womens quarterly conversation

Selah Saterstrom

Websites: http://divinatorypoetics.wordpress.com/

http://www.coffeehousepress.org/authors/selah-saterstrom/

Selah Saterstrom is a writer whose visceral honesty transcends us to corners of the sacred divine. We encounter magic in the ordinary: mud, couch boats, yellow swimwear, and the devil. We contemplate cultural pastels of violence, beauty, and the body. Saterstrom’s hybrid form shifts between prose and poetry, focusing instead on the “syntactical constellations in the field of the sentence”. Here the energy of the language finds its desired impression in form on the page. She continues, “I have always felt inscription (mark making) as an act of love.”

In her forthcoming novel SLAB, out from Coffee House Press, we encounter the frictive and cooperative positions of animals and humans. The particularity of our humanity is that our “interiors,” as Saterstrom explains, often take on very similar textures to the interiors of animals. Saterstrom argues, in this case, a need to linguistically address these variables. We as readers are asked to contemplate these discussions in an alternative textuality. There is importance in this “not knowing,” she writes, “a way to approach uncertainty as something we all must bear.”

Selah Saterstrom is the author of The Pink Institution (Coffee House Press / 2004) & The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press / 2007). She is on faculty in the University of Denver’s graduate creative writing program and in the Naropa Summer Writing Program.

1.) What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer?

The devil and the color yellow, I’d have to say.

As a child I often stayed with extended family. I have fond memories of living with my (so it seemed!) hundreds of cousins at my grandparent’s house in the country. Certainly there was no money for baby-sitters or extravagant toys so we made our own games…we played Boat Disaster, in which the couch was a boat and half of us were on it trying to sort out how to survive and the other half were sharks who had to pull the people on the boat overboard and eat them, we played Honky-Tonk, in which we put mud water in beer cans we found at the levee and then drank them…and often, when grown-ups needed us out of the way, and they always did, they’d tell us to go in the yard and dig for the devil. A lot of time was spent doing this. Sometimes we felt we were getting close. We’d say: it’s getting hot. I do not know why I connect this memory to early experiences of writing, but I do and always have.

Possibly because during this time I was also learning to read and also write my name.

Toward the end of first grade, I was to receive a special visitor, a big deal. She was an amazing presence – tall, perfumed, dressed to the nines, and she said, “I am going to read you a story.” And she did. This story was about a very 1970’s caterpillar named Yellow. By the end, I understood a great many things I had not before. She let me keep this book. It was my prized possession and in a gesture of holiness I let my cousins mark its pages with crayons. Their marks struck me as thoughtless (hardly their faults), but I remember feeling grief about this. What I take from that experience is how, through story, I was first able to approach uncertainty as something we all must bear, and also that I have always felt inscription (mark making) as an act of love.

Yellow Part 2. When I was seven my mother was in hospital for an extended stay. She was released for a weekend visit staged at an efficiency apartment my father rented at the time. At this apartment complex, there was a swimming pool. A place I wanted to go, but I was without a bathing suit and shy. My mother mysteriously brought “prizes” to this weekend visit. One was a fancy Izod bathing suit, yellow and white striped. The other was a blue book, gold stamped flourishes on the cover, filled with blank pages, which I had no interest in.

So with a positive attitude, I attempted the swimming pool. Off I went and in I jumped into the pool stuffed with howling children, but when I got out of the water I was mortified to discover my bathing suit had gone completely see-through. Made of a material similar to panty-hose, it was a designer knock-off naked modifier suit, alas. In a devastated mood I returned to the empty efficiency, and intuitively opened the blue book and began writing. The story I wrote was called “Erma” and it was about a girl who receives a transforming makeover at the Clinique counter at the mall and an invitation to a party (where she knew, via the Clinique beauty expert, a cute boy would also be)…only to drown herself at sunset. It was basically a really bad rip-off of Cinderella or perhaps a (very!) low quality premonition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. This was, I suppose, my first short story, and I have often thought of it: how writing began as a way to both leave and stay, to question and experiment with the possibilities in life. The fake see-through bathing suit was probably the perfect introduction preparing me for a life of vulnerability, such as writing requires. Little did I know how much more naked I’d end up through writing…

2.) Who have been mentor writers in your career?

Rebecca Brown, Laird Hunt, Michael Klein, Joan Fiset, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Anne Waldman, Akilah Oliver, Eléna Rivera, Tama Baldwin, Eileen Myles, Helen Humphreys – these are important figures that at once come to mind. The work and lives of these writers have been an example to me. Their varied generosities have functioned as miracles in my life. They have taught me about integrity, listening to the work – what it necessitates, fierceness, honesty, the role of the body, not to mention the marvelous potential for syntactical constellations in the field of the sentence.

3.) How has your own work changed over time and why?

I have always taken to heart the Irish painter Francis Bacon’s charge: one should subvert what one can do easily. This reminds me not to become co-dependent on “moves” that feel natural or that I otherwise know how to make with some polish or confidence (which is probably only ever a performance, easily deconstructed). One aspect of every project has included doing the technical thing that feels impossible. This has been a way to keep my practice honest and deepen my meditations on the medium. Also, Fanny Howe reminds us of the Islamic prayer, Lord, increase my bewilderment. This speaks to me about a need to trespass into the unknown (book). Not as a way to know, but to more poignantly experience not-knowing. I find that the work requires the cultivation of subversion and bewilderment.

4.) Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?

Wherever and however text appears, I will give it consideration and inevitably be influenced by it if I go on to behold it with attention. I have been influenced by lousy translations of Japanese films and government forms. I have (…to a kind of big extent) been influenced by trash and its textuality (text in a state of decay, visceral juxtaposition; text disrupted out of its content into a glowing – be it beautiful or horrific – divinatory context). It is all a vista unto/into the medium.

5.) What are your plans for the future?

My novel SLAB will be published. I feel this book as the third and final installment in a trilogy focusing on a particular family in the Deep South. Meanwhile I am working on several projects.

I am writing a book with the poet Jennifer Denrow concerned with reading landscapes via traces, stains, weeds…disaster imprints — how many words are there for this multivalent gesture our hearts are obsessed with? We are traveling, writing letters/lyric essays – who knows? It is a work so much in process. Next stop: Chernobyl, Northern Ireland, Detroit, Ray Town.

For a long time the poet James Belflower and I have been working on a book. We meet across time zones in google-docs and simultaneously write/erase/form this text. It began as a way to discuss Cixous’ valentine to Derrida (Insister). Our reading became writing (which of course all readings do). In my mind, I call this book: CATACBOMBS PAPERED IN VALENTINES, I don’t know what James calls it. We are, through live-time writing, trying to find one another, each always just out of range, view…there are a lot of echoes and intimate approximations, and it feels like this text takes place in the twisting undergrounds of cities, burial sites, theoretical texts. This project has taught me how thrilling writing can be and has helped me, in many ways, to remain sane.

I am also working on a text/image book of poems. I do not know if this is a book of love poems or meditations on the Isenheim Altarpiece painted by Matthias Grünewald in the sixteenth century. It may also be about the origins of New Thought movement in the 1890s. These influences seem impossible and ridiculous! But there they are, somehow.

6.) What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?

I began to try and answer this question, but ended up daydreaming about writing a hundred books. I would say that my view is pained. My view is in a state of desire. My view is hopeful. My view is astonished. My view is disrupted. My view is rapturously attentive. My view is antithetical to the solution. My view is in a state of being present for miracles. My view is vibrating off the charts of my nervous system. My view is of my niece’s darling frame while she sings at the very top of her fresh, unburnt lungs. It is shaped like Kansas. My view is of the ocean. Is swamp and Bigfoot prints and Roni Horn and Eva Hesse guts. It is local, inter-stellar, cellular. It is French and Ukraine and Southern. It is expensive lipstick and thrift store slips. My view is of my friend Erin’s face at the dinner party (when she remembers her dead mother), and a memory of my own mother’s face, hooked into the machine, straining, to say a single word. My view is of the faces of many friends, alive / dead, across the table, lamenting-celebrating, clink-clink (and then sunrise).

I don’t know how to answer except to wake in the question, every day, and try. There are things I could say about the state of contemporary publishing and so on. I don’t mean to invoke litany as a means to avoid, but is a huge question I’m not sure I can fully answer here, and it is a question that moves me toward writing as if writing were the burning response.

7.) Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

I want to look at them all, don’t you? Many very exciting writers come to mind…Laura Davenport, Andrea Rexilius, Deborah Poe, Kristen Nelson, Brandi Homan…

For example, at the moment I am very excited by the work Elizabeth (Frankie) Rollins. She has love affairs with sentences: so many planes of existence shoot through her humming, shivering line. She has put her novel, Origin, on-line, publishing it in installments. In so doing she is genuflecting to 19^th century reading practices and also exploring contemporary strategies for reading communities. Also, I am over the moon that Dzanc Books will be publishing Sara Veglahn’s exquisite book, The Mayflies. Keening and spooky sentences – vignettes that feel like “cold spots” in a haunted house. Her ability to lay bare a post-industrial loneliness and reveal the vast distance between beings – the paradox of intimacy – is marvelous.

8.) If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

Florist, diviner, dinner party planner, Aquarius.

9.) Your work is hybrid poetry/pros by nature, sometimes swaying towards a more normative definition, but never allowed to sit still. How do you approach the structural difference between pros and poetry? Do you believe that their needs to be a distinction? When you disassemble these fields are their certain areas that you believe to be less alienating avenues for poetry and or pros?

In terms of structural differences and approach…I feel my job is to make choices that the work (the visitation) requires, which is often contrary to what I might fancy. The urgency to do right by the visitation, as it seeks (book) form, trumps my need to understand or locate myself in genre – even as I am aware of, and hungrily intrigued by, manifestations of lyric planes sliding on top of one another’s surfaces.

I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t have will as writers – that we can’t overlay worthy structures onto/into the work, and so forth. And I don’t wish to suggest that the unstable line between poetry/prose is not a rich place to shimmer in (necessary) conversation (which is what strikes me as important concerning the distinction between genres, which is to say: investigating difference might liberate us into a state of allowing forked tongues which can speak all that seems necessary or impossible).

10.) In your forthcoming work SLAB, which takes on numerous forms including a theatrical play, narrative, poetry, and the many blurs between, attention is made in specific regards to the tension between the animalistic nature of human beings and our more animalistic tendencies. They blur. We are asked to look at for example: the nature of modern medicine’s technological ability to attach the face of a dead woman to that of a live woman who had been mauled by a dog. This is juxtaposed to the field of a page where the breeds of dogs are capitalized. Just as my name or yours, we as readers are stimulated to address the power of capitalizations and how these constructs operate in a western patriarchal structure. A name is capitalized, perhaps more poignantly, signifier, “I”; the mind is capitalized. In SLAB, we are in a world where in many cases animal, in this case dogs, respond in a more appropriate humane response than their master counterparts. These are tangible life occurrences. Could you please elaborate on these meditations, describe your intention behind these frictions, and speak to how they manifest in your work?

Yes, the new novel (forthcoming) is obsessed with animals. One of the main characters in SLAB is Tiger (who, at one point, becomes an actual tiger: hooray!). Dogs are a big theme, too. When I began writing this book, I couldn’t fathom having a pet. But then half way through, I got a dog.

I am extraordinarily moved that some animals choose to align with humans. During [hurricane] Katrina, I was very struck by the dogs, in particular. Devastated, often bent towards any given affection, but at times, competition, in packs, frightening. They died, as many people also did. After a few days dead, unattended, their bloated gaseous bodies went off as bombs – their feathery death textures coating the remains of many ashy layers of on-going suffering. All of us – dogs and humans, etc. – at times performed our interiorities, side by side, which created what felt like a streaming series of revelations. But inside this form of revelation there was (key ingredient) concealment/blur/obscurity. This kind (these kinds) of revelation suggests a new grammar (syntax, morphology, inflections, phonology, semantics), which performs Midrash upon – writes beyond – (but is certainly not limited to) patriarchy.

I don’t know if this describes the intentions behind certain frictions, but that is what comes up for me in the moment.

Posted in Selah Saterstrom
Tags: Selah Saterstrom, SLAB, The Meat and Spirit Plan, The Pink Institution

Erika Lutzner

Website: http://scapegoatreview.com/

http://upstairsaterikas.com/

How much does perception shift experience? The hue of ones colored glasses; in love, in depression, in triumph, in trauma. How much are we the semblance and extrication of simply how we are feeling? What part of our experience is visible and invisible? When we consider a girl removed from her home for abuse and neglect, how often do we stop and ask for her opinion? Do we step into the millionaire’s shoes on trial for shooting his wife? How much does our story incorporate the full spectrum of perspective? Erika Lutzner, whose book Invisible Girls, came out last month by Dancing Girl Press, is a poet copiously aware of the voice of “other”. The invisible and the visible, “show[ing] the tragedy of circumstance”. The arena of artist is a difficult place to be, she explains, “There’s an invisible line I can’t cross. How can I, as a writer, voice my opinion without objectifying these girls? Without doing the exact thing I am accusing the men in the poems of doing. I don’t know that I have an answer. It’s why I write.”

Consider the larger universal conversation and how invisibility perpetuates violence. The cyclical repetitious act of the inability to empathize, sympathize, or simply listen to “other” continues violence. Chaos feeds chaos. Lutzner explains, “we are repeating the same mistakes again and again; we are a huge machine never learning. Our mouth opens we take it in, repeat; spit and begin again.” Lutzner places us in both positions disassembling “other,” so that “By the end of the poem … the reader is no longer innocent. One can’t turn back.” She places awareness onto the responsibility of the reader questioning, “How often as a nation do we sit by and watch atrocities occur without saying anything? We know we should, we say we should, yet, we sit by and do nothing.  It happens everyday.” Lutzner asks us to quite simply wake up.

Erika Lutzner is the editor of Scapegoat Review. She curates Upstairs at Erika’s, a monthly writer’s salon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  She is currently working on an anthology on the topic of truth versus fiction in poetry and how the lines intersect which will be out this coming fall. She divides her time between NY and a tiny island in Maine.

1.)    What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? Who are your favorite writers and how did they change over time?

I was told I was inarticulate as a child, which led me to feel unable to speak. I felt invisible, and I turned to books as a means of escape. Anything seemed possible on the page. I would imagine myself as the characters in the books I was reading and they took me out of myself for a time.

I didn’t make a conscious decision to become a writer but I knew that I wanted a way out and that writing gave one opportunities (or so it seemed in my make believe world). Later, when a tragic event occurred in my life and I didn’t know how to deal with it, I had no way to cope.  Writing was the thing that kept me alive. I know that if I didn’t have writing, I wouldn’t be here now. Without writing, I couldn’t exist; it is as necessary as air.

As a child I loved Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.  I also loved Aesop’s Fables and Grimm’s Fairytale’s. I used to read by flashlight under the covers in my bed. I read Anais Nin, Robert Pirsig, Anne Rice, Stephen King and Henry Miller (my mother’s bookshelf). It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand what I read, I had to read. I stayed back in the second grade because of a problem learning to read, so when I finally could read, I read voraciously without regard to content.  I could tell you what I had read verbatim even though I didn’t understand it.

I still love O’Connor. I have always been drawn to the dark; it makes me feel safe. Some of my favorite writers now are Paul Celan, Aimee Bender, Rilke, Heather Lewis, Wislawa Szymborska, and César Vallejo. My go to writers are Roald Dahl and Raymond Carver; those who take me back to the everyday darkness I crave.

I look toward language as well as content these days.  As a child I was just looking for something to take me to another place. The work is always dark, always beautiful and always carries me away from myself; that hasn’t changed. I think what has changed is that now perhaps it’s a little more complicated although I am not sure about that. I tend toward visceral work now, but I did as a child as well.

2.)    Who have been the creative inspiration / mentor writers in your career?

Maurice Sendak was probably my first true inspiration. “Where The Wild Things Are” scared the daylights out of me but also fueled my desires. Shel Sileverstein too. “One Sister For Sale” and “Where The Sidewalk Ends” were such great poems. And “The Giving Tree” is still a favorite of mine. Sharon Olds was my first love. I didn’t really know about poetry before her. Her poems “True Love” and “Cambridge Elegy” got under my skin and never left. They speak of what love and death are really like. It took me years to find my voice, but in hers, I heard my own, and I would learn not to be afraid to use it.

Most of my mentors have been my books. They have taught me more than anyone. Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Celan, Yehuda Amichai, to name a few. Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and of course, my number one inspiration, Jon my husband, most of my poems are about him. Without him, I would not be writing.

3.)    How has your own work changed over time and why?

When I started writing I was very musical and rhymed a lot. That was about it. I wasn’t contained at all. I was vomiting everything out. I had almost 35 years worth of poems in my head at that point. I needed to learn how to write in stanzas and how to control myself.

Now I still am musical, but I know how to use the music. I’ve always been a lean writer but I’ve become even more so. I use color and texture to say what I want to say; to build a landscape. I write poems about things other than my family and elegy now. There was a natural progression in my work because I finally got out what had been building up for so long. It had given birth, and I was free. I use prose a lot now that was something that was very freeing for me. I also speak through other voices which has helped my writing break open. I still write on the same subjects but in new ways.

4.)    Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?

I think I’ve been influenced by music without knowing it. I have to force myself not to rhyme. It comes so naturally to me. I played the violin as a child, and my instinct is to put music to words. I used to be a professional chef, and I had a cadence in my head. I dreamt of lamb chops and arpeggios. Many of my favorite writers are quite musical in their writing. I also have been deeply influenced by Shakespeare and elegiac writing as well as drama and satire.

5.)    What are your plans for the future?

I am editing a book about girls/women without voices who are trying to take back their power and I am working on a memoir. It’s a bit slow going as I’ve decided to do it in poetryesque form.  I also have a place on an island in Maine, and I would like to start having workshops there, but that is in the way off future!

6.)    What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?

Our voices are getting louder every day. We can and do write on everything. Nothing is forbidden. Sharon Olds was definitely one of the women at the forefront as well as women such as Ruth Stone and Dorianne Laux, they paved the way for us.

7.)    Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

Nin Andrews, Simone Meunch, Dana Levin, Mary Jo Bang

8.)    If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

Dark, elegiac, bitterly honest, humorous and tender, but I hate to box myself in.

9.)    The language in Invisible Girls, published last month by Dancing Girl Press, pays close attention to flowery western ideals of femininity including “glittering,” beds made of “pink cotton candy”. In your poem, “Jorani’s Dream,” these sentiments wrap us in “luminous language,” distracting the reader as we wake up to the witness of “girls imprisoned in the rooms / next to mine”. Can you discuss the tension between our western ideals, invisibility, and the ways in which these cultural norms affect voice?

Western ideals and invisibility and the ways in which cultural norms affect voice, that’s a tall order!  “Jorani’s Dream” as with the other poems in the collection, is meant to highlight the flaws within our logic. I wanted to show the tragedy of circumstance.  I use language because that is my weapon; I learned early on it’s deadly when used correctly—thus the distractions of luminous language as you pointed out which leaves us with the terribly sad ending. This was a tricky book to write because of Western ideals juxtaposing cultural ideals and how it affects voice.  I wanted to at all times make sure that I didn’t overstep any boundaries. That’s something I think about all the time while writing. There’s an invisible line I can’t cross. How can I, as a writer, voice my opinion without objectifying these girls? Without doing the exact thing I am accusing the men in the poems of doing. I don’t know that I have an answer. It’s why I write.

10.) The poem, “God Is On Vacation, Refusing To Take Calls,” confronts sensationalized cyclical violence, particularly war and more specifically 9/11, and the ways in which love intimacy and the participation of the body are affected in this discourse. The poem reads, “Look / in the mirror of historical madness; we become / accomplices. The mad are sane, we are all / that remain. Intimacy swallowed by the infinite.” In this landscape the dead become mere “juicy hues” filling the streets. In your opinion, how does the invisibility of cyclical modes of violence affect our cultural lens particularly around the notions of intimacy “swallowed” in the “infinite”?

We are repeating the same mistakes again and again; we are a huge machine never learning. Our mouth opens we take it in, repeat; spit and begin again. Without learning the why and how, we will never change. We have war after war without acquiring change. It’s like with the Iraq War, Sadaam and Bush, who had the bigger balls? The answer is communication not murder. I don’t think people may agree with me, but it’s what I believe. Killing is not the answer. An eye for an eye and all the world goes blind. We are being swallowed up into the infinite never to surface filling the streets with juicy hues of murder. This is not the world I want to live in. Not the world my husband would want. Who is sane, who is mad? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

11.) “Cambodia,” presents the chilling feeling of a sepia print acquiescesing the reader to climb inside the frames of the poem and sit street side unnoticed. Here we watch young girls, “Sold for five dollars; given drugs to make them jump like monkeys in a cage.” Muted horror is dulled in the eyes of the girls repeatedly questioning the foreigners, “Mister, want some yum yum?” We find the narrator is listening, voicing both perspectives, and one’s own participation in the invisibility of the girls, ending, “I jump like a monkey”. Can you elaborate on the importance of this spherical conversation and how it evaluates and addresses our notions of “otherness”?

You touch on a good point. This is something that is in a lot of my work. In “Cambodia” the reader is asked to climb inside as you say, and does so willingly for whatever reason. Perhaps the curiosity or the horror? By the end of the poem however, the reader is no longer innocent. One can’t turn back.  How often as a nation do we sit by and watch atrocities occur without saying anything? We know we should, we say we should, yet, we sit by and do nothing.  It happens everyday.  We say we will the next time, or our neighbor will, or it’s not our problem.  And the cycle never ends. It’s not my daughter, it’s not my war, it’s not my oil, not my shame—“Cambodia” forces the reader to address these ideas because by becoming a willing participant, the reader is culpable now.  He/she has become the “Mister” in the poem.  The cyclical nature of “Cambodia” is really what the book itself and much of my work is about.  I write about invisibility and those without voices in all my work.  Those trying to capture their voice; trying not to be silenced any longer.

Posted in Erika Lutzner
Tags: Dancing Girl Press, Erika Lutzner, Invisible Girls

J. Hope Stein

Website: www.jhopestein.wordpress.com

www.eecattings.com

www.poetrycrush.com

J. Hope Stein is a poet that evokes the lyrical expression of her craft and human meditations through persona, pop culture, constraint, and our evaluative methods of communication. Music, Playboy, film, and technological intermediary of intimacy dance in a playground of invention and our perception of this space.

Stein describes herself more as, “a listener than a writer”. She articulates, “I am drawn to experiencing history as a citizen does – without hindsight. I get very little from text books and biography.” Persona, in Stein’s work permits her movement through the weighty abstractions of human experience; “some kind of urge for life”. It is here she extracts, “love is the great antelope we make of each other — to me that is a hopeful statement about love and our individual capacity for invention and reinvention.”

J. Hope Stein is the author of the chapbooks [Talking Doll]:  (Dancing Girl Press),  Corner Office (H_NGM_N BKS) and [Mary]:  (Hyacinth Girl Press).   Her full length manuscript The Inventor’s Last Breath was a finalist in the Alice James Books 2011 Kinereth Awards and her chapbook Light’s Golden Jubilee was a finalist in the 2011 Ahsahta Chapbook Contest.  J. Hope Stein is also the author of poetry/humor site eecattings.com, editor of poetrycrush.com. Her short film, The Inventor’s Last Breath, based on her full-length manuscript about Thomas Edison, was screened at the 2011 Cinepoetry Festival at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur and will be screened in several venues in 2012.

1.)   What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? Who are your favorite writers and how did they change over time?

You’ve caught me at a good time to answer this question because I have been trying to figure out why I write the way I do and the answer I think is, that at the time I was learning to read (mostly children’s poetry: Robert Louis Stevenson, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss kind of stuff) I was also sharing a bedroom with a woman who showed me tons of porn magazines–(long story). I would use tracing paper and colored pencils and trace pictures and words and put it together as a book and put my name on the cover. So, my writing has always been kind of a cross between Green Eggs & Ham and Playboy.

Over time I’ve taken in numerous influences– the best thing that I did in that regard is get an MFA at New England College which was kind of a boot camp in which I totally lost my ego– stopped thinking about what I liked and what I didn’t like — and just tried to read and absorb as much technique as I could.

2.)  Who have been the creative inspiration / mentor writers in your career?

My mother was a music publisher so I was consuming lyrics at an intense rate. While I was growing up she represented the lyrics of everyone from U2 to Rodgers & Hammerstein to REM to Sheldon Harnick to Irving Berlin to Leiber & Stoller. And she would bring tons of music home and I would listen to and memorize all the lyrics.

My parents divorced when I was 2. So, growing up, I would see my father on Sundays and we would drive around and he had a new mix of songs to listen to each week and we would just cruise around and listen and that would be the emotional soundtrack of our day and I think that is how I learned to understand him. I mean, I was 5, 6, 7, and felt a very strong sense of communication with him without him saying too much about what was going on in his life. So, lyrics were very important to me at a young age. I could kind of know my father better by the choices he made and my mother’s business was lyric.

My MFA mentors from New England College were rather magical – as artists and as teachers: Ilya Kaminsky, Brian Henry, Malena Morling, Carol Frost.

I am inspired by many of my friends who are in all fields of art and work, especially my husband who is also a writer.

3.)  How has your own work changed over time and why?

When I first started to try to write poetry it was when the person I loved most in the world died. I wrote a lot of short poems which were overwhelmed with grief and regret and guilt and self-loathing. One day I just woke up and took all my poems to the corner of 22^nd Street and 7^th Avenue and threw them in a garbage can and as a survival instinct I completely cut myself off from poetry and got myself a corporate job. It wasn’t until many years later— I fell in love again and got married, that I found myself writing again and it was at the insistence of my husband, who is also a writer, that I make writing a priority.

Around the same time I met Ilya Kaminsky at the Frost Place and read his book Dancing In Odessa on a train from Vermont to New York and by the time I was back in New York I was like– this is what I want to do. So I looked him up on the internet and emailed him and followed him to New England College.

When I started my first semester at New England College I was pretty determined to not write about the dead boyfriend. I think Ilya’s work helped me see how that is possible – his “we dance to keep from falling” attitude made an impression on me and the kind of writer I wanted to be. Also his love poems have this bringing-sexy-back to marriage spirit going on that is refreshing and I had just gotten married and it was a place I wanted to dwell in my own work.

To avoid the dead boyfriend I went to the New York Public Library and read archived newspapers. I think it was in his book Chronicles that Bob Dylan talks about when he first moved to New York City and started writing songs– he would go to the New York Public Library and read archived newspapers from the Civil War. He said that he did it because in writing his songs, he didn’t want to limit himself to his personal experience. So, rather than starting from a place of expression and emotion I was focused on research and technique and language. What resulted was a much more indirect dealing of my grief. One that inspired me rather than swallowed me.

I wrote a book length piece that was based on Thomas Edison’s last breath which was supposedly captured and saved in a test tube (on display in the Ford Museum in Michigan). So it was an exploration of that rather than personal loss. And I began to write longer narrative poems in voices of different characters. Focusing on technique and language and research and working in voices were all ways I think of protecting myself from what happened to me the first time I started writing poetry. So I was creating some distance from myself and I was learning a ton while doing it.

My second semester at New England College, I worked with Brian Henry and three really important things happened immediately in the first month which further changed my work. I read Brian’s book Quarantine, Notely’s The Descent of Alette and Inger Christensen’s It. They all have this incredible trance-y electric lyrical quality that mesmerized me. They are all experimental in nature and they all adhere to strict form.

The trance-y lyric made me realize what I wanted in the quality of my own lyric.  The experimental nature made me more confident in my individuality as a writer.  I began to trust my instincts. And with form – I finally understood form – not intellectually the way you are taught in school, but I understood it in my bones as a necessity for my poems to live. I really love Frost and I love to read his lectures, particularly his thoughts on form.

Currently, I am looking at all the material I have written over the past 3 years and there are lot of historical figures that I use — I kind of have my way with them to work out my own intellectual and emotional explorations.  In that sense I’ve been a bit of a coward.  Now I’m trying to pull a layer back and get a little closer to myself – not too close so that I will swallow myself up, but closer.

4.)  Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?

There was a 1-person play I saw by Anna Deveare Smith called Let Me Down Easy that haunts me and informs my work. There is a final scene which powerfully describes the moment of death and I think that has been in my mind through much of the writing of The Inventor’s Last Breath.

CocoRosie’s first album which they recorded in a bathtub moved me by it’s sheer creative force and is part of what got me to start writing again.

Kanye West is big for me.  When I first heard his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I felt like someone had just broken through to the new century. As though everything had been still and dead before that and he just broke through. I love his other work, but it’s that album that just woke me up.

The honesty of the Violent Femmes and Tracy Chapman is important to me.

The camerawork in Robert Altman films (especially McCabe & Mrs. Miller) as well as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock has a lot to with how I think in image. Sadly I can’t quite transform it into words, but that’s the goal.

The use of musical refrain– the trumpet—in Fellini’s La Strada. It’s a masterful and moving and meaningful use of repetition. Again, I don’t get there in my own work but that is the goal in my mind. That movie kills me in the best ways. And it has everything to do with that trumpet.

I am inspired by the creativity and the liberties of Todd Haynes in his loose biopics of Dylan and Davie Bowie. Most of my work is loose bio.

I just restructured my manuscript to follow the structure of Hannah and Her Sisters (although no one would realize it).

Archived newspaper. I read so much archived newspaper and incorporate it into my work. The research I did on my Edison manuscript was almost entirely based on archived newspaper. I am drawn to experiencing history as a citizen does – without  hindsight.  I get very little from text books and biography.

I saw an early cut of the movie Compliance last spring which I think is coming in theaters this year. It directly influenced one of my poems called Ted & Sylvia. Compliance is based on a true and very disturbing story of sexual crime. And there was something in that film that made something click for me and it continues to inspire my new work. Craig Zobel is one of my favorite new directors. He has a gift for nailing some of the honest and often ugliest aspects of the human condition.

I was away most of January in a remote place in the central mountains of Oregon, where I lived in a cabin and had a spurt of writing that I am grateful for. I was listening to this playlist of like a 100 tracks in constant rotation: Beirut’s new album, Lovers- past 2 albums, Olof Arnalds – all albums, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins new album, live readings from Hayden Carruth, live readings of John Ashbery, Live readings of Wallace Stevens, the new album from Little Scream, the new album from Active Child and James Blake’s latest album. The energy of these works, in my mind, is very connected to energy of what I wrote.

That’s just the first few things that come to mind.

5)    What are your plans for the future?

I’m continuing my new work – Lob Story. I’m going to be a story editor on a film project. And have some other short film pieces I’m working on. I have a new chapbook in July called [Mary]: (Hyacinth Girl Press). I’m also collaborating on a project with Joanna Penn Cooper that I’m excited about. It is both artistic and philanthropic.

6)    If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

I’m more of a listener than a writer.

7)   In your chap book, Corner Office, published by H _ N G M _ N   B KS 2012, we enter into a world of disassembled bodies that unravel and crumble into the passivity of tombstones. But while the body remains inactive, love is an action that breaks through the technological experience of our present everyday lives. You comment on this intimacy as it filters through emails, computer programs, office supplies, and windows. Seemingly searching for the warmth to utter, “I lob you”. Can you discuss how you see intimacy interacting in our present technologically focused culture?

Hey, it’s funny you should pick that line “I Lob You”  because I’ve expanded on that and have just written a new 20page chunk of work called “Lob Story”. I have never really asked myself this question about technology, but now that you mention it I can see that it is all over my work.

I have a metaphor in there somewhere likening the skyscrapers as growing towards sunlight like coral reef…and I suppose I was thinking about how on the bottom of the seafloor where there’s no sunlight – there are still urges for life.

The experience this was loosely based on was when I was sharing an office cubicle with this guy and there was a lot of sexual tension between us. In that environment with people around us all the time– being able to hear what we say and see us– the urge seeped through in strange behavior– the details about how he took pictures of me from his desk and emailed them to me…he took a picture of a picture of my mother (and hung it over his desk), those are details that stuck with me of this kind of strange intimacy that we shared. There was also something withheld that stuck with me. And in moments like this I feel like one can feel oneself being governed by something that is not really them, some kind of urge for life.

Regarding your question about technology– There were times when we were sitting right next to each other in our cubicle and he would both call me on the office phone and instant message me on my computer at the same time. And on the phone he would be like “hey, how are you?” while simultaneously instant messaging me “fuck you fuck you fuck you”. Those were the days! Now our relationship is a completely normal friendship because we are not in that circumstance. The urges play against the structure of the circumstance. In much of my work I don’t start with language, like other poets do (although I spend a lot of time thinking about language). I start with rules and form and structure because my tendency is for all urge so when I give my urges a structure to live within, it ultimately helps me find the tension.

9)  Punctuation plays a commanding role in your collection of poems, Insomniacs. Described as “units of personality,” by your Thomas Edison character in the opening piece, we are visually able to see the subversive quality of punctuation. We witness how it affects our experience of language in the musical field of language in addition to how it is arranged on the field of the page. In the poem, “The Boy,” he “hears the earth/ in a series of dashes and dots”. And in “INVENTOR LOSES HEARING AS MOTHER READS WHITMAN,” there is a passage made up entirely of punctuation “You say you can feel it in your stomach. / .-.. — .- ..-. / — -. / – …. . / –. .-. .- … … // .– .. – …. / — .  loose the stop from your throat.” We are also given footers throughout the collection of poems. Can you describe your intention behind this confronting punctuation and how it is evaluated on a universal platform?

My manuscript was about an Inventor character (loosely based on Thomas Edison) and I was doing a ton of research and Edison proposed to his second wife Mina by tapping on her wrist in Morse code.  It was kind of like their secret language.

The second thing that gave me the idea was that Ilya had me reading Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” – the version translated by John Felstiner–  and he noted to me that it was interesting how in Felstiner’s translation he chose to keep in some lines in German and the power of that. So that planted the seed for me to have something on the page that was not fully translated — something that was preserved within the experience that I was translating from Edison’s life.

The Morse code came out of an instinct to make the work more visually mysterious to myself. As though it’s inhabited by something that I don’t have full knowledge of.  This is similar to my use, which you mention, of the over 90 interruptive endnotes in my long poem Conglomerate. Like the Morse code, the endnote markings within the text represent something that is present but you cannot see it exactly. In that sense, there is something spiritual to me.  And I agree about your observation of punctuation being musical. To me it’s very percussive.

I do think there is a connection between the “units” of punctuation and the quote I use from Thomas Edison regarding his theory of life and death and man being comprised of “life units.”  I can’t articulate what, but I think you are right.

Regarding your question about punctuation on a universal platform.  Punctuation, generally works as a breath manager – determining when you get to breathe.   The book is called Inventor’s Last Breath and The Inventor has “breath experts,” so yea, I think that is all related.

10)    Talking Doll, a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press 2012, focuses on the “Inventor”. The inventor orchestrates artists that “pencil 60 straight-edge diagrams,” “breath experts,” that “mold 30 different breeds of diaphragm,” “experiments of the flesh”.  Love later we find out turns out to be an antelope head hanging over the mantle of a winter fireplace. As readers, we are confronted with the question: “is this love or experiment?” and when the response is love, “is it love for love or for the sake of experiment?” How do you see love functioning in these two separate roles and how does the role of the inventor or artist participate in this discussion?

To me, the inventor and artist are the same. Edison said you need to be a poet to be an inventor.  I guess I see love the same way. You need to be a poet and an inventor. Certain people bring out different things in you, so there is the chemical/scientific aspect.  Love has a lot of possibilities for experimentation and invention. The antelope over the fireplace image, just as I’m thinking of it now,  reminds me of Woody Allen’s dead shark analogy from Annie Hall – in which he says that a relationship is like a shark and needs to move forward and if it doesn’t it’s a dead shark. But later I say something like — love is the great antelope we make of each other — to me that is a hopeful statement about love and our individual capacity for invention and reinvention.

The “Is this love or experiment” line probably is asking the question of whether something is purely chemistry or if there is something deeper.  In the case of the Talking Doll (one of Edison’s inventions) – who is speaking in this poem as she is being put together by the Inventor — I think she is wondering if his motive is just to make her for the sake of a scientific invention – for his love of science — or if he is truly passionate about her. There was a crop of talking dolls that were defective — Christmas, 1889 or so — that were just piled up in Edison’s factory in a corner somewhere. One second they were the hottest Christmas item, the next, they were all returned to the factory because they didn’t work. Poor girls, I felt bad for them.

Posted in J. Hope Stein
Tags: J. Hope Stein, Mary, Talking Doll

Kelli Anne Noftle

Website: www.kelliannenoftle.com

http://omnidawn.com/contest/contest_2010.htm

How much of yourself do you edit as you present yourself to the world? What is the position of artist to reveal inter-dimensional aspects of self that we connect to a universal consciousness that is breadth of experience? Poet, singer songwriter, and artist, Kelli Anne Noftle, whose book, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, winner of the Omnidawn book prize forthcoming next month, discloses that in her process, she “tend[s] to disappear, which seems essential to art-making. In those moments, imagery informs the language … following a trail of obsessions down the internet’s rabbit hole no matter how bizarre or unrelated the material may seem at the time.”

Take for example Noftle’s poem, “Mating Chain,” where she exorcisizes the bizarre mating sexual excursions of sea slugs and explores how this references, “human sexuality and nature vs. the ‘rules’ of romantic relationships”. Here, personal connection is mirrored in a “polyamorous experience,” and we are given opportunity to question intimacy, gender, and our more savage “animalistic instinct”. How does sleep and dream effect these deliberations? We face scapes of multiplicity, fear, and risk, present in the larger scope of her work. Noftle’s musical method evokes a more organic, “messy” quality that inspires chance and less linear examination.

Kelli Anne Noftle grew up in a small town in central Virginia. She has a B.A. in Visual Art and is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her work has appeared in several literary journals including Colorado Review, The Journal, VERSE, Blackbird, Cream City Review, Conduit, and Harvard Summer Review among others. Her first collection of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout for the OMNIDAWN BOOK PRIZE and is forthcoming in 2012.

1.)    What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? Who are your favorite writers and how did they change over time?

I saw the movie Poltergeist when I was four (way too young!) and started writing short stories about death and the supernatural. Consequently, I’m quite afraid of the dark even as an adult and themes of loss and fear are still very prominent in my work.

It wasn’t until my parents’ divorce that I started writing poems. I was extremely prolific as a teenager; I wrote a poem every night before bed in high school. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was the first collection of poems I bought when I was fifteen. Today, my favorite poets/writers are Christian Hawkey, Mary Ruefle, Lyn Hejinian, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, Christian Bök, Roberto Bolaño, Jennifer Egan, and Gertrude Stein.

2.)    Who have been the creative inspiration / mentor writers in your career?

The first poetry course I took was in graduate school with the exceptionally talented and brilliant Elena Karina Byrne. Elena mentored me, introducing me to contemporary poetry as well as the Los Angeles literary community.  My fiction professor, Shelly Lowenkopf, is also a dear friend.  I am indebted to their support and encouragement.

3.)    How has your own work changed over time and why?

I learned to stop editing myself in the creative process. When I write, I tend to disappear, which seems essential to art-making. In those moments, imagery informs the language. It’s all about listening to that inner voice and getting lost following a trail of obsessions down the internet’s rabbit hole no matter how bizarre or unrelated the material may seem at the time. I’m usually pleasantly surprised by odd little connections the brain makes—what may seem like a non sequitur can become the driving force of the poem, a conceit that tethers it all together.  Overall, I trust myself more as an artist/writer than I did when I first began. Reading contemporary poetry has changed my work too.

4.)    What are your plans for the future?

To write a novel and produce/record another album using my laptop.

5.)    Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

Emily Jayne Motzkus. The Offending Adam published her chapbook, The Henry Miller Remix, last year– it literally gave me chills, it’s so good. Another brilliant poet is Molly Brodak. She won the Iowa Poetry Prize a few years ago and is the editor of one of my favorite online lit magazines, Aesthetix. (http://aesthetixpoems.wordpress.com)

6.)    If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

My foundation is in visual art, specifically sculpture and installation. I want to be a writer who constructs the poem or narrative by building with the existing objects, language.  I’m a poem-maker. Read Larry Levis’s poem, “Linnets.” It explains everything.  (http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/poetry/levis_l/linnets_page.shtml)

7.)    The balance achieved between music and lyric must be uniquely balanced. Structure performs in distinct and similar roles in both song and poetry. Some argue the composition of the lyric in a song requires more precise articulated poignancy to deliver a message to the listener when digested in balance with the music that it is accompanied with. Just as there are different structures in poetry, we have the same in music. The possibilities of these unions address the promise of diversity in structure and aesthetic. How do you approach this complexity? Can you please elaborate on your methods of songwriting and poetry and how they aid, differ, attract the listener in different ways? Do you find that some structures are more apt to invite/alienate the reader/listener?

My song-writing brain gives my poetry brain a rest when composing music. I can’t say I’m “composing” because it feels sloppier than that, a very organic process that is heavily reliant on instinct and guessing. Unlike poetry that requires a great deal of editing after the primary creative burst, song-writing (for me) has a lot to do with luck. My songs range from the conventional verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus  structure to a more experimental soundscape. It’s sometimes difficult to play with other musicians because they will tell me to “play the verse again,” and I’ll play the chorus instead because we have different perceptions of song structure.

When writing lyrics, occasionally I borrow a line from a poem, but I tend to choose language I wouldn’t use in my poetry. For example, in one of my songs I’m just chanting the phrase “I DON’T LIKE YOU” repeatedly and it’s my favorite song I’ve ever written . (www.miniaturesoap.bandcamp.com) People seem to enjoy it more than others too. I love listening to pop music. I’m okay with lyrics that are completely banal and cliché. Britney Spears and Rihanna? Yes, please. Sitting in LA traffic makes me crave catchy hooks and fast beats.

8.)    Your poem, “Mating Chain,” begins with a description of the mating ritual of snails: “When three or more sea slugs mate in unison, the first animal in the chain acts exclusively as female, the last as male, and the others as male/female simultaneously.” The poem leaves us with, “But what’s the difference between this hunger and parasitic tendency? I twist and steer each tentacle, tying knots against the stillness. This one to symbolize love and the other, savagery. I’m learning the subtlety, braiding between them.” I am interested in the “subtlety” of gender/love/connection with one to “other” perhaps even these feelings within the self that you seem to address here. How does this relate to the body’s repetition in loneliness? Are you suggesting a tension between the actions of a body and their relationship to the savagery of the process or the connection to the mind? Where in your opinion does love lie in these subtleties?

This poem is one in a series about sea slugs (Nudibranchs).  The poems evolved after attending a marine biologist’s lecture on the mating habits of sea slugs. I’d fallen in love with two people at the same time that summer. It was thrilling and unexpected and messy. One of the people I was in love with became involved with someone else too, so it was this complicated, hopeless situation where I think everyone got hurt eventually. The presentation on Nudibranchs made me question human sexuality and nature vs. the “rules” of romantic relationships. I fantasized about being a Nudibranch engaged in a mating chain where the individuals involved could replace emotional connection with animalistic instinct and swap genders at will. I imagined it to be seamless. This polyamorous experience contrasted with the image of a lone Nudibranch presented in that same lecture—a sea slug that can only move by folding itself in half and reopening over and over as if hinged in the middle, like a snapping jaw or flapping wing. There was a video of it propelling itself upward into the currents, a repetitive motion of opening and closing against a backdrop of dark interminable sea. I identified with that creature, thinking that’s me– wanting desperately to relate to or connect with the “other,” but finding myself alone, working feverishly just to move forward. This is basic self-preservation but it looks terribly forlorn. We have more in common with a species as foreign as the sea slug than I’d ever imagined possible.

There’s a Jenny Holzer quote I love that says, “Having two or three people in love with you is like money in the bank.” To which I would have to respond with a quote by Biggie Smalls: “mo money, mo problems.” I think some of my loneliest moments in life were spent when I was in a romantic relationship (or relationships).  Savagery becomes necessary. At the end of the poem, I’m working to reconcile the two by braiding them together—realizing the difference between desire (hunger) and co-dependency (parasitic behavior) is only very subtle. How does love fit in exactly? I’m still trying to figure that out. Maybe the poem is about a struggle to find that balance.

9.)    In the introduction to your poem “I Follow You All Through the House with My Ears,” published in The Nepotist, you admit that sleep should be safe, prompting us to identify the alternative. The passage I am most interested in reads, “It is inevitable what language will do.// Do not repeat this, what I’m about to say—/Your hands will circle the kitchen/sink, making it clean.” The poem speaks to enveloping that in our dreams which we do not in our “awake” lives. Language here is able to traverse in both realms. This challenges our perceptions of real, our ability to perceive and communicate what are synapse register in a perceived grid of light. The limits of language’s fragility embraced in the miscellany of experience. I am attracted to the last phrase “make it clean”. The poem instructs, “do not repeat” “making it clean”. Do not make it clean. What in your opinion is clean and how does this relate to the conscious and subconscious nature of dreams?

Sleep is dangerous.  In evolutionary terms, if you look at the development of terrestrial mammals, sleeping with both eyes shut is a curious adaptation. Most reptiles, marine life, and birds sleep with half of their brain fully conscious while the other half rests – one eye is always open, on guard for potential predators. Some scientists theorize there are still active circuits in our reptile brain, alerting us to the risk of being harmed or killed as we sleep. This split brain behavior is evident in sleepwalkers and those who suffer from parasomnias/sleep disorders.

Years ago, I was in a relationship with a man who engaged in multiple parasomnias –sleep walking/ talking/eating, sexsomnia, night terrors, and bruxism. I found him eating my ice cream in the middle of the night, but he had no recollection of it the following morning. I researched case studies of somnambulists who inflicted pain upon their loved ones and partners because they were enacting dreams of being physically threatened by an imaginary predator. The speaker in this poem witnesses violence, but also partakes in it. Ambiguity in the voice emerges from the negotiation between a conscious and a subconscious place and bodily actions are dictated from a divided brain. Language is slippery and filled with holes, so sleep-talking (the somniloquy) further reveals its fragility. “Making it clean” can be seen as the act of erasing, trying to remove the inherent flaws of language, an impossible task.

10.) Published in The Off Ending Adam¸ your poem “what we make,” expresses,

Someone told me you can fall into bad habits if you use white consistently. It’s an analgesic. When you want to lighten the sky, you dab the zinc into your blue. When you want to push a little pathway across the thicket, you blot ivory into your Payne’s Grey. It saves time. That’s why I started dumping all my pigments into a bucket of white. It was mostly just to save time.

I am interested in this poem both because of your commentary and experience with studio art specifically in the medium of paint, as well as our cultural adhesion to the color white, and our western cultural perception of light. In this poem, white saves time. What then is color?

A fellow painter once advised me not to use white or black paint when mixing color. This was to preserve the intensity of color because tinting or shading a hue takes away from its particular vibrancy on canvas. Mixing primary and secondary colors to get the desired shade is more difficult than adding white and it requires skill, experience. White (often associated with religious purity and innocence) would actually diminish and dilute the “purity” of color on canvas. It’s an interesting concept; I had not consciously considered the western cultural values/perception of this color when writing this poem.

This is part of a series of epistolary poems addressed to an artist who challenges the speaker. An artist who is not afraid to make mistakes and risk loss.  Again, here is a relationship where fear plays a large role in the dynamic.

Posted in Kelli Anne Noftle
Tags: I Was There For Your Somniloquy, Kelli Anne Noftle

Lynne Thompson

Website: http://www.perugiapress.com/books/bookpage.php?year=2007&pagetype=sample

Lynne Thompson is a story-teller. A poet whose cultural framework is rooted in her African-American and Cheyenne heritage. For Thompson, the responsibility of the writer is to “tell a story,” continuing, “I think story-telling is what captivates the human race above all things.” Although she did not grow up playing an instrument, “jazz, rock-an’-roll and the American musical theater” parade her poetic demonstration. She indulges, “distinctive rhythms and cadences are cemented in my brain.” The visual arts with an emphasis on mixed media, prose, and the structure of theater, are equally inspiring. She delectably describes these moments as “economy wrapped around big ideas made accessible through the personal.”

In retrospect of women writing in the past 20 years, Thompson asks us to recognize that “it seems women are increasingly exploring their worlds as they understand them in ways that are highly original and fresh; excavating the detritus of what has been previously thought to be unimportant or uninteresting by an academy largely composed of—and run by—men.” She comments in response to her own cultural duality, “I have taken on the responsibility for framing these family stories of displacement and dislocation and complicated the task by choosing the genre of poetry with which to tell them. Complicated because the poet seeks, in Dickinson’s words, to tell the story “slant” rather than straight on and therein lies the [sweet] challenge.”

Lynne Thompson was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, by parents born in the Windward Islands, West Indies. She received her B.A. from Scripps College and a J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law. She currently serves as the Director of Employee and Labor Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles. An active member of the Los Angeles literary scene and a Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has been widely published and anthologized.

1.) What were the first inspirations that made you desire to become a writer? Who are your favorite writers and how did they change over time?

Like so many young girls of my generation, Little Women, was the book I read over and over again (don’t think I ever got over Beth dying). I was lucky to have four older brothers who never complained about taking me to the library so I devoured everything that the stern librarian would allow me to check out! I do remember reading every Nancy Drew cover-to-cover before progressing to Cherry Ames, Nurse, Jane Eyre, Clara Barton, Emma Bovary…..seeing a theme here?

The love of poetry, in fact, of all language was inspired by my father who was a closet poet (my mother going in dread of such “romantic notions”). He read the classics to me, including those of African-American writers and, most particularly, the poetry of Langston Hughes. I specifically recall thinking how can I make words sound like that? My early plan was to study linguistics…

My reading habits have changed over the years with my willingness to read with greater attention and to tackle the work of writers whose approach to their material is more of a challenge. A good example of such a challenge is poet M. NorbeSe Philip’s Zong, a completely original work about the eponymous slave ship and the ordered death of 150 Africans so as to recoup insurance money. The book defies easy categorization—it’s more than poetry, prose or legal treatise—and requires an open mind in the reading due to, among other things, the choices Philip made in terms of typographical fragmentation and derangement on the page. But Zong is so satisfying if the reader stays with it.

2.) Who have been the creative inspiration / mentor writers in your career?

This is a tough question as I always feel sure I’ll exclude someone who was, of course, an influence. Someone I must always credit, however, is the east coast poet, Jayne Cortez. She came to my alma mater, Scripps College, for a semester, I believe, during my senior year and was a revelation. Here was a young, black, woman (very much alive; read: not a dead white male) who was not only writing and publishing poetry but breaking with tradition by eschewing punctuation and all the other conventions that I’d been taught about the craft. It was a transformative experience to hear her and read her work.

Other influences who come immediately to mind are Jane Hirshfield, Lucille Clifton, Pablo Neruda, and Toni Morrison – the latter not often thought of as a poet but should be.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention as mentors two poets that I study with regularly because I have the fortune to live in southern California: Dorothy Barresi and David St. John. My workshops with them over the past several years have been invaluable in my creative development.

3.) How has your own work changed over time and why?

When I first began writing seriously, I went in fear of form. Too constricting, I told myself, when the truth was I didn’t think I was up to the task. Over the past few years, however, I’ve been experimenting with form, starting first with the glosa and now on to villanelles and pantoums and most recently, abecedarians. Because I’m still relatively new to this fixity, all I can say is that the writing requires a different kind of attention and willingness to follow rather than lead which feels right at this stage in my creative progress.

Nevertheless, I still go in fear of the sestina. One canzone I wrote reads like an overstuffed mushroom cloud…

4.) Have you been influenced by different genres, and if so how?

Not only different genres, which I’ll get to in a moment, but also different art forms, most obviously music. Although I play no instrument and can’t hold a tune, I have been very influenced by the music I heard growing up: jazz, rock-an’-roll and the American musical theater. These distinctive rhythms and cadences are cemented in my brain and are a feature, hopefully, in all of my work.

The visual arts have been an influence as well. In the fall of 2011, the Hammer Museum mounted an exhibit Now Dig This: Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 and it is still gnawing on my imagination. One can’t see a mixed media assemblage like Betye Saar’s Spirit Catcher, for example, and not run for the pencil and pad.

Of course, prose—fiction or non-fiction—is also an influence. What’s coming to mind as I write this is Alice Walker’s not-to-be-forgotten The Color Purple and a really marvelous book of stories and essays, Haiti Noir. In the realm of non-fiction, I was knocked out by Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a superb example of engrossing truth-and-story-telling.

Finally, I love live theater and the way its structures work. For example, I’m captivated by the bang-for-the-buck Suzan-Lori Parks put into Topdog, Underdog: two characters, one small room–wow!—economy wrapped around big ideas made accessible through the personal….exactly what I’d like to achieve in my own writing.

5.) What are your plans for the future?

I have two concepts knocking around in my head that I want to explore, hopefully when I’m at the Vermont Studio Center later this year. One is for a stage play centered upon a question I held for years concerning my mother’s attitudes during World War II. Only recently, with a greater sense of empathy for her, I have developed a theory about it; unfortunately, it will always be a theory as I never discussed it with her before she passed away.

The second idea is for a collage of poems and prose pieces that will explore the last private moments I spent with my father within the historical context of his immigration from the West Indies and ultimate relocation to California. All of this should keep me busy for more than a while!

6.) What are your views on writing by women as it has occurred in the past twenty years?

Without unduly bashing our male counterparts, many of whom are engaged in writing amazing and original work (Douglas Kearney, Junot Diaz, and D.A. Powell come immediately to mind), it seems women are increasingly exploring their worlds as they understand them in ways that are highly original and fresh; excavating the detritus of what has been previously thought to be unimportant or uninteresting by an academy largely composed of—and run by—men. I’m thinking, to name just a few, of Martha Collins’ willingness to act as witness, once-removed, to a lynching that took place in her father’s hometown in Blue Front; of Harryette Mullen’s wild engagement with language and wordplay in Sleeping with the Dictionary; A.E. Stallings’ invitation to return to ancient Greece as in her recent, family-centric collection, Hapax; and, of Tiya Miles’ deep research and revelation of the almost-lost history of Afro-Cherokee relations in this country. These writers and many of their contemporaries are in the vanguard of a way of seeing how we all live that could only have been written by women; they rise with straight shoulders that I am very comfortable peeking over.

7.) Who are promising women writers to look at in the future?

Gracious, there are too many to name—and I’ll say right away, space considerations make this a necessarily limited list—but I’ll give you the names of some women whose work I’ve been reading lately: Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon, Sarah Maclay, Louise Mathias, Aracelis Girmay, Tracy K. Smith, Marjorie Becker, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Yvette Christiansë and, Stephanie Brown. Of course, I don’t want to exclude those women who have already received and continue to receive recognition for substantial bodies of work: C.D. Wright, Natasha Tretheway, Linda Gregerson, Kimiko Hahn, Marilyn Nelson and the amazing, recent National Book Award-winning Nikky Finney.

8.) If you were asked to create a flexible label of yourself as a writer, what would it be?

Reference the opening poem in my collection, Beg No Pardon: “The Poet Applying for A Job, Cites Her Previous Experience”– “Eccentric drop of ink. Gnome on a trapeze….Hand drum…Sizzling arrow.”

9.) You explain in a personal memoir that your poetry is seated in your own culturally rich, African-American and Cheyenne heritage, a scape you have created out of poetic responsibility. In a personal memoir you write the need to translate your familial, “treasure trove of stories that confirm[s] we have lived in the world.” For example you continue, “May—stories of all of our roots and interconnectednesses. As we laugh and reminisce, Mr. Jimmie is outside sweeping away leaves and fallen fruit in Irma’s backyard after a tropically brief downpour and, just as he finishes, the clouds swell and burst again, drenching the morning’s laundry. Mr. Jimmie chuckles.” Can you elaborate on the importance of storytelling and its role in our ability to exist and translate the self in to the world? How do you see yourself in this conversation as storyteller?

My desire as a writer is to tell a story. I think story-telling is what captivates the human race above all things. Whether it be a crime drama or a Shakespearean play, what we all want to know is what happened, to whom, and why. The poet, of course, seeks to distill this desire into sequential (or non-sequential) language that triggers the imagination of anyone who hears or reads it. The essay you reference in your question pertains to my effort to “excavate” the stories of family, which in my case is complicated by the fact of my adoption, what I consider my “duality”. I have taken on the responsibility for framing these family stories of displacement and dislocation and complicated the task by choosing the genre of poetry with which to tell them. Complicated because the poet seeks, in Dickinson’s words, to tell the story “slant” rather than straight on and therein lies the [sweet] challenge.

10.) I am interested in your address and ability to translate African-American and Cheyenne traditions, two very culturally rich discussions. There is a unique balance between upholding tradition, and translating tradition into a creative adaptation that acculturates rather than assimilates voice in a manner that is accepted and heard in different contexts. One also has to be aware of overly romanticizing tradition. How do these negotiations affect your poetic responsibility?

You’re right when you reference responsibility when taking on this task of translation—albeit in one’s original language—in writing. While I hear writers I admire and respect say that the poem must be more true to itself more than to the “facts”, the facts—often known to family and others—are the facts and, thus, hard to ignore. When I’m engaged in these negotiations, I’m also knee-deep in research on places or persons or situations that I’m trying to bring to life on the page. More often than not, the research into the “truth” gives way to the feeling that I want to convey. It seems that if I’m true to that, my responsibility will be met. After all, how do we ever really know the truth of past traditions?

Currently, I’m reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello and the author has done a meticulous job of conveying what she can only reasonably assume based on the documented history that’s remains more than 200 years later but in the end, the question remains: did Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson love each other as we conceive of love today? Provocative questions like that demand and demand and demand the constant negotiation that the writer can never be completely sure she’s navigated with success.

11.) Your poem, “Unworshipped Woman,” has a very distinct tone and meter. This is accomplished through the form you implement, particularly in repetition and use of a particular syntax.

Nothing

beat her

Break her down or reek so

the way she do

Nothing got her unzipped mind

her flypaper memory

She a riverbed will be

For a dog’s millennium

Does this meter ask the reader to recall specific musical genres or traditions and if so how do you employ this tool in this piece and others? If not, can you explain how melopoeia evolves and reacts with the logopoeia and phanopoeia in your work?

The goal in “Unworshipped Woman” was to give a roadmap to the reader of the page. That is to say, I wrote and conceived of this piece as progressing in s l o w m o t i o n and I wanted to ensure that it would be read and understood that way. I don’t recall that I had anything specific in mind in terms of established genres or traditions rather that I wanted to add a sensory perception to the reception of language.

12.) Can you share with us what you believe to be magic? How do you see poetry interacting with the everyday worlds we live in?

I’m repeatedly drawn back to Coleridge’s definition of poetry: the best words in the best order. It’s a source of amazement and sheer magic that the 26 letters in the English alphabet can continue to be combined and recombined and then set down (or spoken) one after the other in ways that give the tingle to the spine, make the head spin…

….or maybe, in a variation of what the artist, Miguel Covarrubias is reported to have said, poetry is the magic of dancing with words and lines….

Posted in Lynne Thompson
Tags: Beg No Pardon, Lynne Thompson

Elena Karina Byrne

Website:http://www.tupelopress.org/authors/byrne

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Karina_Byrne

Elena Byrne is an assertive actuating poet who intimates, “I write and think like a sprinter”. Writing in transits of translation, she exposes a disengaging spirit, an “exotic explorer of the extraordinary, utilizing the beautiful mundane”. When asked to explain these transmuting experiences and how she as a writer is able to attentively shift these expressions, she describes her poems as “installations in a performance art setting–– they are live objects animated and embodied (made as part of the body) by the voice”. The expression is “physical,–– it’s erotic,” it is a balance of varying subtexts of power.

Posted in Elena Karina Byrne
Tags: Elena Karina Byrne