Interview Project #6: Peter Markus

There are many things I could say about Peter Markus's work, but I'll sum up my feelings in a possibly telling and/or troubling anecdote: There are two writers whose work I cannot complete. I say "cannot" because I just don't want to, not yet. One of those writers is Faulkner, whose three books about the Snopes family (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) sit on the bookshelf and wait for me at some future point, some future where I'll find it alright to not have any Faulkner left to discover. I'll just continue to re-read everything else.

The other writer is Peter Markus, whose stories I discovered during this past summer of malaise. I tore through The Singing Fish, twice, and then a third time. And then Calamari Press released an edition of Good, Brother, and I swam my way through that one just as quick...until I made it toward the end. I went back to the beginning to read again, leaving the last three stories for the re-read, so as to be able to discover something more about these brothers and girl and the fish and the mud. But when I came to the last three stories, again I stopped reading. So the last three stories in Good, Brother remain unread and will remain so until Peter puts out a new book full of the gorgeous, hypnotic tales about the brothers and their muddy river town and their creosote lacquered backyard telephone pole studded with the chopped-off heads of fish. Which will be soon, I hope.

There are a bunch of places out there where you can find individual pieces from Peter's books. Like La Petite Zine, and Sleeping Fish, and DIAGRAM, and Typo. There's also a new one at Tarpaulin Sky.

Books can be gotten from Powell's or directly from Calamari, where both The Singing Fish and Good, Brother can be had for the cool price of $16. I say do it. Now.

And you can read some reviews, too, like here or here or here. Or you can read other interviews at Tarpaulin Sky or EconoCulture or Mad Hatter's Review.

But anyway...

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

I've been mostly working on what I hope will be the fourth sequence of brother stories, a manuscript I'm calling We Make Mud. I've generated some new brother stories and have been reworking some others that have just been lounging around without a spine to call them home, without a pole, a fish-headed telephone pole for them to gather around, so to speak. It's always good when a new burst of brothers come busting out of my pen. I'm always glad to have them back in my life. Also been tinkering around some with the sentences from two other manuscripts, one a novel called Bob, or Man on Boat, the other a monosyllabic novella of linked stories called The Dead Dog Stories. I've also had a university press express some interest in a book of non-fiction that I wrote some ten years ago called Weeds, which is a book about me becoming a father and buying and moving into a house in the ghetto of Detroit. There's yet another manuscript that I'm always going back to, to fine tune its sentences, about me being a writer who goes into the schools of Detroit. So yeah, there's always something calling out to me for my attentions, though I must say I'm most happy when it's the brothers calling out to me by name.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

I do more re-reading than I do new reading. That's always been the case. I like to pick up Faulkner at least once a week to climb inside that man's tongue, then like to reach to the other side and wash my mouth out some with some Hemingway, some Beckett, some Stein. Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is the big, bad wolf of a book that completely owns me right now, even when I'm not reading it. Right now it's by my deskside here where I sit punching these keys and the fact that it exists, even though I can't read more than a page or two without it knocking me on my ass over, but just the fact that it was written, and written by such a young poet (I think Stanford was in his young twenties when he wrote it) humbles me and haunts me and dares me to go further, to reach beyond my own arm's length. As far as newer books go, because I do write reviews of books, I've read the new one by Cormac McCarthy and I cannot not say that I wasn't blown away by it. It's his best book, by far, since Blood Meridian. I also read recently and liked it very much a novel by Norman Lock called The Long Rowing Unto Morning which I loved and have been telling others to seek it out. Brian Evenson's new book I read recently and as always his work swallows me inside the belly of its whale. I was also turned onto, within the last year, to a trilogy of books by the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie. This work about two twins, brothers, is almost too strangely in tune with my own book(s) of brothers that it makes me feel uncomfortably akin to the world that Kristof has conjured up on the page.

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

I guess my signature piece, or as a friend of mine likes to say, my "Stairway to Heaven," would be any of the stories (and there are more than just a few) where the one brother nails the hand of his other brother to the fish-headed telephone pole out back in the back of the yard.

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

Wouldn't be a writer. Would be my daughter, who taught me to relearn language as she was just learning it for the first time, learning how to connect words with perception, the delight in that act. And also my son, who through his sister gave me and taught me the word brother. That's when I was stylistically reborn.

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

I'm a big fan of the world that I find lurking about on the internet and have made more than a few friends whose hands I've never had the actual chance to shake or who, when we do finally meet, it's like standing face to face with a brother. As someone who doesn't often get out much, I feel a lot less disconnected from the world, and from the world of other writers and readers, thanks to the culture of the web. It brings me great pleasure when I see my name or the title of one of my books on some blog. The lone disadvantage of course is that it all seems to take me away from the work itself. I am, I must confess, one of those guys who is constantly checking his emails and even sometimes when I'm in the midst of writing a piece of writing the news that I've just received new mail can sometimes pull me away.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

Place is second only to the language itself. All I need to do is write a word such as river down on the page and the word itself becomes the place itself and I am right there on the river's muddy shore and it's the brothers who come walking up, who come walking out, who come rising up, out of the river, out of the mud. There's the moon and the mill upriver and I know that just beyond our backs is the house with its backyard telephone studded with the chopped off heads of fish.

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

I don't care much at all for the act of sitting down to stare at the TV, so I'm not much the man to answer this question. I have been told by those who know and like my work that they see my brothers as being material that would be duly suited to be made into a film by some filmmaker whose name I don't know though I do know that he's made a film called George Washington (I believe that's what it's called). There is a film that I like very much and that reminds me of my work that I've built around the brothers and this film is called Son of a Shark. I believe it's French. Most films that I sit down to watch quickly put me to sleep, though I'm pretty sure that's not their fault but is more of a deficiency on my behalf in that when I do sit down in that sort of inactive role, without a pen in my hand, I soon find myself and my head nodding off to the land of dreams.

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

For some time I was in correspondence with Gordon Lish, back when he was the editor of The Quarterly and also an editor on his way out at Alfred A. Knopf. One thing that he wrote to me, among many other Lish one-liners, was the line, "Be great!" I strive for that in the sentence-making maneuvers that I like to do. Lish also told me once, "Slow down. Be earnest. Feel." Lish's motto, "The page is your genesis!" also is something I aspire to when I sit down to write.

What word do never tire of seeing in poem/story? 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.)

There are too many words that I never tire of seeing, especially as it concerns my own stories. I never tire, though perhaps there are others who do, of words that are my mantra words, words like river and fish and brother and mud. Those words are the world to me and there is no other place that I'd rather be than with them. I could probably live without the words Billy Collins. I could probably live without most words that have more than two syllables.

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

I get asked this much of the time, or at least my wife frequently does, by neighbors who see me a lot of the time moseying around the neighborhood, or playing with my kids at the park and in our yard, and because I don't necessarily want to get too much into the act that gives my life most meaning (why? because it's too complicated to go there with some people) I simply say that I teach, that I'm a teacher, which is partially true in that this is how I go about the income-getting part of my life. I rarely, unless in the company of other writers, say that I write, or that I'm a writer. I am most of all, I'd have to say, a father, both to my two children as well as to the words, the sentences, the stories that I bring out into the little world where I am also known and call myself a writer above all else. In truth, too, I am not much of a doer (go ahead and ask my wife), and am more of somebody who sits back and watches others do the doing.

Flash. Short fiction. Prose poetry. Sudden fiction. How would you describe the brothers and the fish? Or does it matter?

I call them fiction because that's what they are to me. I am just making things up and finding much pleasure in that process. They are stories, too, though I don't force them to be, nor do I think of any of the conventions when I'm writing them. Words on the page is how I like to get others to think about their own pieces of writing. Sentences if I have to see them as more than just words. I said in another recent interview that maybe I would like to call my next book not stories by, or short fiction by, or even prose poems by, but instead let's go with "acoustical objects" by Peter Markus. I could live fine with that way of looking at the work and its world.

Some guy doing a blog interview says to you, "I want to read the complete works of one writer." What do you tell him?

One writer? Frank Stanford comes to mind, though finding his complete works would be the first challenge in doing so. I think reading all of Cormac McCarthy would be an easier task and not one without its value. I can't say I've ever read the complete works of any one writer so maybe I'm in no position to tell anyone to do so either.

Favorite poetic form? or Favorite story "genre"?

Can't say that it makes a difference to me. It's like I said somewhere else here, words on the page. The sentence itself. I am more interested in the sentence (in a work of prose) than I am interested in the line (in a poem). A sentence already seems complicated enough without having to think about where to break it.

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

There is only one way to get the world right, and that's by making it new, making it your own. So yes, I agree with Stevens here.

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

But here, I'd say to Stevens, the imagination is reality. For me the act of writing is all about displacing the given reality with the made. I am all about detachment and have, I suspect, a touch of autism, or at least enough of the tendencies associated with that condition that allow me to crawl around on my hands and knees in the lingual world that is made out of mud and river, brother and fish.

What is the "Great American Poem" or the "Great American Story"?

I do think that Frank Stanford's book-length poem The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is the great American novel of the 20th Century.

What contemporary writer would make the best President?

I wouldn't do that to any writer. Change "President" to "God" and I'll hit you with a long list.

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

Puck, because I like to fuck with people.

Interview Project #5: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

For some reason or another, there's just a certain clarity that comes across in wonderfully written poem fragments. I think of the H.D. of Trilogy and those gorgeous lyrics of connection/
disconnection, of the Lorine Niedecker who wrote "Thomas Jefferson"...and even the Oppen who wrote "Of Being Numerous," which might not be considered fragments, per se, but is fragmentary nonetheless. And that certain something -- whatever that magic might be -- is also found in Joshua Marie Wilkinson's work. Joshua's most recent book, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk, winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize, is, to me, worthy of that bunch. There's something beautiful and effortless and sneakingly graceful about Joshua's work. Tarpaulin Sky has a swell review.

You can read some selections from Diagram 4.3 and 5.4. And over here, too. And don't forget here.

I first saw Joshua read as part of Wave Books Poetry Bus tour that stopped at the Walker in September. Give him a view/listen.

And so...

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

I've been making a documentary film about the band Califone for the past three years, and that is finally being shaped into something coherent. The co-director Solan Jensen and I toured three times with Califone in 2004 and filmed thirty-five shows in thirty-five cities across Europe and the States. It's going to be called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, which is a lyric taken from one of Tim Rutili's songs -- a song called "When Leon Spinx Moved into Town." Three years on, I realize that that would probably make a better title for the movie. Stretching from Ljubljana to London to Chicago to Seattle, the film is comprised almost entirely of Califone playing live and in their old studio. This latest version --which I just sent to the band this week -- opens with a fourteen minute song called "(red)" played on a classical acoustic guitar strung with four thick bass strings -- actually the song was written after Rutili read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red.

I've also been working on assembling an anthology of poetry with Christina Mengert. Christina and I invited twelve younger poets (Mark Yakich, Ben Lerner, Christine Hume, Sabrina Orah Mark, Christian Hawkey, and several others) to, in turn, invite a more established poet to have a conversation with. The result has been a stunning, sprawling barrage of conversations which have all finally come together. The book will be made up of poems from all twenty-four poets as well as the conversations. Ben Lerner chose Aaron Kunin and their conversation appeared in The Denver Quarterly a couple issues back; Christian Hawkey and Tomaž Šalamun's conversation is in the current (Rexroth) issue of Chicago Review -- both of them are brilliant. Jon Woodward just sent us a really lovely conversation with Rae Armantrout.

My friend Noah and I wrote a strange collaborative book of poetry over this past summer while I was studying for my doctoral exams here in Denver. Every three or four days, Noah would come over to my house and we'd trade this notebook back and forth for a few hours -- which was the perfect break from reading Dickinson and Celan (my two favorite poets) and all this criticism about modernism and Sappho all summer. Denver, by the way, is sort of miserable in the summer -- not Palm Springs miserable -- but miserable enough. Anyways, that book is nearly done and there'll be parts coming out in a few magazines in the spring: /nor, New American Writing, 14 Hills, and others.

I've also been working on this book of fragments and prose poems for a few years now, and that's nearly done. I'm working on another smaller book of poems, too; another homage to the band Rachel's, which my first book -- Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms -- also drew from, namely their record for a performance piece about the painter Egon Schiele. Their newest record Systems/Layers got me through my Master's thesis on Danish cinema when I was in film school in Ireland. I owe them a lot. Probably they'd prefer money and prizes to my little books though.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Since completing my doctoral exams, I've been reading all over the place, hardly finishing anything: mostly Beckett's novels.

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

On my style? That's so hard to say. When I first started writing poetry Michael S. Harper was my favorite poet. His early work especially. Other books I crib from: Arno Schmidt's Nobodaddy's Children; Ann Quin's Berg; all of Lisa Robertson's books; Renee Gladman's work. Kelly Link's Magic for Beginner's. Everything by Sebald, Nabokov, O'Hara, Genet, Cole Swensen, Faulkner, Niedecker...and Anne Carson. I just re-read "The Glass Essay" in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep, and it is still so disarming to me. And Graham Foust and Wallace Stevens. My favorite prose writer is Slavoj Žižek. And I adore Giorgio Agamben's books, especially The Coming Community and Remnants of Auschwitz. Derrida's The Post Card and Roland Barthes' little-known poems are incredibly important to me. All of my second book took its impetus from Barthes' writing. Barthes Par Barthes is a book I re-read every year or two. How much space do I have?

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I visited a creative writing class at University of Colorado the other day, and one of the students asked if a certain part of Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk took place in Turkey -- and, though I hadn't realized it before -- it did. Place is absolutely integral to my writing -- but like Colleen McElroy, one of my teachers, said: you'll probably always write from where you aren't, you'll write from elsewhere, and the past landscapes you've known will filter in somewhere down the road. So -- now looking back -- Dublin is in my books, Seattle, Chicago, Ankara, Tucson, Portland, Bratislava...and Vienna...and Budapest...but there's never a conscious effort to, you know, "write about Seattle." It just sort of materializes and I sort of see it askance much later. When I was writing my first book, it was easier to write about traveling through Austria and the Czech Republic -- which I did constantly via train in 2001 -- once I lived in Tucson. Then Tucson came a bit into my second book -- another student, Lindsey, in a class that I visited with Chicu Reddy and Brian Turner, noticed that there are scenes in Lug... that are pulled right from places in Tucson where I lived for a couple of years. There's this bloodbank, a telephone booth -- which has been ripped out I think...are there any telephone booths anymore?
Umbrella, did you bring me here?

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

Brent Green would direct it. He makes these amazing animated films that he narrates. Or the Thomas Vinterberg of Festen. Living or dead? The Godard of Alphaville, The Haneke of Time of the Wolf, the Herzog of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser...

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

I like Davis McCombs's response from Charles Wright. I never studied with Charles Wright, but I like the idea of writing not from a place of knowing, but from a place of un-knowing..."I'm Nobody! Who are you?"

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?

Depends on who I'm meeting. I always thought that if I ever published books I'd be so pleased tell them I'm a "writer." Now, I seldom say that. I tell them...I'm a student, or a filmmaker, or a teacher...

Your chapbook is titled A Ghost as King of the Rabbits and your full-length collection, Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk, carries an epigraph from Wallace Stevens' poem "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts." What is it about that poem that you're drawn to?

I can't really say. I try not to memorize poems for fear that they will lose their spell. I'm also faced with the strange feeling -- when somebody asks me what I love about ____x poet_____ (Trakl, Oppen, Berssenbrugge, Notley, Joshua Beckman, John Yau, Catherine Wagner, Lisa Jarnot, Sawako Nakayasu, Hopkins, Joshua Clover, Peter Gizzi, Anna Moschovakis, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Willis) I sort of can't say at first. I just return to their work again and again. With Stevens it's a little different. Because Stevens is one of those writers who I will -- as with Hopkins, Celan, and Dickinson -- probably return to for as long as I'm alive. The answer to your question is in the last paragraphs of Kelly Link's story "Stone Animals."

Your poems are poems in fragments, and Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk is itself a book-length poem in fragments. What are your thoughts behind the "poem in fragments"? How did you come to that form/approach?

I wrote much that book and my first book on big sheets of paper with a fat black marker. I like the physicality of that process, but when I go to copy it into notebooks and then type it onto my computer page everything is different. So I have to print it out (as I can't last very long on the computer) and cut it all up again and spread it out all over the floor. This is how I organized my first book and Lug Your Careless Body...I think starting big with the marker then moving to the computer then to the scissors and the typed page and spreading it all over the floorboards at home in Denver -- and on the floorboards in Tucson on 1st Street and 4th Avenue -- and on the grey thin carpet in my apartment in Bratislava...I think this process is itself fragmentation.

It becomes "writing" in a much different sense -- since there are all these stages to the physical composition. Of course, like most writers, I discard much of what I write -- nearly all of what I write, actually. What's left, I try to shape into something. It's already in bits -- little lyrics or stories or overheard conversations or parallel images or descriptions of paintings or little moments from movies (there's one from that movie Love Liza where Philip Seymour Hoffman tears a page out of a telephone book in a pancake house -- somebody actually read it and wrote to me asking if it was from that movie) -- so the composition moves back into making these fragments into a whole.

I love Anne Carson's simple "A Novel in Verse" (which is the first subtitle of Autography of Red -- the second is "a Romance"). It was sort of an homage to that I guess. But I like it when the author gives a little direction -- there's no harm in that. I love it that Roethke says (I'm paraphrasing), "I ask to be read aloud." That's lovely. Me too.

Did you write all of the poems in Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk around the same time? In the order they appear?

No, not all. Some of them date back to when I was still trying to assemble my first book. There was an image in my first book -- these children climbing into an abandoned airplane hangar (and also this image of the two guys in the band Matmos, that my friend Jason Zuzga told me about, where they're dragging a piano through the streets of the East Village and recording the sounds) -- there are a few moments in Suspension like these that sort of produced a keyhole. I kept looking through that keyhole and that's where the fragments of Lug came from. That's also why I had two books come out so close together; I wrote them at the same time -- though I didn't know I was doing that, of course. I was just spreading all this text all over my floor in Tucson and Dublin and Denver and reading aloud and drinking a lot of coffee and reading aloud and building little rooms for all the fragments to live in -- which is why the book is in sections. My third book was constructed in a totally different way, you know, to break with the pattern and the familiarity and ease of how I'd gotten used to working over the last five or six years. It's also mostly prose poems. Some of it is coming out very soon from Ocotopus Books as a chapbook entitled The Book of Truants & Projectorlight.

What is the "Great American Poem"?

Can I indulge us with a collage? It would be some combination of Haryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge, Frank O'Hara's poem "A Step Away from Them," poem #700 by Dickinson ("The Way I read a Letter's -- this -- "), Cole Swensen's Such Rich Hour, Graham Foust's poem "Iowa City," the last poem in Christine Hume's book Alaskaphrenia, all of World Jelly by Tony Tost, Plath's poem "The Detective," the entire oeuvre of Jim Berhle's comics, and Michael Earl Craig's poem "Seahorse." Broken into sections (like H.D.'s Trilogy or The Dream Songs or The Bridge or Flow Chart), each section would be titled with one of the repeating lines from Hejinian's My Life. The poem would begin with Stephanie Young's line: "for beneath / every desire is another desire to drink from the spigot directly" and it would close with Barbara Guest"s line "The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft / unreliable." And Cass McCombs and Cat Power and Dirty 3 would make a double album out of it. And then they'd tour. And I'd go on tour with them and bring my friend Solan and my dog Bella along to make a little movie about it.

George Bilgere on "Writer's Almanac"

I’m lucky to have had some great mentors during my very young experience as a writer. One of these mentors, and perhaps the one who has made the biggest impact, is George Bilgere. George is a great poet and professor who lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. I’ve had him in many undergraduate writing workshops at John Carroll University and have shared countless drinks with him at the local pub Pizzazz (I know, stupid name). He’s the head of the Creative Writing Department at John Carroll and has made great strides in strengthening the writing community of this small university. George’s most recent book Haywire is amazing and was chosen by poet Edward Field to win the 2006 May Swenson Award. A few poems were recently read by Garrison Keillor on his radio show "The Writer's Almanac." On the December 4, 9, 14, and 23 broadcasts, more of Bilgere's poetry will be read, this time from his most popular book The Good Kiss. George also has a radio show on 88.7 WJCU, which is available for online listening here. Check out his work on Keillor's site. I'd like to know what everyone thinks of him. Oh, and if you like his stuff don't forget to buy his newest book.