Interview Project #4: Jake Adam York

Some books seem made to be read again and again. Some books deserve to be read a little every day; to travel with you from time to time for the moments when you might find a brief respite and require a little company; to sit out on your coffee table, refusing to be shelved, because you're not done with it and might never be done with it. Murder Ballads is one of those books, but it isn't just some book. And Jake Adam York isn't just some poet. There are a couple reviews out there who do more justice to Jake's book than I could even begin to attempt (here and here), and I'll simply say that Murder Ballads is a dozen kinds of special. You should definitely get one.

Head over to Blackbird to read and listen to an interview with Jake. And while you're there do a little reading. And then keep reading. You can find another interview-type thing here.

But before you go anywhere, keep reading...

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

I've recently completed a new manuscript of poems, A Murmuration of Starlings, which is now circulating. Some of the poems are recently up at Blackbird, and others are due out in Cannibal and The GSU Review, and a chapbook selection, entitled Murmur will be published by Poetry West in the coming months. I'm hopeful to see the book placed in the next year. I'm also looking forward to a Spring sabbatical, when I'll work on a third manuscript.

Perhaps it's worth saying that A Murmuration and the third both grow from Murder Ballads. In the course of writing Murder Ballads I discovered, as my teacher Robert Morgan might have said, my true mode and subject: the elegy. The last poems to arrive in Murder Ballads, and the poems that gave the book its shape and title, were the elegies for victims of racial crime, poems like "Elegy for James Knox", and "Vigil" and "Consolation".

Writing "Vigil" and "Consolation," I discovered the problem that would provide the kernel for A Murmuration: the Civil Rights Martyrs, men and women whose deaths marked important moments in the Civil Rights Movement, men and women who need to be remembered, but whose memories are difficult given the nature of their deaths, the unbelievable and nearly unbearable violence of their deaths. In the months after Murder Ballads was accepted, I turned to work on a few poems I'd tried to write before but couldn't, specifically poems about the murders of Emmett Till and of Jimmie Lee Jackson, also Civil Rights Martyrs, and in those poems emerged the thread that would bind A Murmuration, the starlings, which visualize the residues of racial violence. I worked on A Murmuration almost every day from last November through this past August, and completed the manuscript, and then began sketching out what will be the third volume, which I'll begin writing, in earnest, in the Spring.

I also have a few other projects that are somewhat disconnected at present, so I doubt they're of much import, but I also wouldn't rule out seeing some poems from one of those other works sometime soon.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

I read a lot, usually 4-5 poetry books a week. Most significant to me has been what I've been re-reading. I've recently returned to Joshua Poteat's Ornithologies and Larry Levis's Elegy, Maurice Manning's Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, Diann Blakely's Farewell, My Lovelies. I'm also spending a lot of time tracking down Manning's "Bucolics" and Blakely's "Duets" which are beginning to surface in various journals. I'm shifting between reading poems that have a strong commemorative strain, poems that have a broad range of reference, and poems that have a strongly southern tone, as these are the elements I'm trying to coordinate every time I write a poem and elements that seem especially important to consider while preparing to address a new project. I've also spent a good deal of time over the last year reading books that come from very different places -- including Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids, Christopher Nealon's The Joyous Age, Karen Volkman's Spar (which I continually re-read) -- books that either draw me in new directions or ground my present work.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

I do so many different kinds of work, and the work itself changes significantly so often, it's hard to promote one piece as being strongly representative, though most folks respond strongly to "Elegy for James Knox" and "Walt Whitman in Alabama," both from Murder Ballads, and I wouldn't object to being represented by those poems. From the new manuscript, "Substantiation" (at Blackbird) is reading well, and I wouldn't object to being represented by that poem, especially as it comes closest to showing all the strains and all the strain of my present work. However, given all that, I'd have to say, if you wanted a single representative poem, I'd encourage you to read Murder Ballads as a long poem, rather than as a collection of poems (that's how I imagined it, as a single long poem comprised of (apparently) discrete poems), and then you'll have it.

Could you talk a little more about your "true mode and subject"? How did you come to writing elegies?

I'll say I slowly found my way to the elegy and not through my MFA curriculum. The thesis I wrote for my MFA had some of the first seeds of what would become Murder Ballads, but mostly it was something altogether different. I found my way to the elegy through my dissertation research, which focused on the relationship between architectural images and commemorative poems in American Literature. Having spent years with "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "For the Union Dead," I started to write my own located commemorations, and the results were "Janney," "At Cornwall Furnace," and "Iron," each of which became part of my dissertation (which was a scholarly/creative hybrid) and later appeared in the last section of Murder Ballads. The Civil Rights elegies came out of those located commemorations, and "Elegy for James Knox" was the first.

I was working on a series of poems linked by steel mills, working and defunct, when a friend passed me a tape of a public television show on the history of Birmingham's iron industry, and in it was a segment on the murder of James Knox, an episode that usually occupies, mostly, a sentence or a paragraph in an Alabama history. "Elegy for James Knox" fell out of me. At the time, I didn't think much about why I was writing it, and since it came so quickly I distrusted it and didn't show it to anyone for more than a year. I was looking for a new title for the poem, mostly because I don't like poems that tell you what kinds of poems they are (e.g. I don't like sonnets that are called "Sonnet," but I do like a 47-line poem or a 3-line poem called "Sonnet"), when I reread Ramazani's The Poetry of Mourning and decided that elegy was the poem's mode and that having the word in the title would help a reader with some difficult matter. And only then did I realize that elegy, the tradition of elegy, could explain, describe, and support the work I most wanted to do in my poems, to recover the past and minister, at however futile a distance, to the memories of the victims of history.

I hadn't read Levis's Elegy yet. A friend recommended it to me in 2003, and that was the first I'd even heard of the book. I'd heard of Levis and, as it turned out, had read a few of the shorter poems in that book, but I'd never read that book. I see now why my friend suggested it, but I'm glad I didn't read it until Murder Ballads was almost fully formed, since I might have destroyed my book on the grounds that Levis did it better. (The influence of Elegy will be visible in the new poems, some of which are up at Blackbird and some of which will appear in GSU Review in the Spring.)

To make the claim that I wanted most "to recover the past and minister, at however futile a distance, to the memories of the victims of history" may sound arrogant, and it may be, but I didn't undertake this work to see or to show what I could do. I found myself, as I traveled in Alabama, more and more at the sites of the history I'd read, and I felt something enormous and terrible in those places, an almost debilitating dilation. This was my sublime, my Southern sublime, an apprehension of the enormity of landscape and of history. Perhaps nothing new, given the work of Dickey or Dave Smith, but I did feel it. As a former teacher put it, it felt like the subject chose me.

"Elegy for James Knox" is an immensely substantive and gripping poem. What types of responses have you received to it?

The responses to "Elegy for James Knox," and to the other Civil Rights elegies, have been amazingly positive. I've been able to read the poems all over the country -- south, north, east, and west -- and at almost every reading someone will come up afterward to talk about "Elegy for James Knox" or "Vigil," either because they or someone they knew was in the Civil Rights Movement or because they knew the history, too, or, just as often, because the poems taught them things they hadn't known.

For "Elegy for James Knox," the best reception, however, came from a Bridge program class in Dothan, Alabama. The teacher had given the students, 25 African-American students, the poem, and then asked me to visit the class. The students were surprised at first that the poem was written by a white person, that, as one student put, I could care so much about the subject. I don't know if I have an ideal audience, but if a group of high-school students in my home state would read my poems and engage them -- well, what more could I hope for?

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

For me, the specificity of place is incredibly important. Most of my poems are, I would say, narrative poems, and narratives need scenes, but that's perhaps a banal way of anchoring place, which is important to my work in two related ways.

First, most of my poems are not just narrative but reconstructive: many of my poems, particularly the ones that develop the Civil Rights sequence, reconstruct very particular narratives, often narratives that have been distorted or obscured in some way, and narratives that both express and develop particular views of particular places. The poem "Substantiation" (recently published in Blackbird) for example is about the trial of Emmett Till, which involved a number of competing narratives: that poem imagines that the narratives, expressing a set of wishes for the Mississippi some white folks wanted (namely the murderers and those that helped cover it all up), can root in and transform the actual landscape of that Mississippi.

Second, place is a valence of language even as language is a valence of place. Place is where an accent develops, from which it arises, and accent -- expressed in syntax more than in anything else -- shapes my work as surely as anything else, so specificity of place, whether it be my home place in northeast Alabama or some other geography in which I settle for the duration of a poem's composition, determines specificity of language, and from that comes all the rest, I think.

If your work were to be made into a film, who would direct it?

I'd like to see a film like a collection of poems, with short chapters, sometimes overlapping. In my dreams, I'd have Janie Geiser, Stan Brakhage, maybe Catherine Sullivan, maybe Jane and Louise Wilson, Terrence Malick, the Stephen Soderbergh that made Kafka, Tim Burton, each direct poems and maybe have them overlap, work together on the transitional lengths. If I can't have it all, at least let me say I'd love to see what anyone would do with my poems, but I'd really love to work with, of all people, Janie Geiser. Her films looks the way I think about my poems: little bits of material, all originating elsewhere, floating together in a new order. Still, each of those I've named is an artist in his or her own way, much better than I am in my endeavors, so that's probably terribly arrogant, perhaps offensive. But you asked...

What does the phrase "Southern poetry" mean to you, if anything?

A difficult but necessary question.

I don't think "Southern Poetry" is a stable genre or subgenre of poetry or of Southern writing, either historically or contemporarily. There are what I might call small hollows of consistency, moments when intersections of concern and style begin to delineate a kind of poetry -- take the Fugitive Poets for example -- but those moments never embrace all the poetry that broadcasts some kind of Southern. So, for me "Southern poetry" is rather a region of poetry that, in one way or another, broadcasts some kind of Southernness, that in some way draws upon, contributes to, or speaks back to the broad cultural category of Southernness. So, for example, I'd consider Maurice Manning and Natasha Trethewey Southern poets: though their poetics are markedly different, the work of each addresses concerns of race and class as power dynamics that have linguistic as well as social consequences, and though such a concern might not be exclusive to Southern writing, I think such a concern has been and will continue to be central to Southern writing.

I consider myself a Southern poet because, even though the list of concerns in my own work may not provide an exhaustive list of those concerns that are Southern, the central struggles in my work attempt to speak back to the notion of Southernness and to the broader cultural field of engagement with Southernness, with the meaning as well as the constitution of Southernness. And, in my own case, I'm not sure I had much choice but to embrace Southernness and to write with it. I went to graduate school at Cornell where I was constantly determined by my peers as Southern, mostly (I think) because my geographical provenance was written in my throat and on my every word, even though my accent is not very "strong." My work would be read against the field of Southernness even if my poems did not directly invite such context, so I decided to write inside of and to draw from Southernness. So, another definition of "Southern poetry" might be poetry in which readers find evidence or avatars of Southernness -- or, as I've said elsewhere, poetry in which there is some kind of "accent."

Wallace Stevens said, "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right." Do you share that idea? Stevens also said, "In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality." What does that mean to you?

I was once lectured, in a scholarship interview, for getting Stevens wrong, so I fear I may get him wrong again, but it seems to me that Stevens' work displays, perhaps more clearly than anything else, the power of conception of imagination. When Stevens says "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right," I take him to mean two things: first, that through poetry we can make the world right, that we can reshape it so it makes sense; and, second, that we might, just as easily, come to understand, as we observe our imaginative visions or revisions, where we misunderstand the world and, then, how we might use imagination to reshape ourselves. That second reading may well be more my extension of or, more to the point, my idea of Stevens, but that's what he's saying right now, in my mind, so I'm going to listen to that. The other quote you offer, "In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality," might be taken as a corollary, reminding us that, while our imagination has the power to shape the world, if our imaginative orders become too independent of reality, they cannot have the force of reality, they lose their vocabulary and therefore their constative force.

What do these ideas mean to me? How do I develop them? In writing the Civil Rights elegies that, I believe, will be my major project for some time to come, I have become fascinated by what I'd call the facticity of error, by what happens when a lie or a mistake comes to be treated as fact. In many lynchings, the accusation that a black man might have raped or been intimate with a white woman was enough to set the mob in motion, so the accusation became tantamount to truth and though we can never know the truth of the matter, the lynching makes the victim a rapist or a paramour. Willie Edwards, Jr., for example, a truck driver who was thrown off a bridge into the Alabama River in January 1957, was thought to have been involved with a white woman; though much of what I've read argues that the Klansmen who killed Edwards identified him as someone else, the person who was involved with the white woman in their concern, that they identified him as the man in their minds was enough to make him that man. That's an example of the imagination shaping the world in an attempt to get it right. In my poem about Edwards ("Consolation"), I try to take that imagination, founded on error, and re-attach it to reality, in a very violent way. In doing so, I perform my own work of imaginative re-shaping. My poem might be considered an error, in some ways, but I've tried there, and in almost all of these elegies, to take the facticity of error that buttressed lynchings and turn it back on the lynchers.

Interview Project #3: Davis McCombs

To be honest, part of my motivation for doing these interviews has been to connect with a number of writers (mostly poets, it seems) whose work I adore. It's great to read all of the witty and humorous things they have to say, but the best part for me is just being able to ask the questions.

That said, our next writer, Davis McCombs, is one of my all-time favorites. His first book, Ultima Thule, was the 1999 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, selected by W.S. Merwin. The collection is exquisite, and, as Merwin writes in his foreward, "its authenticity is deep in its language, not dependent on flash or effect: a grave, attentive holding of the light." The narrative ebb and flow in these 41 poems never strays too far from where it begins -- sure, it moves across voices and centuries, but Mammoth Cave is that always-present source around which the light is held.

Listen to Davis talk about Mammoth Cave and read his poem, "Salts Cave."

Or get yourself a copy of Ultima Thule:

Amazon
Powell's

Also, if you can find yourself a copy of the Spring/Summer 2005 issue of The Missouri Review (or if you have access to Project Muse), check out Davis's 16-part poem, "Tobacco Mosaic." It, too, is awesome.

Now onto our regularly scheduled programming...

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

Not one damn thing. I do have a subject around which words have recently begun to cluster, an idea, mostly inchoate still, for a bigger kind of poem, but no time right now to get to it.

Also, I'm in that lull I seem to go through after completing a manuscript, in this case, my second collection, Dismal Rock, out from Tupelo Press next year. I put everything I had into that book, poems written during a time of great change in my life (my wife and I had two children, I changed jobs from Park Ranger to Professor, we moved from Kentucky to Arkansas) and so I guess I feel spent.

Although I believe strongly that it is healthy not to write all the time, I have an easier time believing it when I'm writing than when I'm not. The trick, I guess, is not to freak out during these times of silence. I spent two years after my first book came out cowering under my desk.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

For pleasure I have been reading book after book about ancient Egypt this fall, particularly Tutankhamen, in preparation for going to see the exhibit of King Tut treasures in Chicago this month. I have wanted to see the items taken from Tutankhamen's tomb since they last visited the United States when I was seven. Ancient Egypt is a subject I find endlessly fascinating and have for years.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

Yes, a poem from Ultima Thule called "Floyd's Lost Passage." It's a poem that nobody ever mentions or notices and one that got rejected from all the finest literary magazines and journals of our time.

That poem was a breakthrough for me. Back then (graduate school), I had been trying to write cleaner, sparer poems (none of which went anywhere) of a type that seemed to be in vogue at the time, and then I wrote the clotted, wordy and, to my ear, musical two sections of "Floyd's Lost Passage."

I wrote the poem exactly seventy years after Floyd Collins' entrapment and death in Sand Cave, Kentucky. It's a story that I became obsessed with when I was in the sixth grade; I'm still haunted by it.

The poem says things that I want to say, or wanted to say at the time, in a way that, more than ten years later, still pleases me. That doesn't happen to me very often.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing style?

A poet named Aleda Shirley was one of the first contemporary poets I encountered. Back in the summer of 1987, she came to the Kentucky Governor's Scholars Program, where I was a student, and read from her first book, Chinese Architecture. I carried that book everywhere in the years that followed. I devoured it. I drank from it. It taught me what contemporary poems were. It taught me about a particular and lush kind of verbal sound a poem could have, one that I still look for and respond to and work toward. And I still think it's an excellent, gorgeous collection.

In terms of my teachers, Lucie Brock-Broido, without question, had the biggest impact.

Any thoughts on the advantages or disadvantages regarding the growth of the literary internet culture/community (web journals, blogs, etc.)?

Not really, but I don't see how one could possibly think of this development as a bad thing.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I often write out of love for a very specific place, namely the beautiful hills and ridges and valleys of South Central Kentucky's Caveland or Cave Country where I grew up. Of all the places on the planet, this little area has more caves than any other, including Mammoth Cave, the longest known cave (350 miles and counting), where I used to work as a Park Ranger.

I find that thinking about some aspect of that place or the people who live there is what, more often than not, drives me to the blank page/computer screen. For the most part, I don't write about myself or out of some urge toward self-expression.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing? Any advice that has stayed with you?

Charles Wright says that the trouble with a lot of poets is that they start to write as if they're somebody, but that poets should always write is if they're nobody (I'm paraphrasing slightly). He says that one should write as if every poem is just another handhold out of the pit.

I can't tell you how important I think that is. And, believe me, these are difficult words to live by, especially given the culture of flattery, congratulation, and hyperbolic praise that seem to be a part of the current po-biz scene.

What word do you never tire of seeing in poem? What word could you live without ever seeing again? (Billy Collins said he hates poems with the word "cicada"...what a joker. Cicadas are always cool.)

I'll speak here of my own work.

The word "stob" is a current favorite and one I grew up hearing and saying.

I probably should stay away from "cedars" and "fencerows," but I doubt that I'll be able to.

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, "So, Davis, what is it that you do?" What do you tell them?

I tell them that I am the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas and that I am drunk on power.

How conscious of meter are you when writing poems?

A strict metrical pattern or framework has less and less to do with how I want to say what I want to say.

I work really intuitively. I go on nerve. I try to trust what I hear in my head and I try very, very hard to get that onto the page. I'm almost never successful, but I find that what I hear is a free verse line -- and a cluttered one at that.

I have also learned to try to stay true to what pleases me. People ask about the audience I have in mind when I write and the truth is that I write, first and foremost, for myself. I have this sense that there's a type of poem I want to read and, since no one else is writing that kind of poem, I have to be the one to do it. If I don't write for myself, I have found, the poems are no good.

Favorite poetic form?

A hint: I'm currently in a fourteen-step program to cure myself of my addiction to this particular form.

What was the genesis or thought behind the sonnet sequences in the first and third parts of Ultima Thule?

I wanted them to mirror each other in a way and I wanted the book to go forward in time but to stay put, to knuckle down, to dig in its local heels.

The book begins with the slave Stephen Bishop's imagined experiences as a guide at Mammoth Cave in the 1830s and 40s, and it ends with my experiences as a guide there in the 1990s.

Let me say something further about the Stephen Bishop sonnets, which I wrote during a magical two months in the Spring of 1997. Bishop was a great subject to invent around because he is, it occurred to me later, the exact opposite of almost every other historical figure. By this I mean that there are moments in the travel narratives written about Mammoth Cave during his time there when Bishop comes perfectly into focus. For example, we know that on a particular day in a particular year (I forget the dates) he was leading a tour, had a toothache and, because of the pain, was forced to turn the group over to another guide. We know something that specific about him, yet we don't know when or where he was born, who his parents were, how he died, etc. -- the things that we usually know about historical figures.

I wanted the series of nineteen sonnets to work in that same way: moments of perfect illumination surrounded by darkness.

Once I had written those poems, I realized that they needed a companion piece. I actually wrote twenty-five sonnets for that second sequence, but over time, cut them down to ten.

Favorite river?

An easy one. The beautiful Green River in Kentucky. Cave-fed, bluff-lined, flowing in its current channel for the last 100 million years.

Charles Wright said, "Poems should be written line by line, not idea by idea." Do you share that notion?

I try not to think about how my poems get written. A big part of me doesn't want to know -- and if I did know, believe me, I would never, ever put it in print. I don't want to publicly commit myself to something other than just following the writing wherever and however it leads me. I don't want all that baggage when I sit down at my desk.

I find that thinking about my own process does me no good as a writer. I just have to trust it.

What is the "Great American Poem"?

If we're talking here about contemporary poems, those written in our time, the poems in Charles Wright's Country Music, a selection from his early books, taken together, come awfully close.

Literati on "The Simpsons"

Those of you who are fans of "The Simpsons" and/or good literary satire should track down this past Sunday's episode of the show, which features guest voices from Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Franzen, as well as a pretty sharp send-up of Breadloaf and writing culture in general. Like most Simpsons fans, I feel the show's quality has dropped off in recent years, but this was the sharpest episode I've seen in a while.

Review: Siste Viator by Sarah Manguso

Another Installment of Ryo's Annotated Bibliography

Dobby Gibson suggested this book to me long ago, and hot damn! Great Success!

Manguso, Sarah. Siste Viator.
New York, NY: Four Way Books. 2006
Review by Ryo Yamaguchi

An irreverent, often comical collection, many of these poems adhere to an "associational" poetic, made into lists of short, declarative statements, working through an often highly obscured theme. Most of these are excruciatingly simple, a language almost minimalistic, the effect of which is a kind of bulbousness to the imagery, a "swelling," as Louise Gluck might put it. Here is an example poem, "There is Such a Thing," in completion:

I spoke to fire as to a bright lover in the forest
Whose brightness was for me.
And fire made everything into itself—
The forest, the cabin, the bed, the book—
And it bore me, a horse of fire bore me
Across the hot river.
It burned my lungs but did not change me.
It was gone and I cried for it as for my best horse,
My love and what would not change me.

What amazes me about these poems, in their simplicity, is their intelligence, the way they turn on themselves, fool themselves into mixed metaphors and strange semiotic alignments. We have to make many assumptions, and Manguso plays with that. For instance, in this piece, we must complete her title for her: "there is such a thing [as love]," but such a requirement undercuts the otherwise bold ontological declaration. And we see this at the heart of the poem, that love's existence is questionable because it is unable to "change [her]"—an ontology based on consequence, reaction. And there is a power play there, reaction as consumption, as the genesis-stained statement declares: "And fire made everything into itself,"—another moment, in my mind, of incredible intelligence, how forcefully Manguso presents language a priori (we get the biblical implications right away, but we have to work for the image; this fire isn't "licking" or "crawling" or "whipping"—it's more mathematic than that). This reversal is similar to the reversal of metaphor: let's not forget that at the outset of this poem we are looking at fire, not love, but somehow, by the end, the speaker has fooled herself into thinking about love, has buried herself so deeply into her simile that she comes out on the other side—the metaphoric relationship is reversed.

Ontology and identity are major concerns for Manguso in this collection. Here is a brief list of some of her titles: "This Might Be Real," "Est, Est, Est," "The Dictionary," "They Are Unlike Us in Almost Every Other Way," "An Idea with No Bodily Counterpart," "Address to an Absent Lover," "Oblivion Speaks"), though, again, she is not going to confront these concerns with the usual crisis: "Woolly zero, someday I will make a coat of you!" ("Better To Shed No Light On The Mystery Than To Shed Bad Light"). Instead, Manguso sets up little equations between agents, between the "I" and a "you" or "the world," moving little cogs of identity and being in between her different machines—seeing what happens, at times, but more often, as a kind of art piece, a statement of transferability, whose effect reminds me of some of the things that Juliana Spahr says of Stein and the way she works with the "universality of exclusivity," though for Manguso, I would say, it is the universality of solipsism. Here are two examples. The first is the closing lines of "Friend":

The snowman drifts on his berg, his head empty.

You imagine him forlorn. And why shouldn't you? After all, he is made in your image.

He is your friend.

Deceptive simplicity: Manguso is mashing Genesis with Wallace Stevens ("The Snowman"), asking us to juxtapose Genesis ("made in [his] image"), its abundance, the populated world, with Steven's "presence of absence," but then, goes further, does it all under a simple, almost childlike paradigm of "friendship," what the poet "I" has created for the reader "you," in the reader's "image" (the author making assumptions about the reader's assumptions). There are three friends, two human, one snowhuman—but Manguso's argument seems to conclude that these distinctions are fuzzier than we think, that we all participate equally in the aforementioned juxtaposition/conundrum precisely because of the assumptions we make about one another, which is, really, a sharing of the mind. However, there is a gap, we "fill in" the "emptiness" with a "forlorn" emotion, with loneliness, as a kind of ligament, a way to see the world as connected and meaningful. We are not sure, in this poem, which conclusion to trust, whether or not we can successfully rely on our assumptions.

The second excerpt is from "Dictionary":

I put my hand in, I take it out, I am thinking about you.
The sound is inside the head and I see what I have become:
The sound is in the God-producing head.

We can see in this excerpt Manguso's use of repetition, which at times plays a major role in her poetic equations, shifting the face of her words, giving a chosen cog added responsibilities as the poem progresses, the effect of which, at times, is like walking around a hotel, going in and out of the same door, seeing new angles of light, and at other times, is more of a Steinian hammer pounding home the word until its meaning is changed: "I give up writing about twice a day, just to keep things fresh. / I write myself a citation every time I break the rule and start writing again / Sometimes I write a citation just so I can write a citation" ("There Is No Such Thing As Skill"). Despite the humor, or indeed, because of the humor, we are brought into profundity, a very serious existential questioning. Like Steven's, Manguso "gets the joke," and uses it to turn her frustrations outward, pairing tautology with solipsism, in this final case, giving us onanism: "I'm so good, I give it to myself every bad way I know. / I whisper in my ear as I come: / Sarah Manguso, you're a damn fine lover. / Maybe someday we can be together, too" ("Kitty In The Snow"). A strange sense of disembodiment—that "too" is important, tacked on to the otherwise flush rhyme—so Manguso is "together" with someone, but not herself, as though she were cheating on herself with herself, which is a bizarre but exquisitely clean identity crises, exemplary of the sorts of paradoxes found throughout this collection.

Interview Project #2: Joshua Poteat

Ornithologies, winner of the 2004 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, is hands-down one of the best books of 2006. Just ask the folks at Blackbird, who say some pretty swell things. And why shouldn't they? Joshua Poteat's work deserves all sorts of kind words. Some that I would use are twilit, gently close to perfect, dearest whisper, a gathering. Ornitholigies is truly, truly a beautiful catalogue of that which is close and o so real. Do yourself a favor, and tell your friends:

Read and listen at Blackbird
And a new one at VQR.
Maybe even think about getting yourself a copy of the Spring 2006 issue of VQR. You'll find 3 new poems there. If you're around these parts, I'll even let you borrow my copy.
Preview/Hint: Our next writerly interview subject is also in that issue, so it's probably in your best interests to just get it now.

Enough arm-twisting. On to the fun.

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

Right now, I'm working on a whole manuscript of appropriated titles, all taken from J. G. Heck's 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science. Some I made up, but for the most part, I took them from Herr Heck’s scientific steel engravings. Titles such as: "Apparatus to show the amount of dew on trees and shrubs," "Illustrating the theory of twilight," "Illustrating the echo in arched rooms," "Apparatus for determining the specific heat of bodies," that kind of thing. The poems are not ekphrastics…they’re just riffing off of the titles, in an antiquated, PBS sort of way. Some of them have appeared/will appear in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, American Letters & Commentary, Copper Nickel, and perhaps other places. I should also have work appearing in millions of mailboxes across the country, i.e., I edit junk mail for a large credit card company.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Oh, all kinds of great things. I just finished Karen Russell’s book of stories, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and despite all the hype she’s been getting because she is so young and cute, it’s a damn good book. The best version of magic realism I’ve seen in quite a while. And in a similar vein, Samantha Hunt’s The Seas, a beautifully strange and short novel.

Coincidentally, from the U of M press: The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, by Peter Schwenger. It’s a bit over my head, but I need to be challenged.

David Wojahn’s selected poems Interrogation Palace. Richmond can now claim him, as he is teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s great.

And another member of VCU’s writing faculty, Susann Cokal. I read both her novels recently: Mirabilis and Breath & Bones. Both are lovely, historically based crazinesses. (I should say that I do not teach at VCU, or anywhere else.)

Also, there’s a magazine/journal that I love called Cabinet, filled with the randomness of the world. Each issue has a theme. I highly recommend it.

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

Nope. They all pretty much sound the same. I’m like the triangle player in the marching band.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing style?

Larry Levis was/is a big influence, especially on the longer pieces in Ornithologies. I had the chance to study with him for two years at VCU before he died. For a long time, he has been my main source. After several years of floundering around after grad school, working lame jobs, and writing nothing, reading his poems was the reason I started writing again. I think I am finally growing away from his influence, which saddens me in a way.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

Important and not important. In my newer work, place is not so important. There’s more of a blur. In Ornithologies, there seemed to be a concentration on landscape, mostly a southern one. I enjoy writing about/including landscape, and what is contained in landscapes, and what I know best is a southern landscape, the landscape of my childhood.

If your work were to be made into a film, who would direct it?

I would say…David Gordon Green, in the style of his George Washington…or even All the Real Girls.

Editor's note: I would say, too. And it would be awesome.

What contemporary writer would make the best President?

David Sedaris!

If you were a character from Shakespeare, which one would you be?

Most definitely the bear that chases Antigonus offstage in Winter’s Tale. “This is the chase: I am gone for ever.” Or a prop of some sort. A broom. A skull. A handful of sand. In kindergarten, I was asked to be the emperor in The Emperor’s New Clothes, but I refused, as I would have had to wear only my underwear (the long thermal kind). I was quite Victorian back then. I just wanted to be one of the palace guards, because there were guns involved.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing? Any advice that has stayed with you?

Someone once told me to write as if a train was bearing down upon me, i.e., with urgency. That seems like good advice.

What word do never tire of seeing in poem? What word could you live without ever seeing again? (Billy Collins said he hates poems with the word "locust"...what a joker. Locusts are always cool.)

Oh, dear sweet innocent Billy. What were you thinking? Locusts are definitely cool. Most insects are. The Locust is also the name of a crazy band from San Diego. They sound just like a locust would if a locust could play electric instruments very fast. I think people in general are tired of seeing “heron(s)” everywhere, but I don’t mind herons at all. There are a few phrases I could do without, mainly office-speak, like “cool beans,” “T.G.I.F.,” “LOL,” and “Adding more complexity into this particular strategic initiative would put too much pressure on the various points of leverage, and our goals would be unattainable in an accelerated time horizon."

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, “So, Joshua, what is it that you do?” What do you tell them?

It’s easier to say “I edit junk mail,” because it’s funny and true. Saying you’re a poet takes a lot of guts. Those are fightin’ words in some parts of certain towns. Occasionally I’ll say “I edit junk mail so I can write poems,” but that’s not as funny.

What does the phrase “Southern poetry” mean to you, if anything?

I can only speak for myself on this, but I’m not so sure it applies anymore, at least to the generation I belong to. I mean, on the surface, I'm mostly a poet, who happens to have poems about/set in the south and who happens at the moment to live in the former capital of the Confederacy. Still, I’m not sure I subscribe to such genre-based grouping by region. Perhaps I’m uncomfortable speaking for a whole region. It does have a nice ring to it, though, doesn’t it? If I don’t have to pay any fees, I wouldn’t mind being in the club.

Favorite poetic form?

The nap.

Wallace Stevens said, “In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality.” What does that mean to you?

I’m sure he doesn’t mean what it sounds like he means, because he sure didn’t follow his own advice, eh?

What is the “Great American Poem”?

The Great American Poem is being written right now, in another country, by a non-American.

Interview Project #1: Alex Lemon

In his introduction to Mosquito, the striking debut from Alex Lemon, Mark Doty says:

Alex Lemon makes something larger than any narration of personal experience: a container for struggle, love, and delight—even, for the wounded and dumb body ("anonymous as graffiti"), an undeceived, adult form of hope.

And it's true. But don't stop there. Nick Flynn says Mosquito is "broken and brilliant, protean and written in blood." Other words/descriptions come to mind, too: raw, naked, shattered, burning, bright, unblinking. It's like a tongue stuck in your ear, singing, and it all sounds so achingly sweet.

Ray Gonzalez calls Lemon "a major young poet," and so do we. Currently, Lemon teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. His poetry has appeared in Tin House, Denver Quarterly, AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, and numerous other journals.

You can read some poems at these places:

Poets & Writers
AGNI
Octopus
And, of course, Dislocate #1

Or you can get yourself a copy of Mosquito here:

Tin House
Powell's
Magers & Quinn

But on to the things you really want to know:

What are you working on these days? Any work coming out in the near or semi-near future?

I’ve got a number of poems coming out in the next months—Lit, Pleiades, Sonora Review, Denver Quarterly, and a number of other places—and a few reviews of new books of poetry. I’m working on a couple of omnibus reviews as well. I’m trying to do as much as I can to support Mosquito—readings, interviews, campus talks, etc. etc. but I’m on medical leave from my job at Macalester College, and so I’ve cut back on everything. As far as larger writing projects, well, I’ve been working on a couple of things for a number of years now. I’m close to finishing a book length poetic sequence called Hallelujah Blackout, that hopefully explores trauma and communication and being alive in America in the 21st Century. In revision I can see the influence all of the James Wright and John Berryman I read when I was at the U revealing itself. It’s a project I’m very excited about, but who knows if it will see daylight. I’m also at work on a memoir, and some supplemental essays that have a breadth of vision that might move them to be books. Somewhere in the backseat of all of this I have two more verse projects. One, a reworking of an essay by Emerson, and the other, a collection of poems that are starting to cohere into something called I Love Cake. They are sort of emotional B-sides to Mosquito.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Lots of non-fiction. Lots of memoir. Going back to some things I really liked—Lucy Grealy, Lynda Hull, Rilke, Cormac McCarthy. But I’ve been reading a lot of stuff that have to do with my disability. Moving to monocular vision has been really challenging some days, and my doctors have given me a lot material to read. In the next couple of weeks I will be spending a lot of time with the Norton Modern and Contemporary to finalize a syllabus for next semester. When there is time, I’m reading new journals. Tin House, No, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Denver Quarterly—the list is so long. There is a tremendous amount of good work being published now. It’s kind of an exciting time to be alive, no?

Regarding your own work, do you have a favorite and/or most-representative piece?

I don’t know if you can whittle me down to fourteen lines. I think Mosquito as a whole is a beautiful and shattered look, though.

Which writer would you say has had the biggest influence on your writing style?

At this point in my writing life, I don’t think I could pick one. I don’t think it would be good to lock myself in. I’m just, and hopefully will remain, a sponge for language. I read as much as I can. I listen. I peep.

Any thoughts on the advantages or disadvantages regarding the growth of the literary internet culture (web journals, blogs, etc.)?

I think it’s pretty great. Some amazing work is being published online, and that kind of dissemination of poetry can only be good for literature. Some wonderful conversations have taken place (and of course some silly and terrible ones). It’s created a space for community that negates distance. I have some friends that edit online journals and they’re getting a tremendous number of visitors. It makes me think that far more people are, at this point in all of this morphing, are reading online work than what appears in journals that have small print runs and limited distribution.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

Not very.

If your work were to be made into a film, who would direct it?

Maybe the Coen brothers? Wes Anderson? Todd Solondz? Wait—are these stupid hipster answers? I like films by these people.

Editor's note: The Coen brothers and Wes Anderson are never "stupid hipster answers."

What contemporary writer would make the best President?

Claudia Rankine or George Saunders

If you were a character from Shakespeare, which one would you be?

Lady Macbeth

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing? Any advice that has stayed with you?

“Wake up!”

What word do never tire of seeing in poem? What word could you live without ever seeing again? (Billy Collins said he hates poems with the word "cicada"...what a joker. Cicadas are always cool.)

I agree, I think cicadas are always, always cool. Why be a fascist? I think if they are used well, any word can be perfect. Like this. Udder.

You meet someone for the first time and they ask you the proverbial, “So, Alex, what is it that you do?” What do you tell them?

I tell them I’m a professor, or a writer. For some reason I don’t have the bollocks to say I’m a poet. Maybe I should now that I have a book.

What do you tell your students regarding the differences between song lyrics and poetry?

I actually do this. I’ll show someone a Jewel poem or Britney Spears lyrics. Then show them a poem by Donne or Rilke or someone. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory when they can hold them in front of them.

Couplets or quatrains?

Couplets, all the way.

Favorite poetic form?

I dig the sestina, and make my students write them. But I think that’s the torturer in me. I wrote a lot of sonnets when I was in the MFA program at the U. I’m thinking about trying to write a thousand haikus.

Wallace Stevens said, “Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” Do you share that idea?

I share that idea, for sure, but I also realize that that response is inherently one that is going to fail. That the world will never be gotten right, but that failing of our work won’t quench the daily desire to try, to respond. Dig?

What is the “Great American Poem”?

I don’t think there can be just one—too many good poems have been written in the last two hundred plus years, many more have been buried, and thousands will be written. I think there are Great American Poems of the Moment, but that doesn’t take away from their hugeness. It doesn’t take anything away from how amazing so much of what we do is.

Blogs and Literary Unhappiness (by Laura O)

Something I've noticed about blogs is that, generally speaking, we blog the most when we are unhappy. When someone's blog falls into disuse, it's a pretty reliable indicator that they have a new significant other, got a new job they love, or something of the kind. We blog when we're pissed off, when something happened that we just need to rant about. We blog when we're bored, frustrated, or riled up. This is not to say that a scrupulously updated blog necessarily indicates an unhappy person, but certainly a person whose has a fair amount of energy that needs channeling. By the same token, this is what makes blogs so intriguing to read (at least for me): we can instantly identify and relate to the details of frustration that people don't normally voice. "I hate that, too!" "That happened to me!" "Seriously?" Even the happiest of persons gets pissed off sometimes, and just needs to rant.

Thinking about it, maybe this is what makes blogs useful, both on the literary and the political level. They provide a forum for people to voice and spread discontent, to challenge frustrated energy into something productive: something that other people can instantly recognize and relate to, and thus hopefully, spread.

And on an artistic level, blogs seem to foster extreme degrees of approbation and disapproval. The best way to get people reading your blog is to say something extreme, whether wildly in favor or something, or wildly against. Blogs provide a place where received ideas can be contested, where frustration and pet peeves can be channeled into something that other people can hopefully key into.

Anyone got any literary blogs that usefully illustrate this point?
My links: (contrary to the theory just outlined above, as far as I know none of these people are unhappy. In fact, most are quite content. They can still work up a good rant every now and then):

Ian Macleod writes about books and stuff at his blog, Artless.

Girly ranting at Pamie

Ranting of all kinds here.

The Naysayers of MFA programs

Our MFA reading series kicked off a couple weeks ago at the Loft Literary Center, and since then, I've been thinking about why I'm so happy to be in an MFA creative writing program. MFA programs have grown tremendously over the last few years, both in popularity and as money makers for Universities. (The latter is not the case for Minnesota's MFA program; those accepted receive financial support for a full three years.) And with most anything that grows in popularity or influence, so come the naysayers. This is an important part of democratic cultural dialogue, but sometimes the naysayers put in their two cents and no one bothers to rubut. A couple of examples of the criticism befalling MFA programs these days:

• Mark Nowak's essay, "Neoliberalism, Collective Action, and the American MFA Industry" in his new chapbook, Workers of the World, Unite and Fight!
• Lynn Freed's essay, "Doing Time" which appeared last year in the July 2005 issue of Harper's, also found in her collection of essays, Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home.
  

For all the criticism programs receive, community remains one of their greatest assests. Just as a Bachelor's degree hardly guarantees you a job these days, neither does an MFA assure a book deal or University employ. For me, it's three years of job security, a literary playground, and a collective of like-minded souls.