Let Us Celebrate the Anniversary of Vanessa Place’s Escape From the Womb
Poet Kenneth Goldsmith has said Place’s work was “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today,” and poet Rae Armantrout has remarked, “Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry.” Bebrowed’s Blog said Place is “the scariest poet on the planet.” Anonymous on Twitter said, “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”
To remember this idea after waking: An Interview with Christopher DeWeese
Recently released from Octopus Books, Christopher DeWeese’s The Black Forest is a slim, refreshing volume, intent on bending time and expectation in language carefully measured, calm and clear. It was described by James Tate as such: “These poems sock home truth and enact poetic somersaults that leave me out of breath. It’s a pleasure to recommend them to anyone brave enough. Chris DeWeese is the real thing, a poet true to his calling.”
BB: The Black Forest is your first book, while also one of many you have written over the years in coming up to it. Did you know this book was a specific project when you began the poems in it, or how did it come together as what it is?
CD: For three years while I was getting my MFA I only worked on this one thing, a sequence of poems called The Confessions. When I started that project, I had just been blown absolutely away by Berryman’s The Dream Songs and Berrigan’s The Sonnets, and I had this feeling that maybe writing a book-length poem was the solution to all of my problems. I remember at the time being very confused about how to write poems: before grad school, I had been writing pretty much on my own for a few years, and the poems I wrote were not very good, and all of a sudden I was around all of these people who seemed to already have really confident, singular styles, and I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing or (more importantly) even what I wanted to do in writing poetry.
The most helpful thing about just writing this one project for so long was that it gave me a stable architecture of form to write into. And that was huge for me, because I felt like just starting to write an individual poem was a process weighted down with huge decisions, decisions about form and content that needed to have complicated rationales lurking behind them. So for three years, I didn’t have to worry about that, because I was totally committed to just working on this one thing. And by the time I finished working on it, I was ready to realize that the way I had thought about the process of making poems before was actually totally wrong (for me at least) and that one good and valid way of composing poetry is to just start writing and to see what happens. So when I started writing the poems that would eventually compose The Black Forest, there were no ideas about the poems going together or belonging together as a certain project: there was just this feeling of freedom, and a desire to be loose and wild with my imagination. I had just started running when I began to write these poems, and a lot of the first lines would occur to me while running, and then I would spend the rest of the run saying the line over and over to myself to try and remember it, and by the time I got home the line would have achieved this power, this importance borne of repetition, so I’d write it down and often the rest of the poem would come out very quickly. And over time, I did realize that a lot of the poems I was writing belonged together, that they shared a lot of language and concerns, and it felt good to realize that the consistency of the book had come together in a fairly organic way. READ MORE >
I Wish I Sat Under Trees More: An Interview with Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of five books: the story collection, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books); the novella, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); How Should a Person Be? (Henry Holt); and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney’s McMullins) featuring art by Clare Rojas. With Misha Glouberman, she wrote a book of “conversational philosophy” called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber), which The New Yorker chose as one of its Best Books of 2011. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer, and has contributed long interviews with writers and artists to the magazine.
Michael Kimball: I feel as if I should know why the collection is called The Middle Stories, but I don’t. Tell me?
Sheila Heti: I had been writing these short stories for a few years, in my early twenties, not thinking they would end up as a book, so the stories came first. Then the manuscript. Then I had to think of a title. I spent a lot of time on this, consulting a thesaurus and drawing little book covers in my notebooks. One day between classes (I was university at the time) the title just came to me: The Middle Stories. Pretty instantly I felt a kind of relief and pleasure. I liked the way it sounded. It made sense to me. It was one of those situations where you make your brain work really really hard on a puzzle, then the solution comes from some other-brained place. I recall trying it out in phrases, “Have you read The Middle Stories?” — imagining writers I knew saying it.
Unfold is the wrong word: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil
To read Bhanu Kapil‘s work is to witness it taking shape. It is as if she writes just for us, closing the space between reader and writer. That space, whose medium is the page, is cared for as one cares for a body. It takes on a consciousness. We feel comfortable, cared for, led calmly to scenes beautiful and horrific, and we trust her to be our guide. Kapil’s work is not something the reader can passively consume, it is something of which you are a part. Her novels move poetically; they are fragmented but do not surrender a narrative. She doesn’t just show us that we are looking through a window, she opens it and decorates it by setting photographs on the sill along with flowers, quotes, cups of tea and coffee; she paints it orange and red and yellow and green; she lets the outside world spill in: wind, leaves, mud, shouts of wolf-girls playing in libraries, and conversations between immigrants and cyborgs. Her narrators are liminal and migratory and her worlds strange, unstable, and yet familiar.
Bhanu Kapil is the author of four full-length works of prose/poetry: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space of monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011). This summer, she is teaching a workshop at the intersection of performance and the novel at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. During the year, she teaches full-time at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, and part-time for Goddard College in Plainfield,Vermont. She also maintains a part-time practice as an integrative bodyworker, focusing on Ayurvedic treatments. Born in the UK to Indian parents, Bhanu, “dreams of turning into a female Michael Ondaatje, writing proper novels in her garage, which has been converted into a solar-heated hut. If that doesn’t work out, she will continue to write anti-colonial literatures and pioneer new spa treatments. Currently, she is working on a paste of chickpea flour, turmeric and rose petals that is guaranteed to brighten even the most winter-bound skin.” For many years, she blogged at WAS JACK KEROUAC A PUNJABI but then, abruptly, stopped.
The interview with conducted through email. READ MORE >
Book + Beer: Tom Wolfe and St. Sebastiaan Belgian Ale
The rain stopped. At that point the guy (knobby head like an asteroid) from the repair shop comes out to tell me that my baby-baby scooter (sweet ride, ODI grips, Kelsey throttle, a desperation of chrome) needs another ninety-four bucks’ worth of repairs, even though they just got finished fixing it, or saying they fixed it, and he says what do you want to do? And I say I don’t want to do anything, Mr. ASS (teroid), you owe me a scooter I can drive away from this crime scene after the last two hundred bucks I spent here, and he says it’s not their fault, it’s a piece-of-shit scooter that hasn’t been properly maintained, and I say hey, I am not paying another cent for repairs that don’t repair, and he says okay, fine, they’ll junk it, and I say okay, fine, junk it then, it’s junk now anyway since you guys mangled it, and he stomps off, so there I am, up a creek and scooterless. So anyway I call my brother, sit down, and finish reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Get in my brother’s car (a brown turd Kia) and he hands me a beer and sees the pink/yellow/retina-detachment bus of a book cover and prowls the title and says, “Is that the kind of shit people who drive scooters read?”
The bottle is ceramic. It has an oatmeal look. I thought, “Oatmeal.” Oatmeal is an OK word to have conked in your kettle while drinking Belgium ale. Has a slight bottled taste to it and that makes some sense. The finish was bitter. I like bitter finishes, I do. I like gas station coffee and going to bed after a big, crazy fight. I find it comforting. One time I took my car for a tire change and afterwards I felt taller. I’m not kidding. I felt taller. My car was purring along. Then about eight minutes later I crashed into a deer committing suicide on highway 69, Indiana. This deer just leapt into its moment. I wanted to take the poor doe home for dinner but they said I’d have to contact the local game ranger and get a special permit and who wants to deal with yet another guy in uniform? Ah, bitter finish, this slouched gray bag of bones, I felt, as I watched my thunked car towed away into the cornshine. There are some peppery notes, too.
What my brother really meant was, “You should have already read that book, like when you were 20.”
Architectures of Possibility: An Interview with Lance Olsen
Lance Olsen is the author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction. He acts as Chair of the Board of Directors for the Fiction Collective 2 and teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. What follows is a conversation with him about his newest book, Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing.
Q: Would you talk a bit about the book in relation to its title? Why the words “architectures” and “possibility”? What about the phrase “after innovative writing?” Are we now in a post-innovative literary world?
A: Let me take your last two questions first, and argue that the history of writing (think Petronius’ Satyricon, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Joyce’s Ulysses) has been, not one of dogging conventions, but of continuously undoing them, experimenting with and beyond them, continuously redefining them, exploring the boundaries of the writerly act, of how we might tell our narratives—and hence ourselves, our worlds—differently. So-called conventional acts of writing, then, are the uninteresting detritus of literary history. Innovation is where literary history takes place.
If that’s the case, then contemporary experimentalists are not only continuously in pursuit of the innovative, but are also always-already writing subsequent to it—writing, that is, in its long wake. Hence my pun in the title on the word after.
And so to your initial question: for me, innovative writing represents a possibility space where everything can and should be attempted, challenged, thought, where every architecture should be explored. In other words, we’re talking about the ideology of form here. Another way of saying this: meaning suggests meaning, but structure suggests meaning as well. To structure one way rather than another is to convey, not simply aesthetic preference, a matter of taste, but a course of thinking, a way of being in the world, that privileges one approach to “reality” over another. One of the jobs of the innovative is unceasingly to challenge the dominant cultures’ narrativization of “reality,” to remind us that there are always other ways to construct the text of our texts, the texts of our lives, always the possibility of effecting change in both.
To write within the innovative, then, is much more than a creative choice. It’s an ethical imperative.
INFINITELY LOOPING
These samples are from an ongoing series of Internet based digital videos. These seemingly infinite looping videos articulate the Internet as space of viewership that is increasingly becoming a platform to represent, archive, and reproduce the real. The content within these digital tableaus are based from the contents within drawings I create before documenting/repurposing them into the aforesaid videos. There is no physical (institutionalized) space that is designated for exhibition exclusivity for this body of work, as they may be viewed anywhere the Internet or a computer is available.
[Click images to view]
*Finite_Skin uses a zoom user interface which allows a viewer to explore the details of the drawing.
When I Was a Poet
By David Meltzer
City Lights Publishers, 2011
144 pages, $10.95
[Reviewer’s Note: I received a review copy of David Meltzer’s When I Was a Poet directly from City Lights Publishers last summer. While reading the book on a quick trip for a family-related emergency of sorts, I began to fill a small notebook with short bursts of a fast-clipped poem-series. This poetic assemblage mixing David’s lines between my own responses generated the gist of what became the official book review (see below)—the poem-series itself follows. I had the honor of reading this poem in David’s presence as part of a group reading celebration for When I Was a Poet @ the Meridian gallery here in San Francisco hosted by SF State Poetry Center on Sept 1, 2011. It’s a pleasure to see both versions find a home on HTMLGIANT thanks to Ben Mirov. Rock on. -pjd]
3 Comments
March 28th, 2012 / 3:26 pm
March 28th, 2012 / 3:26 pm
The Birds’ Ulterior Motives Get Them Killed: An Interview with Craig Morgan Teicher
Congratulations on Cradle Book, published by BOA in 2010. It is a lovely book of what I thought were fable-like prose poems. But BOA has listed the book as fiction. Do you see it as a work of fiction?
Sort of. It’s certainly not poetry. I wrote it in part because I had always wanted to write fiction but don’t have anything resembling the patience for it, so I thought I could write little stories about archetypal characters and animals that die when things that fall on their heads. But, no, it’s not fiction, in the sense that Hemingway wrote fiction or Anne Patchett writes fiction with characters we’re supposed to fall in love with and hate. It is prose—and something separate from poetry, a different material from poetry. READ MORE >
14 laptops or hammers
2. Ander Monson wades into the whole D’Agata thingy.
2. Matt Mullins interview.
1. I Take Back the Sponge Cake is a choose-your-own-adventure collaboration between poet Sierra Nelson and visual artist Loren Erdrich.
1. Seems to me we flash fiction folks don’t really get enough book contests. Hell, here’s one.
14. Duck tape and eggs greeted vehicles traveling down Highway 3 in the early morning hours of Friday, March 16.
5. We learned about student evaluations from a sociologist. She said studies show men rate female professors lower than male professors on student evaluations, but men and women rate male professors the same. OK.
6. A little breakfast treat on tennis and DFW.
The woman is my own regret.
The children are my friends,
how they cannot reach, or save
me. The birds are my eyelashes,
the wolves are my hands.
Noah Cicero interviews Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen & Kendra Grant Malone
Elizabeth Ellen writes in the classical sense: she focuses her energy on the story being told. She doesn’t two things most writers fall into: she doesn’t over styilize and use experimental weirdness to express emotion. Her stories are always very linear, have beginning/middle and end. But at the same time she doesn’t write in cliché language and have big explosive plots involving guns and beautiful people walking around. Fast Machine by Elizabeth Ellen takes the middle ground between alternative/experimental and popular literature.
The stories come out strange and unique, I think because Elizabeth Ellen is inspired by writers like Dave Eggers, but at the same time because of the circumstances of her life she did not get an MFA and go through many writing workshops, her writing turned to be a marriage of Bukowski and Eggers. The writing has some of that nice Eggers clarity and smoothness but at the same time covers Bukowski themes like humiliation, failed romantic relationships, divorse, raising a child in difficult circumstances, violent sex, drinking, weight gain, disapointment, in general about failure and hardship.
The Perfect Stutter: My Only Wife by Jac Jemc
Consider the last breath of Jac Jemc’s forthcoming novel My Only Wife:
“My wife slid the key in the lock, turned it, and and then slipped down the stairs.
The one truth I know is that I came home.
I climbed the stairs, light and unknowing.
I slid my own key into the lock, turned and pushed.”
Notice the repetition of the word “and” in that top line. It’s a stutter so subtle it could be mistaken as a typo, but I hope it’s not a typo. I hope it’s strategically placed, because I believe it’s perfect. Such a small thing: the word and. But such a large thing it conveys.
Hesitation. Frozen in the moment, if only for a moment.
So beautifully rendered but emotionally wrenching, Jemc’s novel brings to mind images by Lucien Freud:
Life Is with People by Atticus Lish
There was a new release from Tyrant Books yesterday. Life Is with People by Atticus Lish is 120 pages of illustrations and text by Atticus. The covers come in four different colored papers. They are thick and nice. The illustrations and text are printed on composition (lined) paper that is thick and nice. This isn’t something I can really try to sell to you. You either like it, or you do not. You either get it, or you do not. I am not saying one is better than the other. Personally, I see each page as a poem that takes awhile to sink in. I can’t really look at too many of them in one sitting. I once looked at a stack of 300 of them in one sitting and felt mental and ill for ten hours afterward. These books cost $20 to make, so I am selling them for $20. If we sell all of them, we break even. I’m not being all, “Look how generous I am.” I am being all, “I think this book is so important that I do not want any kind of deterrence from buying it for those who may not be able to afford it.” Book design by the good-eyed Ryan P. Kirby. There were only 500 of these produced. Do not hesitate. Actually, I am so behind this book that if you order one and think it was not worth your money, you can call me and tell me why and if you make one iota of sense, I will reimburse you. Cool? Cool. Thank you kindly.
The books is available through SPD, the Tyrant website, and will be in limited stores very soon.
[Previews at Vice.]
“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.”: An Interview with Patricia Lockwood, Poet Laureate of Twitter
Patricia Lockwood is a poet. (A poet. A very good poet.) She also uses Twitter in interesting ways. Earlier this year, her series of SEXTS got attention from Rhizome, and then The Huffington Post & The New Yorker.
And I look at those tweets and I wonder, “How does someone do that?” Not get attention, though. I mean write those. How? So I asked.
***
So, I was initially pretty dismissive of Twitter. And then, at some point, I noticed how funny it could be and found it to be a mostly worthwhile distraction. And then—probably while reading the fake Christopher Walken feed—I began to think there could be something kind of poetic about Twitter. That each little update could be a joke, a persona poem, a zen koan.
Did you sense the “poetic” potential in the Twitter post from the beginning or did your approach to Twitter change?
It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.” What is the … where are your mentions … what is hashtag … who is a belieber? When I did join, I spent my first week livetweeting the movie Bambi, focusing specifically on the puberty of Bambi and Thumper, and was subsequently unfollowed with extreme prejudice by the few poets who had charitably followed me in the first place. (This still happens! A real writer will follow me and then four days later be like “what the freak is this” and it is goodbye. CAN’T believe you wrote a tweet about Jesus jelqing.)
OK, so scrolling back, I see that one of my earliest tweets was “I want to see the Beethoven movie where Beethoven finally manages to tear his way out of the dog’s body and play something good on the piano.” About two weeks later I sexted for the first time, like a teen. So it wasn’t so much that I saw the possibilities right away as that … Twitter is the perfect way to disseminate the kind of writing that comes most naturally to me.
READ MORE >
Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
God and man? But isn’t it searching in a dark bar at three a.m. for a hipster magician that isn’t there? Yes. No. Maybe. If you asked Graham Greene what he would take to the desert island, he would say, “Sunblock, three ribbed condoms, a tube of camouflage, the bible, and Power and the Glory.” It was his favorite book. History lesson: While President Calles is sane on all other matters, he completely loses control of himself when the matter of religion comes up, becomes livid in the face and pounds the table to express his hatred. You can trust God to make allowances, but you can’t trust smallpox, or men. The dentist metaphors are supposed to be about the “teeth” of your beliefs—without them you only eat mush, or a stale BRAT meal: bananas (“ripe, brown, and sodden, tasting of soap”), rice (an annual plant), applesauce (favored by children and criminals), and toast (brimstone bread). Miracles, do you believe in them? Yes, but not for me. In his 111th collection, Graham Greens’s characteristic M.O. is intact: casually enjambed verse-prose stanzas marrying the narrative apotheosis of microfiction to the fatigued hope of a Shakespearean monologue:
I found a married priest in the snow
And not knowing what it was or why it was there, I ate a tart and gutted it
as if a LieutenantTo me, up to my polished gun holsters in bladder, the brandy was a surprise
I drank it in like the cunning wink of an exploding butterfly
on the lip
of a teacup while God upstairs puts a bag over His head
& gasses the house& says, “Well if I hated you I wouldn’t want my child to be like you, it makes no sense.”
Enter a shaken rooster of sin.
