CLAIRE DONATO Q&A

The series of poems you have in the current issue of Sir are amazing, incredibly succinct. You say, “Practice is a trope.” What a concept, especially in the context of the poem. Where did this idea come from and does it figure in this series of poems, “I Destroy Romantic Memories”?

I wrote this line a long time ago. This question is interesting because it makes me read the line in a separate context.

When I started writing this series of poems, I had ideas that were less interesting to me than what the poems started to become. I was learning how to write a series of poems, and learning how to get my ideas out of the way in order to figure out what the poems wanted to be (not say). I was learning to see things from the middle. I was at the cusp of beginning the program at Brown and hadn’t spent so much time alone with words in my life.

I don’t want to write a certain kind of poem. “Practice” with regard to poetry usually speaks to a conventional idea of mastery: that one can master technique and learn to write a more perfect poem. I don’t want to master poetry or ever feel like there’s any place to arrive. I don’t want to feel comfortable or complacent.

What's your daily life like? How much time do you devote to writing and thinking? (as opposed to all the other daily crap, including making money and also even writing-related stuff)?

I do my best thinking when I’m on the move or moving or in transit between physical and/or psychological spaces. I live in Brooklyn, NY and commute to Providence once a week to teach my Poetry I class and meet with advisers.

On the days I’m not traveling, my S.O. (Jeff) and I have a.m. kitchen table time—we drink coffee and read and/or talk and/or listen to music and/or talk about what we’re reading, hearing, speaking. Then we retreat into our writing room and write. (In a recent collaborative e-mail, we described the room as “intimate and autonomous,” a goofy but accurate description.) Some days I write for hours. These days, writing consists of a lot of revision and book making and slow-taking. At some point I take a break and go to the gym—I’m training to run a half-marathon in the spring—where I do my best thinking. The transition from 100% mind into mind-body works well for me. I’m still trying to figure out how to write down my thoughts when I exercise.

Can you talk about the Incuhabitations project at Brown?

Incuhabitations is a yearlong colloquium I curate with my friend and colleague, Adam Veal. The colloquium was sparked by our mutual interest in conceptual and performance writing. There’s been a lot of recent hype around American conceptual poetry, and Adam and I became interested in a broader, international approach to concepts and languages in poetic practice. Last spring, with the support of John Cayley and Thalia Field, we received a very generous Graduate International Colloquia Grant, which allowed us to bring Caroline Bergvall and Sandy Baldwin to Brown in September for Incuhabitations I: Performance Writing. On March 8th at 7:00pm, we’ll host Incuhabitations II: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry, featuring Rachel Zolf and Andrea Actis.

Here is a breakdown of the term Incuhabitations, which John, Adam, and I collectively coined last summer:

Incubate. Of a bird sitting on eggs in order to warm them, bring them to hatching. To have what is developing inside manifest outwardly.

Habit. A settled or regular tendency to practice. To dress, clothe. From the French: habiller. Déshabillé: undressed.

Habitat: the home or environment of an animal, plant, or other organism. From the Latin: it dwells, it dwells.

-ation, denoting an action or instance of it, a result or product of an action, forming.

How has teaching impacted your writing? Do you want to be a tenured professor someday or do you have another plan?

My father says teaching is a social activity. I love meeting and getting to know people, and I love teaching. My current group of students is small, smart and cooperative; I know they’ll accomplish a lot.

I volunteered as a tutor at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, and I just taught a poetry workshop at 826 NYC. Teaching reading and writing to elementary and middle school aged students is eye opening! I taught the students at 826 NYC poems by C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Ed Dorn, et al. They connected with the poems instantaneously. Are our intuitive means of reading and writing reversed as we move through systems?

In terms of my own writing, teaching has honed both my intuition and my editorial eye, which are most likely one and the same.

My parents are academics; the lifestyle affords time to travel, work, and think. (And, in most instances, to help others achieve slash ‘be their best.’) I’m not sure what my future holds. The academic job market is terrible; universities have turned into industries; I find the sometimes-ruthless dynamics of academia troubling. I’m currently trying to cast a wide net in terms of jobs. I’m applying for both academic and non-academic work.

You just launched Nasturtium Press with Cléa Liquard. Can you talk about the press and producing the first title, The Lack Of, by Joseph Massey? And what’s next for Nasturtium Press?

Cléa and I met as neighbors in the Providence Armory. When we discovered we were both interested in poetry and books-as-objects, we decided to start a press. In Fall 2008, we took a letterpress class at AS220; I also took silkscreening.

Joe and I exchange work frequently, and he sent me a draft of The Lack Of. Cléa and I gravitated toward the sparseness of the manuscript, and knew that we could come up with a spare design that would complement it.

Making hand-bound books is a slow process, and the production took several months. I’m still sewing books! I should make some this afternoon...

At the moment, future plans for Nasturtium include a new collective member and forthcoming chapbooks. I would love to print perfect bound books at some point down the line.

Can you name some of your literary cousins?

I develop relationships with everything I read, so it’s a big family! Currently, I’m reading Joan Didion’s We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Mina Loy’s poetry and biography, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure, Melville’s Moby Dick, and essays on new media poetics.

Students from Daniel Nester's English 218 Read Nate Pritts

Some interesting audio at Poetry in Performance, Daniel Nester's blog for his ENG 218: Oral Interpreation of Literature at the College of Saint Rose. Link below to hear audio of Daniel's students reading the poetry of Nate Pritts:

Katelyn L. reads Nate Pritts’ “Big Expectations.”
Melissa D. reads Nate Pritts’ “Lines.”
Dawn G. reads Nate Pritts’ “Diagram.”
Chelsea S. reads reads Nate Pritts’ “Sad Girl-I-Did-Not-Stop-To-Inquire-Of.”
Kristine L. reads Nate Pritts’ “Morning Ice.”
Ashley M. reads Nathan Pritts’ “You Can’t Put a Price on This.”
Jeremy R. reads Nate Pritts’ “This One Red Leaf.”

Cousin about Town...Kate Schapira

While she may not be one of our zillion Irish cousins, Kate Schapira is one of our best Providence townsfolk (and treasure)... And she's got a new book of poetry out that is very cousins-ish, in a way. 

• Come see her read tonight 2/13 at Ada Books on Westminster Street at 7pm. Heard there'll be treats.
• Or, head out to Symposium Books in downtown Providence on Thursday, 2/25 to hear her read from Town.

Unlike Providence's genesis on the seven hills (oh so like Rome), the genesis of Kate's town was more conceptual: she asked about a hundred people to describe an imaginary town. She built the contributions of those who responded into poems that explore how we live differently in the same world, who we mean when we say we, what we mean when we say here.

To see the book: http://www.factoryschool.com/pubs/heretical/vol5/schapira/index.html
To buy the book: http://www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?AuthorName=Schapira



To hear more about the book and Kate's thoughts, keep reading:


COUSINS: What kinds of formal constraints did you give yourself for the project?

KATE:  63 people (including me) contributed. I committed to, and succeeded in, using something from every contribution -- sometimes the exact wording, sometimes parts of the language, sometimes just the information. The contributions came in in a few different ways -- some were more narrative and informational, some were developed with more attention to language, some were mostly images, one was just a word -- and the forms in which contributors presented them definitely affected the way I used them.

The only real formal constraint (besides the basic conceit of the project -- ask for contributions and treat them all as true) was the way the titles/headings work. There are a number of categories -- "plumbing/sanitation," hauntings" and "commerce/currency" are a few -- and each poem has a heading that lets us know which categories it addresses. I think my original mental model for that was a manual, something that the mayor might leave behind for her successor.

COUSINS: It seems as if you work fairly often in collaborative projects. How does your writing process differ when you write with others, or using others' voices? Or does it?

KATE: I am continually interested in the ways communities work and decide things, include and exclude, what "standards" and "okayness" are -- as well as violations or failures or ruptures of these-- and I feel that people's estimate of how much control they have over that is rarely accurate. So ...I wanted to see what would happen with this distribution of control, which is different from the one I work with when I'm just working on a project on my own -- and different again from projects where I'm including or working from material that already exists in the world and I just select it. My favorite thing about the way I set this project up is the "everything you tell me is true" clause, because that really required me to think about consensus and contradiction -- what they require, how they shape what happens, what they make possible or impossible. I think collaboration is always about that for me -- it's a way of reminding my ideas, feelings and actions that they share the world with (many, many) other ideas, feelings and actions--what kind of gravity are they exerting on each other?

COUSINS: How does a local community affect/influence your writing? An online community? 

KATE: Well, I run this reading series in Providence, Publicly Complex, and a lot of the people who attend are writers, so we get to see each other, which I love. I'm good individual friends with some writers here in town, and I love hanging out and talking with them about writing and writing-related things. I think they affect my writing primarily by helping me remember that this is a real thing that people do, that I'm not foolish for wanting to do it, that the mini-frustrations and mini-triumphs are real as well as mini. (Here's that idea of "okayness" back again...) I hope I do that for them as well. Also, of course, their work often brings me a great deal of pleasure, and it's possible that I might not know about it if we didn't live in the same place. Some of them I have a relationship of mutual critique and commentary with; others I just enjoy.

I wobble a bit about online community. Most of the people I feel close to emotionally but not geographically, and deal with largely online, are people I've met and spent time with in person, although there are exceptions. I have a lot of feelings about online behavior that I'll be happy to share with you if you buy me a strong drink (although you may not be happy to listen) and what it means to "know" someone online, what you give them and what you need from them, which I feel IS different from knowing someone in person (even if you see them rarely) and certainly different from living in the same place as someone. On the other hand, stuff I've read online, being part of online publications, and even acquaintances I've made online -- writers who, BECAUSE we don't live in the same place, I might never have encountered were it not for the magic of the internet -- have played a huge role in my work itself as well as how I present it. Clearly I need to think about this a bit more.

Cousins News

Heather Christle has been added to the March 7 Cousins lineup! She joins Claire Donato, Matt Hart, and Nate Pritts.

A new Cousins reading has been added on May 2, featuring Sandy Florian, Elisa Gabbert, and Lara Glenum.

Adam Gallari has a new piece at Kill Author.

Molly Gaudry has a new piece at Kill Author.

Darcie Dennigan is reading at Dire Literary Series on Feb 5th with Joseph Riippi and Hannah Baker-Siroty. Dire is Tim Gager’s great series, located at Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, Mass.

Darcie is also reading with Joanna Fuhrman at the Naked Truth Reading Series (The New England Institute of Art),on February 10.

William Walsh is reading with Jessica Bozek, Ori Fienberg, and Elisa Gabbert at Small Animal Project on February 27. This reading celebrates the release of Artifice #1! It is an afternoon reading, starting at 3PM at Outpost 186, (186 1/2 Hampshire Street, between Prospect & Amory Streets, in Cambridge).

Cousins Reading Series is featured at Abe's Bar, located at 302 Wickenden Street in Providence, Rhode Island.

MATT JASPER Q & A

The freewheelin’ Matt Jasper waxes on his BlazeVOX collection Moth Moon, reveals that there is an “irresistible force emanating” from Charles Simic, shares tips on fatherhood, and names his literary cousins.

Wings and flight (ascent and descent) are prevailing images in Moth Moon (the first poem "Flight", “One”, “Fusillade”, the title poem of the collection, and “Vow”, which I really admire). How consciously were these images selected/pursued?

I am almost incapable of conscious pursuit. Anything I write that’s any good is bumbled into in life or daydream and then either lingers as an obsession or sublimates into mist within the evaporation chamber of my head. I record hundreds of pages of seismographic nonsense and then dive into the maybe one percent of it that is capable of coming together from the far reaches.

For me, flight can mean transition from a corporeality that seems to imprison toward a spirit that is free to act even when at odds with physical circumstance. I guess I just bastardized Roethke’s lines: “What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?”

I often think of flight from the literal facts of the world toward an internalization one can escape into and therefore avoid that set of reasonable standards one must adopt. I am definitely substandard—plywood decking, wheels that roll away from rusted chassis when kicked, a brain that should have mental shelves yet instead has belts conveying movement to all that is supposedly fixed. There’s no way for me to succeed at anything unless I kick over the game table and invent my own microscopic strategies and amusements.

I’m glad you mentioned both ascent and descent. They race one another to try to balance ounces of spirit with pounds of flesh. I often see ascent as a flight into perhaps initially solitary heights that are then chorused into many and one by the perspective attained by soaring away from multiplicities that shrink into distant dots as in the poems Shelley and One.

A lofty expansion of consciousness can occur for me just as attractively in the form of a flight terminating in wreckage scattered across a landscape. The flash of airborne insight is often the same to me as an explosion of impact upon the ground. Such unity and terror can only exist at their extremes in some momentary state within most individuals before the barriers collapse. Beyond them lie shock and rapture. In less extreme states, the spirit may lustily veer toward some fine other—as in Vow—yet usually the transaction is darker—more the big death than the little one. I’m fascinated by those flights from reason undertaken (pun intended) in maladaptive defense mechanisms such as those employed by schizophrenics who define themselves as dead in order to become impervious to their fears of dying. This ultimate and desperate form of defense is not much different than Rilke’s advice to “be ahead of all parting.” If you’re dead (in this case, dead while alive), you’re beyond parting alright. I’m interested in that sort of odd unified indestructible deadness that helps create the radical freedoms enjoyed by both schizophrenia and poetry.

In another aeronautical (in that, like Vow, it contains an airplane) prose poem called Because of These Things, the speaker mourns the loss of manic energy from the vantage point of a depressed or merely normal state. I see flight as ascending to a vantage point that can tie disparate events to provide a sense of perspective and unity such as in the poem Scale—(meant as balance/weight and climber’s ascent to a vantage point) in which I very indirectly attained the height needed to stop obsessing about my personal medical (i.e. malpractice) miseries that nearly killed me six years ago. It was either that poem or buy a Glock and maybe some fertilizer.

At the end of my flight lucubration, I should add that the opening poem of my book is a little poem called Flight. It has lines. They go like this:

In the field, birds rising black against the sun.
You say they are ravens. They should be careful.
If one of them opens its wings too wide
all of the light in the world will be blotted out forever.

The poem literally describes a conversation I had with an institutionalized schizophrenic while we were on a stroll. Whelm turns to overwhelm turns to eternal darkness and silence. It is a clue and warning that the book that follows is all about overreaching—turning the squelch knob, risking madness in the attempt to see something invisible, presenting your enemy’s head on a little crimson pillow to a confused bystander only peripherally involved. One hopes that the bystander will see the head as an invitation to become further implicated, yet there are many readers who haven’t been able to decipher my calligraphy.

I hope I’ve cleared things up.

You and I each have a mess of kids, how does that impact your writing (in terms of process and content)?

God. I have four kids at last count. If only I had some idea of what I keep doing to make this happen, maybe I could stop.

More seriously, I like my kids way more than I like my writing, so I am not one to whine that each child you have means you’ll write one less book. They are absolute joys to be around. I drive them to their little violin and cello and piano lessons and buy them strange books and iPods and boxed sets of Monty Python and good Indian food. They hold up their part of the deal by building elaborate forts, drawing robots, staging mock executions, busking for candy money (a string trio fronted by a fourth who wears a welder’s mask and carries a sign that says “WILL DANCE FOR CASH”), melting crayons on the radiators though I’ve forbidden it.

The process of my writing is impeded yet I enjoy the impediment and try to get around it by rising at 4 a.m. to steal a few hours. I tend to avoid finishing things. I tend to shelve and box incomplete projects that may or may not ever congeal when I join the leisure class. Though I aspire to retirement, I like being busy so the devil will not find my idle hands.

The content of my writing is enriched because I get to document actual events and therefore rip off poems like the one about my daughter Eudora or the one (Tributary) about my baby sons smashing a bunch of ice. I love the sense of attachment to the world having kids has given me. I would have floated away without them.

You studied with Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire when you were an undergrad. How did he influence you as a poet?

He was remarkably kind and funny. He turned me on to Russell Edson and Vasko Popa and gave me some amazing books I still haven’t returned. He gave me some sort of writing prize, the easiest independent study credits ever, may have helped me get into Grand Street, wrote back that I was “a genius” and that my poems were “incredibly good” when I sent an early version of Moth Moon to him. I’m eternally grateful yet was really eager to avoid being influenced. I could almost feel an irresistible force emanating from him, so I’d step back or slouch and be sure not to make eye contact.

I was closer to an amazing poet named Mekeel McBride who also teaches at UNH. While Charles has a famous blind spot bolted to his forehead, she has eyes that see in all directions. I was eventually frustrated that Simic couldn’t see what I was up to about a third of the time. His soul had selected its society and shut the door. I would hear his comments or read one of his poems and want to shake him and yell STOP BEING CHARLES SIMIC! I would elaborately parody him in a way that he sometimes thought funny yet eventually crossed a line or two. Aside from this frustration and the sad fact that he won a Pulitzer for his worst book, I really like and admire my estranged pal Chuck. Someday I will send a card and flowers to try to patch things up.

You’ve said that in the future you “hope to hire people to write and all of (your) poems”. How dear is that hope and how close are you to making it so?

I have only succeeded (with the help of the friendly people at Noo Journal) in hiring a few people such as Blake Butler, Elisa Gabbert, Tao Lin, and K. Silem Mohammad. Maybe I’m at ten poems now with at least forty to go. Search my name and “bad poetry” and you’ll find a free downloadable ebooklet that epitomizes what I’d like for the full-length project. I’m paying two dollars per poem. Please email poems or topic requests to mattjasper555@hotmail.com. The poems can be about what a bad person I am, how I done you wrong, or almost anything else. An index will credit individual authors yet I have ownership & share authorship by commission & optional occasional line or edit or topic suggestions (the Noo Journal project contains many lines and topic suggestions from me). People think I’m joking, but I am not. Because I am not prolific and have a heap of kids to distract me, this seems like a reasonable measure.

Final Question: Who are some of your literary cousins?

I am in love with Mary Maclane, Osamu Dazai, Kenneth Patchen, Nathanael West, Gogol, and many others you would expect me to love. I am also gravely obsessed with Horatio Alger. I admire contemporaries such as Gordon Massman, a certain Darcie it would seem suck-upish to mention here, Mekeel McBride, Alice Fogel, Dan Beachy-Quick, Blake Butler, and many others.

I despise Poetry Magazine.

LINKS: NOO Journal Moth Moon Video / BlazeVOX / Amazon / GoodReads

MARCH 7, 2010

Great Cousins Lineup for March 7, 2010:

Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm, a collection of poems published by Octopus Books. She received her MFA from UMass Amherst and now lives in Atlanta. She teaches poetry as a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. This June she'll be a writer in residence at the 2010 Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Read some Heather Christle at: Octopus Magazine // Boston Review // The Agriculture Reader.

Claire Donato lives in Brooklyn. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Action Yes, and Harp & Altar. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008 and is currently completing an MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University.

Read some Claire Donato: Red-Painted Attic // Catalogue Entry for Aging // Selections from I Destroy Romantic Memories

Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections Who's Who Vivid (Slope Editions) and You Are Mist (MOOR Books, forthcoming), as well as several chapbooks, including The Hours (Cinematheque Press, forthcoming) and Deafening Leafening (Pilot Books), which he wrote in collaboration with Ethan Paquin. Additionally, Hart's poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, jubilat and Ploughshares. He is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety. He teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Read some Matt Hart: Minerva System // Goodnight Everybody // 5 Poems in InDigest

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books), as well as two previous full-length books of poems - Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX) & Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press). The founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, Nate teaches poetry for the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse.

Read some Nate Pritts: 3 Poems in KeepGoing // New Year's Eve

New Reading Series in Providence

Cousins Reading Series will launch on March 7, 2010, featuring poets Heather Christle, Claire Donato, Nate Pritts, and Matt Hart.

Note that March 7 is a Sunday and you should be there by 6:30PM.