people in charge, and others under the boot? "Fetch," "For a Dog," "Your mission," "Through the Eye of a Potato," and "Night of the Mushroom" all explore these ideas in one fashion or another.<br />
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Tying into the above, much of my early and middle life I spent trying to escape depression and underlying feelings that I did not have a right to live — I was underground, underfoot. I have mostly thrown the depression off, but many of my poems still start in the dirt. I may approach the subject with humor or whimsy (as in "Through the Eye of a Potato"), but the subject itself is not funny. So when you ask Why root vegetables?, the answer is because they are tough-skinned, live in dirt, and survive the winter; humans consign them to the dust of cellars, but they still sprout and grow furiously. They are also rib-sticking food; you might not describe them as delicious, but they will keep you alive if you are starving.<br />
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At the same time, my other poems —fully half of the chapbook — explore journeys through dreamscapes or landscapes in which I am either disoriented or — amazingly and gratefully — grounded in my own body, in love with the world, my mate, and myself. I am 63 years old but in some fundamental fashion I still don't know who I am, or where I am. I find it completely disorienting to walk around in this world as if I belonged here, as if it made sense for us to be here, on this piece of rock flying through space. I have a hard time calling one's dream life at night "false," compared to the waking life, which most everyone would consider to be "true." Or at least, the waking life is so amazing and bizarre if you really look at things, that it does not seem so very different from dreams. <br />
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<b>You also said that you used to play the flute. Ezra Pound once wrote:
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Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets. I would almost say that poets should never be too long out of touch with musicians. Poets would will not study music are defective. (<i><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=uOQMlH_zYNAC&pg=PA437#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Literary Essays of Ezra Pound</a></i>, New Directions Publishing, pg 437)
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What impact to you think being a musician has had on the way you write and/or read poetry? What are your thoughts on what Pound said?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: Ooof, Pound is awfully judgmental in the quote above. I have read and heard poetry that was not based in musicality and took its punch from voice or integrity. For example, Adrian Oktenberg's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Bosnia-Elegies-Adrian-Oktenberg/dp/096381835X" target="_blank">The Bosnia Elegies</a></i> do not strike me as being musical, but her book brought me to a full stop into an understanding of war that no other poet has done for me—and she achieved this by being so amazingly blunt and unwavering about what happened in that conflict. However, I do believe musical resonances in poetry exponentially expand its impact, and can take a poem that reads like gibberish and give it some wild integrity apart from meaning. My poems oftentimes start with a semiconscious rhythm, though not necessarily from music; it can be the thump and thud of boulders in a current of water, something that's under my skin that becomes audible, and I'll think: what's trying to surface, what's trying to be heard?<br />
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The other sonic devise that is really important to me is the breath, and how the line follows the impulse of the breath. In my poems focused on journey I wanted the lines to roll in one after the other like breakers ("Florida Revisited" or "In the Provincelands (I)", both of which appear in <i><a href="http://www.sweetlit.com/4.1/poetMacFayden.php" target="_blank">Sweet</a></i>.)<br />
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I did play the flute when I was younger, but I was too shy to perform so I turned to writing, an easier art to do in solitude. The flute brought me a visceral sense of creating a complete musical phrase, of using your breath to propel an idea, melody, or tone to fruition. Added to this, as a teenager I believed the flute would bring home my absent father; it had a siren song quality about it that I thought no one could withstand, not even the hard rock of my father. Something of that feeling of loss gets translated into my poetry via the incantatory sound of words and lines.<br />
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<b>You’ve got a full length book out, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/A-Newfoundland-Journal-Janet-MacFadyen/dp/1897174373" target="_blank">A Newfoundland Journal</a> </i>(Killick Press), as well as third, <i>In Defense of Stones</i> (Heatherstone Press). For <i>In the Provincelands</i>, what drew you to the chapbook form? If I understand correctly, some of the poems took years to write. What’s the oldest piece in the book? the newest? How did you know you had chapbook? Was it difficult to integrate the poems?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: I don't actually favor either form, the chapbook or full-length work. I think they are haphazard categories, and what matters is whether the length fits the material. In my case, I joined the Slate Roof collective when I had two potential manuscripts in process — one was <i>A Newfoundland Journal</i>, a short work by full-length standards which I considered trimming in order to publish it via Slate Roof. But I was glad when I got the offer for a full book from Killick Press in St. John's, Newfoundland. The other manuscript could also have been full-length, but the process of putting out the chapbook forced me into choosing poems that I felt were both my best work and fit together in some intuitive way. I wanted the chapbook to be a showcase of what I could do and possibly be a teaser for a later, longer work; it didn't matter to me if the poems were old or new. I have worked the same material over and over in my life with newer work sometimes gaining insight that wasn't to be had earlier, and older work sometimes nailing an issue in a way that I could not recreate now.<br />
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My chapbook <i>In the Provincelands</i> alternates between the "in the dirt" food poems, which can be stanzaic, and more surreal, free-flowing dreamscape or journey poems; and I have had that same oscillation now for forty years. If I am lucky enough to have a poem that lives on past me after I die, no one will care whether I wrote it early or late in life. Out of the 20 poems, eight of them were old, with "Your mission" being the oldest; about the same number were new at the time of joining Slate Roof (the newest being "Fetch" and the two title poems). "The Luna Moth" I began in the 90s, radically rewrote it in 2011, and published it in 2012. Does that make it an old poem or a new poem? It only matters when people try to judge whether an artist's career is on the ascendency or descendency, with some kind of an assumption that only the new work matters. But to me, we are simply following our life's outflowing, and our work reflects that flow.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: My favorite poems vary, but "Through the Eye of a Potato" is — at the moment — the most important poem to me because it most directly expresses the issues I described earlier in the second question above, about feeling buried, about my right to live and grow. It is told through the point of view of a potato, and I read it as a call to arms, as a liberation poem, a resurrection poem about potential rebirth. (The birth is not actual because in 2012, at the time I published the chapbook, I did not understand the roots of my depression as well as I do now.) Like "The Luna Moth," its genesis was decades ago, and it took about 10 years to get it into shape, with its final form happening only in 2012.<br />
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<b>Through the Eye of a Potato</b><br />
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Lying there in a black furrow I saw <br />
how sunlight lit the hard earth, stroked the brown <br />
wrinkled face of my grandfather dozing beneath me. <br />
Sooner or later his head would flower: already <br />
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he loved burlap and brown paper bags and in my greening <br />
I mimicked him, brushing marl and peat from a dozen eyes.<br />
I sensed an uprising out of everything dark <br />
and underfoot, and possibly out of my own heart<br />
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if only I knew how to see. My grandfather wheezed. <br />
He said, "Study it, girl, it's there for the taking."<br />
I copied his dusty squint, lying motionless by the hour<br />
until rain burst open the green heart of the ground,<br />
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and I knew I loved water and round, <br />
ugly things: puffballs and toads grunting in litters. <br />
Everything living was demanding its right <br />
to grow round and fat and put down roots. <br />
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My grandfather drilled frilly corkscrews in fields and in <br />
my mind, reeled out vine after vine of pale fuzzy <br />
leaves until he was wreathed in them like a happy <br />
harvesting god. And though I was full to bursting, <br />
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I knew nothing of the blossoms that on moonless nights <br />
potatoes dream of, clustered together in clods of dirt—<br />
and nothing at all of roots, except how to hold tight <br />
to my grandfather as he tightened his grip on the earth.<br />
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<b>You were a poetry finalist in the Terrain.org 5th Annual Contest with your poetic sequence "<a href="http://www.terrain.org/2014/poetry/five-poems-by-janet-macfadyen/" target="_blank">Five Ghazals from a Provincetown Dune Shack</a>." Please tell us a bit about writing in form. Do you do it frequently? Were these poems experimentation with the ghazal or do you write in that form often? Tell us a bit about the deviations from the <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/poetic-form-ghazal" target="_blank">standard form</a> that you took in some of the ghazals in "Five Ghazals from a Provincetown Dune Shack."</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: I don't frequently write in forms, though I am drawn to internal and end rhymes, and use them whenever they present themselves. However — now I will contradict what I said earlier about working the same material over and over — in 2011 I started a totally new collection inspired by ghazals and drawn from many years of keeping trip journals. The core poems came into being after a residency in a Provincetown dune shack. There I rode out a powerful October storm — the rain and sand blew sideways, a window flew open in the night, the walls vibrated as if the shack was about to take off, and the woodstove howled like a banshee from wind across its vent pipe. And there was no road out — only a three-quarter-mile footpath over open dunes to get to town. I thought I was going to die. The experience galvanized me in a way hard to describe. I had been reading Robert Bly's ghazals, Aga Shahid Ali, and Allen Ginsberg, but Bly's 12-syllable triplets were etched in my mind. (Classic ghazals use 18-syllable couplets, but both formats work out to 36 syllables per stanza.) I now have a full-length manuscript of what I dub "American" ghazals," which do not employ the refrain nor the repeating word at the end of each stanza, but do feature stanzas which stand thematically and emotively alone — with greater or lesser intuitive leaps between them. Some of my poems are quite narrative and others much more leapy; some are more true and others less so to the conventions of the ghazal. I have used the poet's signature in the ultimate stanza when it moved me to do so, and overall I tried to remain true to the ghazal's implied dialog between the speaker and some external presence (lover, spirit, reader, friend); and the key elements of longing and intoxication.<br />
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<b>What poets did you look to for inspiration?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/aracelis-girmay" target="_blank">Aracelis Girmay</a> is currently the poet whose work I return to when a poem-in-progress is too directive or constrained; or if my tendency to tie up the ending in a pretty bow has gotten the better of me. I love how her work just unfurls in this glorious stream of ideas and images so grounded in physicality. Her poems have helped unblock me numerous times. <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde" target="_blank">Audre Lorde</a> and <a href="http://www.parispress.org/adrian-oktenberg/" target="_blank">Adrian Oktenberg</a> (mentioned above) also have influenced me in giving me courage to speak out and in my slow evolution towards the more political writing that I am doing now. Oh, who else? <a href="http://www.robertbly.com/" target="_blank">Robert Bly </a>influenced me hugely in recent years, as has <a href="http://allenginsberg.org/#!/" target="_blank">Allen Ginsberg</a>. <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sylvia-plath" target="_blank">Sylvia Plath</a>, <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/anne-sexton" target="_blank">Anne Sexton</a>, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/elizabeth-bishop" target="_blank">Elizabeth Bishop</a>, <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney" target="_blank">Seamus Heaney</a>, and <a href="http://www.whitmanarchive.org/" target="_blank">Walt Whitman</a> were old influences. <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/william-blake" target="_blank">Blake</a> and <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/john-keats" target="_blank">Keats</a>. I return to all of them.<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JM</span></i></b>: I view my chapbook as a preliminary, veiled exploration into power dynamics, both the survival of the fittest imposed by nature, and power dynamics imposed by human society. I am currently working on this theme with much more clarity in a full length manuscript (different from the manuscript of ghazals described above). A lot of the new poems start in the dirt, but my dream is to have them fly by the end.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-90476445999879802552016-01-02T17:26:00.003-05:002016-01-03T18:57:27.237-05:00Chapbook Chat: Robert Walicki Discusses The Almost Sound of Snow Falling <br />
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<a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/2015/12/listen-its-almost-sound-of-snow-falling.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</a><br />
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Author: Robert Walicki<br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Night Ballet Press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>First Snow</b> by Robert Walicki<br />
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Even when it came and afterwards, it hits me like a surprise wind.<br />
The last clothes of the summer on a line:<br />
<br />
Transparent flowers on my sister’s spring dress still wet and swinging,<br />
or the long threadbare robe of my fathers’ that finally tore itself free,<br />
<br />
hung there in the air is if weightless <br />
held by something I couldn’t see.<br />
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A waiting, something slow like that.<br />
Pausing and stopping, like music gone quiet<br />
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and starting again. Cool as a fridge door opening,<br />
a breeze when a car is moving. Watching children run in a soccer game.<br />
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And cheering. Pizza so hot it burns the roof of my mouth, that walk over frozen mud<br />
to get a bottle of water<br />
<br />
to cool it and I am suddenly alone with what I’ve taken, what I can’t leave behind.<br />
Not even that small boy covering his ears outside, the woolen hands<br />
<br />
that hold the wind back to stare at something so large and black above his head,<br />
while the pieces of something keep falling as if torn,<br />
<br />
pages from a book that sat open by his parents’ bed:<br />
<i>In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth</i><br />
<br />
<i>was formless and void</i>—<br />
Words I never got close enough to read or understand,<br />
<br />
only that whiteness.<br />
That miracle of 2 am when the roads have no memory.<br />
<br />
Sidewalks, unbroken by footsteps.<br />
And no one awake at this hour to sweep it away.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">from <a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/2015/12/listen-its-almost-sound-of-snow-falling.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</a> (Night Ballet Press, 2015)</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/Robert-Walicki-1961568937400784/" target="_blank">Robert Walicki</a> is the curator of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/getversified/?fref=ts" target="_blank">VERSIFY</a>, a monthly reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in <i>HEArt, Stone Highway Review, Grasslimb</i>, and on the radio show <i>Prosody</i>. He won 1st runner up in the 2013 Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition and was awarded finalist in the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. He currently has two chapbooks published: <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/ARoomFullOfTrees" target="_blank">A Room Full of Trees</a></i> (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and <i><a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/2015/12/listen-its-almost-sound-of-snow-falling.html" target="_blank">The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</a></i> (Night Ballet Press, 2015).<br />
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<b>Author Facebook page:</b> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Robert-Walicki-1961568937400784/" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/Robert-Walicki-1961568937400784/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in January 2016.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: <i><a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/2015/12/listen-its-almost-sound-of-snow-falling.html" target="_blank">The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</a></i> follows my last collection, <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/ARoomFullOfTrees" target="_blank">A Room Full of Trees</a></i>, in a fairly chronological way, moving from the inevitable acceptance of loss as a state of existence, but then moving past that aftermath to explore identity and self. I think more so than anything, it's about growth, a trial by fire so to speak and the transformation that occurs as a result of these experiences.<br />
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<b>Some of the poems in <i>The Almost Sound of Snow Falling</i> touch on issues of masculinity and gender identification. Could you speak a little to this aspect of the book? </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: I had been interested in challenging stereotypical roles of masculinity after working for years in the construction trades industries. Society in general, can be very judgmental to individuals that don't fit into the expected or preconceived gender roles.When one is ostracized for their personality and make up, or even what they look like, it can be a very painful experience. This applies to many people and in many different fields and walks of life. The makeup of identity was something important to me and something that I wanted to understand to a deeper degree. Combing through hurt feelings and taking a candid look at what it means to be a man, and that being sensitive and caring didn't make you less masculine, was something that appealed to me a great deal.<br />
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<b>The poems in this collection read as explorations of memories. Here are two considerations of memory in poetry:</b><br />
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<li>In an April 2015 article “<a href="http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/collection/article_item/int_article/26806/The-substance-of-memory" target="_blank">The substance of memory</a>,” poet Chloe Garcia Roberts makes the comment that “[Homero] Aridjis highlights the inseparability of the self and its past in his poem, “Autoretrato a los seis años (Self-portrait at age six)”, by asserting that the past is the substance of the self.”<br /> </li>
<li>In a March 2013 article “<a href="http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/03/affective-poetics-and-narrative-need-part-iv-the-function-of-memory-by-leslie-heywood.html" target="_blank">Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part IV: The Function of Memory</a>,” Leslie Heywood writes:</li>
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[M]emory is unstable and idiosyncratic, and follows a structure and procedure much like narrative … [E]motion is the basis of long-term memory, and our reactions to the world around us are a complicated concatenation of the narratives we’ve written and continue to write in our brains in conjunction with reactions to new stimuli, which is often interpreted according to old patterns. Everything we 'know' is a narrative construction based on sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation.</blockquote>
<b>What is the role of personal memory in your poems? When you’re writing your poetry, do you find memory to be something more solid, like Roberts examined the first quote—an inseparability between self-identity and the past? Or is it more permeable, as discussed by Heywood?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: I think for me, it's a combination. It really depends on the poem and the voice that leads me. I'm very much a believer of letting the poem determine what it's going to be, so in that sense, I feel memory is a very fluid thing. For example, there are poems like "First Snow" or "Ostaria" that attempt to capture the uncapturable or indescribable. Memory, when layered with emotion, often gets very complicated. There can be a lot to unpack and equally, so much of what I remember is colored by emotion and shaped by it. Truth, or what really happened, changes when I write, because what is more important to me, is whether a poem is "emotionally true" and not necessarily 100 percent factual. I'm fascinated most of all by concrete imagery as a doorway into memory and emotion. It's almost involuntary for me, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_memory" target="_blank">Proust</a>. It's a very serendipitous thing. A shirt ripping on a nail reminding me of the loose buttons on a mother's coat in a photograph and suddenly, I'm writing the poem "In The Years Before Color," and everything a simple black and white photograph evokes from the past, and the future. <br />
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<b>Why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: In general, I find it easier to focus on a chapbook length collection. I'm very attracted to shorter length formats in terms of a sharper, thematic focus, although I'm currently working on a full-length. I don't think I ever sit down consciously and say "I'm ready to write a chapbook." It happens organically and I think the best ideas come from that aesthetic. I never stopped writing after my first chapbook came out and in a very fertile period for me, I suddenly had a lot of poems that I felt were speaking to each other. My style was, and still is, evolving, especially from <i><a href="http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/ARoomFullOfTrees" target="_blank">A Room Full of Trees</a></i>, my first chapbook. I felt I was loosening up, was more frank in my language and was moving on from many of the things that I was obsessed about in the first book, namely my father's death and how that changed me as a person. However, one could make the argument that a few of the early poems in this collection could fit right in thematically with that first book.<br />
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<b>What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: That's difficult,but for me, the most crucial poems in this book are the work poems, because they were the hardest to write and the most important. As I've said before, I feel this book is about growth and I think these poems illustrate that process in a profound way for me. Those experiences changed me and forged me into the person I am, worlds away from the person I was before these events happened.<br />
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It took years to write this one in particular (it's not quite a year old), mostly because it was extremely difficult for me to find the poetry or "music" in these hard experiences. I also needed some emotional distance from what happened and perspective so I could write with the clarity and the restraint necessary to do justice to the material. I finally came to the conclusion that a simple frank and matter of fact tone was the best approach in writing about this kind of work. This poem is called "Rain Leader."<br />
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<b>Rain Leader</b><br />
<i>(on running storm pipe under a bridge near Akron, OH, 1997)</i><br />
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When the only heat is from the coffee<br />
at 5am, and less than 4 degrees outside,<br />
you'll learn to wear enough layers,<br />
or better yet, keep moving.<br />
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Some biker dude will laugh, blow frost,<br />
Marlboro smoke in your face.<br />
First day, it's "Hey rookie" and "Don't look down"<br />
It's lift this 8 inch, cast iron pipe.<br />
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First day, It's " Go down to my truck and get<br />
my pipe stretcher" ,and then you'll realize<br />
there's no such thing 4 stories down.<br />
First day, men will want to break you,<br />
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Like they've been broken, their riverbed faces,<br />
grizzled beards twisted like dry rotted wire.<br />
Last night's whiskey, sweating from dirty skin.<br />
You will nearly lose your finger, when the ice forms<br />
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on the pipe, straps loosening, metal slamming flesh.<br />
If you can make it past this, there's a Miller Genuine Draft<br />
There's a welder sitting next to you, buys the first round,<br />
lays his steel hands on your shoulder<br />
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Like the father who couldn't bear it.<br />
If you can make it past tomorrow,<br />
you'll have to trust the pig iron,<br />
this foot width of rust,<br />
and walk this I-beam,50 feet of cross cut steel<br />
falling into nothing. There's a strap that holds<br />
your waist, a broken man who leads you.<br />
he'll walk like a free man across 4 inches of steel.<br />
He'll never look back.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">originally appeared in <i><a href="http://www.kentuckyreview.org/index.php/issues2/2015/item/617-raidleaderit" target="_blank">The Kentucky Review</a></i></span><br />
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<b>You curate a monthly reading series for poets. How do you feel about spoken-word or performance poetry versus poetry on the page? </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: I have learned from personal experience that when preparing to do a reading, I choose work based on readability and my audience. Knowing one's audience as well as having a balanced set list of poems is a real key to a successful reading. There are beautiful poems that I've never read for example, because I feel that they are either too "quiet" or "contemplative" or better on the page than ones that either have more movement in them, or are more accessible to a wider audience. <br />
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Regarding performing, I've had a few poets who qualify as performance poets in my series and I am always in awe of the energy that's brought to a poem by a gifted performance poet. It's a different aesthetic than more traditional poetry,but I often think that traditional poets could learn from performance poets in terms of being better presenters of their work, and performance poets could learn from the traditional poets as well. However, everyone has a unique gift to share with the world, and my goal is to celebrate that, give them a platform.<br />
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<b>What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? in publishing the collection?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: There's always a fear that certain poems can be misinterpreted or something may offend someone, but I made a decision while writing my first book: Do I want to be a truth teller, or I do I want to play it safe and write pretty, lyrical poems for the whole family? Being a "tell all" kind of poet can be very difficult and a sometimes painful road to go down. It's something I continue to struggle with, although I've made peace with who I am as a poet.<br />
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<b>Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: I recently gave my first reading from the chapbook in Cleveland for my press, <a href="http://nightballetpress.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Night Ballet</a>, at the wonderful <a href="http://www.macsbacks.com/" target="_blank">Max Backs Books</a>. I love to do readings in general, but this was a special night and the crowd was warm, attentive and engaging. I'm looking forward to going back!<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RW</span></i></b>: I have several projects that I'm working on currently, a full length manuscript, as well as another chapbook which is going to be a big departure. All of the poems will have or be inspired by pop culture references, so that's going to be a fun project when it's finished.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-66704745423188970742015-11-21T18:03:00.000-05:002015-11-22T08:16:51.808-05:00Chapbook Chat: Kelly Nelson Discusses Who Was I to Say I Was Alive<br />
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<a href="http://minervarising.com/purchase-chapbooks/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Who Was I to Say I Was Alive</a><br />
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Author: <a href="http://www.kelly-nelson.com/" target="_blank">Kelly Nelson</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://minervarising.com/" target="_blank">Minerva Rising</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>Going Unsaid</b> by Kelly Nelson<br />
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A man walks by carrying a table. <br />
I say, <i>you are carrying a table</i>. He ignores me<br />
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on about his business, the reckless <br />
secrets he must be keeping, his legs <br />
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sudden twitching in the moments <br />
before sleep. When a man passes<br />
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with a rug I say, <i>you are carrying a rug</i><br />
or, <i>you are wearing wing tips</i><br />
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to a man in a suit<br />
or, to my brother’s found body, <i>your skull</i><br />
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<i>is in pieces on the floor</i>. <br />
And here, in the churchyard, saying <i>the floor, his skull </i><br />
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to nobody who asks. <br />
I jolt awake<br />
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early dark—things could be happening and going unsaid. <br />
Hours spent listening <br />
<br />
a window fan drawing in air <br />
the inaudible air going out. <br />
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Originally published in <i><a href="http://www.anotherchicagomagazine.net/" target="_blank">Another Chicago Magazine</a></i> (summer 2015)<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JsmIWXctO9A/Vk4_4FxgOfI/AAAAAAAABYM/R4kBuabtv50/s1600/NelsonKelly.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JsmIWXctO9A/Vk4_4FxgOfI/AAAAAAAABYM/R4kBuabtv50/s400/NelsonKelly.jpg" width="265" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.kelly-nelson.com/" target="_blank">Kelly Nelson</a> is the author of the chapbooks <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rivers-I-Dont-Live-By/dp/0979713781" target="_blank">Rivers I Don’t Live By</a></i> (Concrete Wolf, 2014) and <i><a href="http://minervarising.com/purchase-chapbooks/" target="_blank">Who Was I to Say I Was Alive</a></i> (Minerva Rising, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in <i>RHINO, Verse Daily, Prime Number, Tar River Poetry, Another Chicago Magazine</i> and elsewhere. She has performed her poems at the Houston Poetry Festival, Phoenix Art Museum and on the Phoenix Light Rail as well as in book stores, coffee shops, galleries and diners. She serves on her city’s public art commission, volunteers as a gallery docent and teaches ekphrastic poetry classes at her local library. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University.<br />
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<b>Author website:</b> <a href="http://www.kelly-nelson.com/" target="_blank">http://www.kelly-nelson.com/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in November 2015.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="http://minervarising.com/purchase-chapbooks/" target="_blank">Who Was I to Say I Was Alive</a></i>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: It’s a short collection of 20 poems that explores the themes of loss, love and the things that go unsaid. While losses and silences pervade this book, there is also a strong undercurrent of persisting, of continuing on, of being present and alive.<br />
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<b>Why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for these poems? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: With my first chapbook, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rivers-I-Dont-Live-By/dp/0979713781" target="_blank">Rivers I Don’t Live By</a></i>, I very intentionally set out to write a chapbook around the themes of location and dislocation. I’ve lived in nine different states and wanted to explore both the lack of and the longing for a connection to place. This second chapbook snuck up on me. One day I printed out a dozen or so poems that had been recently published and starting reading them as a set and was surprised to find they held together. The poems were written over a concentrated period of time so my preoccupations and concerns at that time—the suicide of a friend, my own turning fifty, the ongoing gun violence in this country—created unifying threads in the tone and content of these poems. <br />
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<b>The chapbook is titled after a line in one of its poems. Why did you select a line as the title?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: Once I realized I had a chapbook, I started holding auditions for the title. None of the individual poem titles seemed encompassing enough to stand alone on the cover (although <i>Going Unsaid</i> was a strong contender). Next I pulled out eight or ten individual lines from different poems and considered the sound and feel of each one. It came down to <i>The Inaudible Air Going Out</i> and <i>Who Was I to Say I Was Alive</i>. I love that the title I chose has so many shorter titles within it: <i>Who Was I; Was I to Say; To Say I Was; To Say I Was Alive; I Was Alive</i>.<br />
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<b>Three of the poems in this chapbook are found poems. Please tell us a bit about your use of found poetry in the chapbook.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: I’m a big believer in cross-genre borrowing. One of the main moves in journalism is to insert the voices of others by using short quotations. This creates a sense of being closer to the event: an eye-witness is lending us her eyes. I make this same move in the poem “Stampede” where I embed quotes by people who have survived deadly human stampedes and in the poem “Look,” where I borrow lines from pundits talking about gun control on a radio show.<br />
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The poem “Brotherless” is a cento, the oldest form of found poetry, in which I’ve created a new poem by stitching together individual lines from seven “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=hQ8wAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT7&lpg=PT7#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Brother-less” poems</a> written by <a href="http://margepiercy.com/" target="_blank">Marge Piercy</a>. I like using found poetry techniques because they widen the sound field of my poems by adding different voices and tonalities. Working with found poetry techniques also injects a delicious element of surprise and discovery into the composing process.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: The title of the chapbook comes from the poem “The man I nearly married.” I wrote this poem in bed with laryngitis in a hotel room in Seattle where I was for <a href="https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/overview" target="_blank">AWP</a> in 2014. And yes, my ex called me while I was there. This poem has become one of my signature poems when I do readings. People comment on it; people remember it. In part I think it’s because it provides an opportunity to smile and laugh after hearing darker, heavier poems. And I see it as an affirming statement on coping and moving forward amid losses and deaths. <br />
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<b>The man I nearly married</b><br />
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calls years later <br />
unexpectedly.<br />
He said it sounded<br />
like I had died, like it was<br />
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my ghost<br />
speaking to him.<br />
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Who was I<br />
to say it wasn’t.<br />
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Who was I to say<br />
I was alive. <br />
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So I tell him the afterlife is good<br />
free trains always running<br />
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on time, plenty of noodle shops<br />
and ripening mangoes.<br />
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And he says, all right, okay<br />
I’m so glad I called. <br />
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Originally appeared in <i><a href="http://redboothreview.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-man-i-nearly-married-calls-years.html" target="_blank">Red Booth Review</a></i>, May 2014<br />
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<b>What else would you like readers to know about your chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: I feel super fortunate that I’ve been able to pick the cover art for both of my chapbooks. I volunteer as a gallery docent at the <a href="https://tca.ticketforce.com/" target="_blank">Tempe Center for the Arts</a> so I get to meet a lot of Arizona artists. I’m thrilled to have the artwork of <a href="https://monicaaissamartinez.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Monica Martinez</a> and <a href="http://cervinihaas.com/fiber-basketry/clare-verstegen/" target="_blank">Clare Verstegen</a> on the covers of my chapbooks.<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KN</span></i></b>: I’m currently writing a lyric biography of an uncle of mine who was a minor outlaw in Minnesota in the 1950s. I never met the guy and I’m recreating his life using his 500-page prison record. You can read more about this project in <i><a href="http://www.rappahannockreview.com/rappahannock-review-contributor-spotlight-interview-with-kelly-nelson/" target="_blank">Rappahannock Review</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.primenumbermagazine.com/Issue71_Poetry_KellyNelson.html" target="_blank">Prime Number</a></i>.
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-55809241036782290832015-11-08T20:51:00.003-05:002015-11-08T20:57:21.839-05:00Chapbook Chat: Catherine Moore Discusses Story<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggWy3yBdDI2yzyxvefRGJr5uezExRUcXT6FVofz8fxpFa4HSLsvyJsSCqI2wbMsfyNXEYys-3v_DQi8xDxqXqlXosm3y01UAgOmH8b7AFMiaRcRJaTGx-E8L4jbPehg0p0eXIqSPSrOe-q/s1600/CatherineMoore_Story.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggWy3yBdDI2yzyxvefRGJr5uezExRUcXT6FVofz8fxpFa4HSLsvyJsSCqI2wbMsfyNXEYys-3v_DQi8xDxqXqlXosm3y01UAgOmH8b7AFMiaRcRJaTGx-E8L4jbPehg0p0eXIqSPSrOe-q/s400/CatherineMoore_Story.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2218" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Story</a><br />
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Author: <a href="http://about.me/catherinemoore" target="_blank">Catherine Moore</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/" target="_blank">Finishing Line Press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>Gazing</b> by Catherine Moore<br />
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<i>Draco, Canis Minor, Sagitarreous, Orion…</i><br />
as a child I could identify them by name. <br />
Once, on a really dark night, I counted 1000 stars.<br />
Tremendous, though less in number than the grains <br />
of a cold dune where my grandma and I sat looking east.<br />
We’d stopped for a great deep chart with no meaning,<br />
since the constellations are imaginary things <br />
made up by poets, sailors, and old astronomers.<br />
Still, she pointed and spoke, and you’d remember<br />
that Orion's hunting dogs are always nearby,<br />
hovered at his left shoulder, or resting at his foot.<br />
You’d draw the image on your hand. That’s the way <br />
mnemonics works, reminding how the unrelated fall <br />
into place. There’s no value in knowing the North Star <br />
or watching craters on the moon, still here I gaze.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI0cJlw120wdCqMD1yadDwLadGeBjzl3pgyOXTqZp58R8b5b901nsRmMbvIbmtScA5bnvkiTlKBphEKUZCHb50hOgeMKB09dtOckt8uE-bB0IbafXSDvU0rjIbo_Y0upWiOiOaBu0OoJdA/s1600/CatherineMoore.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI0cJlw120wdCqMD1yadDwLadGeBjzl3pgyOXTqZp58R8b5b901nsRmMbvIbmtScA5bnvkiTlKBphEKUZCHb50hOgeMKB09dtOckt8uE-bB0IbafXSDvU0rjIbo_Y0upWiOiOaBu0OoJdA/s400/CatherineMoore.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
<a href="http://about.me/catherinemoore" target="_blank">Catherine Moore</a>’s writing has appeared in <i>Tahoma Literary Review, Southeast Review, Cider Press Review, Southampton Review</i> and in various anthologies. She won the 2014 Gearhart Poetry Prize and has work include in “The Best Small Fictions of 2015.” Her collection <i><a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2218" target="_blank">Story</a></i> is available with Finishing Line Press. Catherine earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tampa. She lives in the Nashville area where she enjoys a thriving arts community and was recently awarded a MetroArts grant. She currently teaches at a community college and reviews poetry books for literary journals.<br />
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<b>Author blog:</b> <a href="http://about.me/catherinemoore" target="_blank">http://about.me/catherinemoore</a><br />
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<b>Twitter</b>: @CatPoetic, <a href="https://twitter.com/CatPoetic" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/CatPoetic</a><br />
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<b>LinkedIn</b>: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/catmoore" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/catmoore</a><br />
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<b>Goodreads</b>: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8471273.Catherine_Moore" target="_blank">https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8471273.Catherine_Moore</a><br />
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<b>Amazon author page</b>: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catherine-Moore/e/B00J5CHBNS" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/Catherine-Moore/e/B00J5CHBNS</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=2218" target="_blank">Story</a></i>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: Story is a series of narrative poems that explores resilient stories found in seemingly quiet moments. This collection seeks to observe the small but significant things around our world and in our own lives, and to record it in variety. From a tea room, to a laundromat, to home, these story poems mark moments as intimate as a dream or a conversation, and as universal as star gazing.<br />
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<b>If I understand correctly, <i>Story</i> originated from poems you wrote in your journal or notebooks—you weren’t looking to form a collection, such as a chapbook. Tell us a bit about how you came to realize that you might have a chapbook and what you did to shape the poems into a cohesive whole. </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: Yes, the poems were written over a span of years and I did not set out with the intention of writing this chapbook. The collection originated by finding a similar narrative voice within my notebooks when I noticed a pattern of menial tasks or places, and an expression that in these moments that we still find poetry around us. This broadened into more poems about the small and significant, until I eventually reduced the collection into the poems I felt did a unique job in distilling variations on the theme ‘story.’ I arranged individual poems to complement each other and to hold their own, as if everyday the book can beckon, “come here and let me tell you a story.”<br />
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<b>Narrative seems to be a foundational characteristic in this collection, beginning with the title itself, <i>Story</i>. In addition, you also describe the collection as a series of narrative poems that arose from day-to-day “menial tasks and an expression that in these moments, we still find art and poetry around us.” I took that to mean that the collection is a sequence of poems that explored experiences in daily life. In her essay “Eloquent Silences: Lyric Solutions to the Problem of the Biographical Narrative” (<i>The Contemporary Narrative Poem: Critical Crosscurrents, ed. Steven P. Schneider</i>), April Lindner writes of the tension between lyric and narrative impulse within a poem, saying, in part: “While any long narrative presents challenges for the poet, … the biographical sequence [is] the epitome of those problems, since its author must distill something as complex as a life into a poem and in doing so provide moments of lyric payoff as well as plot.” (105) How did you navigate between the two impulses of lyric and narrative? Being a prose writer as well as poet, did you find it difficult to move to the lyric end of the spectrum? What is your experience with switching between genres? </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: Each genre puts a different pressure on language, which I like to use to my advantage by intentionally switching genres. Sometimes the process of moving between them adds an interesting element, or allows less focused material to fall away. In the past, I structured the switch between genres. If I had writing that seemed bigger than a poem, I’d write a longer prose version of the piece, and often then combine the two with their best moments. Likewise, if I had a narrative poem that became too prose-like I would re-write it in a stricter form, like a sonnet. This reduction in line space requires poetical devices and forces a more lyrical mode. Lately, I’ve been writing unidentified written objects. The freedom of not declaring genre was game changing for me. When I revise the unidentified then I decide genre direction. This method has become highly productive. <br />
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In the end though, the specification of genre may really be in the eye of the reader. “Not About Liz” from Story, is a prime example of a versatile piece— published as a prose poem, and flash, and now included in the <a href="http://queensferrypress.com/blog/the-best-small-fictions-of-2015-edited-by-tara-l-masih-and-robert-olen-butler/" target="_blank"><i>Best Small Fictions of 2015</i></a> anthology. <br />
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<b>What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: The most lyrical poem in the collection, “The While,” is unique in that it’s about the absence of story. It may be a misfit of sorts but I felt this meanwhile period should be included. It came from my own experience of feeling life as a holding pattern, when life moves around us not through us. Sometimes no story is the story. Months that appear frustratingly empty are often a time of hibernation, rejuvenation, and recovery. <br />
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<b>The While</b><br />
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Now, unbearable.<br />
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Still life harvested from its branch sway, while broken free, no longer inching.<br />
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Child hands match its slow swing, tock back, wait while ticks metronome my hours.<br />
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This mockery of a dream while spades and aces slough off our face cards.<br />
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In this while: everything a question, every event a direction.<br />
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Moves paralyzed— deep while each pit roaring in the silence of a swing.<br />
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<i>Scaitheamnh</i>, yes spells, wound over tea pots or some while pints in lieu of answers.<br />
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We sleep, meanwhile ravens and crows cast a mid-point pause on wind thermals.<br />
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Every while, tick, tock.<br />
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<b>You mentioned finding beauty in the quotidian as being one of the purposes of Story, that “the collection seeks to observe the small but significant things around our world and in our own lives, and to record it in variety.” I was reminded of what Jane Hirshfield wrote in <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ten-Windows-Great-Poems-Transform/dp/0385351054" target="_blank">Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World</a></i>, "The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look" (12), and I pictured you writing the poems almost as form of spiritual practice. Please tell us more about the importance of “small and significant” to you. Do you have a daily writing practice of recording observations?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: I love the writings of Jane Hirshfield and I’m tickled that you quoted her in this interview. I think of my poems as inventories of fragments: objects, narrative and people in word paintings, written photographs, and other literary inventions. Even in the simplest form, they are crafted to question our
making of the world through language and bias. <br />
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I've always enjoyed writings that explore the vagaries of situation and choices for women. Some may see it as domestic concerns, but I find the significant hidden in the smallest detail. Often times how I explore these themes is by combining mundane domestic narratives juxtaposed with unflinching poetics. A recent piece that comes to mind here is “<a href="http://ciderpressreview.com/cpr-volume-17-3/how-to-summons-the-blues/#.Vj_6M7erR7c" target="_blank">How to Summons the Blues</a>” published in <i><a href="http://ciderpressreview.com/" target="_blank">Cider Press Review</a></i>, Volume 17, Issue 3.<br />
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I make an effort to maintain a daily practice of free writing— observations, prompts, object descriptions, dream recordings. Any type of writing can be fodder for larger works; I try not to get rigid about how I come into the writing process since that tends to bind my thought process. It may be written in a journal or on a grocery receipt, but I hardly go three days without sketching a poem even if I’m knee-deep in some other sort of writing. <br />
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<b>What poets did you look to for inspiration?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: It is tempting to answer “the Pulitzer and Pushcart prize winners” because that is often true, even if highbrowed. Then I’d confess that inspiration comes from everywhere. This collection contains a brief appearance from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_B-52%27s" target="_blank">B-52</a>’s, and I have a poem currently circulating that features <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman" target="_blank">Batman</a>, and had one published about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sneetches_and_Other_Stories" target="_blank">Dr. Seuss Sneetches</a>. Along those lines, I admire poets that combine the formal and the familiar. A few go-to poets for me include <a href="http://www.barbarahamby.com/" target="_blank">Barbara Hamby</a>, <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lucille-clifton" target="_blank">Lucille Clifton</a>, and <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kay-ryan" target="_blank">Kay Ryan</a>.<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">CM</span></i></b>: I am working on a collection that is a sequel to another chapbook, “One February.” It is a long narrative poem written in Ginsberg <a href="http://paulenelson.com/american-sentences-2/" target="_blank">American Sentences</a>, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Gothic" target="_blank">Southern Gothic</a> under tones. So for right now, I’m into longer thematic works that span a bridge between poetry and prose. We’ll see where this new hybrid writing takes me.
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-69499801428892913332015-10-18T13:51:00.000-04:002015-10-18T13:58:45.146-04:00Chapbook Chat: Jessica Cuello Discusses My Father’s Bargain<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--bBpyBRfdNI/VhbTcP6oZZI/AAAAAAAABVI/Ls1AonEngWY/s1600/JessicaCuello_MyFathersBargain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--bBpyBRfdNI/VhbTcP6oZZI/AAAAAAAABVI/Ls1AonEngWY/s400/JessicaCuello_MyFathersBargain.jpg" style="border: 1px solid black;" width="256" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/about/purchase/" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">My Father's Bargain</a><br />
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Author: <a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Jessica Cuello</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/" target="_blank">Finishing Line Press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>Worn-Out Dancing Shoes</b> by Jessica Cuello<br />
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My sister’s hair<br />
as she walked in front,<br />
<br />
had light metallic strands<br />
she couldn’t see. I knew<br />
her colors intimately,<br />
and our silent footsteps.<br />
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At Christmas we gather,<br />
our children run out back.<br />
When I mention the stairway<br />
and the boats we rode across,<br />
middle sister leaves the room<br />
and eldest laughs,<br />
<i>I remember how we played—<br />
we knocked on the bedpost,<br />
pretended it opened<br />
like a door.</i><br />
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The shoes were proof;<br />
I’m the only one<br />
<br />
with memories. Each night,<br />
last in line, I learned<br />
by heart their shoulder blades,<br />
part butterfly against blue<br />
crepe and yellow silk.<br />
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It seemed to happen at once—<br />
my sisters forgot,<br />
were distracted if I spoke<br />
of the boats in darkness<br />
<br />
outside the lit dancehall.<br />
We spun with our weight<br />
flung back, holding tight<br />
with sweaty hands.<br />
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(Originally published in <a href="http://roseredreview.org/2013-spring-worn-out-dancing-shoes-jessica-cuello/" target="_blank"><i>Rose Red Review</i></a>.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIWTF33muWa_dqLF7U3BenT-jb4vYi6llQlDTCkPvgAH22WxhZjLWn-YGzm8JqbHj1H5eabhdfoO9qKROcF2JqcgaGSXtdOjXNvZmAd66fDTNUzZOagEu_dsdyHAokmGueuKQx3d5lrRcJ/s1600/JessicaCuello.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIWTF33muWa_dqLF7U3BenT-jb4vYi6llQlDTCkPvgAH22WxhZjLWn-YGzm8JqbHj1H5eabhdfoO9qKROcF2JqcgaGSXtdOjXNvZmAd66fDTNUzZOagEu_dsdyHAokmGueuKQx3d5lrRcJ/s1600/JessicaCuello.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Jessica Cuello</a> is the author of the chapbooks <i><a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/about/purchase/" target="_blank">My Father’s Bargain</a></i> (Finishing Line Press 2015), <i><a href="http://hyacinthgirlpress.com/yearthree/byfire.html" target="_blank">By Fire</a></i> (Hyacinth Girl Press 2013), and <i>Curie</i> (<a href="http://kattywompuspress.com/" target="_blank">Kattywompus Press</a> 2011). She was the winner of The 2013 <a href="http://www.newletters.org/writers-wanted/writing-contests" target="_blank"><i>New Letters</i> Poetry Prize</a> and the recipient of the 2014 Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. Jessica was selected as a Juried Fellow by the <a href="http://www.saltonstall.org/" target="_blank">Saltonstall Foundation</a> and will be a Writer-in Residence in summer 2015. Her first full-length poetry book, <i>Pricking</i>, is forthcoming from <a href="http://www.tigerbarkpress.com/" target="_blank">Tiger Bark Press </a>in 2016.<br />
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<b>Author blog:</b> <a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/">https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]</span><br />
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<b>Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="https://jessicacuello.wordpress.com/about/purchase/" target="_blank">My Father's Bargain</a></i>.</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: The poems are inspired by fairy tales, in particular the vulnerable experiences of women and children.<br />
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<b>How did you arrive at the title? </b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: It’s a line from the poem “Rumplestiltskin.” Bargain is connected to the idea of the body as capital—that her body (in the poem) is not her own; it is to be traded by her father. In many of the fairy tales, fathers are either malignant or clueless. In fact, men are often unaware of the plot itself like the bridegroom in “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_Girl" target="_blank">The Goosegirl</a>” or the father in “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Dancing_Princesses" target="_blank">The Dancing Princesses</a>.” <br />
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Manipulation and trickery, which we view as negative qualities, are often the only means for women in the tales to escape abuse. We need these traits less than women in the past, but I do think we’ve inherited these kinds of survival skills by necessity. The title points to the character’s awareness of how she is both part of a deal and also excluded from the deal at the same time.<br />
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<b>Diane Green wrote in a 2007 <i>Rhizomes</i> essay “<a href="http://rhizomes.net/issue14/green/index.html" target="_blank">Exploring Border Country: the Use of Myth and Fairy Tale in Gillian Clarke’s Poem Sequence, ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’”</a>: “[M]yth ... is such a familiar tool in the work of female poets writing in the latter part of the twentieth-century, particularly in its feminist revisionary role, as advocated by Adrienne Rich, and especially where nationality is an issue.” And in <i>Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990</i>, Ian Brinton writes “[A]n interest in myth and fairytale is a recognisable attempt to remove the poet s self from a lyric expression into an embodied narrative. Traditional fairytales have a residual power of rethinking the roles of women and the ways they are represented within society.” (49)</b><br />
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<b>Could you speak a bit about your use of myth and fairytale in your poems and your response to one or both of the quotes?
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: Fairy tales are powerful for women. The domestic realm possesses its own terror. Domestic violence means that the very place where we expect safety and rest is the place where we are most vulnerable. Childbirth hurts. One of my friends said that her experience of childbirth was like volunteering for a car accident. Sexual violence, marriage, the powerlessness of being a child in a family you can’t leave—these are unspoken kinds of pain and fear, even the tedious work that women do every day that is unpaid and unacknowledged, like feeding, clothing, and cleaning others. The other part of it is the responsibility for the bodies of others, particularly children. Many women who have grown up being careless with their own bodies suddenly find themselves responsible for the bodies and safety of others. That particular responsibility is primal. We see it on the faces of the refugees trying to enter Europe, holding their children in their arms. There is a negation of the father and mother’s self in that kind of crisis. Rumplestiltskin has this chilling theme. How can she save her child? How can she keep her child? <br />
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Certainly myth is a way to absent the personal self from the poem while retaining all the emotional connection to the poems. I did not choose to do so consciously. I never said, I don’t want myself in these poems, but unconsciously it began when I first read fairy tales at age 5. We negate ourselves and latch onto these stories; it is a way to cope with pain. I think an underrated quality of literature is its ability to comfort and soothe us, to literally help us survive. I think there is a self that exists in a story when we read—whether a self that identifies as the protagonist or a self that accompanies the protagonist. I watch
my children do this. My 9 year old daughter writes journal entries in the voices of characters from her books. <br />
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<b>While <i>My Father’s Bargain</i> is your third chapbook, from what I understand, the poems in it are the first poems you wrote that you intended to publish. How long did it take to write these series of poems and what, if any, was the impetus to start writing them? What’s the oldest piece in this chap? How did that timing come to be, e.g., that it isn’t the first chapbook that you published? When you started writing these specific poems, did you intend to create a chapbook or collection?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: I had always wanted to be a writer, but for years I spent far more time reading than writing. When my daughter was born, I felt a sense of urgency. I learned what time truly was for the first time. I wrote these poems then—intending them to be part of a full-length. I kept cramming them into books where they didn’t belong. I published two unrelated chapbooks and had a full-length accepted (forthcoming in 2016) before these poems found a home. A smart editor told me to take these poems out of my book and put them in a chapbook. Though my style has evolved since I wrote these poems, I still value them and wanted to see them in the world. The oldest poem is probably “Rumplestiltskin.” It was one of my first acceptances—published in <i><a href="http://copper-nickel.org/" target="_blank">Copper Nickel</a></i> when Jake Adam York was editor.<br />
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<b>What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: The first poem in the book is important to me—I think because it is the only poem that addresses the idea of hunger and the importance of hunger and food in familial relationships. If a mother cannot feed her child, does she abdicate her identity as mother? I am still writing poems about this idea, nine years later. <br />
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<b>Gretel</b><br />
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Where to put our bodies?<br />
We knew how to sit<br />
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and pretend we didn’t want<br />
to eat. Our hunger grew<br />
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into our skin. We fit<br />
inside a hollow tree. Branches<br />
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were the ceiling<br />
and we played in a second house<br />
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where I served up<br />
a feast of dandelion and rock.<br />
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At night I pressed a stone <br />
against my chest<br />
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like a Mother’s hand.<br />
Not our Mother (though she was)<br />
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who whispered the fact of our mouths. <br />
Not our Father (though he was)<br />
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who led us in the dark.<br />
I looked back at the symmetry—<br />
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a door amid doors. A yard intimate <br />
with metal: the outgrown slide,<br />
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rust that flowered <br />
like lichen moss.<br />
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As we fled, I curved my neck <br />
to peer into the other houses:<br />
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shoes lined on a porch, <br />
meals at the times<br />
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of meals: dawn, dusk, <br />
and middle day.<br />
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<b>Who were you reading when you wrote these poems? e.g., other fairy-tale poems or Grimm’s fairy tales or other books of myth? Which a fairy-tale related poem written by another poet is your favorite?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: I was reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Zipes" target="_blank">Jack Zipes</a>’ translation of Grimm (not the new one just out—I don’t have that yet) and I was reading a lot of <a href="http://www.luciebrockbroido.com/" target="_blank">Lucie Brock-Broido</a>. Her poems are not fairy-tale related, but the energy in them captures the kind of darkness and visceral fear I wanted for my own poems. I love all her books, but I must have read <i><a href="http://www.luciebrockbroido.com/trouble-in-mind" target="_blank">Trouble in Mind</a></i> twenty times during that time period. Her poems capture the witchy darkness of childhood and I was more interested in that tone than fairy tale poems. Many contemporary poems are ironic when they write about fairy tales and I wasn’t interested in that. I mean for the terror to be real; I am in earnest!<br />
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<b>In addition to the theme of fairy tales, what are some of the other themes, metaphors, and elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: Childhood, siblings, loss. They are free-verse poems and I was thinking about line when I wrote them, particularly syntax and the breaking of it. The ideas about line were important because so many of the poems are about being mute or about animals and objects speaking.<br />
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<b>Have you given a public reading of the chapbook? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: Yes. I have given one public reading from this chapbook and the poems made me very sad. They were almost impossible to read. I’ve done lots of readings and that has never happened before. The poems are old but apparently the material is still raw. I like to be in control when I read so I may read less of these particular poems at my next reading.<br />
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<b>What are you working on now?</b><br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">JC</span></i></b>: I’m working on a series of poems based on the absent feminine in Moby Dick. Moby Dick is a myth too—an American one—so clearly I am stuck in writing from the mythic. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-2828443691490353532015-10-05T13:50:00.000-04:002015-10-05T18:08:55.102-04:00An Interview With Poet Jessica Goodfellow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>November Nocturne</b> by Jessica Goodfellow<br />
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Even planets turn away from the easement of light, <br />
sometimes. Night’s a rehearsal for the orb <br />
and distance of winter, its map-unmaking <br />
and its unmap-making, its failure to ravel <br />
wander from resist. All night the night sounds <br />
like children not breathing. I am afraid <br />
of a thing and its opposite: leaving and not, <br />
subject unspecified. The curtain stirs <br />
though the window is closed. Stars flash <br />
like bees abandoning the hive, humming a lullaby <br />
in drone, in monotone but with the Doppler effect <br />
of a death mask, coming right at you, wind <br />
pulsing around the edges because there is <br />
no mouth-shaped hole, no eye-sized emptinesses.</div>
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- first published in <a href="http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/027/goodfellow_jessica_001.html" target="_blank"><i>Boxcar Review</i></a></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com/" target="_blank">Jessica Goodfellow</a> grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has spent the last twenty years in California, Florida, and Japan. She received an MS degree from the California Institute of Technology and an MA in linguistics from the University of New England. Her first book of poetry, <i><a href="http://isobarpress.com/?page_id=638" target="_blank">The Insomniac's Weather Report</a></i> (three candles press), won the Three Candles Press First Book Prize, and was reissued by Isobar Press in 2014. Her new book <i><a href="http://mayapplepress.com/mendeleevs-mandala-jessica-goodfellow/" target="_blank">Mendeleev's Mandala</a></i> is available from Mayapple Press (2015). She is also the author of a poetry chapbook, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/A-Pilgrims-Guide-Chaos-Heartland/dp/097176719X" target="_blank">A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland</a></i> (Concerete Wolf, 2006), winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in the anthology <i>Best New Poets 2006</i>, on the website <i><a href="http://www.versedaily.org/2015/regretfullyyours.shtml" target="_blank">Verse Daily</a></i>, and has been featured by Garrison Keillor on NPR's "<a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/author.php?auth_id=2253" target="_blank">The Writer's Almanac</a>." She was a recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the <i>Beloit Poetry Journal</i>, and her work has been honored with the Linda Julian Essay Award as well as the Sue Lile Inman Fiction Prize, both from the <a href="http://www.emrys.org/" target="_blank">Emrys Foundation</a>. Her work has appeared in <a href="http://www.motionpoems.com/" target="_blank">Motionpoems</a> Season 6. Jessica currently lives in Japan with her husband and sons.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: xx-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in September 2015.]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>
Tell us a little about your book <i><a href="http://mayapplepress.com/mendeleevs-mandala-jessica-goodfellow/" target="_blank">Mendeleev's Mandala</a></i>.</b><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mB8_s29b92A/VhBKMlksTLI/AAAAAAAABUw/VxwKKnTvmyo/s1600/JessicaGoodfellow-MendeleevsMandala.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="288" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mB8_s29b92A/VhBKMlksTLI/AAAAAAAABUw/VxwKKnTvmyo/s320/JessicaGoodfellow-MendeleevsMandala.jpg" width="188" /></a>
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: <i>Mendeleev’s Mandala</i> imagines the thoughts and attitudes of different personas from various historical eras, in short different differing worldviews. I have felt bifurcated for a lot of my life, needing to balance conflicting worldviews—for example, a deeply religious, conservative upbringing and an education based on science and reason—and instead of feeling torn up about it, as I have during much of my experience, I wanted to have fun with it—to explore it playfully. The nation as a whole also experiences that kind of conflicting multiplicity of world views, and I wish as a people we could cope with it with less rancor. So that’s partly what <i>Mendeleev’s Mandala</i> is, for me.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>I find the title beautiful and compelling for a number of reasons, one being the mashup of science and religion. The poem after which the collection is titled is fascinating as well. (Poem can be found in the <a href="http://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/march-2012-jessica-goodfellow.html" target="_blank">March 2012 issue of <i>Thrush</i>, second poem on the page</a>.) What led you to write a poem about Dmitri Mendeleev? How did you arrive at the idea of a mandala? In an interview at <i><a href="http://www.telltellpoetry.com/blog/2015/03/22/jessica-goodfellow-design-poetry" target="_blank">Tell Tell Poetry</a></i>, when asked “If you had unlimited time to create, what would you make,” you said “I’m interested in weaving …” Do you carry that desire of weaving into your poetry? I’m wondering specifically about an impulse in your work to weave, braid, or possibly even integrate science and religion, or other seeming opposites.</b></span></span>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>JG</b></span>: I have been moved by reading about <a href="http://www.oliversacks.com/" target="_blank">Oliver Sacks</a>’ relationship to both the periodic table of elements and to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Mendeleev" target="_blank">Dmitri Mendeleev</a> (the ‘discoverer’ of the form of the table we use now), prompting me to do more reading about Mendeleev. My favorite podcast <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/series/podcasts/" target="_blank">Radiolab</a> had <a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/91672-yellow-fluff-and-other-curious-encounters/" target="_blank">an episode about him</a> and I was fascinated by what hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad said about his life, details in his family experience that resonated with my own—for example, a disability that occurred in both our families, and that he had a huge groups of siblings. They talked about how he rode around on trains when he had to think, and riding around on trains and in cars has always been useful for me creatively. In short there were a lot of parallels that drew me to him, even as I feel this great gap between his amazing intellect and what I am able to comprehend.<br />
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I thought about how the periodic table represents all known chemical elements, and then thought about how a mandala is supposed to be a visual representation of everything in the universe, and the parallel and contrast of these two worldviews struck me, particularly in light of the central tension in my life between the spiritual and the logical.<br />
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As for weaving, I’m so appreciative of what you said about perhaps weaving conflicting themes in my poems. I haven’t done well with textile weaving, despite my interest, and I find that disheartening, so your metaphor has cheered me up. I suppose you are right—I do often juxtapose opposites, and it’s certainly more pleasant to think about it as weaving contrasting colors into a pattern than to think of it as courting discordance. <br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>The Motionpoem film of your poem "Crows, Reckoning" is absolutely stunning. (You can find the <a href="https://vimeo.com/129687784" target="_blank">film here</a> and <a href="http://www.diodepoetry.com/v6n2/content/goodfellow_j.html" target="_blank">poem here, second poem down.</a>) How did that film come to be? What was that collaborative experience like—that experience of having other artists interpret your work?</b><br />
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: This year <a href="http://www.motionpoems.com/" target="_blank">Motionpoems</a> worked with <a href="http://www.vidaweb.org/" target="_blank">VIDA</a> to promote the work of women poets, and they put a call out for submissions. I didn’t expect to have my work selected, and it was one of the thrills of my artistic life when it was. The collaboration from my end was minimal; after having had my poem selected, I had no more say in the process, which was fine by me. <br />
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Early on in my writing career, a group of poets asked to read a poem of mine in public, and when I heard what they did with it, I was shocked—not that I disagreed with their extreme interpretation, but it was not what I had ever envisioned for that poem. I talked with a friend about it, and he said it was like sending your child out into the world, and seeing them choose a life that you never would have predicted for them. He told me that poems are going to have lives of their own, just like my children will eventually, and that I’d be happier if I just embraced that. Which I have. I’ve had a few other experiences where artists have responded to my work, or paired one of their pieces with my poem, all without any additional post-poem input from me, and I’ve written a few <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis" target="_blank">ekphrastic</a> poems myself, so I’ve gotten really comfortable with non-collaborative collaborations like this, responses really.<br />
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I teach a course on Japanese poetic forms, and one form, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiga" target="_blank">haiga</a>, pairs haiku with art. The best haiga have images that don’t repeat the images in the poem, but that deepen the feeling or meaning. That’s what directors Edward Chase Masterson and Alex Hanson did with the Motionpoems film—added new imagery to mine in a way that deepens the experience. It’s really stunning work they did, and I’m so honored to have had my poem be a part of it.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>In <i>Mendeleev's Mandala</i>, what is one of the more crucial or important poems for you personally? Why?</b><br />
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</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: “Burning Aunt Hisako” was a poem I worked on for a long time, a poem about the cremation of my husband’s aunt; I knew there was something crucial in the experience, over and above the particular loss, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It was the first time I had attended a post-cremation ceremony, which is described in the poem, and I thought maybe that the visceral experience of coping with the remains of a family member was what haunting me. But I continued to have trouble writing about it. Finally, when I was on vacation, surrounded by snow and consequently thinking of the death of my mother’s brother (which occurred on <a href="http://www.nps.gov/dena/index.htm" target="_blank">Denali</a>), I had a kind of personal breakthrough. My uncle’s body was never recovered, and that is one of the reasons his death has always been so hard to talk about in my family, and contrasting that lack of a body, with all that implies, with how my husband’s family was involved actively with the final rites for my husband’s aunt’s body after her death was compelling me.<br />
<br />
<b>Burning Aunt Hisako</b><br />
<br />
Afterward we sifted through her ashes<br />
with long chopsticks—one bamboo<br />
and one willow, for this life and the next.<br />
<br />
The furnace-keeper lifted bone by bone.<br />
“Her ankle bone,” he tendered. “Her left thumb.”<br />
A plate-shaped bone he named “her face,”<br />
<br />
just before he smashed it into pieces <br />
small enough to drop inside a dull bronze urn.<br />
“What are we looking for?” I whispered<br />
<br />
as we sifted. “From her throat, a bone<br />
that’s said to hold a seated Buddha.”<br />
From Adam’s rib to this, does at least one bone<br />
<br />
from every body belong to someone else? Never<br />
mind—what use are their own bone Buddhas now,<br />
to Aunt Hisako smoldering on her slab,<br />
<br />
to my mother’s father sealed beneath a hard <br />
and glittering snow? Bits of mica, memory <br />
of fireflies—my own hand on my own throat—<br />
<br />
of what use is this thirst for things <br />
resembling other things, this endless trying<br />
to wring milk from a two-headed cow.<br />
<br />
(originally published in <i><a href="http://www.diodepoetry.com/v6n2/content/goodfellow_j.html" target="_blank">diode</a></i>)<br />
<br />
In the <i>diode</i> version the poem says ‘my mother’s father’ instead of ‘my mother’s brother,’ as it does in <i>Mendeleev’s Mandala</i>, because I was afraid to write about my mother’s brother—afraid of breaking taboo and upsetting our family. But in writing this poem , though I wrote in code for the <i>diode</i> version, I came to the understanding that I was going to have to explore the subject eventually. I figured I could write it and not publish it, and I thought it would be a few poems, maybe a suite, and then I would be done with the topic. But that’s not how it worked out; eventually I wrote an entire book-length manuscript. And this poem was the breakthrough that caused me to realize that I needed to do that scary taboo thing. <br />
<br />
In fact, my mother has been fine with me writing about her brother. She showed me documents and photos and newspaper clippings and letters, and we talked about his life, the accident that took him, and she told me she hoped I would eventually write about his life, not just his death. This was not something we had ever talked about before, but because I approached her with my idea to write about her brother, she opened up. So this poem is important to me.<br />
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</span></span>
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<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Your chapbook <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/A-Pilgrims-Guide-Chaos-Heartland/dp/097176719X" target="_blank">A Pilgrim's Guide to Chaos in the Heartland</a></i> was the 2005 winner of the <a href="http://concretewolf.com/contests/2005.htm" target="_blank">Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award</a> and your debut full-length book, <i><a href="http://isobarpress.com/?page_id=638" target="_blank">The Insomniac's Weather Report</a></i>, was the 2011 winner of the three candles press First Book award. Please give us a synopsis of each book. With either contest, were there things you thought would happen as a contest winner, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?</b></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: The chapbook <i>A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland</i> is very directly about my religious upbringing and my education in analytic fields, and about how and where they dovetailed and collided. It’s only about my experience—it’s a personal book with big themes, far less playful than <i>Mendeleev’s Mandala</i>, which has similar themes but includes my imagined experiences of other people thinking about these themes. <a href="http://lanaayers.com/" target="_blank">Lana Hechtman Ayers</a>, the owner and editor of <a href="http://concretewolf.com/" target="_blank">Concrete Wolf</a>, championed my work more than anyone ever has, and she made me feel like a legitimate writer despite it being my first venture in publishing. I had no idea what to expect from a press, but Lana set the bar quite high.<br />
<br />
The <i>Insomniac’s Weather Report</i> is about my experiences in domesticity, in becoming a wife and mother. After it won the three candles press First Book Award, the press folded suddenly, with fewer than 100 copies in print. That was devastating, but luckily a few years later I was contacted by <a href="http://isobarpress.com/?page_id=108" target="_blank">Paul Rossiter of Isobar Press</a>, a Japan-based press publishing poetry in English, who offered to reissue it. Steve Mueske of the defunct three candles press was supportive, and we were able to do it. Both those publishers have been great.<br />
<br />
Having the book go out of print within a few months of being published was completely unexpected, and so was getting an offer to reissue it. The entire experience taught me to be wary, but hopeful. You never know what’s going to happen. So just keep writing. In fact, I wrote<i> Mendeleev’s Mandala</i> during that period when <i>The Insomniac’s Weather Report</i> seemed lost, and I ended up being contacted by Isobar for the reissue and by Mayapple for <i>Mendeleev’s Mandala</i> within the same week, after a couple of bleak years.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>If you were an animal or a place, what/where would you be and why?</b></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: I am drawn to animals and plants that co-existed with dinosaurs yet still exist today in the same or similar form; for example, dragonflies, crocodiles, and gingko trees. I don’t know if I want to be one of these, but seeing them, being in their presence, always affects my conception of self and time, and just about everything.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?</b></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: I started rewriting nursery rhymes before I could actually write, asking my mother to write them down for me. I’ve been writing ever since, with a break during the years of my first graduate program and when I worked as a financial analyst—I found it too hard to switch gears from analytics in the daytime to poetry in the evenings, though there are plenty of people who can do it. <br />
<br />
I took one creative writing class in high school, and one in college, and other than that, haven’t had any formal education in it, and no mentor. I’d love a mentor though. If someone wants to be my mentor, I’d love that. My high school creative writing teacher had also been my next-door-neighbor when I was growing up, and he and his family always encouraged me to write, and more importantly modelled for me that a creative life was a possibility—I wouldn’t have had that model otherwise. But I really would love to have a mentor. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices? Do you have a writing group with whom you share your work?</b></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: This isn’t an original idea, and I regret that I can’t cite where I heard it, but when revising, I like to take a line and change it to the opposite of what it says, and see what happens. Sometimes I replace a line with its opposite; sometimes I juxtapose the opposing lines, for the resulting tension. Particularly when I make big sweeping pronouncements, I find this interesting and generative to do.<br />
<br />
I work a lot with sound when revising. If something sounds clunky, then it needs work, no matter how logical or poetical the sensibility. And I try to cut as much out of each poem as possible; any word, line, or stanza that can be taken out without damaging the integrity of the poem is looked at long and hard for justification for keeping it. And more often than not, it gets jettisoned.<br />
<br />
As for writing groups, I had a great one when I was living in Florida, but now that I live in Japan, I no longer do. I have one fiction writer that I work with sometimes, and when I’m really stumped, I use the<a href="http://www.blacklawrence.com/manuscript-consultations/" target="_blank"> consultations from Black Lawrence Press </a>. Often you can pay a nominal amount to have one of their poets look at a group of poems (five poems or ten pages, or something like that), and give you their take on your work. I’ve done this three times now, and it’s been hugely useful, and a solution to a problem that those of us isolated in the non-English-speaking world face. I think they do entire manuscript consultations too (which I’ve never done), and some of the money goes to (or used to go to?) a literacy program. So it’s a win/win. <br />
<br />
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</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>What are you working on now?</b></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: Currently I am finishing up the manuscript about my uncle, who at age 22 died in one of the worst mountain-climbing accidents in US history, on Denali along with six other climbers. I’m writing about the accident, and its effect on our family, even on those born after his death who never knew him, but whose lives are both diminished and complicated by his absence, and by the absence of his body, a circumstance that has long-lasting implications. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?</b></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">JG</span></b>: Practice fearless receptivity. Notice what you notice. Of all the many words, images, thoughts, facts, impressions, etc., that rush by you in a day, notice which ones catch your attention. Then use that.<br />
<br />
For example, today I heard a poem with the word ‘indigo’ in it. Then I listened to commentary about the poem, which mentioned how difficult it is to dye an item indigo. Later today I listened to a memorial podcast by the New York Public Library for Oliver Sacks, who recently died. Sacks talked about having only seen indigo twice in his life, and he mentioned the cultural and historical importance of indigo. Now indigo is on my mind. I might not have noticed that I was noticing indigo—I might have let it go, even if I had noticed the coincidence of hearing about it twice in one day—if I wasn’t in the habit of noticing what I notice, and jotting it down in a notebook. Eventually, if indigo is crucial to me, I’ll get around to it. But I might get there faster for having noticed myself noticing it now.<br />
<br />
</span>
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<div style="line-height: 175%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b style="color: #cc0000;">Jessica Goodfellow Online</b></span></span><br />
<ul><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">
<li> Author website: <a href="http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com/" target="_blank">http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com/</a></li>
<li> Author blog: <a href="http://jessicagoodfellow.blogspot.jp/" target="_blank">Axis of Abraxas</a></li>
<li> Twitter: <span style="line-height: normal;">@jessdragonfly</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessdragonfly" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/jessdragonfly</a></li>
</span></span></ul>
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<br />
<div style="line-height: 175%;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For a sampling of Jessica’s poems, see the<span style="color: #cc0000; font-weight: bold;"> </span><a href="http://www.jessicagoodfellow.com/poems--prose.html" style="color: #cc0000; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank"><i>Poems and Prose</i> page of her website</a><span style="color: #cc0000; font-weight: bold;">.</span></span></span><br />
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</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-21534527322415226822015-09-27T14:49:00.000-04:002015-09-27T15:02:25.318-04:00An Interview with Poet Karen Paul Holmes<br />
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<i>
Winter trees reveal a drop off<br />
inches from the road’s thin shoulder. <br />
<br />
Some teachings call this universe an illusion:<br />
We all share a dream, a nightmare really, <br />
where we’re separate beings.</i>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
- from "<a href="http://www.verse-virtual.com/karen-paul-holmes-2015-july.html" target="_blank">Scenic Bypass, Blue Ridge Mountains</a>" by Karen Paul Holmes
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/karenholmespoetry" target="_blank">Karen Paul Holmes</a> is the author of a poetry collection, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Untying-Knot-Karen-Paul-Holmes/dp/0615998984/" target="_blank">Untying the Knot</a></i> (Aldrich Press 2014). Formerly the VP of Communications at a global financial services company, Karen is now a <a href="http://www.simplycommunicated.com/" target="_blank">freelance business writer, poet and writing coach</a>. In support of writers and audiences, Karen founded and hosts the Side Door Poets critique group in Atlanta and Writers’ Night Out in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She received an Elizabeth George Foundation emerging writer grant in 2012 and has studied with poets Thomas Lux, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, William Wright, Kevin Young, and Carol Ann Duffy, among others. Publishing credits include <i>Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Caesura, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology Vol 5: Georgia</i>, and <i>Stone, River, Sky</i> (Negative Capability Press). She grew up in Michigan and has an MA in musicology from the University of Michigan.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Utopia, 'Palatino Linotype', Palatino, serif; font-size: xx-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in August 2015.]</span><br />
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<b>Tell us a little about your book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Untying-Knot-Karen-Paul-Holmes/dp/0615998984/" target="_blank">Untying the Knot</a></i>.</b>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: First of all, thank you for this interview, Nancy. I appreciate your interesting questions. <br />
<br />
<i>Untying the Kno</i>t is a memoir in poetry. Sometimes mad, sad, funny, and/or forgiving, the poems recount the sudden end of my long-time marriage and the healing process.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>In <i>Untying the Knot</i>, what is one of more crucial or important poems for you personally? Why?</b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>KPH</b></span>: I find it extremely difficult to describe nature, and therefore not much of my poetry does this. I workshopped this poem with <a href="http://doriannelaux.net/" target="_blank">Dorianne Laux</a> at the <a href="https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/writing-mfa/Summer_Writing_Seminars.html" target="_blank">Sarah Lawrence Summer Seminar</a>, which gave me the confidence to include it in the book. Lines in the poem came to me on a walk, and I really did get hit on the head by acorns. It was an unusually beautiful day but in the midst of the stunning beauty, I was stunned by sadness. That’s how grief works, doesn’t it? One of the reasons the poem is important for me personally is that it reflects my belief that joy can always be found in the present moment – uncovering it is not always easy but we always have the option of choosing joy, or at least peace. <br />
<br />
<b>Fall </b><br />
<br />
Despite the wind<br />
poplars hang on to their leaves. <br />
They catch the light and flutter like gilded eyelids,<br />
jiggle like coins on a belly dancer’s hip scarf.<br />
Whitecaps jostle my dock, <br />
lake darker than the sky.<br />
Those distant mountains, dusty-red with autumn, <br />
recall Sedona’s rocks,<br />
but green grass and willows speak<br />
of lush Appalachia. <br />
<br />
Joy surges <br />
mixed with the old longing: that need to share.<br />
The cherry tree over there—blooming<br />
and showing orange foliage at the same time—<br />
must be as confused as I am<br />
since the gusty lusty breath of Catherine<br />
blew away the colors of my marriage,<br />
forced the black and white of divorce. <br />
<br />
Suddenly, a shower of acorns bounces<br />
off my head, knocking me back <br />
into the windy, sunny present. <br />
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<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>When <i>Untying the Knot</i> was published, it being your first full-length book, were there things you thought would happen, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: I guess you never know how you’ll feel when you actually have the book in your hands. I’m a recovering perfectionist, and I tried very hard not to second guess myself about what poems should have been deleted and/or edited more, but I did do that a bit and even started to question whether the whole thing was crap. <br />
<br />
I didn’t know how strange it would feel going public. I felt bare naked, and I still cringe a little thinking of how much of my personal life I revealed, and also that of my ex and his girlfriend. But people praised me for being so honest with my feelings. Because of that honesty and because most people have gone through some kind of loss, people really related to the book -- poets and non-poets, men and women. That reaction was a pleasant surprise. It was also an affirmation of my intent to write poetry that touches people in some positive way.
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<b>I see you have a degree in musicology. If you were a musical instrument, which one would you be? Why? </b>
</span> </div>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: Could I be the tune instead? I’d like to be a melody that lingers in the memory… in a good way.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: In about 6th grade, I created an illustrated journal of poems I liked for a school assignment. I still have it. Richard Wilbur’s "<a href="http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2013/03/06" target="_blank">Boy at the Window</a>" is in it, and I remember being absolutely touched by the poignancy of that poem. Then in 8th grade, I won some sort of poetry contest. That teacher, Miss Darby, and also my inspirational 12th grade English teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, are my friends on Facebook so I’ve happily been able to thank them for their influence on my life.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: The angel on my shoulder imagines a sympathetic reader who feels just like I do about things. The devil on the other shoulder thinks about a strict critic who expects perfection. In my first draft, I try to keep that devil out.
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Tell us about "Writers’ Night Out". Is it a reading series? What prompted you to start it?</b></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: Once I started reading my poems in public (the first time was in front of the then Poet Laureate of N. Carolina, <a href="http://www.kathrynstriplingbyer.com/" target="_blank">Kathryn Stripling Byer</a>), I became an open mic junkie. I live in Atlanta but spend many weekends in the mountains. Up there, I started attending a Wednesday morning “Coffee with the Poets” with open mic. I decided to start "Writers’ Night Out" to give working folks a chance to come, and also to make it more of a date night on a Friday night. In the small mountain towns, there are a lot of writers and also a lot of tourists looking for interesting things to do. It is a monthly event, open to the public. We feature a poet or prose writer for about 20 minutes and then an open mic. Audience size ranges from 10-35 people—couples and singles—from four counties. We get 5-12 people reading at the open mic, often including really good writers/readers in their 70s and 80s and sometimes college kids. Many of us meet for dinner beforehand. We have featured some pretty well known writers from North and South Carolina and Georgia.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>What are you working on now?</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>KPH</b></span>:I’m a little scattered. I’m writing miscellaneous new poems as the inspiration hits. But I’ve got two books about 90% complete and can’t seem to say “Okay, done, time to send to a publisher.” One centers on family poems about the melding of my dad’s culture (Macedonian) with my mom’s (Russian/Irish settled in Australia) in the U.S.<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>
Finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">KPH</span></b>: Keep at it. Share and get feedback. I wrote for years, but kept everything in a notebook for no one but myself. While that was satisfying, what really made poetry a special part of my life was sharing my work, having it critiqued, and working to make it better. My poet friends are now some of my best friends. There’s nothing better than being in a community of like-minded people. And that’s how I met you, Nancy. Thanks again for wanting to spend this time with me.
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<b style="color: #cc0000;">Karen Online</b><br />
<ul>
<li> Facebook: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/karenholmespoetry" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/karenholmespoetry</a></li>
<li> Simply Communicated (author website): <a href="http://simplycommunicated.com/home" target="_blank">http://simplycommunicated.com/home</a></li>
<li> Goodreads: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/kpaulholmes" target="_blank">https://www.goodreads.com/kpaulholmes</a></li>
<li> LinkedIn: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/karen-paul-holmes/6/83/202" target="_blank">www.linkedin.com/pub/karen-paul-holmes/6/83/202</a></li>
<li> Poets and Writers Directory: <a href="http://www.pw.org/content/karen_holmes" target="_blank">http://www.pw.org/content/karen_holmes</a></li>
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<span style="color: #cc0000;"><b>A sampling of Karen’s poems on-line:</b></span><br />
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<li><a href="http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2015/04/28/poetic-voices-karen-paul-holmes-and-claire-trevien/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">two poems, <i>Tweetspeak</i></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.deadmule.com/poetry/karen-paul-holmes-four-poems/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">four poems, <i>The Dead Mule</i></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></li>
<li><a href="http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=699" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">“Drawn into Circles,” <i>Your Daily Poem</i></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></li>
<li><a href="http://georgiahomeandlife.blogspot.com/2015/07/meet-georgia-poet-karen-paul-holmes.html" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;" target="_blank">"Peach Stand," <i>Georgia Home and Life</i></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span></li>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-52388080708963929222015-09-16T23:35:00.000-04:002015-09-16T23:35:44.667-04:00Chapbook Chat: Nicole Rollender Discusses Bone of My Bone<br />
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<a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/BloodPuddingPress" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Bone of My Bone</a>, winner of the Blood Pudding Press 2015 Poetry Chapbook Contest<br />
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Author: <a href="http://www.nicolerollender.com/" target="_blank">Nicole Rollender</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://bloodyooze.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Blood Pudding Press</a><br />
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Publication date: Sep. 5, 2015<br />
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<b>Bone of My Bone</b> by Nicole Rollender<br />
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I am my own land, unmanageable. There’s a cross<br />
road where my hands and lips intersect<br />
<br />
with an illumined city’s windows open to blackbirds<br />
that promise to come through branches,<br />
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incising a woman’s kitchen, the reliquaria of domesticity –<br />
white-draped ducks’ broken necks rising<br />
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on counters. How do I measure the body’s gardens<br />
from within its bone fences? A woman’s skin<br />
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is one world. The birth canal is another – how you lived<br />
in a bell or an oyster, rocking back and forth<br />
<br />
in seaweed for a long time. Who hatches from it, shining<br />
through rain? In the old world, piss prophets mixed<br />
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a woman’s lemon urine with wine to discern what<br />
was in the womb. A hand held out for a zinnia<br />
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if she empties, if a distant horse runs back<br />
to God, if a boat grows smaller, its cargo<br />
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of consecrated pears now rotting. My mother will curl<br />
into herself, as will I, as did my grandmother, joints<br />
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unloosening more than a century after her birth. I put<br />
the lines that grew on her skin into a bowl, muddy<br />
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my fingers in her waxiness and into her dead eye,<br />
unraveling her, seaming her skin, blanching her<br />
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bones back to such a shine, like a giant star’s last open<br />
into brilliance. The unhurried light is dying, drunken<br />
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bees dropping into water, isn’t it? My body is made<br />
from these flat-footed women – when I step<br />
<br />
outside not knowing where I’m headed, one of them wakes<br />
from her dream of owls calling and hisses,<br />
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<i>We created you from what we saved.</i><br />
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(Originally published in <a href="http://thejournalmag.org/archives/10185" target="_blank"><i>The Journal</i></a>.)<br />
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<a href="http://www.nicolerollender.com/" target="_blank">Nicole Rollender</a> is editor of <a href="http://www.asicentral.com/magazines/stitches/meetthestaff.aspx" target="_blank"><i>Stitches</i></a>. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in <i>The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Radar Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, THRUSH Poetry Journal, West Branch, Word Riot</i> and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, <i>Louder Than Everything You Love</i>, is forthcoming from <a href="http://eljpublications.com/" target="_blank">ELJ Publications</a>. She is the author of the chapbooks <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/absence-of-stars" target="_blank">Absence of Stars</a></i> (dancing girl press & studio), <i><a href="http://www.nicolerollender.com/store/p2/Arrangement_of_Desire.html" target="_blank">Arrangement of Desire</a></i> (Pudding House Publications), <i><a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/BloodPuddingPress" target="_blank">Bone of My Bone</a></i>, a winner in Blood Pudding Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, and <i>Ghost Tongue</i> (<a href="https://porkbellypress.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Porkbelly Press</a>, 2016). She’s the recipient of poetry prizes from <i>CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine</i> and <i>Princemere Journal</i>. Find her online at <a href="http://www.nicolerollender.com/" target="_blank">http://www.nicolerollender.com/</a> and <a href="http://www.facebook.com/nicole.rollender" target="_blank">www.facebook.com/nicole.rollender</a>.<br />
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<b>Twitter:</b> @ASI_Stitches, <a href="https://twitter.com/ASI_Stitches" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/ASI_Stitches</a><br />
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<b>LinkedIn:</b> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15241987rr/" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=15241987rr/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in August 2015.]</span><br />
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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="https://www.etsy.com/shop/BloodPuddingPress" target="_blank">Bone of My Bone</a></i>.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: I often have a hard time writing about my own work, or trying to encapsulate what a chapbook is trying to do in a few sentences, so I attempted to do that here: Through the half-lit poems in <i>Bone of My Bone</i> runs a troubling line of questioning – <i>what’s beyond this life?</i> – as the narrator contends with death on a very visceral level: “The hip is something/ no longer examined in the light.” In these poems’ rooms, which are like the ruins of a cathedral open to a night sky, the haunted narrator explores the real ways that we take which is ours, both in this life and in the next. There’s a chance to seize at “what is also the divine: There is no saint/without a past.”<br />
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One day, I was reading <i><a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/" target="_blank">Blackbird</a></i> and came upon <a href="http://www.malachiblack.com/" target="_blank">Malachi Black</a>’s poem, “<a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v10n2/poetry/black_m/index.shtml" target="_blank">Quarantine</a>,” a crown of sonnets that follow the 10 movements (Lauds, Prime, Terce and so on) in the Christian monastic prayer known as the canonical hours. These movements follow the passage of one day, so Lauds is a predawn prayer, None is the afternoon prayer, Vespers is sundown’s and so forth. Black calls “Quarantine” a poem “to the possibility of God.” My chapbook started with a similar long “book of hours” type poem, parts of which appear in <i>Bone of My Bon</i>e – where the narrator struggles to view and classify what God is: “What is the divine, but God-/light, thorn and scourge, blood let, that bone// shine?”<br />
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I put poems I already had written together to form the chapbook, which I wanted to be a kind of violent crying out to God – trying to make sense of why some babies are born very premature, women die early, some women can’t have children, women commit suicide, some women think of committing suicide. The poems walk between this life and the next, weaving together the disturbing and the sublime.<br />
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NCL: In a <i>Yale Alumni Magazine</i> article "Faith, in poetry" (May/June 2013), which discusses Christian Wiman, editor of <i>Poetry </i>magazine who left to teach at Yale Divinity School, Mark Oppenheimer writes "the relationship between poetics and piety—so obvious from biblical times through the Victorian era—now seems sundered; poets are a very secular bunch..." That isn't the case for <i>Bone of my Bone</i>, in which faith, God, the complexities and incongruities of being an embodied spirit seem to be pivotal. What has been the response to your poems from other poets? Have you found that others try to pigeon-hole you or minimize / make assumptions about you or your work?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: Good question. There’s definitely faith-based poetry like church hymns that are simplistic in their view of God – you know, we’re toiling in the vineyards, praising a distant God and longing for paradise. Things that border on or become cliché, what you referred to as the medieval or Victorian-type poems. Many Catholic saints even wrote poetry like this, poetry that doesn’t resonate with me, since it feels very one-note. My poems aren’t in this “church” camp.<br />
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What you observed about this small collection, that my poems deal with “the complexities and incongruities of being an embodied spirit,” is quite accurate. My maternal grandmother, who was very religious, also saw the dead. Her ability to “see” skipped over my mother and passed to me, so from a very young age, I recognized that there was a here and a there that co-existed. So from about the age of 3, I had an unnerving sense of the dead’s existence after death, and that someday I would be one of them.<br />
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Poet Anne Carson said something that makes sense of this disquiet. I’m paraphrasing here, but Carson described the feeling as walking through your life with an inkling of what’s also running alongside you on the other side, the flame of God, whatever the afterlife is. So that sense of mortality, of an internal straining toward something to take the place of loneliness.
I’m a fan of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interior_Castle" target="_blank">Teresa of Avila’s <i>Interior Castle</i></a>, where she compares the inner self to a series of mansions one must enter and go deeper within in order to achieve some kind of enlightenment: “It is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering into ourselves.” There’s also a definite loneliness in that inner self-contending and contemplation. But the reward is what my poems seek, again quoting Teresa of Avila: “Union is as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in; it enters in different places but it all becomes one.” <br />
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I wrote these poems from a fragmented, fragile stance, and feel they’re confessional: The reader sees my falling apart as my water breaks nine weeks early in my second pregnancy. The reader sees that wish for death. The reader uses my kaleidoscopic lens: here’s the world through a religious/spirit-inhabited lens. The narrator is also a seeker, looking for a God that she hasn’t quite found yet, and is trying to determine if he will love her or shun her. But (as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a God who wants our love and is waiting for it), and as Teresa of Avila writes (“This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come close.”), these poems hope to find that God.<br />
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You know, I’ve been fortunate in that my poems haven’t been ridiculed or pigeon-holed by other poets and editors. Of course, “God poems” aren’t for everyone. But I think in my poems, alongside God also runs a strain of John of the Cross’ dark night of the soul. The despair juxtaposed with the eternal light. There’s sadness in my poems. There’s a music that I make from this chaos.<br />
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Also, I’m not so sure that there’s a strong, continuous tradition of Catholic or Christian poets to latch onto if your work centers on faith-type themes. For me, poets writing about God who resonate are: John Donne, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, Rainer Maria Rilke, Czeslaw Miloscz, Kathleen Norris and Anne Carson. Rilke’s and Carson’s poetry especially, because of that seemingly secret understanding of a vulnerable God who is waiting for us to love him.<br />
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NCL: In her essay "<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/175809" target="_blank">Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer</a>" (<i>Poetry</i>, November 2005), poet Mary Karr writes:
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[I]magine my horror when I began to have experiences of joy. ... But nothing can maim a poet’s practice like joy. As Henri de Montherlant says, “Happiness writes white.” What poet—in this century or any other—has founded her work on happiness? We can all drum up a few happy poems here and there, but from Symbolism and the High Moderns forward, poetry has often spread the virus of morbidity. It’s been shared comfort for the dispossessed. Yes, we have Whitman opening his arms to “the blab of the pave.” We have James Wright breaking into blossom, but he has to step out of his body to do so. We have the revelatory moments of Tranströmer and the guilty pleasure and religious striving of Milosz. W.H. Auden captured the ethos when he wrote, “The purpose of poetry is disenchantment.” Poetry in the recent past hasn’t allowed us much joy.
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Does that observation hold true for you? Why (or why not?) What role has joy or celebration played in your poetry as whole?
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: I do live with a strong sense of mortality, or perhaps the “morbidity” that Karr observed, and that sense often informs my work – so you see that I often contend with heavier topics like death, the spirit realm, God, saints, the afterlife. Of course, I experience joy in my life, and that joy does permeate my work. I also have a strong sense that what I have can just as easily be taken away, so I suppose that when celebration does enter my work it’s with a sense of caution (it casts its own shadow). My poems feel like artifact: They’re my attempt to create something beautiful from the imperfect world we inhabit. <br />
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Sadness, joy, both feelings come and go, but weaving their imagery together in a poem does create something indelible that doesn’t fade or lose its sharp prick. Yet, the self who inhabits these poems is already dead. In these poems, I’m celebrating small miracles of joy in the quotidian (“One summer/ you left your paper/dolls on a train in Amiens.”) This necklace of memories is what makes me nostalgic for a time and a self I can never return to – each day closer to the end of this life, and closer to the next. This makes me afraid, unlike the saints who were often miserable being earthbound, wanting to be reunited with the God who granted them small moments of ecstasy down here in the weeds. Frankly, I’m still afraid of death: The thought of leaving my children now makes me shudder. I would need to be dragged into the next world; clearly I haven’t yet achieved the same connection to the saints’ God. <br />
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NCL: What’s one of the more crucial poems in the chapbook for you? (or what is your favorite poem?) Why? How did the poem come to be?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: Besides “Bone of My Bone,” which is also the chapbook’s title, another crucial poem that I also happen to like a lot is “Marked” (it first appeared in the December 2014 issue of <i><a href="http://mipoesias.com/" target="_blank">MiPOesias</a></i>). I worked through many, many drafts of this poem. I read about certain African tribes that singed the skin of women who didn’t bear children. I thought about people who tattoo iconography on their skin, and what that might mean to them. I thought of those of us who cut into our own skin to make our pain visible. We’re all in some way marked, spiritually, physically or both. And yet, we’re spirits in a body. How do we live these two joined forms? These lines address that concern, can we ever get at the spirit part of ourselves: “This is how // the body seems at first, impenetrable – / yet, a woman still sings ghazals // from between your ribs.”<br />
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<b>Marked</b><br />
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This is a lie I used to believe: The thief<br />
wasn’t nailed to a tree to enter the saved<br />
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city, his palms opening<br />
like mouths, like doors. Only after<br />
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his hands were marked did a paradise appear – <br />
I miss your bones, he mouths. This is how<br />
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the body seems at first, impenetrable – <br />
yet, a woman still sings ghazals<br />
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from between your ribs. Here, these women<br />
squat away from the village, hands<br />
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pressed into dirt, the bloody clench <br />
and release of babies crowning near long-<br />
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haired cows. Their skin unmarked, the village<br />
says, because otherwise the children <br />
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won’t be seen by the gods. Lord, I keep praying<br />
underneath this shadow-drawn tree: <br />
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praying from a lion’s yellow belly is how<br />
I understand the way godlight watches me. Bless<br />
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the dark. Bless the hole from whence we came. <br />
Teach me to float cities, to salt and unsalt<br />
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this ancient hammer before it falls to ink-<br />
arrowed chest. I’m saying make me visible.<br />
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If we carve saints who bleed into hagiographies<br />
on our backs, is that enough<br />
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for our names to be written in the book<br />
of the dead? They enter and exit my body<br />
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as smoke. Migrate the translucencies of seeing<br />
to bone marrow, its shadow ossifying <br />
<br />
on my spine, dangling femur, on skull. I watch<br />
the secret face I make into my own flesh,<br />
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the way I kissed my dead grandmother’s sunken<br />
chest, the lines of her clavicle like outstretched<br />
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arms. The women who don’t bear children <br />
are held down and singed with black lines before <br />
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they return to work in the fields, skin a book<br />
of illumination: a flame rises and thins. How<br />
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I’ll never see the way my life would move<br />
unmarked, the path in moonlight<br />
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already full of stones, already stirring.<br />
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NCL: You had another chapbook, <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/absence-of-stars" target="_blank">Absence of Stars</a></i> (dancing girl press), that was released within a few months of <i>Bone of My Bone</i>. What draws you to the chapbook form? Specifically for <i>Bone of My Bone</i>: Why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: I’m drawn to the chapbook form because they’re tiny little countries that allow a poet to experiment and to also work through a theme or narrative arc in a smaller space. I actually put together <i>Bone of My Bone</i> specifically for the Blood Pudding Press 2015 Chapbook contest last December. I had been thinking about the theme for a little while, and felt that the subject matter was a good match for BPP, since I several of its chapbook titles that embrace the spiritual, the mystical, the ghostly, the macabre, the day’s darker undersides. I know that my poetry isn’t for everyone – my longer book of hours poem was rejected from numerous journals. That’s partly why I used it as a skeleton or starting point for <i>Bone of My Bone</i>. Luckily BPP Publisher <a href="http://julietcook.weebly.com/" target="_blank">Juliet Cook</a> liked the chapbook enough to select it as one of the Blood Pudding Press Chapbook Contest winners.<br />
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NCL: What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: <i>Bone of My Bone</i> is also about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem" target="_blank">carpe diem</a>. Since I was a child of the ’90s, I loved the movie <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Will_Hunting" target="_blank">Good Will Hunting</a></i> where the literature professor played by <a href="http://www.robinwilliams.com/" target="_blank">Robin Williams</a> jumped on a table and gave a spine-tingling monologue about seizing the day. My chapbook is like a long prayer that’s asking for the ability to make the most of time one has on earth. There’s an excitement in being alive, about the possibility of what’s to come, and as Malachi Black said, “the possibility of God.”<br />
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NCL: What are you working on now?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">NR</span></i></b>: My first full-length collection, <i>Louder Than Everything You Love,</i> is forthcoming in the late fall from <a href="http://eljpublications.com/" target="_blank">ELJ Publications</a>, so I’m working on the final order and editing and looking for cover art. It’s scary and thrilling at the same time. I didn’t expect to have a full length out this year. <a href="http://arianaddenbleyker.com/" target="_blank">Ariana D. Den Bleyker</a>, ELJ’s publisher, had originally accepted a longer chapbook collection, and then earlier this year had solicited a full-length so for a while I’ve been editing, shaping and adding to that original collection. Many of the poems have found homes in journals and I’m excited to release it into the world. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-80271943826657597692015-09-03T18:44:00.000-04:002015-09-03T18:49:09.046-04:00Chapbook Chat: Melissa Eleftherion Discusses Pigtail Duty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/pigtail-duty-melissa-eleftherion" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Pigtail Duty</a><br />
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Author: <a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Melissa Eleftherion</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/" target="_blank">dancing girl press</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>epithelia</b> by Melissa Eleftherion<br />
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The thin connective tissue a wedding song<br />
Outside, an organism – <br />
Gregarious leaping from branches<br />
A dull musical hum<br />
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All coordinates marry distance<br />
Measure hostility of an old heart<br />
Slowly – a meat snap<br />
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Asymmetrical <br />
A stitched wedding dress<br />
The heart now feathers for plucking<br />
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(Originally published in <a href="http://www.menacinghedge.com/summer2013/entry-eleftherion.php" target="_blank"><i>Menacing Hedge</i></a>.)<br />
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<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Melissa Eleftherion</a> grew up in Brooklyn. She is the author of <i><a href="https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/huminsect-melissa-eleftherion" target="_blank">huminsect</a></i> (dancing girl press, 2013), <i><a href="http://poetrychapbooks.omeka.net/items/show/45" target="_blank">prism maps</a></i> (dusie kollektiv, 2014), <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/pigtail-duty-melissa-eleftherion" target="_blank">Pigtail Duty</a></i> (dancing girl press, 2015), and several other chapbooks and fragments. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in <i>Bone Bouquet, Delirious Hem, Entropy, Manifesting the Female Epic, Negative Capability, Open Letters Monthly, Poet as Radio, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, So to Speak, Tinderbox,</i> & <i>TRUCK</i>. She works as a librarian with Mendocino County Libraries, and created, developed, and currently manages the <a href="https://poetrychapbooks.omeka.net/" target="_blank">Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange</a>.<br />
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<b>Author blog:</b> <a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">A Poet Librarian</a><br />
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<b>Twitter:</b> @apoetlibrarian, <a href="https://twitter.com/apoetlibrarian" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/apoetlibrarian</a><br />
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<b>Facebook:</b> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/melissa.eleftherion" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/melissa.eleftherion</a><br />
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<b>LinkedIn:</b> <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/meleftherioncarr/" target="_blank">http://www.linkedin.com/in/meleftherioncarr/</a><br />
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<b>Instagram:</b> everlib
, <a href="https://instagram.com/everlib/" target="_blank">https://instagram.com/everlib/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in August 2015.]</span><br />
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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/pigtail-duty-melissa-eleftherion" target="_blank">Pigtail Duty</a></i>.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>: <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/pigtail-duty-melissa-eleftherion" target="_blank">Pigtail Duty</a></i> began over 8 years ago as an attempt to piece together identity as a feminist suddenly married and mothering. In relearning to define myself, I incorporated found language from my autobiographical dictionary – a source text I’ve compiled of words new to me discovered through reading. Identity being a continuous state of becoming, the work evolves as the dictionary grows. How we take in or retain the memory of learning that new word - even if we had to look it up a hundred times to retain its meaning. How that word impacts the extant vocabulary word cloud, how a single word can help us change.<br />
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While writing <i>Pigtail Duty</i>, I occasionally used the autobiographical dictionary as a compass or jumping off point to write the poems - randomly opening it & free-associating from language found in the definitions. I found this incredible synthesis in that my chance experiments usually resonated with something yet to be excavated deep within the grave of my belly. Language began to reshape me in ways I hadn’t yet experienced.
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NCL: How did you arrive at the title? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>: The title derives from a line in the title poem that arcs in couplets throughout the book: “When I wear pigtails it is to be pleasing. I want to pleasure your mouth to be smiling.” I wrote that poem in the park one day waiting to pick up my son from playgroup, & all these conflicts arose in relation to the concept of duty and heteronormative “women’s roles” many women including myself were raised to portray. These figures clashed with the woman I felt I was becoming as a wife & mother. <br />
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There were all these selves taking shape too, & bumping around one another, beginning to fuse a little bit but hardening around the edges. Growing more assured & solid. At times, I felt inter dimensional & weary from so much time travel - yearned for an escape to a carefree childhood in pigtails. Though, that carefree childhood barely exists for most kids - the four year old pigtail I was watching my father deal coke to a friend’s mother, among other shitty things I witnessed. <br />
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The perversity of maturity - how one can feel a sense of duty at a young age. So, I was grappling also with the residue of being a responsible child vs. a responsible adult. Vowing somehow to do better for my son.<br />
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NCL: Recently, another poet asked about the cover of your chapbook, specifically “how you arrived at the cover and what it symbolizes?” If it’s ok with you, please share your answer with us here and/or say a bit about the cover.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>: The cover was designed by <a href="http://kristybowen.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Kristy Bowen</a> (design maven!) of <a href="http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/" target="_blank">dancing girl press</a> based on my request for the cover to incorporate pigeon feathers, blood & card catalogs. Ha, I realize that probably sounds insane. As the book is an accretion of fragments (or at least felt that way while writing it in between feedings, playdates, etc.), I thought of the many ways I (and probably many other women) compartmentalize items, textures, objects, emotions - so card catalogs (plus I'm a librarian so that was easy). Plus, I have recurring dreams about a giant, grand bureau with many little drawers for ephemera. The pigeon feathers are symbolic of my Brooklyn hometown - growing up there I knew no other birds besides ravens and crows, birds were just birds then. And blood = obligation, heredity, all that reckoning that women in particular do when starting their own family or at least begin to individuate.<br />
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How the body is branches and compartments of pigeon feathers. Pigeon feathers and dust. Vocabulary and wine stains.<br />
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NCL: What’s one of the more crucial poems in the chapbook for you? (or what is your favorite poem?) Why? How did the poem come to be?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>:<br />
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The body met with an alter of the image of the body<br />
What we see when we seek reflection<br />
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The ever a whisper an incandescent eye droop <br />
Gravity seeking its own breasts cupped so the light can laugh too<br />
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How time makes us empathic for women we once reviled<br />
Neglect and its chambers of dropped infants<br />
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The insouciance of stubbed cigarettes as woman spooned the creamed peas<br />
Time is making my ankles heavy where I ripped and ripped out my roots<br />
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Extirpated that woman in the kitchen smock<br />
Extirpated that idea of seeking permission<br />
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This poem was originally published as <i>line/limn</i> in <i><a href="http://www.menacinghedge.com/" target="_blank">Menacing Hedge</a></i>, an awesome journal created & produced by Kelly Boyker Guillemette, Craig Wallwork, & Gio Guillemette. While it isn’t my favorite poem, I think it’s a critical piece for the denouement of the voice in <i>Pigtail Duty</i>. Her new sense of becoming emboldens her to have the courage of her convictions, and stop seeking validation in other female figures she either identifies with or resents. She gains a sense of security that only a strong backbone can provide.
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NCL: The tag line for <a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">your blog</a> is “a portfolio of my fragments” and recent blog posts include shaped poems of rocks and minerals, poems with fragments of lines like mineral shards, e.g. “<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/2015/04/08/rhodochrosite/" target="_blank">rhodochrosite</a>,” “<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/azurite/" target="_blank">azurite</a>,” “<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/cassiterite/" target="_blank">cassiterite</a>,” “<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/leucite/" target="_blank">leucite</a>,” and “<a href="https://apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/abalone-2/" target="_blank">abalone</a>.” Please say a bit about the importance of the word ‘fragments’ and what it represents for you.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>: I return again and again to fragments & feel sometimes like an eroding igneous rock. There’s just so much conscious wearing away of little ignorances & little malnourished egos in these selves (read: identity roles) that have formed around me. All the chipping away leads to just me writhing in a ditch & the poems get more honest.<br />
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Fragments are also a way into the poem for me, as a perpetually “busy” working mom. If I can write a line or two on the bus to work or during my lunch break, eventually I can get somewhere close to a poem. When I was writing <i>Pigtail Duty</i>, I participated in & later organized a poetry postcard group. Writing poems on postcards & immediately mailing them off was very liberating for a person who often fusses too much about diction. Receiving poetry postcards or any kind of mail art is also a fantastic way to co-opt & resist the usual dread of junk mail & bills, & possibly share poems with disgruntled postal workers who can’t help reading them. Several poems in <i>Pigtail Duty</i> were begun on postcards during stolen moments (breastfeeding, nap time, on the bus to work, in the middle of the night…)<br />
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NCL: What are you working on now?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">ME</span></i></b>: At present, I’ve just completed a third round of edits on a full-length manuscript titled <i>field guide to autobiography</i>. In this work, I'm exploring the inter-relatedness of various species through accreted fragments toward autobiography. <br />
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How does a person begin to enumerate the many fragments & fractals that comprise a life? This book is an attempt at memoir through the lens of various animals & minerals including katydids, wrens, abalone shells, and apple trees.<br />
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The first section: <i>auto/</i> is comprised of poems that incorporate more found text from from my "autobiographical dictionary.” The second section: <i>/bio</i> incorporates language from a variety of field guides, and explores morphological and sociological relationships of various genera, while personifying their unique attributes.<br />
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I’m beginning work on two other projects as well - the first is titled <i>flowers from the gut</i> & deals with gut microbiota & class issues. Another series is titled <i>the ditch poems</i>.
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-33391043039336333502015-08-20T19:29:00.000-04:002015-08-20T19:33:08.363-04:00Chapbook Chat: Ruth Foley Discusses Creature Feature<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhiVeiK9q4614gV3QoalxQ398xdTcnlkMCdp-yKAofMtDeaTI1DFTmNOXH1JvOEWxo7ZY60UrDhpCfGEgVZlfrBL70T7rTDA7Zaa14GMe1UUf-MPBgamEH7tYFbk_uaCWs7YHusACmsLU/s1600/RuthFoley_CreatureFeature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhiVeiK9q4614gV3QoalxQ398xdTcnlkMCdp-yKAofMtDeaTI1DFTmNOXH1JvOEWxo7ZY60UrDhpCfGEgVZlfrBL70T7rTDA7Zaa14GMe1UUf-MPBgamEH7tYFbk_uaCWs7YHusACmsLU/s400/RuthFoley_CreatureFeature.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://eljpublications.com/available-titles/creature-feature" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Creature Feature</a><br />
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Author: <a href="http://fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Ruth Foley</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://eljpublications.com/" target="_blank">ELJ Publications</a><br />
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Publication date: 2015<br />
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<b>Dear Maria</b> by Ruth Foley<br />
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I used to think it was your fault, sinking<br />
blossom, for being kind, for being naïve,<br />
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poor child, dripping limp as lake weed <br />
across your father's arms, your limbs <br />
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swaying in the watery air—this is where your<br />
power lies, where you might have grown <br />
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from peasant girl to peasant wife, your <br />
own children playing near the dappled edge<br />
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—but dead, your power forces men to<br />
their knees, and then their feet; dead, you torch <br />
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every cold club. Dead, you can make an entire <br />
village swarm and bellow against the night.<br />
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(Originally published in <i>NonBinary Review</i> and featured on<i> </i><a href="http://dailydoseoflit.com/2015/06/19/excerpt-ruth-foley/" target="_blank"><i>Extract(s)</i>, along with several other poems from <i>Creature Feature</i></a>.<br />
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<a href="http://fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Ruth Foley</a> lives with her husband and two retired racing greyhounds in Massachusetts, where she teaches English for Wheaton College. Her work appears in numerous web and print journals, including <i>Antiphon, The Bellingham Review, The Louisville Review,</i> and <i>Sou’wester</i>. Her poems have been included in the Best Indie Lit New England anthology and nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart, and she is the recipient of a finalist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches poetry workshops in various locations around New England. When she’s not writing or teaching, you can sometimes find her elbow-deep in a bee hive or neck deep in the water. Her first chapbook, <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/dear-turquoise-ruth-foley" target="_blank">Dear Turquoise</a></i>, is available from <a href="http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/" target="_blank">Dancing Girl Press</a>. She serves as Managing Editor for <i><a href="http://ciderpressreview.com/" target="_blank">Cider Press Review</a></i> and blogs at <a href="http://fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Five Things</a>.<br />
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<b>Author blog:</b> <a href="http://fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Five Things</a><br />
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<b>Twitter:</b> @GrainOfRuth, <a href="https://twitter.com/GrainOfRuth" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/GrainOfRuth</a><br />
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<b>Facebook:</b> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/foley.ruth" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/foley.ruth</a><br />
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<b>Pinterest:</b> <a href="https://www.pinterest.com/foleyruth/" target="_blank">https://www.pinterest.com/foleyruth/</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in August 2015.]</span><br />
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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook <i><a href="http://eljpublications.com/available-titles/creature-feature/" target="_blank">Creature Feature</a></i>.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: <i>Creature Feature</i> is a collection of epistolary poems, letters written to the various actors and characters (and one director) of the early black and white Universal monster movies. The films range from<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera_(1925_film)" target="_blank"> <i>The Phantom of the Opera</i> with Lon Chaney</a> (1925) to <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_from_the_Black_Lagoon" target="_blank">The Creature from the Black Lagoon</a></i> (1954), but is focused on what I think of as the big three: <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(1931_film)" target="_blank">Frankenstein</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_of_Frankenstein" target="_blank">The Bride of Frankenstein</a>,</i> and <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolf_Man_(1941_film)" target="_blank">The Wolf Man</a></i>. <br />
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NCL: As a guest blogger on <a href="http://lisaromeo.blogspot.com/2013/11/guest-blogger-ruth-foley-on-poem-series.html" target="_blank">Lisa Romeo Writes</a>, you wrote:<br />
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I became obsessed for a time with the archetypes—the mad scientist, the specific visions of some of the monsters, the villagers—developed in those films, and with the actors who helped create them. This is, in some ways, the most complicated of my series, because it's most at risk for misinterpretation.
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Please speak bit more about that obsession, e.g., how came to be; why those archetypes; what drove the interest in the *actors* who portrayed the creatures; unpack, or expose a bit of what underlies, the phrase “risk for interpretation.”
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I have loved those movies since I was a kid in the days before cable. A local UHF station played a double feature of horror movies on Saturday afternoons—B movies from the 50s and 60s, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_Film_Productions" target="_blank">Hammer horror movies </a>with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee" target="_blank">Christopher Lee</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cushing" target="_blank">Peter Cushing</a>, Japanese monster movies like <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla" target="_blank">Godzilla</a></i>, that sort of thing. They also played all of the Universal monster movies, and while I learned later that it was because they were shopped around as a package deal, so they were really cheap, I didn’t know that then. As a kid, I was taken in by the otherworldliness of them, how completely we were asked to believe in the outlandish. I came back to them as an adult by way of an Ursula K. LeGuin essay, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Language-Night-Fantasy-Science/dp/0060924128" target="_blank">Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction</a>,” in which she says, among many other wise and wonderful things, that Frankenstein’s monster walked his way into our collective unconscious and refuses to leave.<br />
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I thought about that a lot, about the way that you can walk into any store around Halloween and what you see isn’t just Frankenstein’s monster, it’s the monster that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff" target="_blank">Boris Karloff</a> created. Other versions didn’t sink in the way his did. And every vampire since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi" target="_blank">Bela Lugosi</a> played Dracula reacts to or against his version—everything from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_von_Count" target="_blank">Count von Count</a> on <i>Sesame Street</i> to Count Chocula cereal to the vampires of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118276/" target="_blank">Buffy the Vampire Slayer</a></i> or <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(series)" target="_blank">Twilight</a></i> or anywhere else you find them. They are all aware of Lugosi’s Dracula, and all the creators of the vampires since have to make decisions with that character in mind. That’s the power of archetype—when Boris Karloff first enters the room in that first <i>Frankenstein</i> and the camera holds on him, switches to a different angle of his face, holds again...they’re creating that archetype right there on the screen, and you can watch it happening. That realization was very powerful for me. Even the fact that the Frankenstein’s monster you see in your local grocery store is green comes back to that film—Karloff’s makeup was green so that it would read as corpse-like on the screen in black and white. That blows my mind because it’s a fact from reality that doesn’t appear on the screen and still made it into our idea about what the monster is. How many people knew Karloff’s face was green? A couple of hundred? And how many people think of that green now when they think of that monster? All of us.<br />
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The “risk for interpretation” I was talking about with Lisa Romeo was that these poems would be dismissed as “monster poems” or as basic treatments of popular culture. And they do stand as those, and I’m fine with that. But it was important to me that the poems be about more than the monsters or the movies, that they maybe serve to highlight a little bit what the films were trying to do: talk about where the monsters really lie (inside and outside of us), about how we recognize and fear the ugliness in ourselves, about how to find beauty there. That might be how I came to include the actors, too—I began researching the films to get insight into the characters in the hopes of discovering a bit of why these particular interpretations of the stories resonate with us so deeply, and in the process, I learned quite a bit about the actors themselves, and one of the major directors of the genre, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whale" target="_blank">James Whale</a>. Whale’s story is covered in part in the 1998 movie <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_and_Monsters_(film)" target="_blank">Gods and Monsters</a></i>, and with sympathy and empathy (and a dose of fiction, of course), but if you go into, say, <i>The Bride of Frankenstein</i> or <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_Man_(film)" target="_blank">The Invisible Man</a></i> knowing that Whale was gay and was telling stories of outsiders and of hiding and of fitting in, it adds yet another layer to the films. I wanted to capture a bit of that, too, that masking and mystery-making, because every human being I have ever met participates in that as well in some way.<br />
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NCL: In a 2011 essay “<a href="http://www.pw.org/content/thinking_like_an_editor_how_to_order_your_poetry_manuscript_0" target="_blank">Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript</a>,” April Ossmann writes “[T]he biggest mystery to emerging and sometimes even established poets is how to effectively order a poetry manuscript.” How did you order <i>Creature Feature</i>? Was it something you had in mind early in the writing process, for example or did you write the poems with a strategy in mind? What were some of your considerations? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I might be breaking the Poet Code when I admit I had zero strategies when it came to writing these poems. I wasn’t even sure what I was doing—I didn’t know it was going to become a series. I wrote “Dear Bela” first, for Bela Lugosi, who had such a tragic life in a lot of ways because of addiction. If you had asked me at the time, I probably would have told you that I’d write a poem for Bela Lugosi and one for Boris Karloff, and then maybe be done with it. I started watching the movies, though—it was September and Netflix was streaming a lot of them because Halloween was coming up in a couple of months. I watched the precursors to those movies, too, the silent films like <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu" target="_blank">Nosferatu</a></i> and <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cabinet_of_Dr._Caligari" target="_blank">The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</a></i> and <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Jekyll_and_Mr._Hyde_(1931_film)" target="_blank">Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</a></i>, where I could see the roots of the films I found so captivating. Once that happened, I was lost—the series just sucked me in and I wrote drafts like a fiend, sometimes one or two new poems a day. It took a long time for me to revise, but that came later. In the beginning, I was just trying to make sure I didn’t miss anyone.<br />
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When it came to arranging, though, I had something of a strategy. It was a balance between letting the poems echo in and off each other without any group of them getting so heavy with a certain theme that they landed with a thud. Some of the poems—one for Lon Chaney, Jr. as himself (as opposed to in character), for example—didn’t make it into the chapbook. Those poems hit the same themes too hard or didn’t seem to discuss their issues as well as I would have liked. “Dear Lon Chaney, Jr.” does plenty of things on its own, but also covers much of the same territory as the poems for the two halves of the Wolf Man, so I relegated him to the cutting room floor. As it were.<br />
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Another consideration was the weight of the films, how many poems I had written for each one. The Frankenstein movies in particular take up a lot of space—Boris Karloff, the creature (which I had to call “monster” in the series to avoid confusion with The Creature from the Black Lagoon), Doctor Frankenstein, Maria (the little girl who drowns)...the list goes on and on. When I teamed those up with the poems to the villagers and the ingénue and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwight_Frye" target="_blank">Dwight Frye</a>, who plays the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(character)" target="_blank">Igor-type character</a> under different names in various films, it all just felt like too much, especially since there are movies in the chapbook which only have one poem. I decided to move thematically in some ways, but in others, I was aware that some of the characters in the poems needed to have some grounding—the gypsy woman in <i>The Wolf Man</i>, for example, is better served by having her poem placed in a context where it’s clear that’s the film to which she belongs.<br />
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NCL: In a <a href="http://lindaksienkiewicz.com/what-%20how-why-ruth-foley/" target="_blank">recent interview of you by Linda Sienkiewicz</a>, you said “Poems are where I explore and understand and interrogate.” What are you exploring and interrogating in <i>Creature Feature</i>?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: Well, the archetypes, certainly, and the way they resonate with me and, I think, with a lot of us if we allow them to. The human beings in these movies do not come across well—the good people are flat, as if their goodness is all that matters (and in terms of moving the plot, I suppose that’s the case). At the same time, most of the “evil” people are simply misguided—obsessed with knowledge or consumed by the belief that they are above needing to face the consequences for their actions because their motives are pure. And then the monsters are the most human of us all. They’re misunderstood, their otherness is seen as ugliness instead of beauty, they’re punished for their aberrations. Well, except for Dracula. Dracula is a jerk. But I love him anyway. And he, unlike the scientists for example, didn’t ask for what he became.<br />
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NCL: What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: Oh wow. I think if you asked me this question every day for a month, I’d rotate through all the poems with my answers, based on what’s happening that day. All the female-centered poems are important to me, and “Dear Maria,” which you link to, is certainly right up there in terms of me coming to grips with myself as a feminist and poet, and as the key to seeing where the monsters really are. The Bride is on the cover for a reason, and I became more and more aware as I was writing of how very un-represented women are in these films. But what resonates with me right now is “Dear Larry Talbot,” because of the work I’m currently doing and discuss in another question below, but also because of how it ties a bunch of the themes together. I’m supposed to root for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Talbot" target="_blank">Larry Talbot</a>, but instead I root for the wolf because at least I know what I’m getting into there. Talbot is supposed to be the safe one, the solid one, the man who doesn’t want to become the wolf. Yet he ruthlessly pursues a woman he is interested in. He looks in her bedroom window with a telescope and then uses the information he discovers as a pick-up line and it WORKS. She turns him down for a date (she is already involved with another man) and he responds by telling her what time he’ll come by for her. He doesn’t take no for an answer, and this is supposed to be appealing. Really, though, it’s just creepy. He is supposed to inhabit Love—capital “L” intended—but he represents himself with force instead. It might have played okay in 1941, and I certainly didn’t notice it when I was a kid, but it sits badly with me now, and adds to the horror factor for me. At the same time, it weaves right into my thoughts on power, love, romance, and the ways in which we are beautiful, ugly, and misunderstood.<br />
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DEAR LARRY TALBOT<br />
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I used to know a man like you: the scarce <br />
veneer of skin across the beast, the claw curled<br />
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in a hand. I used to wait for him to snarl <br />
or snap, to say I drove him to it like your <br />
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autumn moon. I recognize your startled heat, <br />
your palm against the scrabbled bark of a tree,<br />
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the furring edge of a french cuff, the unraveling, <br />
the woman backed against the trunk, the duff <br />
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at her feet. I used to know the woman too:<br />
the way she likes to pretend she doesn't hear<br />
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the howling, the way she lifts her hand,<br />
tugging her collar closed against her throat, <br />
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the blood bruising her temple from within,<br />
the beating pulse of her. The call. Dear man, <br />
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she knows you're hardly man at all, despite <br />
your polish and your shoes. Despite the hollows<br />
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at her clavicle and the way her marrow<br />
holds her scent, begs you to unmake her.<br />
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NCL: Please discuss the choice for a chapbook. For example, why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I can’t imagine a full-length book of these poems. For one thing, I deliberately kept the subjects limited to a specific cast, to narrow the viewpoint to a particular time and place. I could have found room for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Price" target="_blank">Vincent Price</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock" target="_blank">Alfred Hitchcock</a>, for example, and I know both of their work well, but they tell different stories. I could delve into the minor characters, the less well-known movies and monsters, and maybe I will eventually, but many of them don’t have much to say to me. That may be my own failing. The only poem I wish I could have written is one to <a href="http://zita%20johann/" target="_blank">Zita Johann</a>, who plays the ingénue in <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(1932_film)" target="_blank">The Mummy</a></i> and is the least ingénue-y of the bunch. She smolders. But I couldn’t figure out what to do for her, what to say, and so that poem hasn’t been written and maybe never will be.<br />
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I have been very vocal about not including them as a section in a book—I just can’t imagine the shape such a book would take, in the context of another work—but a couple of poets whose advice I respect have been talking to me recently about the ways in which these poems might expand in the presence of other poems, and the ways in which my other poems might also benefit from rubbing up against these, so I could end up including some of them as part of a larger collection. I haven’t made up my mind there yet, but I’m thinking.<br />
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As I said above, I didn’t have a plan when I started writing, but once I saw I was in the midst of a series, I did think it would become a chapbook one day. I didn’t compose drafts to that end, but as the series wound down, I realized that I should go looking for holes or for places where I might expand or define the scope of the series a bit more, and then I watched all those movies again with that specific goal in mind. A couple of the poems, like “Dear Ingénue,” didn’t arrive until that second, deliberate viewing. I wrote most of the first drafts of these poems over the course of about a month, and then spent ages in revision. Some of them took much longer than others, which is just how these things tend to work, and then I didn’t even put them together into a chapbook for over a year because I got caught up with a different project, which became the chapbook <i>Dear Turquoise</i> and then grew from there.<br />
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NCL: While the common understanding of ekphrasis is poetry in response to visual art, in a 2008 essay <a href="http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/notes-ekphrasis" target="_blank">“Notes on Ekphrasis</a>” by Alfred Corn, Corn mentions that poetry in response to “works of music, cinema, or choreography might also qualify as instances of ekphrasis.” Do you consider some of the poems in Creature Feature to be ekphrastic? If so, to what extent is knowledge of a film, character, or actor, necessary in order to “get” the poems?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I absolutely think of the majority of the poems as ekphrastic—all the poems that cover characters, certainly, but also aspects of the poems to the actors, many of which make reference to their characters, might also qualify. I don’t think it’s necessary to know the films—even if you’ve never seen them, you likely know the basic idea behind them, and that’s where the importance is for me, is in that grounding in the collective imagination. I’ve had a couple of people tell me the poems sent them looking for information, and that’s great. I’ve had others ask me to watch a movie or two with them, or tell me the chapbook made them watch the movies, and that’s also great. I guess the short answer is that nobody needs to know the films in order to get the poems, but the more you know, the deeper you’ll be able to get. Isn’t that true of everything?<br />
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NCL: Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I just read from the work in July at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Classic-Lines/685643054851974" target="_blank">Classic Lines</a> in Pittsburgh, and it was really well-received. The reception of this chapbook has surprised me—I was surprised to have it accepted in the first place, even—because I know that my love for these films strays into the obsessive and I didn’t know that anybody else would ever care about them or the poems. It’s been gratifying for me to get the responses I’ve had so far, notes from people who understand what I’m doing, or questions from people who want some clarification but whose questions indicate to me that they do in fact get it. That’s an amazing experience. <a href="http://waterstreetbooks.d7.indiebound.com/event/ferguson-reading-series-ruth-foley-and-sara-biggs-chaney" target="_blank">I’ll be reading from it again in October</a>, at <a href="http://www.waterstreetbooks.com/" target="_blank">Water Street Bookstore</a> in Exeter, NH.<br />
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NCL: When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I have a group of poets with whom I gather every year for a week of poetry and discussion and laughter (and wine), and I’m lucky enough to get to see most of them in between times as well. I often revise with them in mind, with what they have raised as issues in their own work or in mine. When I’m in the composition process, that earliest of stages when a poem hasn’t yet told me what it’s going to be and I’m still just working with the impulse, I sometimes have one specific person in mind as a reader, often as a spoken or unspoken “you” even, but that person can change from poem to poem, and does. Sometimes that person is a specific person I know, but sometimes it’s someone I create out of parts of different people. I’m tempted to put a Frankenstein joke here, but sometimes you need to let readers fill in their own blanks.<br />
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NCL: What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I’m way funnier than I seem to be here. WAY funnier. And the chapbook is more tender than I think one might expect from the way I describe it. There’s a lot of love in there, admiration for the actors and their choices (I could watch Boris Karloff all day long, I find him so fascinating), appreciation of these movies as films of importance rather than cheesy horror movies. I am trying, in these poems and maybe in all poems, to find humanity. That brings a little bit of sweetness, and if that accentuates the horror, then I’m just fine with that.<br />
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NCL: What are you working on now?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">RF</span></i></b>: I think I might be, finally, figuring out a way to get my sense of injustices out into the world. I’m a political person and a feminist. I have deep, solid beliefs about the ways human beings should treat each other, and I have been trying for years to find a path toward opening my poems to more of that without crossing over into lecture or didacticism or rage. There’s a place for all of that in poetry, maybe especially for rage, but I am not comfortable with my poems hanging out there. I want to find a quiet outrage, one that builds and maybe one that resonates by bringing that sort of simmering heat. Angry people are often very, very placid on the surface, and I grew up knowing that sort of anger, and I’d like to see if I can tap that in a way that shows it for what it is. I’m not there yet, but I am working on ways to get it in there without abandoning who I already am as a poet. It’s too new for me yet to know if I have another series on my hands, but I suspect it will color whatever I end up doing next. We’ll see.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-56962230768946803822015-08-08T12:01:00.001-04:002015-08-08T12:01:15.563-04:00Chapbook Chat: Lisa Wiley Discusses My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lisa-wiley/my-daughter-wears-her-evil-eye-to-school/paperback/product-22031556.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School</a><br />
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Author: <a href="http://www.pw.org/content/lisa_wiley%20/" target="_blank">Lisa Wiley</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: </b><a href="http://www.angelfire.com/journal/garyearlross/den.html" target="_blank">The Writer’s Den</a><br />
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Publication date: March 2015<br />
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<b>In The Junk Drawer</b> by Lisa Wiley<br />
— after Charles Simic<br />
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A little red spool<br />
full of thread<br />
for a ladybug costume<br />
forgotten long ago.<br />
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I unwind the plastic cylinder<br />
to feel those autumn days<br />
coil around my finger.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 14px;">“In The Junk Drawer” © Lisa Wiley, <i>My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School</i>, (The Writer’s Den, 2015)</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.pw.org/content/lisa_wiley" target="_blank">Lisa Wiley</a> teaches creative writing, poetry, literature and composition at Erie Community College in Buffalo, NY. She is also the author of <a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=1618" target="_blank">Chamber Music</a> a chapbook of 21 villanelles (Finishing Line Press, 2013.) Her work has appeared in <i>The Healing Muse, Medical Journal of Australia, Mom Egg, Rockhurst Review, Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine</i> among others.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in July 2015.]</span><br />
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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about <i><a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/lisa-wiley/my-daughter-wears-her-evil-eye-to-school/paperback/product-22031556.html" target="_blank">My Daughter Wears Her Evil Eye to School</a></i>.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: The nucleus of the chapbook is motherhood and generational love. While my daughter is mentioned in the title, I include many nods to my mother such as in “Why My Mother Won’t Attend My Poetry Reading,” and to my maternal grandmother in “Making Split Pea Soup.” Although we are not Greek, my mother brought back an evil eye charm for my daughter from a trip to Tarpon Springs. The chapbook is dedicated to my grandmothers who both did not go gentle and taught us all many life lessons. My paternal grandmother is not directly mentioned, but my love of putting pen to paper came from her. <br />
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NCL: The bulk of poems in chapbook are themed around parenting and domesticity, childhood and raising children in contemporary American society. What are some of the other themes, metaphors, and other elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: Yes, the bulk are about parenting and domesticity, childhood and raising children. I am also inspired by travel. Every time I step out of my immediate world, I look with new eyes. Trips to San Francisco and New York City last summer inspired a travel motif in some of the final poems including “My Own Private Alcatraz,” “Dim Sung at the Yank Sing,” and “Feng Shui.” I hope “New York, In My Ballet Flats,” captures a dreamy quality associated with many poets, dancers, artists and mothers: those desires we have for our own future and then for our children. <br />
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Food is another theme prevalent in the chapbook because so many of our memories are grounded in the kitchen or in the field such as “Strawberry Picking” which was inspired by Seamus Heaney’s childhood memories in his poem “Blackberry Picking.” Set in the kitchen, “Farmer’s Sink” is a romantic speculation of the future based on the ordinary object of the sink. “Store-Bought Cookie” is a reflection on being a working mother and not always having enough time to bake homemade cookies, and all the guilt that goes along with it. I teach English at a community college and was thinking about one of those days when I used up all my patience in the classroom.<br />
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NCL: . In a 2012 <a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/201206/?read=interview_koestenbaum_rohrer_zucker" target="_blank">conversation-interview in <i>The Believer</i></a>, in which Rachel Zucker, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Matthew Rohrer discuss domesticity as a taboo subject in contemporary poetry, Matthew Rohrer writes:<br />
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Well, I’ll start, because maybe it was my griping that made this conversation happen. I was thinking about some of my recent poems that are very “domestic,” and I was feeling uncomfortable about it a bit, thinking it would be something people would object to, or that I should have edited that stuff out before it even got to the page. Then I started thinking about how we live—especially those of us who teach in MFA culture—in this poetic culture that says there are no rules. But then I thought, The one thing you can’t do is be domestic. You can write about anything you want, but the domestic is attacked by everyone from every side. Experimental people consider it too pedestrian, and I guess that’s the epitome of the bad workshop poem: “I’m looking out into my backyard and there’s a bird and it makes me feel transcendent.” Even more narrative, lyrical people think it’s the most debased form of talking about yourself. That made me more willing to do it, actually, because if everybody hates it, there must be something interesting about it. </blockquote>
Did you have any hesitation about domesticity or parenting as a subject? What are your thoughts on what Rohrer’s comments above? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: We are all domestic creatures who perform domestic tasks. Even movie stars raise children and cook from time to time. Everyone has a junk drawer. I think poetry should be accessible and grounded in everyday life. Clearly, I don’t consider domestic poems “pedestrian” or shy away from them. I don’t possess an MFA, but I respect those who do. A reader might not savor pea soup, but maybe my poem jars a reader to remember preparing a special family recipe such meatballs or pierogis. Maybe reading mine will inspire someone to write a process poem about the experience or at least pause and reflect on Nona’s sauce and smile. If it makes the reader turn inward and retrieve a memory he/she hadn’t located in a while, my poem is successful.<br />
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NCL: What is your favorite poem in the book or one that is important to you? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: One of my favorites is “Strawberry Island, Late Summer” because of its form and local color. I intended it to be a modern, unrhymed sonnet with fourteen lines and a slight turn or twist in the final couplet. The humorous twist brings my mother into the mystery of the island. I broke the poem into all couplets so the reader could absorb the vivid island imagery and metaphors for this magical place. <br />
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It’s significant to me because of that romantic quality of late summer, when you savor one last adventure before school begins and for its local color. In Buffalo, we are proud of our waterways and links to presidential history, which is why I included Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt. One served as our mayor, the other was inaugurated here. <br />
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STRAWBERRY ISLAND, LATE SUMMER <br />
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We cannonball into the calm Niagara, <br />
pirates making our way to her shore, <br />
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collecting colored pebbles, shiny sea glass <br />
to preserve summer in mason jars. <br />
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All of us ten years-old again. <br />
Three acres of mystery, <br />
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it’s a squeal at the end of a long boat ride, <br />
a Malibu shot before last call. <br />
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Bald eagles reclaim her treetops; <br />
remnants of fires dot the wooded beach, <br />
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Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt <br />
sank lines in these waters — <br />
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my mother docked once on a date <br />
and won’t say a word about it.<br />
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NCL: When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: I’ve always enjoyed what Billy Collins said of the reader when <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/482/the-art-of-poetry-no-83-billy-collins" target="_blank">interviewed for <i>The Paris Review</i></a>. He said:<br />
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She’s this girl in high school who broke my heart, and I’m hoping that she’ll read my poems one day and feel bad about what she did. No, the reader for me is someone who doesn’t care about me or has no vested interest. I start the poem assuming that I have to engage his or her interest. There is no pre-existing reason for you to be interested in me and certainly not in my family, so there must be a lure at the beginning of a poem.</blockquote>
I agree wholeheartedly. There’s no reason for a stranger to be interested in me or my family, so I have to hook him or her with the title or opening lines. Then, the trick is for the reader to stick with me a little while over the journey of 20 lines or so. My reader doesn’t need to be fluent in MFA terms or versed in form. The reader is a hitchhiker of sorts who is willing to enjoy a little jaunt or cruise around the lake knowing I won’t kidnap him for long and will drop him off safely at his destination.<br />
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NCL: Are some of these poems about your own child? If so, who is your favorite author who has written about his or her children and/or your favorite book or poem? <br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: Yes, several of these poems were inspired by my own daughter Madeline. These include the villanelle “Feather Extension,” “Taking My 8-Year-Old Daughter to Hear Seamus Heaney” “Easy-Bake Oven” and the title poem. Yes, she did wear that feather ornament in her hair, and yes, I took her to see that beloved Irish poet before he passed away. Yes, my husband caved in, and “we are the Easy-Bake house on the block.” And yes, she was tormented a bit by the boy who sat next to her in third grade and felt the need for protection by wearing her evil eye charm.<br />
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I have always loved E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake.” Of course it’s about a lake, but it’s really about the passage of time. White doesn’t identify his son by name because it’s truly more the dance of the roles of father and son and moving up another rung of the generational ladder he’s interested in depicting. I wanted to celebrate my own childhood in moments like “Making Split Pea Soup” and “Autobiography” which includes my love for reading, yet come to terms with that generational ladder in “Watching the Wizard of Oz with My Children.” My children’s experience of watching that film is so different from mine because technology has changed the world. White wrote about what changed and what remained the same on his lake. In addition, I have always adored his book <i>Charlotte’s Web</i> because it’s about unlikely best friends and the inevitable passage of time.<br />
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NCL: What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? in publishing the collection?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: I pared down a longer, full-length manuscript to create this chapbook. The challenge was deciding what to cut and what to keep. Likewise, in writing individual poems the challenge is always what to cut and what to keep. For example, I wrote a longer original version of “Taking My 8-Year-Old Daughter to Hear Seamus Heaney.” I condensed it to its essential core during Billy Collins’s workshop at the Southampton Writers’ Conference in 2013. I had to part with sentimental lines that weren’t pertinent to a reader’s perception of the central images. <br />
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Along those lines, I wonder what to reveal and what to leave unsaid as evidenced in “Let the Pterodactyls Out” and “Learning to Say No.” It reminds me of how we edit what comes out of our mouths in everyday conversation. Some people have stronger filters than others.<br />
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I was fortunate two publishers accepted the manuscript. <a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/" target="_blank">Finishing Line Press</a> published my first chapbook <i><a href="https://finishinglinepress.com/product_info.php?products_id=1618" target="_blank">Chamber Music</a></i> (2013) and its editors also accepted this manuscript. I had already given my word to Gary Earl Ross, a local Buffalo publisher who created The Writer’s Den. I wanted to try a more personal approach this time. I made final edits with Gary while seated on a rocking chair in his living room beside his white cat. He offered suggestions for cover shots and added the evil eye graphic to the Converse sneakers. His interest in the project was an invaluable asset, and he even read a poem with me at a chapbook launch.<br />
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NCL: What has been the reader response to your chapbook? Have you encountered anything you were not expecting?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>:“Brave” and “bittersweet” are some of the words readers have used to describe the book. “Bittersweet” was mentioned because it is about the passage of time, and “brave” surprised me. Billy Collins declined to write a blurb, but he did say the title is “a winner.” Some readers responded by showing me their own evil eyes “matis” that they wear on necklaces and bracelets.<br />
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NCL: What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: I’m always trying to say more with less. The final poem is only eight lines, yet I hope to convey a poignant moment on a hike in <a href="http://nysparks.com/parks/79/details.aspx" target="_blank">Letchworth</a> about a family that stays together. I think it’s clear from the chapbook that the first hat I put on every day is the title of mother. Everything else is secondary to that. My love for that role is the heart of the book.<br />
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NCL: What are you working on now?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">LW</span></i></b>: I continue to write along with my creative writing students. I write while they write. I may pursue one more chapbook before attempting my first full-length collection. My sons ask me, “Can you write one about us?” Running is a big passion of my son Max, and it may emerge as the next project’s core. My husband has a new love for boating and that too could create a focal point. Either way, my family grounds my work and inspires it.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4394737079248979611.post-32698071502845744812015-07-26T09:43:00.001-04:002016-07-03T09:57:03.346-04:00Chapbook Chat: Kerri French Discusses Instruments of Summer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/instruments-of-summer-kerri-french" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Instruments of Summer</a><br />
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Author: <a href="http://www.kerrifrench.com/" target="_blank">Kerri French</a><br />
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Publisher<b>: <a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/instruments-of-summer-kerri-french" target="_blank">Dancing Girl Press</a></b><br />
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Publication date: 2013<br />
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<b>Amy Winehouse’s Husband Sends Letter from Jail</b> by Kerri French<br />
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Yeah, I meant what I said that night on the boardwalk:<br />
love, or something like it. Amy, these promises move too fast. <br />
In the arcades, teenagers contort their bodies, their tongues <br />
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surging like fireworks pressing into each other. <br />
Wasn’t that us once—the wet hair, the warm mouths? <br />
I could tell you a story about this woman who swam naked<br />
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in the water and then told me to get lost. Her body,<br />
some instrument of summer. What is she to me, or you?<br />
We’ve lost the darkness that kept our movements hidden,<br />
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but honey so what? Let’s find a spot on the beach <br />
where no one can see us. Let’s strip off our clothes <br />
like we’re the things on fire. Let’s think of cities colder<br />
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than our own, rain that doesn’t sizzle when it falls to pavement.<br />
Here, beneath the whistles and sirens, I find a picture <br />
of you in the sand: shirtless and exact, thighs stretching across<br />
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the blanket, lips moving in moans to the rhythm <br />
of my hands—touching you like we were speaking, saying oh <br />
baby, yes, yes, yes, please, don’t hate me when I go. <br />
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(Originally published in <i><a href="http://pankmagazine.com/piece/kerri-french/" target="_blank">[PANK]</a></i>) <br />
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<a href="http://www.kerrifrench.com/" target="_blank">Kerri French</a>’s poetry has appeared in <i>Barrow Street, Mid-American Review, storySouth, DIAGRAM, Waccamaw, Lumina, Best New Poets</i>, and <i>The Southern Poetry Anthology</i>, among others. A recipient of the Larry Franklin and Mei Kwong Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston, she holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, and Boston University. A North Carolina native, she has lived in Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and England. <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/instruments-of-summer-kerri-french" target="_blank">Instruments of Summer</a></i>, her chapbook of poems about Amy Winehouse, is available from <a href="http://www.dancinggirlpress.com/" target="_blank">Dancing Girl Press</a>. She lives and writes in Murfreesboro, TN.<br />
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<b>Author website</b>: <a href="http://www.kerrifrench.com/" target="_blank">www.kerrifrench.com</a><br />
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<b>Twitter</b>: <a href="https://twitter.com/french_kerri" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/french_kerri</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">[This interview was conducted via email in June 2015.]</span><br />
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NCL: Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: <i><a href="http://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/instruments-of-summer-kerri-french" target="_blank">Instruments of Summer</a></i> is a collection of persona poetry exploring <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/amy-winehouse-244469#synopsis" target="_blank">Amy Winehouse</a>’s life. Written in the voice of Amy and those who knew her, the poems are inspired by tabloid headlines, with each persona attempting to retell those headlines in their own words. <br />
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NCL: How did you arrive at the title?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: The title came from a line in the poem “Amy Winehouse’s Husband Sends Letter from Jail,” which originally was not supposed to be a landmark poem in the manuscript, but as time went on, I noticed I was always writing these poems or revising the manuscript over the summer months when I was living in flats without a/c. For me, many of the poems in the chapbook seemed to represent the urgency of summer, the grittiness, the desperation…I loved the idea of the poems serving as instruments that attempt to capture this.<br />
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NCL: What drew you to Amy Winehouse and her life?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I wrote the first few poems in 2007 just after seeing Amy play live in Boston. My roommate and I were huge fans and she became a bit of an obsession for me that year. The poems started off as a bit of a joke with friends one night when we were reading articles about her—the portraits those headlines painted were such a stark contrast to the singer we had seen live just a few months before. I said I wanted to write an acrostic persona poem based on one recent headline that claimed Amy had been diagnosed with impetigo, and I ended up writing it very quickly on my lunch break the next day. That poem spelled out impetigo down the page, and I decided to write a few more acrostic poems using more headlines. I had always intended to stop after writing just a handful, but at some point writing these really opened up something in my writing that I hadn’t previously tapped into, and I soon stopped writing the acrostic poems and just continued to write in Amy’s voice. I’m always quick to point out that even though these poems started from a place of humor, I wrote them as a way of playing against the headlines, as a way of exploring the real person beneath the media’s jokes. At the time, the media turned so quickly on her—she went from being praised as one of the best voices of her generation to ridiculed and scrutinized across every aspect of her personal life. I was so drawn to this voice I imagined was there behind all of these headlines, and as time went on, I kept envisioning a recovery, a happy ending, the great comeback story. I wanted to keep telling her story until we reached that place, which is probably why the manuscript took me so long to complete… <br />
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NCL: How did the poems, or the writing of the poems, written before her death differ from those you wrote after her death?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: All of the poems were actually written before her death, but I did reshape the manuscript after her death. I mostly reordered the poems to tell a slightly different story, ending with a poem in Amy’s mother’s voice rather than her own. The order that the poems were placed became a lot more important after her death. I also went back and took a closer look at line edits and played with the tone of the manuscript so that there was less humor and more sadness, more desperation.<br />
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NCL: Why did you decide to write a series of persona poems, e.g., speaking in Amy’s voice, in her ex-husband’s voice, in her mother’s voice? In a March 2015 <i>Girls Write Now</i> post “<a href="http://www.girlswritenow.org/2015/03/challenges-rewards-in-persona-poetry-a-mentee-mentor-perspective/" target="_blank">Challenges & Rewards In Persona Poetry: A Mentee-Mentor Perspective</a>,” Katie Zanecchia writes: <br />
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At its core, persona poetry forces poets to better identify themselves in order to take on another’s perspective. After all, how do you become someone else without defining who you are, in addition to who they are? While poets construct poems from the view of their chosen characters, the resulting poetry is their own. Whether through use of vocabulary, syntax, or punctuation, poets shape others’ voices into wholly unique works of art. Therefore, persona poetry says as much about the poet as it does her subject. The way that personas are presented on paper provides great insight into poets’ sense of self.
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Did you find the above true for you?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: Absolutely! Writing these persona poems really helped me gain a better sense of who I was as a writer, and the type of poetry I write today is still largely influenced by these poems. I think writing persona poems allowed me the distance I needed to try new things in my poetry, in terms of both content and style. I also think the poems provided an outlet for me to emotionally purge a lot of things that I was experiencing personally—I had just moved from Boston to England, was newly married, and had to navigate a healthcare system I wasn’t familiar with during an incredibly difficult pregnancy where I was diagnosed with a liver condition that increased my risk for stillbirth and required me to be in the hospital 3 or 4 times a week. I wasn’t ready to confront any of this in my writing, but the persona poems allowed me to express all of the fear, desperation, guilt, and grief that I was experiencing in a way that felt safe. The emotions in many of the poems very much feel like my own.<br />
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NCL: Have you given a reading of the poems in which Amy Winehouse is the speaker, and if so, what has been the response?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>:I found the response changed as the poems were developed and especially after Amy’s death. The readings I did in 2008 when there were just a handful in existence were much more light-hearted and the audience found humor in them—especially American audiences. By the time I was living in England, the poems had taken a more serious tone. The last reading I did was around the corner from her flat in London at a bar she used to frequent. It was about six months after her death and I felt it brought out a sadness to the poems that hadn’t always been present during past readings.<br />
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NCL: What’s one of the more crucial poems in the chapbook for you? (or what is your favorite poem?) Why? How did the poem come to be?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: For me, the poem that really steered this from just a fun series of persona poems to something larger was the poem “Amy Winehouse Admits to Self-Harming from Age Nine.” That poem gave me a way into the persona that wasn’t just relying on humor or trying to be clever. It was a gut-wrenching one to write—even though it was inspired by an actual headline, it was definitely one that I took a lot of liberty with, but to me, it is one of the most real poems in the chapbook. It marked the turning point where I knew I wanted to keep going with these poems and expand the series to chapbook length.<br />
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<b>Amy Winehouse Admits to Self-Harming from Age Nine</b><br />
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It was like drawing a map to every room <br />
in the body, the bitter halves of fruit <br />
seared across the stove. It was schooldays,<br />
bathroom stalls, the back garden under rain. <br />
It was the way he touched me, every stone <br />
unstacked. Oh, the world must have seen <br />
the initials we laid, must have heard<br />
the steps of our names. I was a cat scratching <br />
at the window. I was the tree’s branch <br />
breaking my fall. I was the way I wanted <br />
to be touched. I traced my hand in chalk. <br />
I cut paper hearts with scissors. I bled. <br />
I bruised. I was the stem of constellations,<br />
a pattern of snowflakes buried between each page.<br />
It was green water calling, the scars<br />
swimming beneath my veins. My back<br />
swore my secrets. Doctors sewed my skin.<br />
I threw bottles against the wall and named<br />
each piece of fallen glass. I followed <br />
the clouds for cover, circled words<br />
splayed like stars across my stomach. <br />
I was a portrait writhing, a fence <br />
crashing, cracked edges in the porcelain.<br />
Even then, I saw my body as a maze. <br />
Lines gave directions. My arms told my age.<br />
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(Originally published in <i><a href="http://souwester.org/" target="_blank">Sou’wester</a>,</i> Fall 2010)<br />
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NCL: Please discuss the choice for a chapbook. For example, why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: A chapbook seemed to be the appropriate choice for these poems for a lot of reasons. I didn’t feel I could really sustain this series over a full-length manuscript, and at the time, these poems were so different from others I was writing that to be a section in a full-length manuscript didn’t feel right. The entire chapbook took many years to come together, though I had some very long pauses while working on it. The first handful were written in 2007 when I was living in Boston as a fun project during the height of Amy’s fame and it wasn’t until around 2009-2010 when I was living in England that I began to focus on developing the project further. I had actually completed the chapbook the summer before her death but reached for it once again after the news broke and reworked the chapbook into what it is now. I very much wanted to get it out into the world sooner rather than later at that point, and I felt the poems needed to exist on their own together, so the chapbook format seemed to fit perfectly.<br />
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NCL: The majority of the poems are persona poems, primarily in the voice of Amy Winehouse. What are some of the other themes, metaphors, and other elements of craft that you used to unify your chapbook?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I based each poem’s title on a tabloid headline in an attempt to unify everything. I also tried to think about the voice of each persona in the chapbook and how what they sounded like would shape who they were. The voices of Amy’s husband and mother are more conversational whereas Amy’s voice is more lyrical and plays with language in more interesting ways. I also used many of the same images throughout the poems—cities, summer, fire, etc.—in an attempt to connect the poems to each other.<br />
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NCL: What are you working on now?<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #990000;">KF</span></i></b>: I’m currently working on a chapbook manuscript based on the health complications I developed while pregnant that increased the risk for stillbirth during both of my pregnancies. The poems all work to confront the very real feelings of grief women experience when told their baby may not be delivered alive. My condition presented very early on, so there were many months of worry that played such tricks on my mind, and I tried to capture this throughout the manuscript.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0