Q: Is it wrong to e-mail this guy for the sheer snickering joy?

A: You’re a jerkface, Jerk.

Q: So it is.

Read the poem for yourself.

No. We won’t know what Apple’s announcement is exactly until 10:00 AM Pacific time – but there’s enough speculation, all concentrated around the same general assumptions, that the possibilities of the Apple Tablet seem reasonable to consider.

According to most guesses, the Apple Tablet will be an e-book reader – although not a device dedicated to reading. John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball, has this to say:

If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or just anything, I say you’re thinking too small — the equivalent of thinking that the iPhone was going to be just a click wheel iPod that made phone calls. I think The Tablet is nothing short of Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

But a quote from Steve Jobs mentioned in this essay implies that he has little interest in e-book readers: “People don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the US read one book or less last year.”

Also, while most e-book readers – think Kindle and Nook – are dedicated devices, meaning they don’t do anything but e-books; and while that’s been lauded as a gesture toward the preservation of traditional experiences of reading, Jobs has also said that “I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing, but I think the general-purpose devices will win the day.”

While these quotes – and particularly the first – might seem to imply that Jobs doesn’t have any interest in the e-book market, Gruber says that he “would square the two remarks as follows: Not enough people read to make it worth creating a dedicated device that is to reading what the original iPod was to music. [...] But e-reading as one aspect among several for a general-purpose computing device — well, that’s something else entirely.”

Given this logic, which seems reasonable, we can probably expect that, assuming the Tablet is an e-book reader, it won’t only be an e-book reader – and if Gruber’s right, it might be something equivalent to a laptop, a device we’ll buy in place of the macbook – and it might even end up, as Gruber says, “redefining the experience of personal computing” in the same way that iPods redefined MP3 players, or how the iPhone – and its apps – have changed the expectations for cell phones.

But: Apologies. This is the Linebreak blog, not a tech forum, so I’ll get to the bit that intrigues my poetic sensibilities: Gizmodo’s Brian Lam writes, in an article titled “Apple Tablet to Redefine Newpapers, Texbooks, and Magazines“, that Apple has been “in talks with several media companies rooted in print, negotiating content for a ‘new device’” – including The New York Times, McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press. He also claims “several executives from one of the largest magazine groups” recently presented “their ideas on the future of publishing” to Apple.

More? Yesterday, in The Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg reported that “Book publishers were locked in 11-th hour negotiations with Apple Inc. that could rewrite the industry’s revenue model after the technology giant unveils its highly anticipated tablet device Wednesday.”

Finally, mostly for fun: There was also a strange rumor going around about this time last year, courtesy of Newsarama’s Vaneta Rogers, who passed along a word of an odd activity at Apple as reported by Andy Ihnatko, a technical writer and a contributer to some big-gun media outlets: “For awhile, trucks loaded with books would arrive at a loading dock on the Apple campus, and offload big, big, big, big, huge load of books, and then the trucks would leave empty. And Apple does not have a 100,000-book employee library there on the Apple campus.” Ihnatko guesses that Apple might be preparing to go into the e-book market, and wants to have a lot of titles. He goes on to speculate about “a large-screen iPod Touch or something very much like it.”

But, really, the most interesting proposition is summarized best by Brian X. Chen and Dylan F. Tweeny of Wired in “Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets“ . They write, simply, “Apple’s goal is to offer a new platform for content creators to reinvent books, magazines and online content.”  Without hesitation, they continue, expanding on what they mean by “reinvent”:

Already, iTunes LP utilizes HTML5 and JavaScript code to present richer album experiences that can include cover art, liner notes, lyrics and more, in addition to music. ITunes Extras works in a similar way with movies. Both take advantage of a browser built in to the iTunes application to present multimedia content.

An iTunes book involving HTML5 would be a logical extension of the platform to create similar rich-media wrappers for e-books and e-magazines. But why stop at the covers?

Content creators could use HTML5 and JavaScript to create well-designed, interactive content. That could be as simple as an illustrated and code-enhanced story or as complex as a fancy digital magazine packed with video and audio.

This would signal, to say the least, a fundamental shift in understanding – but not in regard to the e-book reader. When it comes down to it, this would  ultimately demand a reconsideration of the e-book itself.

Returning to to Gizmodo’s Brian Lam, we find an even cleaner description of what this might mean for readers: “The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static.” A contributer to The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs expands on what this implies for readers – and writers:

New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That’s the really exciting thing here. Not the tablet itself, but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature. Gasp. Geddit? Is the fucking light going off yet? This is what Anton Chekhov meant when he said that the medium is the message. This is why the Tablet is so profound.

There is no point in moving to digital readers if we’re just going to do what we did on paper. That’s why Kindle is such a piece of shit.

Here’s what interests me: “New technology spawns new ways to tell stories,” and, also: “the medium is the message.” Maybe you know me by now, and assuming you do, you’re are fully aware of my weakness for speculation. So, of course, I’m asking this:

What implications would this have for collections of poetry?

Given Linebreak’s audio element, it makes sense that I wonder if select poems – or, heck, all the poems – included in a book might link to recordings of that individual poem by the author? Or videos of various, lengthier readings? Embedded images showing the art that inspired an ekphrastic poem? Links to the sources of epigraphs? All the allusions hyperlinked to obscure Wikipedia articles? Definitions of flagged words? In short: Will the reader interaction that might be enabled by Apple’s Tablet only result in contextualizing poems more effectively, more immediately?

Or, as in Steven Johnson’s article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write” from The Wall Street Journal, a piece I’ve written about before, will every poem have a “Comments” section, like a blog post – a place to praise, or to vent puzzled frustrations? Explications, discussions by readers?

Will we be able to believe John Stuart Mill’s famous claim that poetry, as defined against public speech, “is read as overheard”  - a quote that informed at least one cultural theorist’s opinion that poetry cannot have the influence of public speech. When the “overheard” poem is surrounded by an active and engaged community of readers, each one very aware the others, can a poem remain an intimate experience?

Is it true that we’ll see what Johnson describes as a “great flowering of annotating and indexing,” so that “readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review”? Is the end result of this, truly, that links to the poem – or even links to a line, or to a word of the poem – will these “citations”, to use Johnson’s language, “become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today,” given that search engines respond to the number of inbound links a page has.

Could today’s announcement be the beginning of the fragmentation of Johnson predicts, with “every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked”?

Johnson’s dream of the future of literature might be almost apocalyptic in the sense that books as we know them, books as whole and physical objects, could be completely lost – or, maybe worse, retained as a kind of trinket, a novelty. However, the idea of interactive text also opens entirely new territory for literature, which could easily be seen as exhilarating.

Myself, I’m not sure which emotion, or emotions, to have. If anything, I feel removed. I can’t seem to reckon with what this all implies – it’s odd and foreign, an unreal future; it’s the Twilight Zone, a world moving with and against somehow-familiar, but subtly different rules. It’s a supposition to me – but I realize it could be very actual, very soon. I’m not sure what to do with that.

Really, it seems likely that we’re a few hours away from, at least having a foundation for the kinds of interactive texts Johnson imagines; we’re just barely set off from a moment that could be defining for literature. Put briefly – and I think I’m being honest, assuming Apple’s Tablet lives up to hype, even eventually – this is an event that could tilt the poetic landscape, remake it as almost impossibly different. And, so. Should we then presume?

And how should we begin?

As usual, NPR has a point: In her article, Lynn Neary points out,  ”you can’t put a pretty bow on an e-book — and that’s where traditional booksellers still have an advantage.”

But that’s probably cold comfort given that the article fully acknowledges the growing popularity of e-book readers: Neary quotes Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti as saying that the Kindle is the company’s best-selling product overall  - ”in both units and revenue” – and Barnes & Noble’s e-book reader, Nook, has already sold out for the holidays. On top of that, of course, buying books online – particularly from Amazon - is still a major threat, too.

I’d be devastated to lose indie bookstores like The Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, MA – or, my current haunts, Dickson Street Bookshop and Nightbird Books here in Fayetteville. No question about it. But I’m also broke enough that it’s hard – if not downright dumb – to say ‘No’ to Amazon, even if it does mean paying for postage.

But it’s even harder to justify buying a physical copies of some books at all – say, Shakespeare’s Collected Works. I could just as easily read it in its entirety online – or even download the iPhone app dedicated to Shakespeare’s work, or more easily still, I could just bring it up on an app I’ve already downloaded, like Stanza.

So, if I had a Kindle proper, I can imagine it might be hard to convince myself to spend significantly more for a paper copy. In some cases, I’m sure I would, but it wouldn’t be a matter-of-course anymore – maybe more like a mark of honor. Something like that.

But when it comes to e-book readers, Steven Johnson seems to think that the entirety of the way we experience books might be at stake. In his article “How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write”, which was published in The Wall Street Journal in April 2009, he explains that doesn’t just see e-books and physical books as competing for the same territory. He sees the potential for e-books to provide an entirely different – and entirely unprecedented – reading experience all together, sparking a new vision for the publishing industry as a whole.

For starters: Your library? Every word could be searchable. I think that’s beautiful – but Johnson sees that as just the beginning: What if every word in a book has the potential to be a hyperlink?

With books becoming part of this universe, “booklogs” will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. [...] You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning.

Johnson points out that this could, in essence, become “a permanent, global book club,” and he also notes that it would mean that “nobody would read alone anymore.” But we’ve learned from Oprah that bookclubs aren’t all bad, and are exactly what some readers need to get started  - or to keep going.

However, Johnson sees these potential hyperlinks as being the catalyst for more dramatic changes to the way we read – and even write:

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that “front doors” matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

That’s where Google rankings come into play. Ultimately, Johnson foresees books themselves competing for Google rankings, and each one will need to generate links or citations to become the first or second hit:

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison’s controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google’s results for anyone searching “invention of light bulb.”

In Johnson’s view, this leads to “every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked.”

He assumes this will entail serious changes for writing and publishing: Publishers will want high Google rankings, and that’s bound to affect the writing that gets published. For authors, would it only mean being sure to pack a solid punch in every paragraph – or, as Johnson suggests, would it result in “entire books written with search engines in mind”?

What does that even mean?

More: Because books won’t be unified any more, but seen in terms of successful chapters, great paragraphs, etc., it might not even make sense to sell books as a whole package. Johnson notes, “many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge.”

Drawing on this, he imagines a la carte pricing – selling a chapter of a book the way the iTunes store sells a song from an album. Chapters would need to learn to stand on their own – or would, at least, be lauded in the marketplace for doing so – and a book would have to give its reader a clear incentive to buy the next chapter. What might that incentive be? Johnson says it plain: “Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.”

Now, Johnson doesn’t address the question of poetry, but I can’t help wondering. Will we be buying a poem or two online for 99 cents each? Will every erudite word or classical allusion be linked – and would that be limiting or freeing for poets? Would poets try to avoid those reader-distracting hyperlinks – and at what cost to, say, poetic diction? Question after question after question! It boggles the mind!

Bizarre!

But, even given these prospects, there is a certain joy to what Johnson describes as “the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading.” There is a pleasure in reading as a solitary act. I don’t think that will be terribly easy to forget.

After all, as Johnson points out, even the Kindle currently tries to preserve this kind of reading experience, not even including a dedicated e-mail client.  So, maybe this hypertext vision won’t catch on?

Either way, I have a headache now, but, regardless: Buy your poetry collections from your local indie bookstore when you’re able, enjoy folding corners to mark a good poem while you can – and try not to imagine that every other word is bright blue and underlined. Good luck!

Because Slate explains the gist behind their “Write like Sarah Palin” contest way more gracefully than I ever could:

In honor of Sarah Palin’s best-selling new memoir, Going Rogue, we asked Slate readers to submit sentences that captured Palin’s unique style of writing. We received more than 700 entries, the best of which combined pastoral lyricism (“the soft periwinkle glow of the Alaskan morning”) with unlikely metaphors (“The snow machine pummeled through the white-dusted plain like a jubilant beaver”) and an adventurous approach to the English language.

My favorite result: “Unlike New York, Wasilla would always have my heart which not only pumps red, but also white and blue.”

What’s yours?

The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English is a book by “Dr. Goodword (Robert Beard)” that claims to – you guessed it – tell you the 100 most ravishing words in the English language:

Dr. Beard’s book is a collection of the loveliest words in the English language, carefully researched and written up in small one-page essays designed to help increase the beauty of our conversations and out understanding of how and why we speak the ways we do. The book also contains an essay on what makes words beautiful, so that you may go beyond the book in beautifying your speech.

Moreover, the list is provided to us. Poets, break out your pencils. Let the loveliness wash through you.

***

UPDATE: “Pyrrhic”  makes the list – and the iamb? Left out in the cold. Where is justice?

We at Linebreak act, on rare occasion, ambivalent about paper. OK. I know that’s an understatement. We get nearly unreasonable when yet one more print journal comes whining, prophesying that online journals are a sign of Armageddon – or at least the end-times – and so on, and so on. Needless to say, when we hear that kind of crazy talk, we tend to become almost as aggressively annoyed as a teenager who’s being quizzed about how school went. At least.

But really, our impatient eye-rolling would start to seem a little strange – even hypocritical – if you were to come over for coffee: You’d see bookcases doubled-up with two rows of books on a shelf; books laid sideways on top of the books standing upright; books stacked on the coffee table – on the  floor around and under the coffee table! Books swinging from the ceiling fan!  Books in the bathtub! Books in the fridge! Be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ale Van Allen O’Shea – Oh! The Books You Would See!

So I identify probably a little too closely with this cartoon from The New Yorker: Some guy showing his lady-friend around his impressively book-filled apartment says, “Those are the books I never had a chance to finish, and those are the books I never had a chance to start.”

Yeah. I bought that mug.

I’ll buy books compulsively if you let me near them – even though I already have a rather looming stack still waiting to be read. I’d insist that this is not OK, but it seems perfectly normal in my social circle, so I go with it.

But now: Holidays are rumbling home, and they’re accompanied by a motorcade of the gift-laden expectations of your family and friend(s). They’re escorted by an overwhelmingly sizable marching brass band of consumer goods to choose from. Terror!

Since I assume that you might have more than a few bibliophiles on your list, I thought I’d be helpful, relay a few lists of picks for the best books of 2009 – and generously let you know you which ones made my wishlist. After all, I wouldn’t want you to worry too much over what to get me. You have enough to worry about. Yes?

In the article “Christmas Gifts 2009: The Most Beautiful Books Of The Year” on Huffington Post, Lina Tabori from Welcome Books has compiled a wide-ranging list that includes both Batman and W. Eugene Smith’s ”legendary” photographs of 50’s and 60’s jazz musicians. The unifying factor: She considers these “the most beautiful books of the year”. (Of course, the books are physically beautiful – and the content sounds promising in most cases – but if you’re just looking for pretty, you probably can judge these books by their covers. Hooray!) Which of the books on this list do I want, you ask?

Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans is a 528-page catalogue of Robert Frank’s photographs, and it includes an introduction from our own Jack Kerouac.  His photos document America as it was fifty years ago, and as Tabori notes, “One cannot say that the America he observed was always one he loved.” (Amazon: $48 – or a signed copy for $8,000. Your call.)

There might be a conflict between being a feminist and being high femme, but I hope not. Here’s one reason why: In My Favourite Dress by Gity Monsef, Samantha Erin Safer and Robert de Niet, 100 major designers picked their all-time favorite dress – and this book showcases their choices. Photograph after photograph of gorgeous designs presented in interesting ways. Am I being mesmerized, hypnotized by the patriarchy if I buy this? Is this book just a tool for further brainwashing the ladies? Maybe. But it’s so pretty! Dilemmas are so hard! (Amazon: $32.67)

Inside the Painter’s Studio by Joe Fig reminds me of Linebreak’s series “Where the Magic Happens” – both glimpse where art is created, but in regard to painters and poets, respectively. While Inside the Painter’s Studio gives you 214 photographs of the studios belonging to famous painters, Fig also takes a time-out to ask each painter about their process and their beliefs about art. Fascinating. (Amazon: $23.10)

Meanwhile, over at NPR, Susan Stamberg’s article “Season’s Readings: Top Picks From Indie Booksellers,” has revealed a particular book – or, really, a boxset of books – that I covet terribly: The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4. This collection features interviews with an impressive array of novelists, playwrights and – (Most importantly?) – poets. According to Amazon, interviewees include T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, and Robert Lowell. While most of these interviews are available online by now, being able to read them all by candlelight when the power’s out is just about irresistible. I can only hope W.H. Auden’s interview found its way in. (Amazon: $40.95)

Also courtesy of NPR, two more lists for those among you who read the fiction: Glen Weldon gives us his personal  list of “The Best Five Books To Share With Your Friends”, and Jessa Crispin catches us up with contemporary world literature in “A World of Novels: Picks For Best Foreign Fiction.”

If you prefer to maintain your purity, reading only poetry, you might check out Ted Genoways’s list of “The Top 10 Poetry Books of 2008″ over at The Virginia Quarterly Review. Sure, it’s a little behind the times, but the 2009 list isn’t posted yet. Deal with it.

Alternately, if you’re really looking for the greatest of the latest, check out the No Tell blog. They’ve let quite a few folks supply litanies of 2009’s best poetry collections, and they’re all worth glancing over.

In the end, though, I’m a sucker for the Great Dead Ones, so naturally, one list I find appealing comes from The Academy of American Poets. They’ve rattled off some titles they think of as  “31 Groundbreaking Books”,  promising that the list “showcases the masterpieces of American poetry that have influenced—or promise to influence—generations of poets.” Additionally, they provide a brief description of each book’s importance, sample poems from it, an essay on it, and more – seemingly everything but the book itself. Maybe a really good place to get some gift ideas?

After all, what can go wrong when handing off Leaves of Grass to a poetic compatriot? Nothing, right?

In this, my triumphant return to the Linebreak blog, I’ll just say it: I sympathize with the artists on Cracked’s list of “5 Musicians Who Need to Find Something New to Sing About“.

Granted, this is only because I’m notoriously guilty of writing no fewer than 3 kinds of poems. True story. So, at least, I sympathize to some minimal degree, which is to say mostly as a knee-jerk reaction.

Comfort me: Are there poets besides me who ought to do anything it takes - anything – if it means new subject matter? What are your habitual poem topics? Which cliches need to stop immediately? (For example: Are you going to hunt down a dog next time you read the word “ether”? Tired of Salt Lake City  and midnight buffets showing up in Poetry – often in the same poem? I know I am.)

Help these tired poets: Comment sections exist for several reasons, and this is one of them. Use an alias if you must – like Judger McJudgerson. Or, you know, one that’s clever at all.

My Advice:

1. Cage a Jameson scholar in your office – one specializing in the theorist, the whiskey. Better: Specializing in both. 2. Pick up an adderall-driven prostitute problem. 3. Launch a mad quest, following the pirate map you drew on the back of a Wendy’s napkin three years ago, to rediscover Dr. Phil; keep in mind that this effort should be rooted in the good Christian guilt resulting from mass-murdering bluejays with an automatic pellet gun. Yes. Or not?

I’ll stop, having already been more than disturbing enough for reason. I don’t want to alienate more of our readers than I ought.

Apologies to the world-in-general. (So much sorrow fills me!)

Lisa Fay Coutley wrote “Errata”, a poem we just snapped up. It was published a little while back, so you might want to revisit it before you check out Lisa’s gorgeous answers to my fairly grotesque questions. As a refresher, Lisa Fay Coutley is Associate Poetry Editor for Passages North. She teaches writing at Northern Michigan University, where she is an MFA fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Pedestal,Terminus, and elsewhere. Now: Onward!

* * *

ASHLEY: How did this poem first occur to you? Where are its origins?

LISA: As with many poems, it started while I was driving. In Marquette, MI, winters are painfully long; spring is certainly a welcome time. I was driving on the first sunny day in months, and the snow runoff welling against the curb looked like a string of diamonds in the right light. That was how it began, with water in a gutter. From there, I imagined ravens in that gutter, and on and on. I was interested in the idea of light striking water in a gutter in an unexpected way, and then the ravens just took over, as ravens are wont to do. Those are its literal origins.

ASHLEY: “Errata” is an intriguing title, meaning – of course – both errors and corrections. How do you see the string of images here: as a list of mistakes or as setting right of what was wrong? Both? How do you see the title interacting with the poem?

LISA: Both. The poem begins by trying to correct a longstanding error/misconception about the myth of the raven, but certainly by doing so it’s trying to reveal the blurry nature of errors and corrections (and truth or judgment for that matter). The speaker in this poem is trying to set something straight, and as the poem moves, the errors/corrections become more intimate. It’s important to recognize that this speaker is talking back to some degree, and anytime you see such a speaker hinting at bravado (I won’t strut, etc) there’s the potential for reading vulnerability. I suppose it will suffice to say that just as you can’t have the need for correction without error, you can’t have a strong speaker without weakness. Certainly these binaries are dangerous, but for all intents and purposes, in this poem they are very much applicable and accurate.

ASHLEY: Casting the ravens as a transformative image that represents both “bad omens” and the speaker’s heart is striking, and it puts me in mind of a broken relationship – possibly a death. How did this connection come to you - all at once, or were you as surprised by the ending as I was? What implications did you intend this image to have in regard to the relationship between the “you” and the speaker of the poem?

LISA: Well, the final lines were in place when I first constructed the poem in a very different version/form, and when I reworked it, changing the beginning entirely, the goal was to find my way back to these lines.

Using the raven as a transformative image for the heart stems from my fascination with a particular version of the myth of the raven. According to some sources, Apollo turned the raven’s wings from a silvery-white to black when it delivered news of his lover’s infidelity (or for not pecking out the lover’s eyes). I was intrigued by this idea of punishment, of a bird that’s terribly misunderstood—once white and prized for its clairvoyance and later construed as a dark omen. To reconcile this with the speaker is to both cherish and condemn the heart and the choices and misconceptions therein, which certainly calls back to the “you” of previous lines.

ASHLEY: “Errata” is a lonely poem, and circles what we do when we feel unseen: the man “pocketing two-for-one toothbrushes” and the cashier “hand-perking her breasts / and picking her teeth with a receipt”, the son who the “you” of the poem won’t see. How do you see real or imagined invisibility working in this poem? How much does the presence of the self rely on others in your view?

LISA: The loneliness of the poem circles around the idea that sometimes we condemn ourselves to solitude and misunderstanding by doing what we think is right/asked of us, or acting against what we construe as right/wrong (depending). In many ways, it’s simply about the reconciliation of motivation and action. The self certainly relies on the presence of others who are full of judgment and action/inaction just as she judges and acts or doesn’t act. They definitely serve as backdrops for one another just as they serve to cancel the other out in other instances. I fear that I’ve muddied your question. In short, it is about what we do when we think we aren’t seen as much as it is about the ways we can lose ourselves through perceptions or through preoccupations with the desires that motivate our actions.

ASHLEY: If this poem were a constellation, what would it look like? What would its backstory be?

LISA: Of all the questions you’ve posed, I find this one to be the most intriguing. Yet, I think that any answer I could give would be less poignant than the question itself—this idea that we make connections between random points of light in a sky we don’t understand. Essentially, the poem strives to do something similar.

ASHLEY: Speaking of stars, a complete digression: What’s your sign? Do you read your horoscope? Does it matter or not?

LISA: Really, it’s not a complete digression. As I’ve said, the poem is working within a version of a myth about the raven. I am a Libra, born under the star sign of the raven constellation. Do I put a great deal of stock in my horoscope? Not at all, but as I said, I was intrigued with this story of the raven and internalized it for the purpose of this poem.

ASHLEY: Back to the poem: Abandonment of the self seems integral to this poem, especially as the speaker dissolves into the “you” of the poem: “Your shape in this bed is my shape”. What does the abandonment of the self mean for this relationship? How integral is it? What does this mean to you personally, if anything?

LISA: First of all, I’d just like to say that I’m flattered by how deeply you’ve read the poem—you’ve picked up on some of the nuances that I worried wouldn’t be apparent. I appreciate your attention here.

As for the abandonment of the self, it is definitely an integral part of this poem. One of the many errors this speaker attempts to correct is a loss of self, having allowed the self to be lost in the “you.” It calls back to the loneliness you pointed out. For me, in this world of misconceptions and errors and corrections and relationships, the loneliest feeling is to miss one’s self. At times, we mean to lose ourselves; at others, it’s an unfortunate result of circumstances. In either case, we don’t typically see it coming, and it can take a long time to find the way back. When we do try to trace it back—to piece it all together—it’s every bit as disjointed as this poem may appear to be; yet, in the end, all of these points of light are linked.

ASHLEY: The “you” seems to be given complete control over the speaker’s presence or absence when the speaker says, “Erase my whole notes from your page.” To me, this passivity impresses a severe longing, a willingness to submit the self entire to another person – almost a helplessness – but it could also be a command, urging the you to let the speaker go, to let the speaker move outside of the “you” and into herself. How do you imagine that line? Does the speaker want to be erased completely – or freed from the control of the ”you” through that act of destruction? Both?

LISA: Again, both. More or less, the answer to this question is in the answer to question 7, but I think that the ambiguity you’re plucking out here is important. Bravado, loneliness, truth, desire—all very murky territory, and the journey back to the truest self, sifting through these emotions, is one of utter confusion. I hoped this would be reflected—that there is a sense of vulnerability and self-doubt in trying to find one’s way back. In this way, it’s as necessary to ask permission of the “you” as it is to make this command. I think it’s what makes the loss of self that much more tragic yet empowering as the self is rediscovered; at times, the speaker might like to be erased, but in the end muscles through in an attempt to be free.

To see this piece in the context of the collection I’m working on (tentatively titled Back-Talk), you’d see a whole slew of speakers who are ultimately tenacious as they struggle through loss. Again, my hope is that their most delicate human traits (i.e.: fear and weakness) will be apparent in their heightened sense of necessity in such endeavors.

ASHLEY: In the last lines of the poem, it’s the speaker whose heart is a bad omen, which implies that the speaker blames herself for the failure between herself and the “you”. How do you see this duality of assertion and surrender working in the poem?

LISA: The speaker sees herself as a bad omen only insofar as others see her heart as a bad omen. Again, this is drawing on the raven’s myth—of what this speaker might have seen/known that caused such wreckage, of what might have been avoided. Perhaps it’s too loose of a connection for the metaphor to fire on all cylinders; either way, it strives to reinforce all that I’ve said about the reconciliation of self and motivation within the poem. She’s bound to blame herself, and part of that would certainly be about “the failure between herself and the ‘you.’” Though that’s not the most important part.

ASHLEY: Transitions between the images in this poem seem to work, but they are also slightly disjunctive. How did this string of images arrive? Was your writing process fluid or jarring?

LISA: As I said earlier, initially, this poem took on quite a different form. In fact, I was working with a sonnet in iambic pentameter couplets, but the rhetoric wasn’t jibing in such a confined space. Once I broke the form, the rhetoric seemed to move itself. Some of the images from the sonnet made their way into this version; others came from other pieces (older pieces). I’m likely to plug in old ideas in new places when they seem to fit, and there was some of that happening here. I’ve found that as I make my way through the poems in this first collection, there’s a great deal of overlap. So when I can rip a line from a poem that I’m sure won’t make it into the book, I do that. This is all to say that it wasn’t necessarily “fluid,” but it didn’t feel “jarring” either, seeing as the images/emotions are of the same vein.

ASHLEY: Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read the relationship between the speaker and the “you” as romantic. What do you think?

LISA: No correction necessary, you aren’t wrong to think that the relationship is romantic, but in the end, the relationship with the self trumps the romance.

ASHLEY: On the topic of romance: Would you ever date a poet? If you had to, but could date any poet, living or dead, who would it be? Why?

LISA: I have dated poets, and I’ve learned that you can’t judge a man by his poems. Therefore, I couldn’t answer this without spending some time with the man, which, of course, rules out all the dead guys. As for the living, not just now.

ASHLEY: Which poet has most influenced your work? How?

LISA: There are many, most of whom are more contemporary than not: Sylvia Plath, Marie Howe, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Rita Dove, John Rybicki. The list goes on…

ASHLEY: Do you like their author’s photo? Why or why not?

LISA: I’m not sure that I’ve necessarily seen a true “author’s photo” for Plath, but I find the contrast between her face and her words/voice most intriguing. I don’t know that I’ve seen any strikingly-unique photos from any of the others.

ASHLEY: What do you think is the best pose for an author’s photo? Most cliche? Is it OK for it to be in black and white – or is that inherently pretentious?

LISA: I think the best pose is the one that best reflects the author. Most often, they seem to be pretty standard—head and shoulders, sometimes black and white (which I didn’t find pretentious before, but I might now). Usually I find them boring. But I did admire a particular photo that poet Sandra Beasley used earlier on in her publications: a photo of her looking away, writing. It felt honest.

ASHLEY: Last one on author’s photos. Promise. Why’s there a bird in your author’s photo? Whose is it? What’s its name? Tell me all about it. I’m wildly curious.

LISA: This tickles me. It’s a very long story, but I’ll try to be brief. During the last summer of my undergrad days, I had a huge writing assignment due and two young sons who wanted to play. Needing time to write, I forced them to go outside. Within five minutes they were back indoors. My oldest (who was 7 or 8 at the time) said, “Mom, do we have parakeets in this area?” I went outside, and there was a parrot in our spruce tree. He wouldn’t leave until I offered him a cage. When no one claimed him, we kept him. My sons named him Einstein. He lived with us for a few years, during which time I was the only person who could handle him. Tragically, in the end, I left my parrot’s and ferret’s cage open when we left for Christmas one year. I assume the ferret chased him around until he died of a heart attack. I buried him in a jewelry box in Lake Superior. Uplifting story, I know.

Of course, the metaphorical implications of something that wanted nothing more than to be caged at a time in my life when I was feeling pretty caged—and that he died as a result of a cage that I left open—has definitely been a source of material for me. In fact, I wrote a poem based on much of this, which is forthcoming in the fall issue of Blackbird.

In any case, the contrast of being caged with wanting to be caged represents me and my current body of work, which is why I use the photo. So much for being brief.

ASHLEY: Why won’t the speaker “strut across town” in ballet slippers?

LISA: Here, bravado meets vulnerability—a refusal to “strut” (which is typically done with confidence) in “ballet slippers” (which have the potential to throw the wearer off balance). Honestly, “slipper” just happened to come out after “blizzard” as a matter of sound, and then I realized its function, as well. I think Richard Hugo might have a thing or two to say about this.

ASHLEY: I’m getting a little out of hand, so I’m going to shut this down in true Linebreak fashion: When was the first time you got cash money for poetry, and how did you spend it? Any advice for those with checks in the mail?

LISA: At this point, we’ve both gotten out of hand. What can we do? First and only cash money for poetry came from The Pedestal Magazine last December. I bought a thirty-dollar bottle of wine. I don’t advise this for everyone, but it can be a nice reward for all the hard work we do. Poetry’s a seriously tough sport.

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Previous Interviews:

An Interview with Carolyn Guinzio

An Interview with Katrina Vandenberg

An Interview with Sally Molini

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

Carolyn Guinzio is the author of Quarry (Parlor Press), West Pullman (Bordighera) and the chapbook Untitled Wave (Cannibal Books), and because it’s been a little while since her poem “Shack & Creek” was published on Linebreak, you now have one more good reason to read it again in our archives.

***

ASHLEY: What were the origins of “Shack & Creek”? Where did the poem begin?

CAROLYN: Shack & Creek began with an image. I remembered hearing a story of a small house being washed down a river in a flood. The very idea seemed to say something about human beings, permanence and power, about the things we have no power over. Even a house can be uprooted.

ASHLEY: “Shack & Creek” seems to exist in the tension between the comfort of isolation and a simultaneous longing to move outside of the self, that struggle to “let it go back” toward a more natural interaction with the world. What does this tension mean to you personally, if anything?

CAROLYN: A shack on an edge of creek makes me think of a hermitage, so yes, the balance between solitude and connection is meant to be evoked as well.

ASHLEY: I noticed a tension between the organic self – the tree roots – against the constructed self – the shack. How do you feel about this opposition – or is it an opposition in your mind?

CAROLYN: The tension you noticed between, as you nicely put it, the organc self and the constructed self, is something that interests me very much. The idea that we make something real just by looking at it, a version of the watched pot that never boils, is an aspect of one of my favorite things to think about: We humans know just so much, just enough for speculation, presumption and hubris. We undestand just enough to scoff at the certainties of the past.

ASHLEY: In our correspondence with you, we mistakenly referenced the poem as “Shack and Creek” instead of including the ampersand. You corrected us right away, but – knowing you – it seems like that was an important choice rather then poetic posturing. What, to you, is the significance of the ampersand?

CAROLYN: The importance of the ampersand has to do with a project I’d been working on for some time. A symbol that fills the space between things, a symbol for connection between things: the perfect center between two, like the bubble in a level. It also resembles a route on a map, with intersecting points, roads and rivers. I liked it as a visual symbol of connection, a wordless “and.”

ASHLEY: What was the first poem that had an effect on you?

CAROLYN: The first poem that had a effect on me? That’s a tough one, but a very early favorite was “The Emperer of Ice Cream”. I’m fond of beauty, and it has such shape and sparkle, while being utterly bleak at the same time. And it’s in the level bubble between sound and sense, my favorite place.

ASHLEY: At a recent poetry reading in Fayetteville, you mentioned that your chapbook from Cannibal Books was a poetic departure from your previous work. What do you see as your usual poetic stance, and how did this book change that course? Why did you see this as necessary?

CAROLYN: Untitled Wave is quite different from the poems in Quarry, it’s true. It’s a sequence of poems with very long lines and it moves forward only very slowly, like a stalled out storm front. It hovers obessively over its ideas; there is a lot of repetition and circling back. The lines are not economic; they unravel. I think it’s a bridge to the project that followed it. I do think it’s possible for any of us to reach a point where we could continue writing pretty well the same way we’d been writing, but I want to try, at least, to move forward and try something new.

ASHLEY: Now for the traditional rock-star question: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it?

CAROLYN: I have not been particularly lucky making money from poetry. I got a state grant in KY, I think it was $5000, which I probably used for health insurance premiums. But who among us is in it for the money?

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Previous Interviews:

An Interview with Katrina Vandenberg

An Interview with Sally Molini

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

Gmail just advertised this link to me: “New Bad Poems Daily – Be the first to read some of the worst poems ever written“.

I’m not sure what that says about my inbox. Is it meant to be a challenge? Is it a sad, sad assessment of my work?  (I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!)

Regardless, it seemed like the kind of thing Linebreak readers would appreciate. But click at your own risk: Links sometimes take you places you never thought  you’d go. 

Then again, while ESPN might be off course, I’m assuming that most of you are readers of Linebreak and, therefore, could be -coincidentally or consequently – on first-name basis with Irish whiskey-based drinks.

Call it even?

I’m a little behind schedule when it comes to posting this interview with Katrina, true – but that’s just another excuse for you to return to “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side”, which can only lead to good things. Promise. As a refresher, Katrina Vandenberg’s first collection Atlas was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. A new chapbook, On Marriage, is available now from Red Dragonfly Press. She’s received residencies from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, the Amy Clampitt House, and the MacDowell Colony, and her work has appeared in journals such as The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, and Post Road. Now – on to the answers you’ve been longing for!   

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As usual: What was the impetus for this poem? What triggered it?

I saw a production of the play Speak Truth to Power. It’s based on the testimonies of human-rights activists from all over the world, and their stories are singular and moving and brave. After, the director of Center for Victims of Torture made a speech in which he said that “courage and horror stand side by side.” I saw it, literally — characters in Everyman or the gods Jack Gilbert sometimes writes about, passing out decisions about our lives. Like most people, I’ve never found a satisfying answer to the question asked by the Book of Job, which is basically: why do good people suffer? How do we respond?

The spacing and breath accomplished by the dropped lines and drastic spacing of “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” is, of course, the reason it needed to be published in a monospace font, but it’s astounding formally, and handled with a deftness that’s rare to find in poems that attempt to use the full width of the page. Why did the poem call for this kind of form or shape? How did it occur to you?

Thanks for formatting it, by the way. I heard it took two weeks to get right. More below.

The shape of this poem on the page seems to be an atypical style for you. Did you find it a challenging form to work with? How did you approach it? What were your primary concerns?

The poem was originally had a circular structure. It ended with a couple lines that were something like: “Then let this poem be your song for them, / say the gods who hold the cosmos in their hands.” I showed the poem to Jim Cihlar, the poetry editor at Milkweed, and we talked about it cutting it back, roughing it up. He’s a sharp reader, so it’s possible he also suggested exploding it on the page, but I don’t remember.

I liked the idea of breaking open the poem, because it’s not about an orderly universe, and cosmos grow like that — they’re named for the orderly look of their blooms, but the plants themselves are vigorous and unruly, and grow anywhere . . . I don’t think I’ve ever spent more time reading a poem aloud as I was writing it, to make sure there was still some sense of there being lines.

But I was initially suspicious of whether breaking the poem made it any better. White space makes everything look significant, after all, and when I look at that poem, I still see a fairly conventional one in a slightly more dissonant form — in the same way that a lot of verses in songs by groups like the Pixies or Wilco have a slightly more dissonant “new” sound but are still fairly conventional twelve-bar chord progressions. However, I enjoyed doing it, and writers should trust pleasure.

One aspect of your poem that truly impressed us was that the lines in “Courage and Horror Stand Side by Side” really seem to be lines – provocative units of sense. How important was this to you in composing this poem? How do you judge a line as a line?

A line, Miller Williams said in class, is a unit of sound, sense, and syntax, and that is how I will think of a line forever. In 2006, I heard Billy Collins on NPR, talking about how the University of Arkansas Press published his first book, and how much he learned about poetry from Miller — the press founder and his editor — during the editing process. Apparently Miller taught Collins the same definition of a line, because I was making dinner as I listened, and caught myself reciting it along with Collins.

Rote knowledge is useless if you stop there, but it often makes an excellent foundation. You can bend it, contradict it, explore its gray areas, turn it on its head, but I’ve found it easier to do all that when you begin holding some concrete ideas in your hand. I’m glad I had teachers who made me write 300 lines of blank verse, be articulate about 16th-century sonneteers. My teachers left out tons of writers I wouldn’t — anyone who wrote after the 60s, writers from other countries, women writers, writers of color, just for starters — and I don’t write formal poems much anymore, but I still think about that principle of “sound, sense, syntax,” maybe especially when my lines don’t look like ones I was taught to make. So many of the more experimental visual artists and musicians I admire departed, knowledgeably, from tradition.

Another question about the form or shape of this poem: It strikes me that the dramatic spacing of the poem – both horizontal and vertical – keeps the reader’s eye from moving too easily across the language. However, it seems as though the poem can be read in multiple patterns while still maintaining its strength. Was this something that you considered, or did it occur naturally? How do you feel about the lines being read in alternate orders?

I didn’t think about alternate readings. If you can read it in multiple ways and it’s meaningful, great. Whoever makes the art has to let it go.

In this poem, the gods are actively involved in human lives – “…the gods who / dole out fates…” – but they are also presented as inherently and naturally distanced, which I see in the parallelism of the lines “The gods are busy. / The cosmos are lavender.” How do you see this tension working in the poem? What does this disjunction mean to you personally, if anything?

I like “the gods.” They seem nearly fictional to our cultural mind-set, which gave me more room to move around in the poem than a monotheistic God might. And I’ve always — liked might not be the right word — the way the ancient gods were multiple and had egos and personalities. They were fallible, could take pity, get angry. I wanted that capriciousness. They are irrational, and they are in charge.

That’s why the massage therapist’s response means so much to me: she can’t control the rapist, but because she prays to be in control of her response, she inadvertently succeeds in scaring him. Perhaps if she had prayed to scare him away, it wouldn’t have worked. I don’t know. I think he gets scared because he can tell he doesn’t have her.

A lot of poets I know are wrestling with how to portray injustice. We are more aware than ever that we live in an increasingly-crowded planet with scarce water supplies and great wealth disparities, in which there is genocide and mass rape — it wasn’t a kind of poetry many of us were taught to write. The poets I know feel as if they’re trying to build a way to talk about these things, from the ground up.

There are a number of characters in this poem – the gods, the speaker, the “you”, the boyfriend, the rapist, the massage therapist. For the most part, they’re kept straight – which is an accomplishment in and of itself – but while we can assume the gods are speaking through italics in the line,”And did you sing for your enemies?”, I’m wondering who answers them by saying, “No.”

The “you” says “no.” I hope that one way to read the poem is that it is the unsung song for the enemy, but it’s okay if you don’t read it that way.

The simplicity of that answer, and the significant variation in syntax that comes with the answer “No”, followed by the statement that “The gods are busy” lends a lot of heft to that response, as though the two are somehow related, as though that’s the moment the gods become disinterested in the voice that answers. How do you see or feel this moment? What about singing for one’s enemies intrigues you poetically or personally?

At that moment, I see the gods as preoccupied parents, though I didn’t want them to seem all-benevolent, or even parent-like. Perhaps they want the speaker to learn to sing for her enemies, and she’s not yet ready, so they go on.

I’m really interested in compassion and forgiveness. Learning how to truly forgive someone (and whether — I had a long talk with a poet-friend this week, about whether or not “forgiveness” is sometimes a euphemism for taking abuse), is one of the biggest tasks people have. Like a lot of people, I’m not very good at knowing what to do with my anger. I don’t write angry poems well; other poets do.

Having seen an earlier version of this poem, one that featured even more dramatic spacing, I’m wondering how you felt about condensing the lines for the purpose of publication? How did you go about this? What was lost and what was gained?

I pulled in the right margin and took it from there. Most of it was intuitive. The poem’s easier to read now, which I initially had mixed feelings about. But I initially miss most things I cut, then cease to notice.

Also, you originally had reservations about publishing this poem – if I’m remembering correctly. While we’re ecstatic you chose to let us go ahead, what were your reservations?

Part of the rape narrative really happened. The event was years ago, and I’ve never met the woman, but because she’s a real person who lives with it every day, I wanted time to examine my conscience. There was a chance I had learned a detail I used while acting in a position of trust, and if I had, I didn’t feel I could publish the poem. Finally, I called a local journalist; when I learned that the detail had been published in the newspaper at the time, I felt I could let go of the poem.

We could probably have a lively discussion about what details of other people’s lives are free for writers to “take.” When I was in grad school, I learned that pretty much everything’s fair game; at CVT, we talk about the importance of clients owning their stories; hospice nurses talk about “vulnerable adults.” I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer, especially given that the Internet makes a poem so much more public than it might have been, published in a small magazine, ten years ago. I don’t think the Internet makes us less private, by the way. Instead, we’re creating new kinds of shields to suggest openness while maintaining a different kind of privacy.

Generally speaking – and imagine this in the voice of a six-year old girl – Where do poems come from?

Reading other poems? Living in your body, in the physical world? A lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness? Strange juxtapositions. Taking the figurative literally. Generally speaking, if I knew, I don’t think I’d like writing as much, but I could write faster.

Who are your most important influences, the poets to whom you return again and again? How much sway do contemporary poets hold with you?

I’m a fickle reader. I envy people who love a poet or two above all others, and pattern themselves after that poet. But somewhere in my past I’ve had Donne phases, Keats phases, Whitman, Milosz, O’Hara, Bishop, Larkin, Levis, Simic, McGrath, Rilke, Strand, Zagajewski, Berryman phases. James Wright was the first poet who really meant something to me, as a college kid in Ohio. But mostly I obsess over single poems, one after the other, and I always seem to find just the one I need.

Contemporary poetry is amazing in its variety, playfulness, and fascinating associative leaps. How could I not respond, somehow, to the poetry of my own time? It seems pointless to fight about schools of poetry, though, as if only one kind could or should exist, when we, and our responses to the world, are so varied. One quality I greatly admire about the MFA program at Hamline, where I teach, is that the faculty introduce students to a diverse body of writing.

However much I read, I wish I could read more. I try to read new books from Twin Cities presses, especially — Milkweed, Coffee House, Graywolf — and like reading very new books and older ones simultaneously. Recently I co-read Brenda Shaughnessy’s Human Dark with Sugar and Pablo Neruda’s Selected Poems, which resulted in a very good writing week.

What was the first poem you read? How did it affect you? How and when did you realize that you wanted to be a poet? What was your response?

An Emily Dickinson one, in third grade. I remember being happily uncomfortable with the way “gown” and “on” didn’t exactly rhyme, and the poem making me happy and sad at the same time. I found it in a textbook we’d been given to use for only that morning, I loved the poem, and I was afraid I’d never find it again once my teacher collected the books. So it also became the first poem I ever memorized.

Finally, our Rock-Star question, but extended: What’s the most money you’ve made from poetry, and how did you spend it? What about the first time you made any money from poetry? What’d you do then? Any advice for those expecting their first checks?

I won a $44,000 Bush Artist Fellowship in 2005. It let me take time off teaching, write my next manuscript, read a lot, volunteer at the Center for Victims of Torture, apply to places like MacDowell. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I got the best piece of advice about the $1,000-or-so first-book advance from Natasha Trethewey via Dan Albergotti: Don’t use it to make a car payment. Buy something you can keep, something you normally wouldn’t buy. I think Dan bought some first-edition Jack Gilberts when he won the Poulin. I bought our house a twenty-volume set of Oxford English Dictionaries.

And, this isn’t poetry, but in high school, I won $50, second place, in a local story-writing contest. I wish I could find you the photo they took for the newspaper; I have really big hair in it. I learned later, from a PTA member, that the panel had decided that my story was too depressing to win first prize.

 

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Previous Interviews:

An Interview with Sally Molini

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

While Daniel’s already done us the courtesy of posting a meet-and-greet post, and has been wonderfully active over the past 48 hours – posting about Gene Simmons impersonators, required reading, why Mick Jagger’s not afraid, and the assessment of assessment – we’ve hardly done him justice with an introduction proper. 

The thing you really ought to know about Daniel is that he’s published, not one, but two poems on Linebreak: “Stardust Memories” and “Caddyshackesque“, both of which are worth reading again. And again. 

But, in addition to those two fine accomplishments, he’s the author of How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009), a book of humorous nonfiction, God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II, prose collections on his obsession with the rock band Queen, and The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVox, 2006), a book of poems. His work has appeared in Best Creative Nonfiction, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and The Best American Poetry 2003, among other places. Also: He is an assistant professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

Keep on reading those prolific posts as Daniel sets a new – and intimidating – standard of productivity for guest bloggers. Lovely!

The local Burning Chair reading series is hosting a poetry reading in Fayetteville, AR that will feature one of Linebreak’s poets: Farrah Field, who wrote “Matilda Stays Up Late With No Questions to Ask” will be reading with Jared White at “an undisclosed location” that turns out to be at 3996 N. Frontage Road, #2.

The reading will happen Friday, June 12 starting at 6:30. While you should bring your own date, there will be free refreshments. Over at Burning Chair, they evidently understand how important free food can be to drawing a crowd of poets.

Here’s a map:

For more information, contact Matt Henriksen at frankstandfordfest@gmail.com or check out the Burning Chair blog. Hope to see you there!

Sally Molini’s poem “At Ruann’s Having Tea with the Future” was published this morning on Linebreak. Molini’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Beloit Poetry Journal, elimae, and 32 Poems, among other journals, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor for Cerise Press, an online international magazine and lives in Nebraska.

Since Johnathon started with this question last week, and because I’m curious about such things: How did “At Ruann’s, Having Tea with the Future” come into being? What prompted it?

There actually was an initial image for this poem. I once walked by an oceanside deck full of tables set for dinner, a bright white napkin folded in the shape of a sail sitting on each plate. For some reason I never forgot those napkins. This was at the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego; I’ve never stayed there but it’s quite a place, a sprawling Victorian beach resort with lots of flagged turrets, carved balconies, gazebos and open vistas full of what must be recreational splendor.

Anyway, the poem grew from that one image, the original setting and contents of the piece changing over time. Wasn’t sure what I wanted to say until I added a bit about the current job market, and so, far from the pricey red peaks of the Coronado, the ailing economy found its way into the poem. I also liked the idea of someone reading tea leaves for a person who doesn’t pay enough attention to or maybe doesn’t understand completely the accumulating signs and directions of her own life, which is something to which I can relate.

Do you have a usual writing process?

I usually start out with a line, an image, or a phrase. I’m a slow worker, am unfortunately not prolific; a poem can take me a while to finish. Often it helps to get away from the screen or keyboard, so I’ll walk around the living room and stare through a window out into the backyard while working on something. I like getting past that beginning phase of the poem, enjoy revision the most, when there’s something coming together on that no-longer blank screen. I least like starting out with a new piece, having to develop and expand that first flash of an idea or line. There’s resistance and doubt to push past, which is probably typical for other writers.

In other poems of yours that I’ve read - ”Elegy for an Estranged Friend“; “In Lumbini, Doing the Continental Shift“; “Remains at 920 Prospect“; “Bird in the Hand Alley” – you seem to see the human elements of a poem through the lens of dense natural imagery. What draws you toward these images, or how do they arrive?

Not sure why I’m drawn to certain images or how they arrive — seems the best lines or phrases sort of pop up out of nowhere as I work, which doesn’t sound very intellectual. Ideas come from the usual daily bumping into people and objects. Memory obviously triggers a lot, people and events that have ripened with distance and so come to mind with a little perspective or malleability.

The natural world can offer clues about what’s happening on different levels, physically, spiritually, etc. In the poem, “In Lumbini” mentioned above, there’s a glowworm crawling on a bathroom floor — there are various meanings in that glowworm and its world, which is also my world. We’re connected, that little bug and I; the possibilities, the how and why of that connection calls to me.

I tend not to analyze or think too much about the creative process; it definitely has its mysteries and I like keeping it that way, don’t want to try and solidify some view.

Which poets or poems have influenced you the most – in life or in writing? How do you see these poems or poets working to inform your poetry – or do they?

A teacher once told me that the poets one reads and studies become a kind of chord of voices which shapes one’s own voice. I like that idea, a sort of ongoing weave of developing sensibility. To name just a few poets whose work I love and keep close: Gerard Manly Hopkins, John Keats, Elizabeth Bishop and T. S. Eliot. Contemporary poets: Tom Lux, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Dean Young, Eleanor Wilner. Sometimes a poet’s attitude or views can be more influential than their work. For example, I love Keats’ poetry, yet reading his biographies and prose writings have had more of an effect on how I view and read poetry.

Let’s assume that your favorite poets are, as we have always suspected, superhuman. If you could steal five literary superpowers from your favorite poets, which superpowers would you steal and from whom?

I wouldn’t mind being empowered with:

1. The narrative scope and skill of Elizabeth Bishop.
2. Hopkins’ breadth and depth of diction and sound.
3. Eliot’s abililty to blend the big and small picture — I guess most poets strive to do this, but Eliot has a certain style of penetration, has so captured the strange bleak meanderings of modern times.
4. Eleanor Wilner’s lifelong dedication to civil rights coupled with her writing’s cosmic/mythical point of view.
5. Tom Lux’s reading prowess, so direct and honest; his vocal rendering of a poem the simultaneous sound of heart and irony.

If someone at a bar were to ask you what you do, would you tell him or her that you’re a poet? If so, when did you decide to call yourself a poet? If not, why?

I call myself a writer. I like what Louise Glück’s said in her essay “The Education of The Poet” — I use the word “writer” deliberately. “Poet” must be used cautiously; it names an aspiration, not an occupation.

Finally, here’s our (soon-to-be) traditional rock-star question: What’s the greatest amount of money you ever earned from poetry, and how’d you spend it?

“Little World, Flitting Away,” a poem about the ever-increasing number of extinct species and our dying natural world, made $100 when it took 3rd place in Fugue’s annual poetry contest a few years ago. Not sure how I spent the money; probably on books.

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Previous Interviews:

 

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

After trying to search online for the restraints of alcaic verse, I realized that there is literally nothing on the internet that describes the form – which meant that even my earlier post mocking Google’s suggestion for the  phrase “alcaic meter” turned up when I tried again. No good.

Therefore: a short public service announcement seemed in order. Let me know if I miss anything, and I’ll gladly correct or add it.

* * *

Greek meters like sapphic verse and alcaic verse are based in a prosodic system called quantitative verse, which measures the length of syllables rather than the stress pattern. However, in English, it’s proven – at best – to be very hard to replicate the quantitative system: English poets tend to hear stress patterns rather than the length of syllables.

Partially due to this, even the best information on the internet about alcaic verse simply describes it as a syllabic form, which has the pattern of eleven syllables in the first two lines, nine in the third and ten in the fourth. This isn’t an unprecedented approach to writing in alcaics. W.H. Auden’s poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is a good example of this particular pattern. Below, you’ll find the first two stanzas:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,
when grief has been made so public, and exposed
to the critique of a whole epoch
the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die
among us, those who were doing us some good,
who knew it was never enough but
hoped to improve a little by living.

As you can see, the third line is typically indented a little more than the fourth while the first two are flush with the left-hand margin. This is another aspect of the form that’s usually preserved, if only to signal that the lines are different lengths, but this isn’t always the case.

Strict alcaic verse, though, is slightly more complicated. In this approach, stressed syllables are substituted for what would be long syllables in quantitative verse, effectively using an accentual-syllabic prosodic system in order to imitate a quantitative one. The pattern is delineated below, where “x” signifies a stressed syllable and “-” signifies an unstressed syllable:

xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x–x–
xx-x-x-x-
x–x–x-x-

“Alcaic Figure” by Sidney Wade is a solid example of this approach. I’ve included the whole poem as an example, but the link will take you to the original version, which I found on Google Books.

ALCAIC FIGURE

I’m sweating. Tossing. Sleep is impossible.
Damn blankets. Ankles caught in the undertow.
Hot breath of sttentive mosquitoes. A swelling of
doubt and the whining of tiny woodwinds.

Bad day. I didn’t do it the way that I
should have. This heat is brazen. I think of my
two beautiful daughters. I’m never the mother I
want to be. Barking. It sounds like oboes.

No. Horns. I could get up and continue to
read Death in Rome. I won’t. All the characters
repel me. I’m breathing the one thousand two thousand
three thousand laurel tree where the hell is

that dog? There’s sand awash in the bed sheets, I
hold off the weight, the terrible slowness of
tides. Nine thousand ten I am sinking now, classical,
shifting impurities, reedy, stranded.

Pale waves, the sea is scrambling to climb up the
beach foaming notes like Morpheus muttering -
shades, white and sublunary, washing ashore to those
masses of children with pale blue faces.

Enjoy – and good luck!

“…Thanne longen folk” to celebrate National Poetry Month?

Why? Well, April is – and you can check Wikipedia on this, it’s bondafide fact - the cruelest month, and that makes it the best time for poems. The end.

(Don’t pay attention to what  it says on Poets.org – a website from the Academy of American Poets, the folks who’ve been bringing you National Poetry Month since 1996. They suggest that April was chosen simply because it “seemed the best time within the year to turn attention toward the art of poetry.”

My story’s blatantly truer.)

However, whether or not we trust the facts on Poets.org, they do suggest ways to celebrate.

You could do it up with their “star-studded”  annual Poetry & The Creative Mind Gala at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts -  this year features “readings by Jorie Graham, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chip Kidd, Wynton Marsalis, Steve Reich, and other special guests” with VIP Tickets available for the low, low price of $450.00 (contact bharrison@poets.org) and the cheap seats going for $40.00 and up right now.

If you aren’t in New York – or, alternately, if you are in NY and are also broke – they provide a list of 30 other ways you can celebrate National Poetry Month, asking you to “Promote public support for poetry” by writing your Senators or Representatives in Congress  or just to “Play exquisite corpse“.

Additionally, Poets.org is offering you the shot to  sign up for their Poem-A-Day e-mails. Much as you might suspect, should you choose to sign up, you’ll get a poem in your inbox every day, beginning April 1.

While I’m planning  to celebrate April 1 by cuddling up with some liquor before simultaneously memorizing “The Wasteland”, “The Canterbury Tales” and my W-2, even I know that getting a poem a day – or some free lesson plans to use for the month of April – is nothing to sneeze at.

Or, well, maybe it is, if the image they’re using to promote NPM implies that poetry is medicine?

Gasundheit!

Let’s assume that our favorite poets are, in fact – as we have always suspected – superhuman. What are their superpowers, and – more importantly – what are the top ten poetic superpowers you would steal from them for yourself? Go.

At Sewanee Writer’s Conference last summer, there was a panel on online journals. To represent online journals, the organizers chose two editors of print-based journals, one of of which had an online counterpart. The other editor was half-heartedly – almost regretfully – toying with the idea.

During the panel, the latter editor asked who among us would be happy being published on a journal’s web version instead of in its print publication. While well over half of the attendees raised their hands, that apparently wasn’t enough for this editor, who said “See?” and went on to explain why online publication wasn’t perceived to be as prestigious as a print publication.  

Believe it or not, we deal with this attitude all the time here at Linebreak: an attitude that Johnathon summarizes as making technophobia a literary badge of honor,  an attitude that implies the work we publish is somehow second-tier because it’s not laid out in ink, an attitude that fears the internet is killing off good poetry.

Frankly: I’m calling bullshit. But so is Andrew Motion. 

In an article published in the Telegraph titled “Internet ‘is causing poetry boom‘”, the British poet laureate explains his thoughts on the relationship between the internet and poetry: “Poetry as an art form was simply well suited to the internet.”

While the article focuses on how internet communities support poetry readings, which have grown in popularity; how the internet provides a “shop window” for small presses; and how more people seem to be writing poetry lately, Motion sees the internet as returning poetry to the ear in important ways:

He said that because the web allowed people to listen to poetry once more, it had helped return it to the position it held in the “mead halls” 1,000 years ago.

Moreover, the ability to hear poetry online isn’t just rejuvenating an interest in contemporary poetry, but also in the golden oldies:

Websites like Poetry Archive, which enables people to listen to recordings of poets like TS Eliot and Allen Ginsberg reading their work, are now enjoying unprecedented success.

Poetry Archive , which Mr Motion helped set up, now receives 135,000 visitors a month and a million page hits.

The popularity of the Poetry Archive has only led Motion “to conclude that the real problem with poetry was ‘not one of appetite, but of delivery’.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.