Malone & Savoca Week (5): Kendra & Matthew Interview Each Other
(note: Kendra’s keyboard is broken so none of her text is capitalized. She would really like it if someone wanted to buy her a computer.)
Matthew: Can you briefly describe the timeline of events surrounding the entirety of Everything is Quiet, from inception to publishing, including the total amount of time that the poems span?
Kendra: okay. four years ago i moved to new york for a job. three years ago i got laid off from that job. three years ago i started drinking everyday and writing a lot because i wanted to just use up my savings instead of getting another job. two years ago, or maybe a little more i started submitting things to magazines. a year ago i compiled a manuscript. six months ago jeremy spencer accepted the manuscript and told me he was releasing it in six months so i could be released with you. i think the poems span about three years of my life. some go back a little farther. some don’t really have time frames at all.
most of your work is grounded in the quietness of domestic life, and the listless struggle of it all. do you ever intend to do this? how does your domestic partner(s) view your work?
Matthew: I’m pretty sure that I don’t intend it in the sense that it is something I really try to convey. What I’m usually trying to do is “get things right”. It’s a whole lot different from “make things right” which I think has more in common with the general idea of being deliberate, which I am not.
I think my domestic partner probably views my poetry as something good that it is “doing something” – that’s a phrase she has used before – but she also feels bored sometimes in reading about her own life, and then other times she enjoys it in the way we all do, and then in one final way, when she reads it she learns things that I was thinking and feeling that she was unaware of previously.
Malone & Savoca Week (4): Our Cat Comes With Memories of Her Own: A Discussion of Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything is Quiet
“i like the feeling you get / from lies through omission / they make you feel / like a weird little / phantom”
One of the poems early in Kendra Grant Malone’s collection, Everything Is Quiet, talks about that moment after a good movie when we all have to accept the movie wasn’t real. When two people hang out in that moment, it’s excruciating, because they know “you have to / speak at some point / and you have to shatter / what you were just feeling / a moment before.” Much later in the collection, the speaker—let’s just say Malone because that’s what Malone says—talks about people who are “very beautiful” and other people who are “very drunk,” but ends talking about how she has no one to talk to “at this very / moment.” And it’s that isolation of Very-flavored moments that this book lives to talk about. Even though these spindly, skinny poems are gorged with excesses of violence (sexual and otherwise), excesses of ingestion and injection, their main concern is excessive solitude. Which gets no worse than when two people who want to be together are stuck living through those moments they don’t want to be together. READ MORE >
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September 23rd, 2010 / 7:37 pm
September 23rd, 2010 / 7:37 pm
Malone & Savoca Week (1): Everything is Quiet
This week we’re going to be highlighting a new pair of poetry releases from Scrambler Books, now available for order: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. They are $12 each, or $20 together, and both available in limited hardback.
To kick off with K, you can read some of the poems from her book at Bear Creek Feed and via her blog, Tricoteuse.
Everything Is Quietly Descriptive Love
Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.
Blake Butler—
Kendra Grant Malone’s Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful at Bear Creek Feed. Also, her vagina turned into a book.
16
Kendra Grant Malone Poem
All The Ways I Have Failed You
1.
finding him under the piano
was not the most alarming part of
the day, that day
finding his waifish
six year old body
in my underwear and
costume jewelry was not
the most alarming part
either
what worried us all the most
was his inability
to pronounce the syllables
that didn’t really
exist anyways
2.
various things are real
the cloak he wears while
walking down lake street
the antipsychotic pills
i’ve seen them,
they are pink
his inch long finger nails
humming birds that move very
fast, yes we saw that together
your arch angels
the ones that tell you
that you are beautiful
okay okay
yes I will always believe you
they are real
and that time you
stabbed me
hysterical
screaming in tongues
that was real too
3.
hey juan?
where is zack?
did you leave him
in the courthouse
again?
but its christmas!
he needs to be here
for christmas
so we can
sit in front
of the fire
and build the alamo
together one more time
4.
the rainbow wallpaper
was mine
but we all knew
that all the rainbows
made of light
belonged to you
everyone could see it
especially father
because the secret
was hiding in your teeth
Kendra Grant Malone lives in Brooklyn with her cat Delores Grant Malone. She has been widely published in web and print magazines and has an assortment of e-books and chapbooks including Conor Oberst Sex, Rape Children, and Love Your Friends And Not Your Lovers. You can go to her website, www.kendralovely.blogspot.com, to read more about her, her cat and her work.
Boobs Friday for Internet Literature
Friday. I think Friday is okay? Friday actually kind of sucks for internet land because it’s the beginning of the weekend and during the weekend people aren’t at work all day jacking off on the internet not doing their real job and they are actually out like talking to people and being with real life friends. Fuck all that. The weekend is like my reverse weekend. I have a weekend through the week and the weekend feels like the week.
Internet literature definitely suffers on the weekends, there are less emails, less updates, stop being real people, mmk?
To combat the weekend slump of weekend, HTML Giant is pleased to present some tits.
As a gift to internet literature from our very own Kendra Grant Malone, here are Kendra Grant Malone’s boobs.
This hopefully will be the beginning of what I’d like to think of as Boobs Friday for Internet Literature.
Submit your boobs for future Fridays, get an acceptance to like elimae or Wigleaf via karmic booyah.