Dislocate Blog

Dislocate Poetry Contest

2007-11-27T10:15:00.000-06:00

Dislocate, a literary journal at the University of Minnesota, announces its first Dislocated Poetry Contest: Poems on the theme of Dislocation.

The Winner will receive $500 and publication in the 4th print issue of Dislocate.

All entrants will receive a copy of Dislocate and be considered for publication.

Entry fee: $10
Page Limit: 5 pages
Deadline: January 31, 2008

We welcome both experimental and traditional forms which stretch the boundaries of poetry.

Each contest submission must include an entry fee. Submissions must also include a self-addressed stamped envelope and cover letter with your name, address, phone number, e-mail, and entry title. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities English department students and faculty are ineligible for this contest.

Simultaneous submissions are accepted; previously published work or e-submissions are not.

Manuscripts will not be returned without a SASE and correct postage. Make entry checks payable to Dislocate Magazine.

Send all entries to:

Dislocate—Attn: Dislocated Poetry Contest
Department of English
222 Lind Hall
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0134

*Please note that non-contest submissions for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction do not require an entry fee and are welcome from September 15 - December 15 every year.

Contact us at dislocate.magazine@gmail.com with questions. To view previous issues, visit our website at www.dislocate.org.

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2007-11-20T10:45:00.001-06:00

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An Audience with the Don

2007-11-19T10:52:00.002-06:00

In 1997, Vanity Fair's James Wolcott pejoratively referred to Lee Gutkind as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction." Though it wasn't Wolcott's intention, his dismissive remark brought Gutkind and the genre to the awareness of millions of Vanity Fair readers, and as we all know, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Gutkind started America's first MFA program in CNF at the University of Pittsburgh, and is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction. He has written or edited twelve books, most recently Almost Human: Making Robots Think (2007).

I had the opportunity to work with him last spring at Arizona State University, where he was the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Thanks to Lee, I came away with a new awareness of the importance of structure, and a new mantra: “The building blocks of creative nonfiction are scenes.” I recently chatted with him briefly about immersion journalism, MFA programs, and the role of the internet in the genre of creative nonfiction.

When you’re coming up with an idea for an immersion piece, is it something that you’re actively looking for, or is it triggered by an article you might read, or is it a combination of both?

It’s a combination, but I like to keep doing this kind of work. I don’t think I serve myself well by only editing and teaching, or only writing personal memoir. I think that it’s really good for me to keep my hand in this immersion aspect. And I decided that I’m not crazy about doing short pieces of immersion. So I’m always looking for opportunities to do longer immersion pieces.

It must be a huge commitment; didn’t you research Almost Human for six years?

I researched Almost Human for six years off and on, so it’s a big commitment, but some of these projects can be off and on projects, so I might have devoted a month or two to robots, and then I might have left for a month or two, and come back to it. You like to do the long story, so the reason it’s six years for me is it really did take the roboticists six years to create and design a robot that I wanted to see happen. So you pick a narrative project that will allow you to move in and out and tell an elongated story.

So at the moment you have your antennae up looking for a new immersion project?

I’ve been spending some time looking into the future of medicine. I may go in that direction. Personalized medicine or diagnostic medicine, whatever you want to call it, that starts with a person’s genome and gets doctors to look at a person’s body individually, rather than the way they do medicine today, one drug for lots of folks who have lung cancer. That, and I’m also looking into the state of marriage in America.

Did the interest in medicine arise out of the organ transplant book that you did [Many Sleepless Nights] or is it something you’ve always been interested in?

The most memorable experience I ever had as a writer was doing that organ transplant book. To me it was much more important and much more engaging than writing about baseball, or writing about motorcycles, or writing about robots, for that matter. Life and death stories are always the best in a high tension atmosphere that allows you to walk in and out of a series of dramatic moments.

Definitely a high-stakes subject.

Absolutely. And when you’re at such high stakes with people, with their backs to the wall, they are much more likely, if they trust you, to talk to you about stuff that really matters.

You set up the first MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at Pitt. What are MFA programs doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

Every MFA program’s a little different, but the good part about it is that people come to MFA programs, initially anyway, in order to get advanced help writing. As long as we continue to help writers who are more advanced than undergraduates, and who also have more life experience and professional experience doing this kind of work, that’s what MFA programs were first established for, and that’s the thing I think many programs are doing right.

What we’re doing wrong is that now the degree has become much more important in many respects than the writing itself. That’s a problem; at least, it is to me. As I look at the job listings, say, in the AWP job list, so many people have MFA requirements; you know, you have to have an MFA to get a job. An MFA doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a good teacher, and it certainly doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re even a good writer. I would much rather see people wanting a writer who has published a book or two or three, not caring one way the another about the MFA. Hemingway didn’t have an MFA. Fitzgerald didn’t have an MFA. Gay Talese doesn’t have an MFA, and I don’t have an MFA, so the degree is not nearly as important as the writing itself, and I see students hunger for this degree. That disturbs me. And I’m very disturbed by the fact that the standards are so different at different institutions.

What issues do you think are going to prove central to the genre going forward? Obviously the James Frey [A Million Little Pieces] issue has people talking and thinking about the nature of truth in memoir and emotional truth versus factual truth. Do you think that will remain a central issue?

I think we’re going to keep talking about it, and I think we’re not going to come to any conclusion about how memoir ought to be written, and what truth really is, and the validity and accuracy of memory. It’s going to just go on and on, and I think that’s good that people are talking about it, and I think it’s really good that we have different opinions and that we share opinions. The more we share opinions and the more we see that nobody really knows, that there’s no law, no rule, no guideline except for the fact that you’re not supposed to knowingly make anything up, then I think that it will make people more aware of being careful, and trying to remain as close to the essence of the story that they’re telling as they can. I think that’s good. I do think that publishers and writers need to be much more careful about the other kind of truth, the truth in the facts that they use. I think that we have to be really careful to fact-check ourselves or to force a publisher [to fact-check], and I think that we also need to be much more careful about the innocent victims in our narratives.

Wasn’t it Annie Dillard who said, “Memoir is an art, but it’s not a martial art”?

Yes indeed.

Let’s talk about the internet and the role you see that playing in the future of creative nonfiction. In the recent anthology Best of Creative Nonfiction, you included some blogs.

I think blogs are rather interesting. I think it gives us—all of us—the opportunity to exercise our writing abilities and also to say what we think and not feel so frustrated. For so many years, writers wrote in the dark. They’re all alone and they’re writing draft after draft of essay or story or novel, and if the writing wasn’t particularly good or the subject didn’t appeal to publishers or editors, then they were sitting in the dark all by themselves, isolated and alone. So blogs give writers the opportunity to find an audience, and reach out and touch other people. So in that respect, I really like that, and I appreciate the freedom that writers are getting, and the riches and rewards that readers are getting by the efforts made in blogs. On the other hand, so often, blogs are done by people who are not yet ready for prime time as writers, and so you read a lot of pretty bad blogs. A lot of peple who are not particularly schooled in the craft of writing, nor are willing to revise and work real hard like the working writer really does to write the best thing they can, so you get a lot of instantaneous stories that aren’t particularly good. So there’s the good and the bad, but I chose to include blogs in Best of Creative Nonfiction, and I’m hoping that I chose very good blogs, because it reflects what’s happening, especially in the world of nonfiction today. When you’re blogging, your work is available all across the world, to all kinds of different people, and I think it’s really a fascinating thing that’s happening, in allowing us to sit in our house and communicate with other cultures instantaneously in a universal way.

The hard part in finding good blogs is that they’re not organized. So you literally have to surf and run into good pieces of narrative, and it’s hard to find. In this particular case we found six blogs, and two of the six that we published had been noticed by major publishers and two of the bloggers were already the recipients of book contracts.

Is that how you found these pieces for the anthology, then? Just by surfing the web?

Exactly.

That’s a daunting task.

Yeah. A couple of them were absolutely accidental. Only in one case was a blog site recommended.

Final question: Do the Godfather jokes ever get old?

No, they’re fine. And they’re fun. The Godfather label and the Godfather jokes kind of helped elevate the dialogue about creative nonfiction. And so I really appreciate it. When I first saw what James Wolcott did, I was annoyed and embarrassed. But immediately, instead of a few people talking about creative nonfiction, he attracted the attention of his four million readers. It was a port of entry into a discussion about the form. It delighted me in the end, and I don’t think he meant to make it such a productive experience, but it certainly was. He made fun, but the readers didn't.

LINKS:
The Journal of Creative Nonfiction
Lee Gutkind

Interview with Kristy Bowen

2007-11-08T09:10:00.000-06:00

All the poets and I here at Dislocate are huge huge fans of Kristy Bowen's latest chapbook, feign, out from New Michigan Press last year, 2006. Okay, I have been trying to find a deft, definitive reason for why I am so enamored of this book, and short of solving any of my own life problems (inability to sleep, lack of rhythm, that reoccurring smell of copper), I have come upon a conclusion: I love these poems for the way they bring an otherwise associative sensibility into a strong sense of scene: how Bowen discovers within and at the corners of her stagings these shadow worlds: or a jar lifted to open the air over the curio: so everything has a pitch toward a silent figure: even has her mind leaps, it finds an accumulating logic: or maybe, just have a look at a few of these lines, from one of my favorites, "Girls Reading Novels:"

Violet is named for lavender equations, the glitter at the end of your spine. Avenues grow contradictory, the length of the chain-link divided by the water's murky circle. Kitchen floors tilt at a seventy degree angle while intricate societies are discovered among the broken dishes. My limbs are symmetrical, polite.

Oh, oh that exquisite tone, the abeyance, until we get the ending:

Some terrible violence in the way I say open.

These are careful poems, even as wild as they are. A measured mental conflagration, hoorah! So, so, the real bit here: this has prompted us to invite Kristy Bowen to kick off our series of:

Awesome Interviews with Awesome Writers

Okay, but first, the links:

please read Kristy Bowen's blog, here:

http://www.kristybowen.blogspot.com/

please buy her first collection, the fever almanac, here:

http://www.ghostroadpress.com/catalog_poetry.htm

please buy her recent chapbook, feign, here:

http://www.newmichiganpress.com/nmp/ordering.html

We are so pleased to present this interview with Kristy Bowen:

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

I'm in the midst of a couple of projects, one a collection of love and anti-love poems called the kissing disease, as well as a novel-in-verse type thing about two sisters in 1970's Wisconsin . I'm also plotting another book arts project with Lauren Levato, who I collaborated with on at the hotel andromeda. My second full-length collection, in the bird museum, should be out from Dusie Press in December or January, and another, girl show, is due out in 2009 from Ghost Road

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Lately, I've mostly been indulging my perennial craving for local ghost stories. I spend a lot of time commuting, so it's perfect for reading . Weirdly, I can only read poems in the privacy of my own home, however, since I occasionally like to read them aloud. I just finished Laurel Snyder's Myth of Simple Machines last night. Before that, Larissa Szporluk’s Embryos and Idiots. I also tend to read a lot of stuff online. I work in a library, so I'm constantly picking things up, then getting distracted by the next thing, so I start far many more books than I actually finish.

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

I'm still much enamored of at the hotel andromeda, the homage to Joseph Cornell, not just for the poems inside, but the project as a whole. It was very hands on in conception and execution, and probably the thing I'm most proud of as both a poet and a visual artist.

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

As perhaps untrendy as it is to say, I'm all about Plath and Sexton. I also tend to read a lot of younger, contemporary female poets, and I'd have to say what I read definitely has a cumulative effect on my writing. Some of them are poets I know (either in real life or internet life) like Simone Muench, Arielle Greenberg, Rebecca Loudon, as well as other poets like Christine Hume, Larissa Szporluk, Mary Ann Samyn, Sabrina Orah Mark, Daphne Gottlieb, and Olena Kalytiak Davis. Also, I'm a big CD Wright fan . Years ago, I think I was reading TS Eliot when I finally "got it" as a poet about eight years ago (I'd been flailing before that). I'm also influenced by a lot of fiction writers--historically the Brontes, Henry James, William Faulkner, and a lot of contemporary writers—Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson.

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I would consider myself a much more rural-based writer than I would ever consider myself an urban one. While I grew up not too far outside of Rockford, the second biggest city in Illinois, there was a certain element of isolation out where we were. I’m intrigued by that idea of Midwestern gothic, particularly, inspired by all those lonely dark roads, open spaces, that silence that I never get here in the city, that lonely dark-windowed farmhouse that seems to emerge almost from the flat land around it. It’s probably why my work is so filled with floods and fires, and car accidents. I’ve lived in Chicago for the last ten years, and it took awhile for the city really to creep into my work, but it does on occasion. Of course, what I would consider my only Chicago-focused work was a series of poems , Archer Avenue, which was about the city’s famous, vanishing hitchhiker legend, which isn’t exactly urban in its nature…

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

My favorite Shakespeare play is Titus Andronicus (bloody and violent and wonderful), so I’m not sure I would want to be any of those characters. Seriously.

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

I have this great rebelliousness when it comes to people telling me I can’t do this or can’t do that. Don’t use too many adjectives. Don’t use the word “dark” in a poem. Of course my reaction is to do exactly that. I once had a fiction workshop leader as an undergrad who said breaking the rules was fine as long as you knew what the rules were.

How would you describe your time/experiences as an MFA/Phd. student?

I enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia College, largely because 1.) I was already working for the school, 2. ) I got to take classes for half price, and 3.) it was a brand spanking new program that seemed promising. I also always worry that I’ll regret at some point NOT doing things, so I decided to go for it, figuring it could only make me a stronger writer. I’d already been publishing work for awhile, doing readings, making inroads into some sort of publishing career, so I felt a little conspicuous amongst writers more at the start of their writing “careers” as someone who was, I guess, already in the midst of it. I think I was also a little suspicious of it all. In the end though, I’m certain it made me a tighter poet and fostered a lot of reading and projects I might not have done otherwise.

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

I’ve only recently gotten comfortable with telling them I’m a poet. I feel a little more comfortable with my MFA and a published book backing me up (though obviously those are silly and arbitrary markers of success.) I’m actually more comfortable with “poet’ than I am with terming myself an “artist”, even though I do a lot of visual art, especially since I’m mostly self-taught in the latter. I also usually mumble something about working in a library and editing when they ask about how I actually make a living.

Favorite poetic form?

I like litanies, and litany-like constructions in the midst of non-litany poems. I also just like the word “litany.”

Favorite landscape?

You would think it would be that flat, Midwestern view, but actually I’m an ocean girl. I initially went to college to study Marine Biology in Wilmington, North Carolina, but I’m a poor scientist and bad at math, and ultimately decided I could be an English Major anywhere. If I had my way, I’d be living in a beach front cottage somewhere on a coastline. I guess I’m willing to settle for living a block away from Lake Michigan, which sometimes looks like an ocean.

Bananas or Mittens?

I hate mittens. Especiallly wet wool mittens. So bananas, I guess.

If you were stuck in a room forever, would you rather have limitless writing utensils or a window?

Definitely a window.

Marsupials or Clairvoyance?

Clairvoyance..also a favorite word.

Do you prefer the word “bubbly” or “chipper?”

Yech..neither.

Do you write by time or by page? Or some other order?

I tend to, over a couple of days, collect notes, thoughts, random bits of things, then sit down to forge them into poem. It usually takes a couple hours, then I’m tweaking it for about a week…

What time of day do you find yourself writing?

Since I work evenings most of the time, until 10pm, I get most things done after that, the middle of the night.

What is the best way to run a writing workshop?

My idea workshop would be where the participants look at the work in question not as other writers, but as readers. Not so much “If this were my poem, I would x,y, or z.” But more like “I’m not getting this as an audience, how can the writer make the piece work toward that end..”

What do you strive for most in your work? Image, meaning, logic, sound, etc? Why?

I‘d say image first. Then sound. Meaning maybe. Logic…not so much. I think image and sound are what distinguishes poetry from prose. Not that prose can’t be both image and sound driven, but to me, poetry HAS to be…

The Worst and Best Creative Nonfiction from the South

2007-10-23T15:21:00.000-05:00

How Charlie Daniels hurt my soul and Joni Tevis made it all better

As a student of writing, and as a Southern transplant, I try to keep an eye on new literature coming out of the South. Recently, I came across some of the best and worst collections of literary nonfiction I've read in quite a while, both from writers raised in the Carolinas.

Let's start with the worst: Growing Up Country. It's an anthology of short memoir pieces, compiled and edited by Charlie Daniels—yes, that Charlie Daniels, the one who sings "Devil went Down to Georgia." The contributors are mostly country music stars, including a few icons like Dolly Parton and Toby Keith as well as newer, lesser known musicians. There's also a short contribution from former president Jimmie Carter thrown in for good measure. Each piece (there are more than fifty contributors) is between one and three pages chronicling how each musician "grew up country." Nearly all of the contributors are also from the Southeast, and thus my ire.

Perhaps living in Minneapolis has made me overly sensitive about being a southerner. I'm originally from the foothills region of South Carolina—think Deliverance, but with more golf courses and less squealing—but despite the geographic location of my upbringing, I grew up with indoor plumbing, non-abusive parents, and a solid grasp of evolutionary theory. To read the contributions in this book, you'd think I'm an anomaly.

There's nothing in this book that I haven't heard before—and that's what bothers me. Growing Country repeats just about every stereotype I've ever heard regarding the South and rural life—over and over and over. I'll give a brief summary of Daniel's introduction: "Praise Jesus I was born to a poor, rural family of Southerners who taught me the dangers of new ideas and beat me everyday so I'd know wrong from right and that's why I'm making music today. Oh, and do you remember the Grand Ole' Opry? Boy, there sure ain't entertainment like that anymore! "

If Daniels were the only one expressing these sentiments, I could forgive this book. Unfortunately, I'd say the above summary could apply to almost every piece in the book. I flipped to Jimmie Carter's contribution, hoping to find something redeeming, but there just wasn't much there—his biographical notes took up more space than his two paragraph "essay."

Praise Jesus I checked this book out of the library instead of buying it.

There's still hope for the South, though. I recently had the pleasure reading The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis, a writer who brings something genuinely new to the craft of writing. And while I think it be disservice to classify Tevis as a "Southern Writer"—the settings and subjects of her work ranges around the world—I cannot help but draw pleasure from knowing that she comes from Easley, South Carolina, twenty minutes from my own hometown.

Perhaps what I love most about The Wet Collection is that I can't place it in any particular genre or style. The book is being marketed as "literary nonfiction," and I expected a collection of personal essays. But several of the pieces read more like short stories with fully developed characters. Others feel more like a series of related prose poems. And sometimes Tevis writes in forms I don't know how to describe: the image of a crumbling wall leads her into the mind of Oregon homesteader in the mid nineteenth century, then back to the present, and then suddenly Tevis is wearing a Beaver suit and wandering around a National Park, greeting campers and desperately missing her fiancé. And somehow, this all makes sense to me. I'm with her every step of the way.

Tevis does work with traditional forms in this book—memoir, lyric essay, literary journalism—but she never simplifies her subjects. "Building a Funeral" is a fairly straightforward personal essay about Tevis's experiences selling funeral plots, but the tone manages to be both humorous and heartbreaking. "Jeremiad of a Bad Drought Year" begins as a lyric essay on the Appalachian landscape, but as Tevis interweaves stories from the Bible and her own life, the piece becomes a meditation on the sacred properties of water. Tevis is constantly juxtaposing unusual narratives and images, and the result is always surprising—and beautiful.

Tevis knows something about growing up country—this book addresses, among many things, farming, family heritage, working-class life, and religion. But Tevis never falls back on stereotypes or clichés. Good books, books like The Wet Collection, challenge our preconceived ideas about the world and help us to think and feel in new ways.

If you want to meet Tevis or pick up a copy of The Wet Collection, the launch party for the book is this Thursday, October 25th at the Open Book, 7 pm. I'll see you there.

Sugar Sugar

2007-10-18T11:28:00.000-05:00

Author Steve Almond read last Thursday, October 11th at the Minneapolis Central Library as part of their “Talk of the Stacks” series. Almond was on tour promoting his newest collection of essays (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions and hoping to unload a few more copies of his last book Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.

The atmosphere was warm and playful, even when addressing sensitive emotional and political topics, much like Almond’s writing in general, and especially his new essay collection. There were bowls of sweets strategically placed around, and Almond wore a candy necklace wrapped around his wrist. Promotional gimmick? Perhaps. But with the progression of the night it began to look more like metaphor. Almond was sweetening weighty issues - like individual moral responsibility - providing an appetizing package for bitter (but essential) public medicine.

Curiously, this approach marks a sharp contrast to Almond’s inspirational figure, the late Kurt Vonnegut, who Almond describes as having a rough and unflinching honesty about the state of the world, in the image of a prophet “howling in [a] hole” (40). He explains:

We don’t mind watching guys like Jon Stewart josh around about that silly war in Iraq, or global warming. But when someone actually points out that our species is goose-stepping toward extinction – without a comfortable laugh line at the end – things get uncomfortable. (26)

And here was an evening determinably comfortable. Laughter abounds as Almond recounts his decision to resign from Boston College by open letter upon hearing about BC’s decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to speak at commencement. Almond read a few well-chosen pieces of hatemail he received in the media frenzy, and his creative responses, which were - quite frankly - hysterical.

The same tone is evident in Almond’s three-part essay “The Failed Prophecy of Kurt Vonnegut (and How it Saved My Life)” where he embarrassingly recounts his youthful infatuation with Vonnegut. This love affair produces one crappy undergraduate thesis and sows the seeds of a future creative writer. In the essay Almond is able to track down a copy of said undergraduate thesis:

…which included the proofreading marks of my college pal James Shiffer, who, perhaps not coincidentally, no longer speaks to me. The last page bore a circular stamp at the bottom right. I initially took this to be some sort of academic notarization before coming to recognize it as a large, oddly filigreed coffee stain. (16)

But the atmosphere became decidedly less comfortable when during the Q&A James Shiffer himself raised his hand and stated that he was not aware he and Almond weren’t on speaking terms. Almond handled it as gracefully as he could, even after Shiffer added that – in terms of hatemail – Shiffer had letters from Almond that were comparable to the ones just recently read. The exact relationship between these two men was never clarified, it is possible that Shiffer served in some official capacity at Wesleyan University and was responsible for giving feedback on Almond’s thesis. What did come across clearly was the tension, and it raises interesting questions for other writers.

Why might Almond have slightly exaggerated the rift? In his “Author’s Note” Almond states that the content of his book is “radically subjective, whacked by memory, but true.” Maybe this is all that was happening: memory bias. But exaggerations also make for a better story, a brief moment that is more evocative, more funny. It is condensed, and as such can often produce a more meaningful truth, something that readers can grasp onto and feel. Every writer knows this.

Yet, how necessary was it to mention this man by name? Not very. So why did Almond do it? Probably because he was still under the influence of that old youthful hurt, and currently under the influence of the soap box of personal essay, and he just couldn’t resist. Who wouldn’t have done the same?

I wonder if there’s a problem with this form: creative non-fiction. Because far too often discussions around essay and memoir writing devolve exactly like this – what is really true? Who is being implicated? And not about the work as art. Futhermore, it’s telling that despite all of Almond’s efforts to sweeten his messages, they still came out a little sour. Perhaps fiction is what gave Vonnegut the ability to portray that rough honesty without the sugar, a greater truth. Personally, I attended the reading because I enjoy Almond’s short stories. If he writes in fiction again I will be first in line to buy a copy.

cited: Almond, Steve. (Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. New York: Random House, 2007.

The pens we love:

2007-10-15T18:02:00.000-05:00

I wrote this entry with my current favorite pen. You have these pens, too, I know this: the only pen you can possibly write with at any given point; the only way, sometimes, you can write at all. For me, this favorite pen fluctuates.

As an undergrad, I only wrote in pencil—mostly, with this bad boy:

Not only was it aesthetically pleasing, it had a side-clicky! So when you erased, you didn't accidentally pump out more lead. Erasing, to me, was important: I couldn’t abide scribblings-out. I would still be writing with this kind of pencil, except, I can't find them for sale anywhere, and I have discovered pens. I still have compulsions about scribbling out mistakes, however, so, when I have time, I draw boxes over the mistakes and color them in.

My favorite pens are generally ones that make me write neatly. I can't, for whatever reason, write neatly with gel-based pens, or roller-ball filled-with-a-well-of-ink pens. I generally do better with Bics or those skinny blue Paper Mate pens I keep stealing I mean borrowing from the copy room. This is to say that I normally do better with pens that are cheap or free. I do especially well—as we will see—with pens that come free. These pens either come in the mail, or with a conference registration, or from stealing, or as a gift. I wonder if novelty correlates directly with a psychological impulse to print clearly. I wonder if being cheap also correlates directly with a psychological impulse to print neatly. Cheap, in concordance with my upbringing, = good. Good, in concordance with my third grade teacher, = nice handwriting. So, by the universally-accepted transitive property, cheap = good handwriting.

So, I suppose this essay/post has done, thus far, what essays are supposed to do: it has taught me something. I love cheap—even free!—pens. I love pens that make me print well. When I print well, I love writing. Therefore, again, calling upon geometry's transitive property, and if/then conditionals (thanks, Ms. Lougheed, for teaching me how to do proofs), if I love cheap pens, then I love writing.

Cheap pens are especially nice in another way: I always lose them. They are nice because I can replace them easily. (Key into copy room; steal pen.) I lose them because I put them in my pants pocket, and, being a girl, my pants pockets are very shallow. They fall out a lot. This is annoying. I wish I could wear shirts with front pockets deep enough to store pens. This essay/post is also confirming something I suspected but never actually, truly believed: I am a Nerd. However, pens:

A few months ago, I had to take a Dostoevsky midterm. In keeping with the Dostoevskian tradition, I knew that this midterm was going to be long, long, long, and handwritten. So I needed my pen. I had to write my midterm with that pen. Had to. Had to even more because I couldn’t find it. Anywhere. I looked everywhere. Missed one bus because of it. Not on desk, not on windowsill, not in bathroom, on table, on futon. Second bus, gone. On coffeemaker, on cat or plant or floor. Beneath bed nor futon nor table, nor cat nor plant nor etc. I railed my fist, and left to catch third bus, inferior pen in hand. Ah, it hurt.

As I was running toward the last bus that would get me to the midterm on time, my hand brushed against something long and hard jutting out of my pocket. No, writers! Do not go there! For indeed I am a girl, and, besides, the geometry of it actually impossible. It was my pen! With me all along. But it failed me on my Dostoevsky midterm—no, I did just fine, but my printing not very neat. It—the pen—fell out of my favor.

Next to cycle into my favor was my Pilot Easy Touch Medium Point. Easy touch, indeed. I have always loved RSVP pens, but I also have always lost their caps. I will not have a bald-looking pen. This Pilot Easy Touch had the easy touch of an RSVP pen but not the easy loss of their caps: it was a clicker pen. This, too, was its downfall: I couldn't stop myself from compulsively clicking it—often in time to some song I have stuck in my head. Clicking is bad enough; clicking to a beat by someone who is intrinsically beatless is horrific. Apologies to classmates who may have had to experience this.

The Pilot Easy Touches held me over for a while. Then, one day, I was sitting at my desk, looking for something with which to write. I have packed and moved this coffee can of truly terribly utensils with me five times in the past four years. Five times. And I still haven't learned to throw out a molded, plastic julienned French Fry pen, which I bartered for in a sixth-grade Odyssey of the Mind competition. It doesn't write anymore, but know this: if the thing still wrote, it would never leave my hand. So, due to the unfortunate fact that the julienned French Fry pen was drier than the Mojave, I latched onto another, equally distinctive pen.

So: the pen. Right now: my love. Simply: As an undergrad, I worked in a writing center, called, because we accepted money from a corporation, The Meijer Center for Writing and Michigan Authors. I was a Lead Consultant, which meant that I met in weekly meetings with the director of the Center and other Lead consultants. To bring seriousness and levity to our meetings, one of the Leads bought us these:

Now that I've rediscovered it, I can't stop using it. I think I have lost all credibility as a writer—should I have presumed to own any in the first place. However, on the plus side, now, I now have a combination writing utensil/cat toy. Lucy and Bill are thrilled.

Pencil it in

2007-10-09T22:44:00.000-05:00

Literary events in the Twin Cities area
(free unless otherwise indicated)

Wednesday October 10:

Daniel James Brown, author of Under A Flaming Sky. University of Minnesota Bookstore, 2:00 p.m.

Rebecca Haile, author of the memoir Held at a Distance. Amazon Bookstore, 7:00 p.m.

Nancy Horan, author of the Frank Lloyd Wright biography Loving Frank. The Loft Literary Center, 7:00 p.m.

Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman. University of Minnesota Bookstore, 7:00 p.m.

Thursday October 11:

Cartoonist John Porcellino. Big Brain Comics, 5:00 p.m.

Steve Almond, author of (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. Minneapolis Central Library, 7:00 p.m.

Friday October 12:

Cartoonist Jerry Van Amerongen. Magers & Quinn, 7:30 p.m.

Saturday October 13:

The Twin Cities Book Festival. Minneapolis Community & Technical College, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Sunday October 14:

Chuck Brown, author of Barn Dance. Nina's Coffee Cafe, 2:00 p.m.

Monday October 15:

David Sedaris. State Theatre, 8:00 p.m. $35-40

Ritual, Aesthetics, and Dislocation: Some Tips

2007-10-04T17:53:00.000-05:00

A seemingly banal action can put you in a sort of trance state, allowing your unconscious creativity to float to the surface. I copy a favorite poem out by hand. I enter the poem in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, and nuances are revealed to me that were unavailable before, no matter how many times I’ve read the poem. Being in concert with a piece of writing and its author in this way can lead one’s own creative imagination to unlock in ways that were previously unavailable. When I was coming into my own as an aesthetician and an attentive, concentrated writer, I developed many aesthetic and creative rituals that served to prepare me for the experience of writing, prepare me for the Muse, and put me into a world of heightened sensory experience, which for me is an invitation to concentration and creativity. My favorite activity is to go through a letter of my dictionary and make a list of all my favorite beautiful words, for later inspirational reference to use in poems or writing. I also make an obsessive practice of looking words up for their varieties of meaning, which almost always opens up interesting territory for a piece of writing. For awhile, I made a point to brew a specific tea (jasmine, which I call “garden tea”) to smell and drink as I wrote, which always leant a certain aesthetic quality to the writing, then—light, airy, beautiful, ephemeral. I get Bosc pears from the grocery store every week because they’re so lovely to look at, just looking at them makes me want to write, and because the word “bosc” is one of the most beautiful words ever. This doesn’t mean I write anything about bosc pears, per se, but just having one on my desk infuses some quality into the writing, which can happen when the writer is attentive to the workings of the subconscious and the environment’s effects on that. Because I find the word “kale” so beautiful, I started eating kale, first spending long minutes at the grocery store looking at it, terrified, until I finally had the courage to bring it home and eat it. This was necessary for me, because I wanted to be able to use the word if I chose, and use it to its most textured capacities. But this kind of ritual is necessary for me, even if I hadn’t wanted to use the word in a poem—it’s the conscious, conscientious attempt to make myself of the world, to be a participant in natural wonder, to be, in a word, an artist. When I am feeling particularly bereft of aesthetic inspiration, I always turn to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. I believe Stein to be our foremost Western aesthetician, and she always proves inspirational for me. Fanny Howe advocates another style of concentrating, another way to structure the lived life in writing, an aesthetics of bewilderment. This seems particularly useful to those of us who write from the perspective of child narrators, or who want to express in their writing a deep awe, pain, or confusion at the state of the world. She sees bewilderment as a way of entering the work. Bewilderment as a poetics and a politics. She attempts to write characters “who remain as uncertain in the end as they were at the beginning. Bewilderment does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. Instead, weakness, fluidity, concealment, and solitude assume their place in a kind of dream world, where the sleeping witness finally feels safe enough to lie down in mystery.” Welcome to the term, and to dislocation!

Pencil it in

2007-10-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

Upcoming events in the Twin Cities area

Tuesday October 2

Abigail Thomas, author of the bracing new memoir Three Dog Life, appears at the U of M Bookstore, 300 Washington Ave SE Mpls. 2:00 pm. FREE

Local humorist Kevin Kling reads from his new memoir, The Dog Says How at the Fitzgerald Theatre, 10 E Exchange St, Saint Paul. 7:30 pm. $15

New author Rattawut Lapcharoensap reads his short fiction at the University of Minnesota, Walter Library, 117 Pleasant St SE Mpls. 7:30 pm. FREE

Wednesday October 3

Authors and scholars John Wright and Arnold Rampersad discuss the life and work of Ralph Ellison in A Dialogue In Black & Blue at the U of M Library, 222 21st Ave S Mpls, 7:30 pm.

Poets Deborah Keenan, Jim Cihlar, and William Reichard discuss their work at Nina's Coffee Cafe, 165 N Western Ave, Saint Paul, 7:00 pm. FREE

Michael Perry discusses Truck: A Love Story. U of M Bookstore, 2 pm and Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave S Mpls, 7:30 pm. BOTH FREE

Thursday October 4

Walter Jacobs discusses his memoir Ghostbox at the U of M Bookstore, 7:00 pm, FREE

Friday October 5

Poet Linda Back McKay reads from her collection The Cockeyed Precision of Time: New and Selected Poems. Amazon Bookstore, 4755 Chicago Ave S, Mpls, 7:00 pm. FREE

Saturday October 6

Chris Finan discusses his book Palmer Raids the PATRIOT Act as part of Banned Books Week at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, FREE

Phil Martin discusses his New Writer's Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Your Career. Magers & Quinn, 6:30 pm, FREE

Sunday October 7

The U of M's own Patricia Hampl, accompanied by pianist Dan Chouinard, reads from her brand new memoir, The Florist's Daughter, at the Fitzgerald Theatre. 7:30 pm. $15

Clearing out the cobwebs

2007-09-20T09:26:00.000-05:00

WELCOME BACK! Nothing like a five-month hiatus to cleanse the palate; am I right?

We're heading into the new publication year here at Dislocate, which means new blood*, new voices, new writing, and a new issue of the magazine—our fourth, in fact.

We're also going to be trying exciting new zeitgeisty things like a podcast. And a poetry contest. While continuing to bring you the latest literary news from the Twin Cities and beyond.

So watch this space.

* Metaphorically speaking, of course. Probably.

Issue #3 Launch Party!

2007-04-24T22:38:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday we held our launch party for Issue #3 at The Ritz Theatre in NE Mpls (that's Northeast Minneapolis, if you're not into the whole brevity thing) and it was a smashing success. The party featured three wonderful readers from the third issue: John Vick, Matt Rasmussen and Erin Ergenbright.

Matt Rasmussen

Erin Ergenbright

John Vick

Mike Mueller and Stef Resnik show off Issue #3

Ladies' man Matt Burgess with Erin Ergenbright, Emily Freeman, Laura Owen, Katie Leo, and Tara DaPra

Emily Freeman and Erin Ergenbright

More photos from this and other events here!

Happy Birthday, Creative Writing MFA!

2007-04-17T16:15:00.000-05:00

Students, professors, alums, and writers convened at the University of Minnesota on April 13 for a gala celebration of tenth year of the University of Minnesota Creative Writing MFA Program. Dislocate was there, showing off copies of our brand new Issue #3, mingling with celebrities, and snapping photos.

Charles Baxter and alum Laura Flynn

Managing Editor Tara DaPra and Editor Emily Freeman

Matt Burgess and Assistant Fiction Editor Philip Fuller

Assistant Non-Fiction Editor Jim Novak, Matt Burgess, and Philip Fuller

Blog Editor Jake Mohan and Assistant Fiction Editor Laura Owen

Community Liaison Coordinator Katie Leo and Assistant Non-Fiction Editor Morgan Sherburne

Alyson Sinclair, Sara Cohen, Ethan Miller, and Fiction Editor Andrew Luckham

Parties and Children's Books

2007-04-07T21:59:00.000-05:00

Save the Date: On Friday, April 13th Dislocate will be at the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the University of Minnesota's MFA program. We'll be selling Dislocate subscriptions and copies of the new issue. If you're in the area, stop by the 4th floor of Coffman Union on the University of Minnesota campus. Come by our table and say hello, and we'll give you a free button and a back issue of the journal. The party starts at 7pm and promises all the food, drink and writers we can fit in one room.

Carson Ellis, the cover artist of Dislocate 3, illustrated the recently published Mysterious Benedict Society, a book for young readers by Trenton Lee Stewart. Take a glimpse at the illustrations (and download free bookmarks!) here.

There was no group singing involved:

2007-03-29T08:17:00.000-05:00

The University of Minnesota wrapped up on Tuesday a four-day Dylan Symposium—which, being one of two University of Minnesota MFA representatives, I do believe I am obligated to record here. There is also that small matter of Dylan perhaps being the most well-known Minnesotan (aside from Garrison Keillor and Jesse "The Body" Ventura, probably) in the world—and the most well-known Minnesotan writer, as well.

The Symposium—in conjunction with the traveling museum exhibit called Bob Dylan's American Journey, 1956-1966—is called "Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World." Part of this symposium (the term "symposium" means "drinking party" in Greek; my partner-in-crime—fiction writer extraordinaire and fellow Dylanite, Ethan—to this symposium celebrated this fact by sneaking fat cans of cheap beer into a showing of Masked & Anonymous at the museum), and the major attraction for me was a bus tour to Hibbing, Minnesota, birthplace of Robert A. Zimmerman/Dylan.

Hibbing's isolation and size—at 16,509 people, it's approximately 35.656587473002 times my town's size—made me homesick. It was like taking a bus tour of the town near where I grew up to which my friends and I would travel to get our kicks—like watching those moving picture shows.

Once we got to Hibbing, we—Ethan and I—quickly found that we'd be on a tour that would have less to do with Bob and more to do with the town and the surrounding landscape. This was fine by me—many pieces of nonfiction deal with the landscape's effect on a person. Surely enough, during a panel discussion later in the weekend, Dylan scholar (and general musicologist and organizer of the Symposium) Colleen Sheehy suggested the connection between the wasted land curling around Hibbing and the apocalyptic imagery of Dylan's early music. She also intelligently posited the connection between the mine's product and how closely its success was tied to whether there was a war going on in the world. This image of war from the top down, Sheehy said, may have inspired Dylan's song "Masters of War"—which is, unfortunately, as timely now as it has ever been.

So, after a buffet lunch at Zimmy's (a Dylan-centric restaurant in downtown Hibbing that served such gems as "Time Out Of Mind Combo Appetizer" and "Highway 61 Pizza" and a truly terrifying layer-cake/sandwich (ask us in person, really)),

we rode out a ways from town to learn about Hibbing's iron strip mine.

The mine, the largest man-made hole in the world, did indeed look like a wasteland. The ground is so rich with iron that each chunk of rock torn from the ground was stained red—even the decorative rock lining the sidewalks of the mine observatory was red. Adding to the wasteland-esque scenery was the sharp angles of all the rock. None of it had been exposed for probably more than a century—not nearly enough time for wind and snow to soften jagged edges.

The mine, in its hey-day, was taxed by one enterprising mayor of Hibbing in the 1920s. He somehow finagled a fine deal out of the mining company: that it would be taxed not on the iron already out of the ground, but all of the iron still underneath the ground. This was, in short, a few (hundred) truckloads of money.

Truck used in mining. Picture it full of money, driving to Hibbing. Ethan for scale.

Between this tax and the bribery required to move the original town of Hibbing from the patch of iron it had its feet in, the mine built for the town—among other things—a four-million dollar school. Today's equivalent would be about 45 million dollars (if my internet inflation adjustor does not lie—what?—the internet never lies).

Part of that four-million dollar school is its auditorium. This auditorium is one of the first Dylan venues—in Dylan lore, he played the stage with his high school band, The Golden Chords. His first short concert was for a talent show, and they played a Little Richard song too hot for 1950s rural Minnesota. A teacher pulled the curtain on Dylan and his band.

The auditorium itself was gorgeous. You know how many words a picture is worth, so I'll just stop beating around the bush:

The tour was mainly focused on the town and, by extension, for me, the oddity of having a gem of a school in a town where the community's tax base (they no longer get any money from the mine) would barely cover the upkeep of the building. Of course, this was fascinating—though Ethan probably voiced all of our innermost feelings when he said that what mostly we want is to drink from the same water fountain that high-school Dylan drank from.

With the mine and the school out of the way, we went to the only other places significant to Dylan's early formative (and preformative, as it were) years: his house and the stage he played on in another talent show. Neither of these places—his house or this second stage—is immortalized in any way that would inhibit their functionality. In fact, there is no trace of Dylan on them, permanently, whatsoever. I'm not exactly surprised at this Midwestern utilitarianism that requires the every-day use of artifacts that most Dylanologists would rather keep under lock and key and Plexiglas.

Bob's childhood home had two small nods to its lineage: the CD player playing his music, and a coffee table, under whose glass top lay several different books on Dylan. While we tourists/salivating Dylan fans milled about in the living room, tracking early spring gravel into the rug, the sink ran in the kitchen—someone was washing the lunch dishes—and the present owner of the house stood, shaking hands and introducing himself.

Next, we went to the town's Memorial Hall to see the stage on which Dylan and his Golden Chords took second or third place in a different talent show. The group watched for a few minutes a group of woman were curling on the ice rink, and photographed them as if they were recording the first encounters with a newly-discovered tribe of Papua New Guineans.

Downstairs, we sat for a few minutes in a hot and stuffy, small auditorium, watching a few of our tour members jump up on the stage—the stage that looked like any other, functioning, small-town-hall stage, a place for awards, commemoration, but no commemoration of Dylan. Just meticulous care and upkeep of a stage now more than 50 years old.

The town seemed almost to willfully ignore that it produced an anomaly like Dylan—except for its once-yearly Dylan Days, a grassroots festival that celebrates the arts in northern Minnesota and the memorabilia-laden Zimmy's Café. Dylan was not just an anomaly for that town and age—he is, it seems, an anomaly of the human race altogether. While it is easy—as it was suggested by one of the symosium's panels—to see where Dylan's infamous interview-sidestepping sensibilities came from and the inspiration for songs like "Masters of War," "North Country Blues," "Girl from the North Country," and "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," it is of course inherently problematic to expect—perhaps as I did—to find his roots all in one place, to try to find his footsteps set in the cement of some sidewalk. He is as transcendent of landscape and town as his songs were—and continue to be—of their contemporaries.

Interview Project #8: Yuko Taniguchi

2007-03-23T11:52:00.000-05:00

Quietude, as it relates to writing, may mean a number of things to any number of people, but when it comes to poetry, I find quietude to be the beautiful marriage of the aching and the serene. Which is one reason why I would use quietude to describe the poetry of Yuko Taniguchi. There's a halo of aching-ness in her poetry that goes beyond quietude, however. It's about longing, perhaps, or how to get the story "right." Her poems aren't quiet (in terms of subject or voice), but they move along a seemlingly predetermined trajectory toward a succinct, yearned-for revelation. And there's music...such sweet music.

Yuko's first book of poetry, Foreign Wife Elegy, is that harmonious trajectory. But the journey doesn't end there. In May, her novel, The Ocean in the Closet, will be out from Coffee House Press. As Chitra Divakaruni describes it, The Ocean in the Closet is "a beautiful and poignant novel that adroitly spans generations and continents to explore the intricate workings of the human heart in times of war and peace." Sounds pretty cool, wouldn't you say?

Read an excerpt from The Ocean in the Closet here. And read Yuko's take on the writing of her novel here.

How about some excerpts from Foreign Wife Elegy, too.

With the release of The Ocean in the Closet fast approaching, Yuko will be out and about for a number readings. Check here for dates and places near you.

On to the good stuff.

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

I am working on my poetry manuscript, Breaking Rivers (tentative title). Many poems in this collection explore the stories/experiences of Hibakusha (victims of the Atom Bomb) in Hiroshima.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Lately, I am reading many essays, novels and poems written by Hibakusha since I recently traveled to Hiroshima for my poetry project. For fun, I am reading a contemporary novel, Letter by Keigo Higashino, and a memoir, Eating Meals at the Battle Field by Kazutaka Sato. (Both texts are written in Japanese. I'm not sure if translations are available.) I also read Fall on your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. I had a great time reading the entire 508 pages. I am also reading Rin Ishigaki's poetry.

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

I admire Anna Swir's poems that are simple and complex. I also admire the work of Rin Ishigaki, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Akiko Yosano, Kotaro Takamura, Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz, Li-Young Lee, Robert Hass, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, and many more...

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

Although I was always influenced by landscape, it is only recently that I concretely began writing about landscape and its power of affecting our emotions, memories and realizations.

I could relate to Dvorak's comment when he first arrived in Iowa: "It is very strange here. Few people and a great deal of empty space" (from Patricia Hampl's Spillville). When I first arrived in Minnesota—the vast land and sky grew endlessly ahead of me—I was immediately overwhelmed. This great space, what Trish called "American vastness" in her book, was my enemy, the source of my loneliness for a very long time. I always hoped to relocate to a place where there are hills, bridges and the ocean—perhaps San Francisco. I felt more familiar and comfortable with the space being interrupted by buildings and hills. For a very long time, I blamed the land for being so foreign, and I waited for the land to become familiar to me. Since it never became familiar, I wanted to move, but the truth turned out to be that I needed to walk into it.

Last year, I was lucky enough to receive the writing fellowship from the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, which offers a two week residency at a house located in Moose Lake, MN. The house is set on over 550 acres of land including forests, one half-mile of lake shore on Little Moose Lake, beaver ponds, a heron rookery, as well as a beautiful assortment of wildflowers and wildlife. Although I was thrilled and honored to be selected as one of the fellows, I was very nervous about how well I would handle the nature and isolation (My husband was more worried about me since he knew that I was truly a city girl...).

While I was in Moose Lake, I looked closely at the landscape, the forest, and the change of the land’s appearance at different times. Soon, I was obsessed about the water stream in rivers, the movement of wind and how it affected the movement of all the plants, the color of sky, how long it took for the redness to disappear from the sky in the evening etc. Then everything—trees, flowers, wind, wild animals—seemed like the metaphor of something to me, and I wrote poems after poems everyday. I even woke up with immense joy!

Interestingly, this experience actually helped me realize why I write about music. I knew how nature inspired many composers. For example, Dvorak had a routine of walking in the morning and listening to birds singing. Tchaikovsky often took his afternoon walk alone, climbing the hills in search of the solitude. He sent a letter to his patron Nadejda van Meck with dry petals of lily-of-the-valley": "They will remind you of the South, the sun, sea warmth...There in the woods I was completely happy and immediately it was necessary to tell you about it." While I stayed in Moose Lake, I could understand how standing in the midst of birds singing and fresh air would fill one with energy. I could also understand how such energy would inspire composers to capture this moment into music. Letting the land and nature be a part of my life felt familiar, like the feeling I often get from listening to string instruments.

While I was in Moose Lake, the war started in Lebanon. I listened to National Public Radio reporting the war everyday. Since then, wherever I was, even at the most peaceful spot on the hill overlooking the river and forest, I thought of the men, women, and children who were surrounded by the terrible sounds of jets, bombs, and fire. While I felt helpless and I couldn’t do anything about the conflict and violence, at the very least, I wanted to be aware of the reality, of those who struggle hundreds of miles away. Even such a foreign concept, I touched through nature. When I came by the St. Louis River, I thought of the citizens who ran to the river in fire—a nightmare that many citizens experienced over the years and it was happening again. The opposite of violence is a prayer for peace, which was something that I could give through poetry. This is how I started working on my next project, Breaking Rivers.

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

I would say "Elegy for Cello and Orchestra by John Williams."

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

Patrice Leconte who directed The Widow of Saint Pierre.

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

Princess Kathleen from Henry V. When I first read Henry V 10 years ago, I was amazed by the sense of humor that was suddenly added by Kathleen’s character at the end of this play. I even wrote a poem about it ("Henry the Handsome V" in Foreign Wife Elegy).

How would you describe your time spent as an MFA student?

While I was at the U of M, I learned a great deal. I was just out of college, so I didn't know much about anything. I am mostly grateful for all the new reading materials that I was introduced to, especially Spanish and Polish poetry in translation. Every class I attended, I took something with me.

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

Nowadays, I do say that I'm a writer.

Favorite poetic form?

Couplet.

Best first line to a story or novel?

"The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country; the earth lay white under the night sky." —Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

(Unfortunately, this line in translation from Japanese doesn't quite explore the way the Japanese line captures the wonderful image of a train going through darkness and suddenly being in the middle of the completely white world.)

What was the genesis behind writing a novel?

I wrote a short story with a nine year old narrator, Helen, while attending Julie Schumacher's Child Narrators course. Helen's voice was very intriguing, so I let her tell her stories, which became the beginning of The Ocean in the Closet. I fell in love with her voice exploring her wonders and imagination, and through listening to her voice, she became more and more real.

Does being a poet help or hinder your approach to writing prose?

I used everything that I learned from poetry and had to learn more to finish a novel.

Can you talk a little about the research you did for The Ocean in the Closet?

I have heard many stories about Japanese-American immigration over the years, and they have been always quite memorable. The darkness of Helen's family, especially her disturbed mother and her disconnected father, is connected with the struggles I have known about Japanese immigrants. But to continue with this novel, I needed to know more about them. While I researched the experiences of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast, I found out about many biracial Japanese children who were adopted by American families starting in the 1950s and 60s. I was taken by the life stories of these individuals, and their experiences helped shape and develop specific characters in my mind. I spent a year reading many historical texts, articles, memoirs, and essays, watching documentary films, and conducting interviews with people from similar backgrounds. I took many pages of notes and tried to absorb all the details. I wanted to gain the memories of the characters. Once I started writing again, I barely returned to my notes from my research. I let my new memories guide the novel to develop its own life. I returned to my notes only after the novel was completely done, to make sure of its accuracy and consistency.

Favorite landscape?

The ocean under the blue sky. It doesn't have to be a specific view from a specific place. I just love looking at the ocean.

Can you talk about the story behind the publication of your first book, Foreign Wife Elegy?

Foreign Wife Elegy was my MFA thesis. I worked with Jim Moore who helped me realize and identify what I was trying to do through this project. After I graduated from the U of M, I continued to revise my manuscript. When I felt that I did as much as I could, I mailed it to five publishers who published the writers I admired. Coffee House Press was one of them, and they were kind enough to accept my manuscript.

Poetry's Un-doing

2007-03-13T12:16:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks back, the crew was down in Atlanta for the AWP conference. And while I can't (and don't presume to) speak for my cohorts, it was the best darn 3 days this side of games 2–4 of the 2003 NLCS.

I dig all sorts of poetry (genre-fy it if you like: narrative, prose, lyric, formal, fractured, short-line, long-line, dropped-line, etc.), but what I dig the most is when poetry un-does me. Sure, there are more objective ways to discuss or "evaluate" poems, but I'm a sentimental guy who's sweet on the un-doing. Poetry doesn't have to break me, but I like to be broken. And when it hits me, it feels o so nice. Which is why those 3 days in Atlanta were so beautiful.

The quick hits of un-doing:

• Hearing Patrick Phillips read from Chattahoochee for the first time, and then a second time 2 days later. The lingering ache of "My Lovely Assistant."

• Hearing Jake Adam York read "Substantiation." Damn if I didn't wish it would go on almost-forever.

• Hearing Natasha Trethewey at the same Greensboro Review reading as Jake and Patrick.

• Reading Kristy Bowen's Feign at 2am in the hotel lobby.

• Reading more pieces from Joshua Poteat's J. G. Heck's 1851 Pictorial Archive of Nature and Science in the new issue of Copper Nickel. Heck, the whole darn issue of Copper Nickel, really (Mathias Svalina, Gina Franco, Noah Eli Gordon, Jen Lamb, Allison Titus, etc. etc.).

• Getting my hands on NMP's re-print of The Moon is a Lighthouse by Peter Markus. I, of course, swoon.

And lastly, to everyone who stopped by the Dislocate table or chatted with me in hallways, at panels, or at their respective book fair tables, it was a humble pleasure. To meet those I writerly-adore, or those who publish the words I dig so much, it was, simply, a beautiful time.

Postmodern Poon

2007-03-05T15:10:00.000-06:00

I have this book entitled "Postmodern Pooh," which is a series of parodies of literary theory -- a bunch of people interpreting "Winnie the Pooh" in all sorts of different ways, cleverly showing that literary analysis sometimes leads to lots of different and ridiculous interpretations! Hilarious! My parents gave it to me. I've never read it. I have a bunch of English major friends out there whose parents also thought this would be a hilarious present for them. It's like the literary equivalent of a gift of fancy soaps or something. It's neat, and weird, but at the end of the day, it’s like, "Oh, goody! Strangely shaped soap!" And then you put it in your bathroom drawer and forget about it and keep using your bar of dove.

Anyway, everytime my roommate sees the spine, she thinks it says "Postmodern POON," which is a little bit different. She told me this, and it made me think of a conversation I'd had awhile ago with an ex, about how awesome it would be if you could cover for shitty sexual technique in the same way you can cover for shitty literary technique -- by evoking postmodernism. Not that there isn't great postmodern literature out there, but, like abstract art, it's easy to use as a cover for crap. I've done it myself.

So, what would "postmodern poon" be like?

"Okay, I guess you just didn't GET what I trying to do there."

"So....you didn't have an orgasm, but that wasn't what I was GOING FOR. That is such a derivative cliche."

"It's not my fault if you don't understand my vision."

"Why does sex HAVE to be good? Who made up that rule? The bourgeois literary establishment? I was trying to subvert your expectations."

"Sorry. I was just trying to make you question your metaphysical reality."

Other examples of postmodern poon:

-Refusing to have sex, and just sitting in the corner of the room in silent misery

-Providing an ironic, self-aware commentary the whole time ("Yeah, um, are you going to do it....that way? Okay, whatever")

-Refusing to have sex in the usual order, because narrative structure is a lie.

-Dressing up as pop-culture icons or cartoon characters (which, actually, makes those people that dress up like stuffed animals kind of the heroes of postmodern poon).

-Keeping silent the entire time, because there is nothing new to say.

-Or, alternatively, repeating random series of repeititve words and images the entire time: "Black black darkness darkness Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe darkness darkness darkness"

-Insisting on keeping on your clothes the whole time, becausing every "disrobing" is just another "enclothing."

-If the person doesn't call you insist that it's not because they didn't like having sex with you, but just that, existentially speaking, there is no "outside the sex."

So, that, my friends, is postmodern poon. You never have to feel anxious or insecure about your sexual technique again! Remember, you're just too deep for them to get you. Quote Derrida, and cut and run!

The $200 million poem

2007-02-23T01:33:00.000-06:00

All writers, especially poets, would do well to check out "The Moneyed Muse", by Dana Goodyear, in this week's New Yorker. It's about Chicago entrepreneur John Barr, Poetry Magazine, the reclusive pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly, and the monetary incentives they're all using to try and get more people to read poetry and more poets to write the kind of poetry people supposedly want to read.

It's a fascinating story that exists at the nexus of the art/commerce debate and the perennial question of poetry's relevance in the 21st century.

A (belated) Valentine's Day poem

2007-02-15T21:09:00.000-06:00

Something to lighten your mood:

The Luscious Very Kissy, Smoochy, Valentine Poem
by a Wahpeton Elementary School 3rd grade class, Wahpeton, North Dakota

Kiss me sweetheart.
I'm your brainless mudpie.
Kiss me, baby,
You're an empty piece of paper
For me to smooch
With muddy lizard lips.
I love you true
Like 0 + 0 = 2 zeros,
But even math has problems!
Kiss me, sweetheart,
My blue kangaroo.
I love you true
As bats hate light!
Be my earthquake, darling,
Be my molten lava honeybun
And we'll spin around
Like Earth kissing Mars!
Kiss me, luscious lips.
Pulverize me,
Make me melt
Like ice cream.
Kiss me darling
My dancing pineapple,
My rubber cement,
My broccoli popsicle.
Kiss me, you fool!

Finding flow

2007-02-12T01:35:00.000-06:00

"[Elizabeth] Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity's a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve. Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with body."

—Alan Shapiro, "Why Write?"

"Every day includes more non-being than being. Yesterday for example . . . has it happened a good day; above the average in 'being.' It [the weather] was the fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like—there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton. . . . The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can, and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both."

—Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"

"And what happens in protest or civil disobedience, I think ... is that moral questions are temporarily put to rest. Moral ambiguity is resolved; moral tension is diminished. The energies bound up in the tensions of moral doubt are again set free to fill, to power, the self. One finds oneself, simultaneously, at home in both the self and the world. ... The very same feelings of connection or belonging or being fully used and alive that we feel sometimes in solitude or sex can also be experienced in protest or resistance—not as a smug certainty of virtue but as a deepened quality or resonance of being, a sense of being, for the moment, where we belong."

—Peter Marin, "Body Politic"

"A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to relect complexity."

—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

—Joan Didion, "The White Album"

Book Review: Flow Chart, by John Ashbery

2007-01-31T17:41:00.000-06:00

Is it self-indulgent? Is it plain mad? When I was a boy they told me I was hermeneutic, and this was meant to dissuade me. Well, eat this; yet another installment of:

Ryo's Annotated Bibliography

Ashbery, John. Flow Chart: A Poem. New York, NY: Noonday Press, 1991.

A book length poem divided into six sections, just over two hundred pages, this is an intimidating work, not only for its length but too for its density and breadth. I'm not sure you are going to find a work that comes anywhere near Flow Chart in terms of variability of tone, image, narrative, diction, allusion, subject, etc. Anything is possible in this poem. That being said, I do feel some overarching comments can be made regarding both theoretical and rhetorical structuring. Ashberry embeds things multiple times within themselves, but what he ultimately returns to is discursion, a frank, questioning tone objective in its perspective and quick, always, to examine both sides, rebutting itself, though the reader has to pay fast attention to where he or she is at, as Ashbery will of course, unannounced, slip into an entirely different realm of concerns. This is not to say that this is the most fragmented, associational text you'll read, however. Ashbery allows large chunks of development, staying centered around a theme, scene, or narrative—and in larger swaths more fundamental concerns will linger. The effect is like wandering through a series of drastically different rooms, different in terms of size, color, strangeness, concreteness, mood, music, etc etc. But, sometimes the walls are solid, and sometimes they only appear solid, and sometimes there are no walls at all, just varying areas of light. All of this makes it extremely difficult to pull out an overarching concern, but one does seem to glimmer forward, which is established by the gesture the poem makes of decentered inclusivity. Ashbery allows a kind of ?breathing space? for any and all perspectives of the world, the commingling of which, in its constant flux, makes up the body of his own perspective, on a global scale, the perspective of the poem as a whole, ?And these marginalia—what other word is there for them?—are the substance of the text / by not being allowed to fit in.? (p. 37). However, Ashbery also recognizes, in an almost Hegelian way, the need for an overarching truth, an actual ?something? rather than the ?something something.? The fact that this absolute cannot be found leaves the speaker at times hopeless, though he argues against this hopelessness for what can be salvaged. In more specific terms, the poem is concerned with itself, its success at communication while maintaining democratic (i.e. inclusive) principles, which, in some ways, are a response to a failure in communication:

Everybody must vote. Everybody's vote must be accepted into the

tilting radio tower that is collapsing in one's own best interest in one

dark swoop of mingled horror and relaxed apprehension: to accomplish

anything more would be a joke. (p. 38)

Ashbery is pointed in his commentary: this inability to communicate, the ruination of the radio tower, while it might be fundamental to our human condition, is furthered by our own social and individual dispositions and our subsequent behaviors. We lack a vigorous response to our own undoing, our horror is ?mingled,? and our apprehension ?relaxed.? He is most pointed, I think, toward corporatism and consumer culture, evident by the title and approach of the poem as a flow chart, but also seen in local moments throughout:

[…] utopias can crumble

in that split-second, and you may wake up finding you have more than you

ever wanted to own,

but by that time the dream is falling in on itself in slow motion or someone

is dismantling it. (p.48).

Ashbery, of course, speaks of a Jeffersonian utopia, but I think the notion has deep, alternate implications throughout this text. He is largely cynical about utopias, though toward the final pages he invests himself in a developed vision:

Thus, all things would happen simultaneously and on the same plane, and

existence, freed

from the chain of causality, could work on important projects unconnected

to itself and so

conceive a new architecture that would be nowhere, a hunger for nothing,

desire desiring itself. (p. 200).

Asbhery's utopia is not agrarian but physical, astronomical and atomic and philosophical—a unified field, ?simultaneity,? the effect of which, it seems, might be an end to ?desire,? even, nostalgia for desire (which, perhaps, undercuts the utopia). It appears that what prevents us from achieving this is the ?chain of causality,? the flowchart itself, which requires of ?existence? constant attention to its own preservation. Unfortunately, we are only afforded the chain, existence is always under threat, so that whatever moments of truth that come to us come as phantasmagora, like invisible stones one can only see because they've been shat on by birds, invitations in the mail to the gluing of the top of a mountain back on, or better yet, comes to us ?here and there, if only in the gaudy hues of the diaphanous wings / of some passing insect,? and yet, there is hope, as the speaker continues, that ?that is enough, however, to send the scribes back to their tablets.? (p. 113). Thus, Flow Chart, for me, becomes about what we can salvage, what might still have value in our hyperreal and overabundant world. Certainly the implications are for the self, and Ashbery is most beautiful when closing his work, addressing the self. It seems, even as we are being constantly shut out of any significant understanding of who we are, we have a predilection to always try and work our way back in, to,

[…] live up to that image of ourselves as it gets

projected on trees and vine-coated walls and vapors in the night sky: a

distant

noise of celebration, forever off-limits. By evening the traffic has begun

again in earnest, color-coded. It's open: the bridge, that way. (p. 216)

This has certainly become one of my all time favorites. Flow Chart 4-ever!

Blooming Doomsday

2007-01-25T14:51:00.000-06:00

With the world ending and all it's getting harder and harder to write for posterity. Global warming, nuclear proliferation, the Doomsday clock going Daylight Saving Time, and other pressures on our existence, are creating an inhospitable environment for the writer who hopes to be appreciated by readers of tomorrow. From the look of things, by tomorrow there won't be any readers. But if by the grace of a strengthened Kyoto Protocol there are still literate people alive you can be assured these privileged survivors will be too busy looting, drinking, smoking, crying, sobbing, sun-bathing, praying, and freely fornicating to bother curling up in the passenger seat of an abandoned Mercury Mountaineer with your dense and highly literary book. They won't have time to read the novel's footnotes when they're living out the footnote of human history. Without posthumous fame and appreciation is there even a reason to write?

The short answer is no. The long answer is no I don't think so. The answer is strongly influenced by the criteria of the question. It's my opinion one should never write for posterity. For one thing, you'll never see any of that money. And only the very devout believe, as some religious texts claim, God reserves Heaven's best seats for writers, where they can, without obstruction, observe later generations of readers increasing their posthumous fame. Observe, however, that these books were all written by writers, many of whom were likely considering their own posthumous fame in writing that passage.

It's with some anxiety, then, that certain literary writers observe the end of human life. In situations like these sometimes all that's needed is a change in perspective—the proverbial frown inversion. With the decimation of the planet comes an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to refocus one's literary efforts. While not a novel idea, perhaps writers should reconsider the aesthetic whims of the living. There is much to be gained. Money, for instance. You can still address the big human issues affecting us today. War, famine, greed, these are still viable subjects. Add one thing—a hero, who, with a little bit of wit and a measured amount of muscle, can overcome the big bad blank. Envisage an actor who might play your hero. Tom Hanks is good. So is Tom Cruise, but not so much. Consider carefully because you'll get more money if your book's made into a movie. Videogames might follow. At night, you can nestle your sleepy head in the nooks of the embossed title of your latest thriller. And do not worry about that other quote from the holy book "Lay not up for yourselves literary treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal." Moths have been genetically engineered away from book consumption to use in ethanol production. Metals are for missiles and only the most desperate of thieves would rob a bookstore.

Another option might exist. The hyper-literate indulges the intellect and the bestseller boils the blood but what pricks the space between these two? It won't be that which hatches elaborate plans or bullies others with a shaking fist. It's a kind of literature that shows its reader that life is present beneath the surface of facts and rising sea levels. This kind of literature proves, by eliciting an elusive tremor in that place not intellectual and not excitable, that our experience of life exists only marginally within the knowable world. There is a whole other margin, and by writing in it, there is some profit.

Nabokov, a victim sometimes of his own intellect, provides an incomplete definition of this writer—"A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way to what…" The editor notes that at this point two pages are missing from Nabokov's manuscript. But in a moment of inspiration, he finishes the paragraph with this later fragment—"under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."

Perhaps the future isn't bleak ... just a little overcast. In the end we've still got love and beauty, and we can walk hand-in-hand while we learn the ins and outs of this new planet.

Two blank pages between then and now. Time to start writing.

Interview Project #7: Simone Muench

2007-01-18T13:38:00.000-06:00

The first poet I saw read their own work was someone I can't remember. But the second? The second one I do remember. I remember colors: reds and greens and girls' dresses and other things I'm sure I'm remembering wrong. I remember grittiness: the kind where there's dirt and blood and dry flowers hanging by a window. I remember fingers (or was it one finger preserved in a jar?). I remember all of these things like some irascible collage where words turned into images and images into words and everything rubbed up against everything else. I remember, for the first time, noticing the spaces within a poem and how things act/react in the spaces they share. It was fantastic. It was revelatory. It was Simone Muench.

Simone's most recent book, Lampblack & Ash, was winner of the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. In her introduction to the collection, Carol Muske-Dukes writes that the poems "speak to the reader like high-speed oracles." Oracles indeed. Go read.

Simone also has a chapbook (Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum.) at one of this interviewer's favorite presses, New Michigan Press. And last I checked, you could find yourself a copy of her first full-length collection, The Air Lost in Breathing, at Abe Books.

A number of Simone's poems can be found at various places: DIAGRAM and Glimmer Train and Poetry 365 and The Melic Review and new stuff (those orange girls) at Three Candles.

There are also some interesting reviews and interviews and chats out there for you to gander: here and there and there and here. And you can read a variety of informative and amusing and noteworthy snippets from Simone at Sharkforum.

And so.

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

I've been working on a manuscript called Orange Girl that will be released in chapbook form in July from Dancing Girl Press, run by the multi-talented and tireless Kristy Bowen. I hope to extend it to a full-length manuscript. The term "orange girl" historically refers to girls during England's Restoration period who sold oranges at the theatre. Selling oranges was often a euphemism for prostitution. All of the titles are extracted from the OED circling around the word "orange"; for example, "The orange-girl is generally allowed to enter an auction-store, for auctioneers are mortal, and sometimes eat oranges."

The series initially arose out of a collaborative exercise I did with poet Kristy Odelius. We exchanged 20 lines a day, ala Harry Mathews. I've also collaborated with William Allegrezza (moria) in a more integrated manner and we have a long poem forthcoming in Dusie.

What sorts of things have you been reading?

Since it's the holidays and I've been on a road trip to Kentucky and Louisiana, I have several books in which I've managed to make it to the half-way mark: Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Buffyites and shoplifters of the world unite); a serial killer book called The Apprentice; Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis's superb book of poetry Intaglio; Benjamin Peret's From the Hidden Storehouse trans. by Keith Hollaman; Rio Bravo by Robin Wood and Cat People by Kim Newman--both part of the great BFI series. When I'm home and have access to the internet I usually peruse crimelibrary.com and horror reviews at bloody-disgusting.com.

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

I have two favorites that are quite different from one another, even though both are homages. One is an old poem to Tom Waits. I like its simplicity, and that out of all of my poems it's probably the one closest to song lyrics. It's certainly no "Kentucky Avenue" or "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis," but I wanted to work in Waits' dedicatory and elegiac manner, within that liminal space of song and poem. The other poem is "By Your Mouth," an homage to the French surrealist Robert Desnos. If I had to pick a representative piece, this would probably be it--a love of metaphor's associative logic, three sections, a faux-sonnet, and couplets, my favorite stanzaic form.

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

No writer, but a bevy of writers: Wallace Stevens, Angela Carter, Julio Cortazar, Robert Desnos, Faulkner, Plath, Celan, and Neruda. These are the people I return to for direction, sustenance, and illumination. More contemporary writers with influence include Charles Wright, Lucie Brock-Broido, and Yusef Komunyakaa; my teachers Marilyn Krysl, Reg Saner, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ed Dorn, Anne Winters, and Michael Anania; and my UIC cohorts Kristy Odelius, Mary Biddinger, Jackie White, Chris Glomski, Garin Cycholl, Kimberly Lojek, Mackenzie Carignan, and Sean Starr, among many others. I believe in the "the exhilaration of influence" as opposed to "the anxiety of influence."

How important is the specificity of place in your work?

I'd say quite important. Originally from rural Louisiana, I can't seem to shake the country road dust out of my poems. They are enamored with soil. My grandmother and mother are horticulturists so I'm beholden to them for all the flora and fauna that inhabit my poems.

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

As you've probably gathered, I'm not good at singular responses, so Germaine Dulac of The Seashell and the Clergyman, Georges Franju of Eyes Without a Face, Maya Deren, Ladislaw Starewicz (he created an amazing stop-motion film called Fetiche (The Mascot) that's on a dvd with Dreyer's Vampyr, Dario Argento, and Andrzej Zulawski (I actually wrote a poem in response to his disturbing film Possession). Mainly these directors because of their configurations of desire, violence, the marvelous and the bizarre.

Though in the end, I'd probably pick a Mervyn LeRoy/Busby Berkeley combo with Ginger Rogers singing one of my poems in Pig Latin...or Billy Wilder with the inimitable Barbara Stanwyck playing the title character. I certainly wouldn't turn down Wong Kar Wai or Zhang Yimou with Christopher Doyle as cinematographer either. This is pure wish fulfillment so I'll stop now before this becomes the entire interview.

Are there any "words of wisdom" that linger in your head when you're writing?

The response that makes me smile every time I read it is Frank O'Hara's answer to writing poems: "You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep...As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you."

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

For a period of time I was taken with the reply, "I'm a mathematician." It's a great conversation killer. I still say it occasionally when I'm not in the mood to talk about what I do. Instead of saying I'm a poet, I usually tell people I teach. I also tend to prefer to talk about film before poetry. I enjoy how animated people get when discussing movies. I'm always intrigued by what people are viewing, and what they like/dislike and why, especially in terms of genres.

Your poems are loaded with colors, especially reds and oranges. How conscious of color are you when writing? Do you write with color in mind or do those images just seem to come of their own volition?

I think that I'm a better visual learner than aural learner, and I often "see" my poems cinematically. Color helps anchor the poem for me. In my previous response to directors, I specifically mentioned Argento, Wong Kar Wai, and Zhang Yimou because of their innovations in coloration. And I've always loved Stevens, partially because of his obsession with color, most expressively in "Disillusionment of 10'Clock" but also beautifully illustrated in his poem "Gray Room."

A number of your poems are comprised of couplets. What is it about that form that appeals to you?

I think of poems as collaborative acts; they are call-and-responses. The couplet perfectly illustrates this idea via its two-part form: dialogic; question & answer; holler & echo, etc.

Your poem, "One Swallow Doesn't Make a Summer" (from Lampblack & Ash) opens with a fantastic list of what "a poem is" (e.g. "cuttlebone," "Baudelaire's concubine," "a lunar reader"). Can we get a few more?

Well instead of accreting more of my own phrases how about C.D. Wright's idea that a poem is "new ways of moving under my dress."

What is your take on the phrase "Southern poetry"?

Adjectives are sometimes employed as a tool to diminish what one does, a reduction technique whether it be "southern poetry," "chick flicks," "erotic fiction," "woman poet," etc., and certain adjectives are more devaluing than others. For some reason, the phrase "Southern poetry" has always had a ring of regional exclusiveness, so I don't use the phrase. In an interview Charles Wright says, "Of course I see myself as a Southern poet. That's where I'm from. But I don't see myself as exclusively so, or seamlessly contained therein." I think his answer demonstrates his, and my own, discomfort with adjectival categories and the impulse to side-step them.

Favorite poetic form?

Each semester, I have my students create forms by collaboratively deciding on 8 stipulations for a poem (creating decisions about stanza length, punctuation, syllabic count, etc). Those end up being some of my favorite forms. I like the bouts-rimes for the same reason--that it invites collaboration around a collective group of rhymes. Denise Duhamel wrote a double sestina called "Incest Taboo" that's pretty impressive, and has always made me want to attempt one, though I've yet to do so.

Favorite landscape?

I love water and caves and forests. Big cats in big trees are good too.

Dogwood or gardenia?

Couldn't choose. I grew up with gardenias in my grandmother's yard in Benson, Louisiana. They smell so sweet I used to lick the petals. Similar to the gardenia is another plant my grandmother grew called magnolia fuscata, better known as banana shrub. It smells remarkably like bananas, but much to my disappointment as a kid, it doesn't taste like them. Later, when I lived in the Ozarks in Arkansas, dogwoods and redwoods threaded the woods. When they bloomed in Spring, the whole mountain seemed to shimmy.

What is the "Great American Poem"?

I think that's an impossible question to answer, at least for me. However, if I were to choose a few poems beyond the obviousness of Whitman, I'd probably list Stevens' "Sunday Morning," Berryman's The Dream Songs, and agree with McCombs' choice of Charles Wright's Country Music but in a do-si-do with C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining. And the list goes on.

The Ugliest Books of 2006

2007-01-09T12:53:00.001-06:00

Bookslut has published its list of 2006's worst-looking book covers. I've always been particularly sensitive to the aesthetics of book covers, and since learning that most authors have absolutely zero control over what goes on the cover of their book (and, in some cases, even its title), the whole enterprise seems almost frightening. Especially when it produces such ugly results. Check out Bookslut's list and nominate your own candidates in the comments.

There is consolation in the fact that, with Carson Ellis on our team, DL3 won't suffer a similar fate.