Interrobang | Red Hen Press

Hey! My very talented friend Jessica Piazza has a book of poetry coming out with Red Hen Press, and you can preorder it now if you click the link! 

If you want a taste of the book, here’s a little excerpt to get you excited.

Automatonophilia

Love of things that falsely represent a sentient being

You married a marionette for the lumbering way
that she succumbs to teeth. You saw; she sways

and says okay. And she admires the daze
you move in, hydroplaning days away:

exultant accidents. Instead of me,
a blissful wooden girl; a wooden knee

submitted for exhibit. Deadened trees:
the shelter you inhabit. And didn’t we

expect it, eking out animatronic
epochs on the sofa? Both electric—

me with boredom; you ran programs: tricks
for trenchant eyes. Disguised, the lists you ticked

led straight to this. Your love nest: nuts and bolts,
no musts. No lust. No faults, and no one’s fault.


Oh, and there’s a great video interpretation of that poem if you’re the type who likes to watch.

What are you waiting for? 

“The Cave or The Mine,” by Thomas Lux

Everywhere you walk someone else is
walking beneath you, in a cave or a
mine. You’re sure of it. No matter
where you are you can drop to your
knees and hear the damp invitations,
the buzzing of a hollow, silent place.
You’d rather think of it as a mine.
Men go down in mines, they come up,
they go down again. Caves are slightly
different. Some caves have never been
visited. There is something uncertain
about caves. But you can’t stop the
person underground who is always fol-
lowing you. You can’t stop a buried
shadow. A man who would love to gnaw
on your white heels. So, you have two
choices. One is to take your pick-axe,
with which you are very familiar, and
go outside. Put your ear to the ground
and listen this time, listen very care-
fully. Whatever the directions, you
must follow them as if you were in a
trance. An iceberg trance. Your second
choice is to never leave your apartment. 


______________

From the first issue of Ploughshares, published Sept. 1971. 

Gold Line Press’s chapbooks are super pretty this year, guys. And, as someone who read the submissions this year, I can say with full confidence that—although there were MANY great manuscripts—these two chapbooks will really make you sweat. In a good way. Jessica Poli’s poetry is gorgeous, and Alisa Slaughter’s weird and compelling stories are basically impossible to put down. Go get yourself some copies!
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Gold Line Press’s chapbooks are super pretty this year, guys. And, as someone who read the submissions this year, I can say with full confidence that—although there were MANY great manuscripts—these two chapbooks will really make you sweat. In a good way.

Jessica Poli’s poetry is gorgeous, and Alisa Slaughter’s weird and compelling stories are basically impossible to put down. Go get yourself some copies!

Half Heaven

Someone says pull once. Another
echo, another zero. A wonder above a mirror
couldn’t touch water. (I welcome

terror.) A stranger to source, to
rhythm, to pleasure. (I welcome
wolves.) Yield to laughter. Does a machine

carry courage? Does a bullet
promise quiet? A greater journey: I pierce
today. I shoulder today. I shovel treasure

for tomorrow. I couldn’t measure
anything: ocean, mother, trouble. Instead
I guess, I squat, I watch. A flood

should wash. One word. Should
touch heavy earth: ancient,
stranger. (I welcome danger.)

_______________________

Note: I wrote this poem using only words from the 1978 Speak & Spell dictionary. 

Matthea Harvey on “Confessional Poetry”

I love Matthea Harvey, and this interview only makes me love her more.

Louis Bourgeois: In your work, there seems to be little “confessionalism” going on. This is not to say that your work is not “personal”—there is a strange type of internal dialog at play, certainly—but the poems always seem to be reaching outward to a world beyond the speaker of the poems, to the point that your work seems to become almost “anti-confessional.” If any of this is accurate, please comment. In any case, this rather convoluted question poses the question: what do you think of “confessional poetry”?

Matthea Harvey: I’m all over my poems, even if their relation to my everyday life is that of dream to reality. Poems can’t help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life. It’s a matter of temperament—my neurons fire when I’m writing about strange implausible situations. But, for example, my husband and I moved next to Prospect Park in Brooklyn about six years ago, and Modern Life has three park poems in it. Granted, none of them are about me in the park, (in one, the park is a place for word-watching in lieu of bird-watching), but that park crept in.

As a reader I don’t distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain “I” poems are confessional? It’s a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet. If I begin a poem, “I am a donkey,” reason kicks in and says, “She is taking on the persona of a donkey.” But if I write, “I have taken so many drugs I can’t see my feet,” the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn’t matter. I’d almost prefer for it to be the other way round. Some of my favorite poems are “confessional” poems written in the voices of aliens (“Southbound on the Freeway” by May Swenson” and “Report from the Surface” by Anthony McCann), sheep (“Snow Line” by John Berryman) or a yak (“The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia” by Oni Buchanan).

“Confessional poetry” is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion. I suppose it’s useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an “I,” but it’s a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others. Plus the way people “confess” can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, “Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?”

The Next Big Thing

Last Wednesday, the lovely Diana Arterian tagged me in this ongoing self-interview chain, “The Next Big Thing.” Although I don’t consider myself anything like “the next big thing,” I’m flattered to have been asked to participate in the project! 

What is the working title of the book?

The title of the book is Nights I Let The Tiger Get You; I actually had submitted the manuscript to several contests with the working title Such As Losing One’s Teeth, &c., but that got thrown out the window pretty quickly. 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Mostly, there were just poems, and then there were more poems, and then suddenly these poems started to group themselves together—to form allegiances in a way that suggested a book. Many of the poems came out of what you might call neurotic or anxiety-related states of mind. Sometimes, frankly, there is no “idea” that sparks a poem for me; the poem often begins to come in images and sounds, and then creates its own idea. 

The long poem that lends the book its title grew out of a recurring dream I had about as a young child. The dream was about my brother and me, and I’ve never been able to forget it because of both its intensity and its frightening prescience. As my brother and I grew up, and our adult lives began to play out, the dream’s clairvoyant images returned to me full-force.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, that’s tough. There aren’t too many “characters” here? If I had to choose an actor to narrate many of these poems, I think I’d like Elizabeth Olsen. Marcia Marcy May Marlene had a big impact on me, as it sort of unfolds in an anxious, surreal world much like the one that is sometimes in my head when I’m writing. Plus, she has a lovely voice. 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

I just had to write one for my publisher! This is the best I could come up with: “Nights I Let The Tiger Get You is a neurotic journey through the déjà vu of recurring dreams and the disorienting patterns of our own personal histories.” 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Most of the poems in the book were written during a two-year period. I think there may be a few that were in the works before that, and there are definitely a few that I added in more recently while doing some revisions. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Compulsion, obsession, love, fear.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’m hoping to make a book trailer involving my dog, tiny people made out of cheese, and brutal carnage. 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Nights I Let The Tiger Get You was a finalist for the Hudson Prize, and will be published by Black Lawrence Press in April 2014.


My tagged writer for next Wednesday is Fox Henry Frazier. Look for her answers next week! 

“Life Gets Dark,” by Adam Robinson

There are two things that I care about most on a day-to-day level.
The first is for people to understand something about other people:
I want everyone to know that other people are very sad right now.
What’s worse is they are sad in general, watching out the window
on the various days and nights of their loneliness. Yes, lo,
all people are miserably sad, and even though they hurt you in particular,
even though you are thwarted at every turn by nimrods in big cars,
hotdogs with cleft chins, dipshits who have been well provided for,
it’s only because they are so miserably sad, because things don’t add up,
because life gets dark sometimes. It really does, no matter what. We lie in it.
The second thing I care about most is that nonsense, oh sweet Lord,
nonsense is some of the best stuff we’ve got going and it’s wrong,
it’s a profound devolution, to try to make everything make sense, like
here we got this and here we got that and let’s see mumble mumble Ah yes!
My friend The Ghost said he wants to make the mystery greater.
I just want to recognize that it’s a mystery, and I want to languish there,
taking deep breaths, like a hangover you endure best as you enjoy it.


________________

from FENCE 

“A 21st Letter Turn,” by Cody Todd


Night, the animal that keeps you alive. 
Night, the u-turn of the self. Hear

sad cows moo their way into the fire. Write
the great American novel, and it scatters

into the poor American madman’s thoughts
in the small tornado of your life.

Pull flower petals like prudes.
Put on woolen tube socks, boots,

and march through your animal rage
on Pluto: one big ball of ice too

far away. Shoo away
friends like flies. You’re no more you

than he or she was you.
Blue sadness was a happiness

that turned its back on you. Poor you.
Fuck you. Love, you

followed the same path until
it finished. You died. You turned

the other way and walked it all again.

_______________________________________________

(from Shampoo)

(Hey, if you like this poem, preorder Cody’s book Graffiti Signatures!)

Keeping Up With The Literary Journals

I often get questions from people about where to submit poems, or what writers they ought to be reading. How do you find these poets? they ask. What should I be reading if I want to know what’s going on in contemporary poetry? (These questions could be equally applied—and often are—to contemporary fiction as well.) 

The ironic thing is that, as much as I’m sure some people consider me an “expert” in this stuff, I am often asking myself these same questions. There are so many great writers out there, and so many places they’re publishing their stuff: it seems nearly impossible to keep up with what’s happening in the contemporary poetry world. 

After my book got picked up in June, I basically dropped off the map submission-wise. At first it was a well-deserved break: I had actually done it! I’d placed my manuscript! I’d EARNED a hiatus from the never-ending submission-rejection cycle. But now it’s nearing the end of February, and I’ve been writing more poems, and they’ve just been collecting limply on my hard drive like dollar bills under a mattress, earning absolutely no interest. So I figure it’s time to start putting new stuff out there again—to start building towards a second book. And as content as I am to continue sending poems to journals that I have long admired (and have probably been rejected from before), I also enjoy the feeling of finding a new place to send poems—and to read poems, and possibly be re-inspired by other people’s work.

So far the best method I’ve come up with to discover new journals/lit mags (or even just REMEMBER them, because there are seriously so many journals that I discover some only to forget them in six months) is to read people’s bios obsessively. If I have a book of poetry that I love, I check the acknowledgments for every place those poems have been published. If I’m reading a literary magazine that I like a lot, I haunt the contributor’s bios to see where they’ve been sending their work. There are, of course, the usual suspects that pop up all over. But sometimes this method helps me find fantastic venues I’d never have otherwise heard about. I went through the whole Writer’s Market phase when I was just starting out, and while those books are extremely helpful, they’re also so tedious. (Same with newpages.com. Something about the comprehensiveness of it overwhelms me so much that I get scared off before I can start to make a dent in the offerings. Plus, staring at all those journals and books and reviews in one place only exacerbates the There Are Too Many Writers Out There anxiety, leading my brain to such paranoid conclusions as Stop Writing, The World Doesn’t Need Any More Poems, Especially From You.)

I suppose this is why little writing communities or cliques form. The whole vast world of it all is too much, and there’s no way to keep up with it all—so why not enclose yourself in a bubble of four or five literary magazines and presses, all run by friends, all publishing similar work, and just be happy? This is really just a contemporary extension of the historical groups of writers that we all envy—the Romantic poets hanging out with each other in a castle at night telling ghost stories, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound and H.D. standing around and discussing Japanese art. And these cliques produced amazing, timeless work! I remind myself of this because I think it’s easy to get annoyed with the way certain poets all know each other and all publish each other—if you’re looking at it in a middle school cafeteria sense. But when you consider that forming these self-sustaining groups may just be a method of cultivating exciting voices in this world of literary journal overload—this world of Ten Thousand Million People All Writing And Submitting At Once—it makes a lot more sense. 

I suppose the only question left is: which group do you fit into? Do you form your own? Is there a way to successfully stake a claim for yourself outside of any system—just alone in the whole vast world of it all?

Lynn Keller: People objecting to experimental writing sometimes complain that whatever claims are made for its social engagement or Marxist perspective or its changing ‘hegemonic structures of consciousness,’ that, in fact, the audience it reaches is a very narrow, highly educated one, that the reader has to have tremendous intellectual confidence even to grapple with these texts. What do you think? Does that concern you?

Susan Howe: No. The objection offends me. I think it is part of a really frightening anti-intellectualism in our culture. Why should things please a large audience? And isn’t claiming that the work is too intellectually demanding also saying a majority of people are stupid? Different poets will always have different audiences. Some poets appeal to younger people, some to thousands, one or two to millions, some to older people, etc. If you have four readers whom you truly touch and maybe even influence, well then that’s fine. Poetry is a calling. You are called to write and you follow.

Interview from Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews. Eds. Elisabeth A. Frost and Cynthia Hogue.

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