Ben Mirov—
Listening to this Ben Lerner interview from Minnesota Public Radio is similar to attaining an MFA in Poetry.
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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 >
Blake Butler—
If there’s any one good way to make writing even more irrelevant in the world it’s by doting over ceremonial bullshit that never meant anything in the first place.
Pseudonyms, Authenticity, and Internet Identity
When I was a kid I made up a superhero named Dr. Power. He wore a blue costume, carried a purple Frisbee not unlike Captain America’s shield, and whatever powers he possessed were derivative of whatever comic books I’d been reading at the time.
Drawing Dr. Power wasn’t enough. I wanted to be him. My mom encouraged my eight-year-old fantasy by making me a handsome cape out of blue velvet, and I made my own mask out of paper-mache. The mask sucked, it was thick and heavy and weird-smelling, and I could barely see anything out of the eye holes, but I thought it looked pretty cool.
For some reason it was important that my friends believed Dr. Power was real, and not just my super alter ego. So I had my brother take a picture of me standing next to Dr. Power while Dr. Power did pull-ups in our bedroom doorway. See, that’s the best you could get with Dr. Power, because he didn’t have time for photo shoots. He had to stay fit. Eveready. You never know when your next deranged enemy will come busting through the wall.
Things I’ve Been Thinking About (Promotion, Links, Salter, Soap Operas, Etc)
1. Last year, I watched a documentary called I Am Comic which featured comedians talking about the challenges and joys of performing comedy. I love watching stand up so I watch almost anything involving behind the scenes stuff about comedy. It was really interesting to see just how demanding and relentless it is to perform comedy. The kind of drive a comedian needs to succeed is intense. They are relentless in marketing themselves and completely shameless about it and I found that combination inspiring. Writers could benefit from that energy.
I tend to believe writers have to be the most vigorous advocates for themselves. If you won’t fight for your writing, who will? Closed mouths don’t get fed. I love that saying because it is so true. If you want an opportunity, ask for it. A lot of people believe there’s some kind of magical formula for certain writing and award opportunities but most of the time, it is writers who have chosen to advocate for themselves who benefit from these opportunities. Every day, I hear a writer lament about how uncomfortable they are with sharing something as innocuous as a link to their work. Relax. Share the damn link. If you write and submit your work to a magazine and consent to have that work published, you want to be read. Accept that you want to be read. Make peace with yourself. There is no shame in it. There is a difference between self-promotion and being obnoxious. In the time you Tweeted about feeling bad about sharing a link you could totally just share the link.
JON LEON & A POETRY OF CONTINGENCY
THE MALADY OF THE CENTURY
By Jon Leon
Futurepoem Books, May 2012
88 Pages / $16.00 Buy from SPD
In consideration of the work of Jon Leon, it is necessary to consider Jon Leon, the poet, simultaneously as an apostle and a construction. Anna Kaven (nee Helen Emily Woods) ended up, at a particular point in her career as a novelist, changing her name from that which she was born with to a name she had invented for a character in one her own books—Jon Leon has always simply insisted on living as a character in his work, as the character in his works.
His poetry.
There is a level of both the inter-textual and the extra-textual interaction present throughout his entire oeuvré; something that becomes apparent throughout his career. As Dan Hoy points out in his case-study of Leon, there’s a particular overlap of reality with a poetic construction of reality:
“We mixed agitprop, erotic dance, and horror to construct a total environment of focused bliss.” Jon Leon, Hit Wave
I’ll risk substituting tropes here and suggest the above sentence from Jon Leon’s Hit Wave could be taken somewhat literally as a nod to his overall objective (construct a total environment of focused bliss = enable and induce the experience of the impossible) and strategy (mixing agitprop, erotic dance, and horror = forming a triangulation of world, life, and nothingness).
4 Comments
April 17th, 2012 / 11:17 am
April 17th, 2012 / 11:17 am
ONLINE LITERATURE EXCLUSIVELY FOR STATEN ISLAND
The other night I was doing my taxes and commiserating with softballers and wondering why the water was still running behind a locked door and getting shoved passive-aggressively by a woman whose love of darts I was unconsciously interrupting when the guy to the right said that he liked it when I used to post on HTMLGIANT about new issues of online magazines, and I was like “You mean the only thing on HTMLGIANT I was ever good for?” and he was like “Yeah, exactly,” and then one thing led to another and the Yankees got swept in their opening series by Tampa Bay, so I figured what the frick I would tell everybody about:
)) People who think they have secrets over at Sixth Finch, but actually they just have the word DOOR superimposed like a crosshair on their smallest confession.
)) People who meld heads and flood banks and steal mother scarves over at Dark Sky, but really they just stand around covered in hair in the mammal room.
)) And if that’s not enough for you Yankees fans, you can take a NAP, and when you wake Up, you can conduct enough electricity to become a diode. The important thing is that every time you read an online literary magazine for the rest of your life, you should also imagine the gangsta in the woods reading along with you.