More Cousins

Cousins Reading Series at Abe's Bar resumes in the fall with these great nights of poetry and fiction:

SEPTEMBER 5:

Brian Foley

Dorothea Lasky

Emily Pettit

Janaka Stucky

OCTOBER 17:

Matt Bell

John Cotter

Adam Golaski

Carol Novack

More details to follow.

Cousins Reading 4: May 23rd

Terence Hawkins, the author of Rage of Achilles, was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Yale. His work has been featured in Poor Mojo's Almanac(k), Pindeldyboz, Ape Culture, Eclectica, The Binnacle, The New Haven Register, and on Connecticut Public Radio. He is a trial lawyer in Connecticut.

Matt Jasper is the author of Moth Moon, a poetry collection published by BlazeVOX in 2009. He was born in Manhattan in 1966. A frequent contributor to Rollerderby and Grand Street in the 90s, he went on to have many children and start a poorly-posed-taxidermy-and-bad-yard-sale-art-themed restaurant called the Friendly Toast. He collects schizophrenic autobiographies and makes lists of poet enemies in Farmington, New Hampshire. He is currently working on a book-length poem entitled Obolus.

Gordon Massman divides his time between Medford, Massachusetts, and the island of Frenchboro, Maine. Poems from his book The Essential Numbers, 1991-2008 (Tarpaulin Sky Press) have appeared in The Numbers (Pavement Saw Press) as well as in Exquisite Corpse, The Harvard Review, The New York Quarterly, Pleiades, and elsewhere.

Kathleen Rooney is a poet and a writer. With Abby Beckel, she is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. With Elisa Gabbert, she is the author of That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths). With Counterpoint Press, her prose collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs is now available. With her husband, the writer Martin Seay, she lives in Chicago, Illinois.

The Best-Smelling Cousin We've Got. Elisa Gabbert explains what's wrong with "woman writer," and answers other questions, and I hope it's not some kind of latent anti-feminism that made me highlight the fact that she wears perfume in the title when I could also have highlighted what a freakin good poet she is.

COUSINS: I've followed a bit of the discussion on your blog recently about sexism. Do you identify yourself as a female writer first? Or simply a writer first and last? Or a female writer out of necessity? Were you to be asked to submit poems for an anthology of women writers, would you? Why or why not? Did you ever read that Candor discussion between Rachel Zucker and Sarah Manguso? Does what either says resonate with you? Would you be more Zucker or Manguso? Or someone/something else?

EG: Here’s how I feel about the phrase “woman writer.” I’m a woman, and I’m a writer; insofar as English syntax allows nouns to be used as modifiers, I’m a woman writer, by definition. I don’t know what else that phrase could mean. When someone denies that they’re a woman writer (while conceding that they are both a woman and a writer), it sounds like they are saying that a “woman writer” is inferior to a writer, which makes about as much sense to me as saying that a black dress is inferior to a dress, or an 18th century painting is inferior to a painting. “Woman,” like “black” or “18th century,” is just a factual description. I don’t see why adding a modifier to a noun, in this case, automatically creates an inferior category. When someone asks me if I’m a “woman writer” in a challenging way, as though it’s a category I could choose to be in or not, I find it very odd. What exactly does “woman writer” mean to everyone else? Why is it less than the sum of its parts?

So to answer the question of what I identify as first: It depends on the question. If someone asks what I do for a living, I say I’m a writer. If a form asks me to check M or F, I check F. I find this statement of Manguso’s a little hard to swallow: “In my mind my identity begins with Writer and Teacher; Woman is much further down the list.” So, if she woke up tomorrow and had lost her job(s), she would feel more alienated and stripped of her identity than if she woke up and discovered she was a man? I’ve been female longer than I’ve been a writer. I may say “I’m a writer” more often than I say “I’m a woman,” but that’s because the latter is generally so obvious.

I do identify with some of Manguso’s statements; like Manguso I am not a mother and don’t feel like an “egg-box.” I identify with this: “I am genuinely interested in the lives of mothers inasmuch as I am interested in the lives of people in general, but I’m separately fascinated by some mothers’ apparent conviction that nonmothers are shallow, that mothers suffer and feel more deeply than nonmothers.” However, I identify with Zucker in that I feel the fact of my body is inescapable. Whenever I leave my house, and often when I don’t, it is obvious that people are noticing my appearance: my gender, my race, my age, my build, how I’m dressed (a strong indicator of my economic status). I see no reason to pretend they don’t notice or that it doesn’t matter.

I wouldn’t object to being included in an anthology of women writers. For the most part, I think projects of that sort address an imbalance. More men are published than women in general poetry anthologies; more white writers are published than writers of color. I think anthologies of women writers or Hispanic writers or what have you are intended in the spirit of inclusion, not exclusion. I’d be suspicious of an anthology of men writers, or white writers, because the publishing market does not appear to disadvantage whites or men.

COUSINS: Something I love in your poems is how your lines undo themselves:

When the boredom hits, I hit the boredom like a glass door.

The man who pushed me pulls me up.

In "Ego of the Distance" (which is totally awesome): Sometimes the distance looks at me.

It reminds me of that John Ashbery line: So that meaning can begin and in doing so be undone. How important for you is meaning in poems? In your poems? In poems that you love by other writers? Do you love any poems because of what they mean?

EG: Primary importance. Complete importance. It seems to me that everything you can talk about in a poem (the language, the lines, the syntax, the “music,” etc.) adds up to its meaning.

I’m most interested in poems that foreground ideas, versus sound or meter or image or _____. (There are a lot of ways for poems to do that, without just dropping ideas in overtly, though I’m not against that as a rule.) Maybe to me the meaning in idea-based poetry is more … meaning-y? Has more meaningness?

That said, there are poems I love although, or because, I don’t understand them. I think I believe that trite cliché that you can’t paraphrase poetry. I was talking about this with some writers on Twitter recently. I think translation is necessary, but there is something in every text that can’t be translated. The poetry I’m most attracted to seems challenging to translate (see Cesar Vallejo). The meaning is so tied up in the specificity of the language and its arrangement; you can’t extract the meaning completely and port it over to another language and another syntax; those elements are part of the meaning.

COUSINS: Would you talk a little bit about why you called the series "Blog"? Do those poems follow a poetics of blogging? Or did you have something else in mind?

EG: I wrote the blogpoems one April for NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month). I think initially I was sort of mocking the idea of speed-writing a poem to then post on your blog, but from the first day, the exercise of speed-writing a poem for a blog became very fertile and interesting territory. I liked working under those limitations. I wanted the poems to feel free and immediate, as you said, and I wanted them to fit neatly in the space of a blog post, to be sort of easily digestible, since people read blogs differently than they read poems on paper. And, since I had to write one every day, I considered anything and everything as fair game for material. I couldn’t only write about the big stuff or the beautiful stuff; there was no way I’d write 30 big, “important” poems in one month. So I often started with an insignificant or silly idea and tried to push it until it became an interesting poem. It was like an intellectual challenge, to make a poem out of anything, without it all feeling like an empty gimmick.

COUSINS: Tennis. It's the sport of poets, right?

EG: Do you think so? I don’t know why I have an affinity for racket sports. I like racquetball and ping pong too. I think I like how much of the skill is in the return. I could never beat my brother at ping pong; he just has a stronger shot. But I have a really good return. It’s rare that I can force him to make an error, but I can win points by consistently hanging in until he screws up of his own accord.

If the writer-reader dynamic is anything like a game of tennis, I hope I’m my brother in this analogy.

COUSINS: In the AWP magazine this month, there's an interview with Marie Howe, and she's talking about jobs for writers... "How do you find a job that doesn't drain the essential energies that you bring to participate in the creative act? ... How do you nourish those energies and live in life?" Could I pass these questions on to you?

EG: It’s a difficult balance to achieve … I work as a writer, so in some sense, my job does drain those energies. After reading and writing all day, I don’t always want to deal with more words when I get home, or sit in front of a computer. At the same time, it’s kind of amazing to get paid for something I actually like doing, and it’s surprising how endlessly renewing the need/desire to write is.

I admire writers that don’t work as writers or teachers of writing. I think it’s good to leave the insulated bubble of the writing world from time to time. It enriches your writing and, you know, your life. I often think back fondly to college when my social group was a lot more diverse in almost every way. Sometimes, hanging around writers all the time, I feel like we’re not learning anything from each other. (Assignment!: Talk to a physicist or an architect or a doctor this week. They’ve read just as much as you, but totally different words.)

Wow, that wasn’t what you asked at all, was it? I guess my point is, one can be a writer and not focus on writing all the time. I used to work as a copyeditor, and while the job wasn’t wildly fulfilling, it did free up my creative energy to direct completely toward writing. There are rare individuals with boundless energy, but for others, it often comes down to a choice between dream job and dream writing-life. I think I’ve settled on a compromise between the dreams.

COUSINS: Would you name 2-3 of your literary cousins, dead and alive?

EG: My first cousins are my alive-and-well “community,” poets I feel really close to on both a personal and artistic level. I’ve got a bunch of these. Chris Tonelli, Kathleen Rooney, Sam Starkweather, and Heather Green, to name just a few. Second and third living cousins would be poets I don’t know personally, or only know a little, but feel some kinship with artistically. I wrote a blog post once about the Netflix algorithm and said I thought people who liked Heather Christle’s poetry would like mine too. Who else would I put in that category? Maybe Matthew Rohrer.

Among the dead, I feel an especial kinship with Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, and Frank O’Hara.

Anne Carson and Mary Jo Bang would be a cool as honorary aunts.

COUSINS: And, to complicate that question, since you are a perfume aficionado, if these idols were perfumes, which scents would they be?

EG: That is a tough question. I’ll just do a few. Anne Carson would be something very intellectual, classical, and androgynous, like Mitsouko or Cuir de Lancome … John Berryman would need a reckless scent, dangerous but with a sense of humor. Kouros, perhaps? My friend Kathy would be a smart, snappy feminine like Lolita Lempicka.

ROB STEPHENSON Q&A

Rob Stephenson's new book Passes Through (FC2) is truly a book like no other. It's poetic and plainspoken. It's wildly transgressive and it is also, at times, kind of homey, especially once his voice is in your head. Rob passed through Providence a few weeks ago and he was kind enough to read for the cousins assembled at Abe's. And he submitted to this Q&A:

Can you describe the composition process of Passes Through? How did that process dictate its structure?

The text was made by passing four times through a journal I kept for over ten years. The journal started out as description of daily events and morphed over the years into detailed thoughts on all sorts of subjects. Eventually, I tired of keeping the journal. I never intended it to be published. A few years later I considered the time I’d spent writing it and decided it should be transformed into a fiction. Prior experience with writing memoir and autobiographical essays left me dissatisfied and questioning the value of expressing truth about the past by using traditional storytelling. I decided to move in another direction. Using innumerable constraints, I deleted most of the journal and combined the remaining pieces with all sorts of material external to the journal. The form (and formlessness) of the text grew into its shape as I moved along. Without going into all of the specifics, the architecture of Passes Through comes from an improvisatory linear accumulation over time within a semi-rigid overall scheme designed to create non-linear movement.


The book makes me think of David Markson's description of his work: "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage." Those terms apply to Passes Through, but in addition, there is a genuine narrative and a strong sense of the narrating character. What were some of the benefits to this lyrical, collage-like approach? Were there specific challenges that emerged that would not have been a factor if you had taken a more conventional approach?

I’ve been making art of various sorts with found material for over 30 years. At 19, inspired by punk rock concert posters (whose creators were sometimes inspired by Dada poets, Burroughs, or the Situationists), I cut up the pink entertainment section of the San Francisco Chronicle and taped words to paper. I only remember one phrase: “Your hero moves to a boring age.” Soon I was cutting up abandoned grammar school science textbooks and remaking them into my own stories. I still have some of these. I felt comfortable with non-linear approaches very early on. For years I made short or small pieces using various systems of organizing material: films, texts, music, drawings, photo collages, videos. I have always based a certain amount of my work on bringing disparate elements together to see how they suggest something that is not there when they remain separate. I’ve made many shorter precursors to this book. Paris Over Paris possesses some of the qualities that became more elaborated in Passes Through. I am now more interested in making extended pieces that take on other qualities altogether. One challenge for me in making Passes Through was to invent good methods and then trust and finesse them enough to carry them out for longer than I usually do.

And WOW. This is the third time in recent weeks that David Markson has come up in conversation about Passes Through. I finally read a book of his, The Last Novel, about a year after finishing my book. I loved it. Really loved it. It moved me in ways that I did not expect to be moved. It’s such a beautiful book. I was completely unprepared for the way the last fifteen pages left me dewy-eyed. The only other long list that has affected me in an emotional way is on Maya Lin’s powerful Viet Nam war memorial. While it’s true that Markson and I both use short bits of text that accumulate over time into something unexpected, I think our intentions and modes of composition are quite different. And from what I surmise, I often built things up from much shorter elements in Passes Through, than he did in The Last Novel.

Stylistically, there are many incomplete sentences in this book. Which I love. I always tell students that incomplete sentences are OK as long as meaning is not sacrificed. You somehow make more significant meaning with your incomplete sentences. Can you say how this style developed for the book?

I often work with much less than sentence lengths of text. Passes Through especially points up one-, two-, three-, and four-word combinations. If you have ever kept a rambling journal, you know that a lot of mistakes creep in and a home-grown shorthand emerges. Sloppiness gets the upper hand late at night. I kept, even embellished, aspects of that in Passes Through. My rhythmic flow became a finely tuned word-by-word, sound-by-sound jaggedness. I was interested in creating a version of English that mirrors the way thoughts bounce around in a mind over time with all sort of collisions and interruptions between inner modes of being and external distractions. I pushed hard against the way most people tell stories by progressing linearly through argumentation or by using uninterrupted chains that build towards specific inevitable goals. All sorts of voices coalesce and compete to infiltrate the narrator as he speaks. He becomes all of the voices that are speaking. My hope is that the reader, by the end of the text, has adjusted to this Hydra of selves and feels in spite of it all that they do perceive a narrator. You, in fact, did feel “a strong sense of the narrative character.”

You are a composer as well. How does writing music inform your prose writing? And vice-versa?

Music influences everything I make in a number of ways. I think of my writing as music. Passes Through is as much a musical composition as it is a novel or a long poem. The text is tuned to my speaking voice and inflections. I consider the sound and rhythm of words as much as the meaning of words.

Compositional methods from medieval to contemporary times directly influenced Passes Through. Specifically, the constantly shifting and momentum-driven multi-layered music of J. S. Bach permeates the work as much as the Moment Forming and Integration theories of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the asymmetrical pattern distribution techniques of Morton Feldman, and John Cage’s thoughtful forty years of chance operation deployment. Composers create wonderful abstract languages, how can contemporary writers not look to them for inspiration?

Passes Through was published by (the great) FC2. What was it like working with them?

Absolutely terrific! I am amazed and grateful to have such a beautiful book object with my name on it. I know, I know. The author is supposed to be dead, but I’m secretly glad I’ve lived long enough to become one.

You read from Passes Through at AWP recently and you're touring to promote the book. Can you describe this life on the road? And can you describe audience response to your readings?

Though this is my first published novel, I have been reading for years in public and I enjoy it very much. I get strong responses from audiences, mostly positive ones, but sometimes my subject matter causes some negative reaction. That’s fine with me. I feel it is important for writers to know how to read and perform their work. (This is the composer in me speaking.) I have been to many readings by authors who mumble their way through a passage as if it’s a bother or who have no idea how to relate to a microphone or a sound system and have never considered how the sound of their voice changes in every public situation according to the acoustics of the environment in which they find themselves. Reading out loud is as much about communicating something as is writing the book. By reading your text, you are asking an audience to absorb and contemplate something (usually a small piece of something longer) that they could probably more easily understand by taking it off the page at the rate they are comfortable with and that allows them to reread at will. I think readings in general would be more compelling if authors thought more about what is special about these events and how best to make their words have a life off of the page. I’ll save the part about using video projections, pre-recorded animal sounds, and having someone peel and chop onions during the performance for another time.

(our standard closing question) Can you name some of your literary cousins (contemporaries or precursors)? That is, what writers inspire you to the point that you feel a kinship?

Among my favorite fiction writers are Michael Snow, Brian Ferneyhough, Charles Darwin, Robert Altman, Alice Aycock, Daniel Liebeskind, and Robert Ashley. I can’t come up with a short list without feeling that I’m leaving out so many I ought to mention. I’ve loved so many writers long and hard that you will find tiny bits of them sprinkled liberally throughout Passes Through. Even Marguerite Duras’ cookbook makes an appearance.

Cousins Reading 3: May 2nd

Sandy Florian is the author of Telescope (Action Books), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky), The Tree of No (Action Books), Prelude to Air From Water (Elixir Press), and On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Press). She lives in San Francisco where she is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and works as one of the “other” editors for Tarpaulin Sky Journal.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and the chapbooks Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press) and, with Kathleen Rooney, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths). She is the poetry editor of Absent.

Lara Glenum is the author of two books of poetry: The Hounds of No (Action Books) and Maximum Gaga (Action Books). Her chapbook, The Hotling Chronicles, is due out from Tarpaulin Sky later this year. With Arielle Greenberg, she is the co-editor of Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), an anthology of contemporary women’s poetry and visual art. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at LSU.

Leslie Patron lives in Providence, RI where she is an MFA candidate inPoetry at Brown University. Her poems and stories have recentlyappeared or are forthcoming in Dewclaw, OCHO, and Parthenon West Review. Her hometown is San Jose, CA.

Friday Night Email Chat with Amish Trivedi

Amish Trivedi, amanuensis of the Trivedi Chronicles and curator of the Museum of Vandals, will be reading for Cousins on April 18th. I promise not to ask him any stupid questions that night. It will be purely, purely his poetry.

COUSINS: Have you by chance read Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker? I ask because that book title seems to me to be a blaring statement of Zucker's poetics... And I wonder if you see Museum of Vandals working in that way?

AMISH: I haven't read it to be honest and I only became aware of the title after Vandals was set to come out. For titles, I usually think up something and Google it. If it asks me to try without the quotes, I take it as a good sign.

Or I could phrase the same question differently maybe: Do you have a method of, or allegiance to, wreckage or breakage in your poems? And I guess I mean wreckage/breakage in a sort of playful sense... "Vandals" makes me think of kids destroying things for the fun of it. Your poem "Rowboat Over the Atlantic" seems to work like that.

(We interrupt this question to bring you 'Rowboat Over the Atlantic')

I have become
my own airbags, admitting
I'm more willing to break
than be broken. These words are
not mine
anymore, but they are a revenge
lay. And I used to sit
outside, slumped over feeling
boxed or stigmata over the
soil. Steps line a side, which is
a jar. Rain and saliva become
the next tabloids.

And if I'm completely
wrong, set me straight?

AMISH: I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, I am very interested in the destruction of language. There's no method, I guess, but whatever we build, we can take down. I grew up with parents that had moved from India, so I came to understand language as being built however you choose to build it. (That sounds really frumpy.)

COUSINS: The way your poem "Letters and Soda" works makes me jealous. How do you do that! And by "that" I mean---hmmm---make a kind of non-linear sense that seems playful and irreverent but also not random, not meaningless...

Letters and Soda

My craw-daddy penis
has so many claws!

I thought you'd written
that psalm: one is drunk and

the other drunken. About
the rain? I was the

one that buried
it in a wall.

AMISH: The first line came from my friend Mark Mattes in Iowa City. Mark's a great guy and he is incredibly playful. He just screamed that line out one night and I told him I was going to steal it, and if it ever got published, I'd get him a case of beer. I have yet to pay up. But I think in a lot of ways, I think in random thoughts (you can ask my wife) and so, with a poem like this one, it's about giving in to the randomness. But there are patterns in everything, I think, even if you are trying to avoid them. Sense, like language, can be created from what you want to put into it.

COUSINS: Also, would you be able to list here a simple recipe--an idiot's guide perhaps--to writing good short poems? I would give you Bill's fifth-born child for the knowledge.

AMISH: I have rewritten my answer to this question several times now! I think the only tip I can really give for a short poem is to cut the fat, so to speak. You have to want to keep it short and the thing kind of is, you can't let the poem settle at any one point. It's like making a custard: if it settles, you're screwed.

COUSINS: In your piece in Octopus on Ceravolo, you wrote that after reading Transmigration Solo, "I probably didn’t even put pen to paper for a bit, thinking that everything I could do wouldn’t be what Ceravolo had already done." I know that feeling of deep admiration inspiring a kind of hopeless paralysis... Do you actively try to imitate him in your work? Or work against him? Is there a poem by him that you have sort of set for yourself as a goal?

AMISH: I think maybe there was some desire to imitate Ceravolo in some poems, but I don't think I ever really tried it because I realized it was impossible. I figured eventually it was better to write my own crappy poems than attempt to ruin Ceravolo's. In terms of poems of his, it's hard to pinpoint. Chunks of Transmigration are so fantastic- I remember sitting in two different Special Collections rooms at libraries just pouring over it.

COUSINS: Has there been a writer or book since more recently who has struck you dumb? (a/k/a Who are your literary cousins?)

AMISH: I have no idea! Graham Foust comes to mind right away, especially because I am obsessed with his first two books that came out in '03 or so. I almost don't want to name anyone else because I don't want to drag them down! BUT if I had to name my largest influence, it's my old TA from UGA, Johannes Goransson. I didn't even know I could get an MFA or do anything with poetry until I met him. He always pushed me (and still does really) and that's been the great influence. "A New Quarantine Will Take My Place" is probably one of my favorite books because there's so much that appeals to me: the threads, the language, the thematics- it really is something nearly perfect for me and each reading reveals something more to me. Beyond books, I'd say I have always drawn a lot of inspiration from films: Lynch, Bunuel, Godard, Svankmejer, Varda, and Bergman especially. In Lynch and Bunuel, I think I'm drawn to something that you mentioned earlier: at first glance, things can seem random, but the pieces fit in a way.

COUSINS WHO ARE LOOKING FOR ANSWERS THEMSELVES: Once you finish your MFA, how will you make your way in the world? Will you continue to write? If so, how are you imagining that you will
set up your life so that you can do that? What else are you besides a writer? What could you do or accomplish or be in your life that you would consider worthwhile?

AMISH: You should never ask such questions! I have no idea- part of me wants to keep going with school- maybe a PhD in literature/English, but I would say I ultimately want to teach. I know it's a lot of work, but I'm drawn to the classroom with the goal of creating a good experience for the students. I'd love to do little more than teach workshops, but I'm guessing I'm 2-3 books/10 years from that right now. I don't think I can really quit writing, to be honest. It's nearly a compulsion. I'm addicted to it, in a way: I'll wake up, and say I'll never do it again, and within 20 minutes, I'm deeply embroiled in a poem. In terms of accomplishment, I've decided I just want to be comfortable. I want to write and publish, course, but I don't really want anything out of that. Does that make sense? I'm not looking for poetic achievements/milestones, and don't really expect them to come any time soon. I'd just like a nice little life of poems and teaching and maybe a Ferrari at some point. Nothing major.

Finally, if I gave you one of my poems, would you vandalize it for me?

I could try, sure!

MARC LOWE Q&A

Marc Lowe is a dexterous writer who reduces the space between character and setting with nimble (but artfully complex) sentences. His new ebook from ismspress, Sui Generis and Other Stories, is a collection of kinetic, surreal, and obsessively detailed stories.

For a quick taste of Marc Lowe's prose, check out a short animated feature that Marc's brother Jeff produced for "Immaterial," a short story from Sui Generis.

Marc Lowe is a featured reader at the Cousins' event on April 18:

Several of the stories in Sui Generis feature characters responding to accusations that lack justification or explanation. How do you bring accusation from element of conflict to thematic center?

I take it you are referring to pieces such as “Restless” and “Guilty,” where the narrator is in some way implicated in a crime he may or may not have committed. I should probably say that I took my cue from Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which is my favorite of Kafka’s novels (The Castle is a close second), though, the more I think about it, the less sure I am of whether such a claim would actually be true. What is true is that the spirit of Kafka pervades a lot of the work I tend to enjoy. As Nathalie Sarraute suggested in her essay on Dostoevsky and Kafka, written in the 1950s, those who have come after Kafka can do little but to retrace his steps (albeit in a variety of original and constantly updated ways, I’d assert).

As this doesn’t really answer your initial question, I guess I should also add that “uncertainty” is frequently a theme in my work. Perhaps this is so because, well, who ever knows what tomorrow may bring? None of us can ultimately “know” anything in any definitive sense. Life is multifaceted, unpredictable, the human condition a mystery. If this weren’t true, we would no longer have any need for religion, philosophy, psychology, or neuroscience. I am generally a paranoid person by nature, so that probably tends to creep into my fiction sometimes. It’s not so hard for me to imagine that someone could in fact wake up one day to find himself (or herself) transformed into an insect!

A few of the characters in Sui Generis are floundering in "fish-out-of-water" scenarios, and in "Fish: A Melodrama in Five Parts", you make the fish literal. In other stories, birds appear and carry significance. With stories so short, so precise, readers latch onto every detail, especially those that appear to recur. Should readers attach any significance to the fish and birds that populate the collection?

Well, I’d say that there is a semi-literal fish in “Fish: A Melodrama in Five Parts.” That is actually one of the earliest pieces in the collection, and was penned earlier than I’d realized when I first decided to include it. (In other words, it was conceived some months before I boarded the plane to Japan, where I was to live for the next two years of my life, though this can just be our little secret.) I guess, in a sense, one could argue that the collection goes from a semi-literal fish to those scenarios you’ve described as “fish-out-of-water” narratives. I’m not sure how exactly they might relate to each other, though. I’ll leave such things to the reader to decide. The only literal bird that comes to mind at present is the one in “Eggshells,” which is quite dead and quite frozen…

I like your use of form in several of the stories in the collection. You use timeline and other associative techniques to mold your narratives. What’s your take on story structure? How do you use (or define the importance of) structure as an element of process?

I derive a great deal of pleasure from work that does interesting things with form, as well as from work that plays with or subverts narrative conventions. While I think a story that is structured traditionally with arc, climax, resolution, etc. can definitely be satisfying, so long as it’s well done and holds my interest for reasons other than its decidedly staid shape, in my own writing—and perhaps especially in the work I was writing between 2004-2006, which is now a very long time ago—I do quite enjoy working with the bare bones of narrative. For me, the building blocks of fiction often lie in its structure, rather than in its characters, as someone like Virginia Woolf would have asserted. Of course Woolf was also very much concerned with language, imagery, etc., things I greatly care about as well.

Over the years I’ve been strongly influenced by the nouveau roman aesthetic, particularly by the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novels were a sort of obsession to me when I first discovered them. They literally changed the way I thought about the potentialities of fiction, especially Jealousy, which was the first one I read. Before that I was reading and thinking seriously about Kobo Abe’s body of work (an important Japanese non-realist writer who died in 1993). Before leaving for Japan I had been writing a thesis paper that dealt specifically with Abe’s “mature” novels The Box Man, Secret Rendezvous, and also Kangaroo Notebook, his very underrated, darkly humorous final statement (some of the culture-specific bits in it literally get lost in translation, unfortunately). He does some very interesting things with structure and metafiction in those works, especially in the former two. I’d say that his influence can be felt most strongly in the first fragmentary novel I completed in 2005, a very strange metaphysical detective story set in and around various dark, labyrinthine alleyways in Japan, though it hasn’t yet been published.

You mentioned that teaching “occupies a good deal of [your] brain space”. Can you talk about how teaching workshops informs your writing.

This is an interesting question, which I’m going to have to answer in two parts. At the time I was writing these pieces I was not leading a fiction writing workshop, but was rather teaching fifteen to twenty-five English language lessons per week to Japanese businesspeople, the majority of them private. This, and the fact that most of my communication outside of these classes was done in Japanese, got me thinking a lot about how language communicates, or fails to communicate. This is not to say that I’m an expert in linguistics/semiotics or anything (far from it), but simply that this concern surfaced in some of the fictions I penned at the time, such as “00” and “Patterns.” (Unfortunately, neither of these particular fictions could be included in the e-book.) “A Good Example” was in some ways a satirical response to what it sometimes felt like to teach English to children in the public school system in Japan, a job I was often asked to do when the companies for which I taught were on holiday, but that’s probably not the sort of influence you were referring to…

In terms of how teaching fiction workshops informs my current writing practices…hmm. I haven’t yet written anything either about teaching or workshopping fiction, which is maybe a good thing! I think that running a workshop has made me think more carefully about the ways in which I critique others’ work, which may ultimately change the way I think about my own work. It’s interesting to see how others perceive the writing process, what they think works or doesn’t work in a piece (i.e. what they are reading for, what their expectations are) as opposed to what I’m seeing or not seeing in a given piece of writing. The booklists I assign probably say a lot about my own quirky tastes, in any case. I really want to open my students’ eyes to things they might not otherwise be exposed to in their other classes, such as, for instance, a prose/poetry hybrid work by Renee Gladman (The Activist), or a modern fairy tale by Barbara Comyns (The Vet’s Daughter), or a high-octane, literally electrifying nightmare by the French postmodernist writer Claro (Electric Flesh, translated by the chair of our department, Brian Evenson), or a collection of “transgressive” fictions by Kono Taeko (Toddler Hunting & Other Stories)…

Can you name some of your literary cousins?

Well, Kobo Abe and Alain Robbe-Grillet, as I’ve already said. And of course Kafka is always there in the background, paring his nails. Other writers I might claim as “cousins”—if, by cousins, you mean influences, and this is by no means an exhaustive list—are Paul Auster (especially City of Glass/The New York Trilogy), Samuel Beckett (The Unnamable!), Thomas Bernhard, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Adolpho Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Brian Evenson (I’ve been hooked ever since discovering The Wavering Knife in ’04, and am really excited to have him as my thesis advisor), Witold Gombrowicz, Mieko Kanai, J.K. Huysmans, [Comte de] Lautréamont, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, Ann Quin (Berg should be required reading for anyone who likes experimental fiction), José Saramago, Bruno Schulz, Yôko Tawada, Alexander Trocchi, etc., etc.

In terms of my reading these days, I’m pretty much all over the place. I recently reviewed Rachel Kendall’s The Bride Stripped Bare (Doghorn Publishing), which I liked a lot, and Suzanne Burns’s Misfits and Other Heroes (Dzanc Books) is next on my list. Read Marie Darrieussecq’s allegorical novel of “lust and transformation,” Pig Tales, over the weekend, and have books by Rikki Ducornet, Chris Abani, and Hiromi Ito in the to-read queue. Lastly, I’ll just say that I’m excited to get my hands on Rob Stephenson’s Passes Through and Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars, both published by FC2 this spring.

ADAM GALLARI Q&A

Adam Gallari’s We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now (Ampersand Books) is a debut collection of young-men-questing stories that examines recurring themes of loss, pride, and what it means to be a man. He’ll be reading for us at Cousins on April 18th. He took some time out of his busy academic schedule to submit to a Q&A:

Baseball figures prominently in the lives of your characters. What is your relationship to the game? And, can you do a quick compare and contrast: baseball and writing?

Until very recently, baseball had always been very central to my life. I played through college and spent a season in Germany playing what you might term “semi-pro” baseball. I have a love/hate relationship with the game now. I almost feel like it was a bad marriage at times. I’m happy it’s over. I have nothing left to give it. But I definitely miss it, because it’s impossible to not remember the good times, too.

I think that baseball and writing are very similar pursuits. I think my background as an athlete has helped me very much in regards to my writing because I approach the two the same way. There’s a saying I heard once, I think it’s a Russian proverb that goes “When you’re not training, someone else is. And when they meet you, they will beat you.” I think that you can substitute writing for training and it’s pretty much the same. It’s a competition. If two manuscripts come across an agent or publishers desk odds are only one of them is going to win.

But I think that the greatest analogy between baseball and writing, or even life for that matter, is that the game is designed for its players to fail. Hall of Famers fail more often than they succeeded, and the average player even more so. It’s the only game that celebrates not necessarily the victory but the resilience it takes to come back day after day and know that you could go 4- 4 at the plate, but make the error that costs your team the game. What you did well is forgotten. The error remains. Just take Bill Buckner. One error erased an entire career and is ostensibly keeping him out of the Hall of Fame. This is coming from a Mets fan, too.

In "Chasing Adonis" you use the second person point of view to present a young man obsessed with achieving and maintaining physical perfection through a controlled diet and extreme exercise regime. The POV seemed to help objectify the character, but at the same time you managed to drain the vanity from his pursuit by showing his loss as an athlete. How did you manage to make me care about this guy who dressed as a sexy Jesus Christ on Halloween?

I tried to make him human. If I just gave you the bullet points for that story I don’t think the “You” is necessarily someone a reader would tend to empathize with. I’d wanted to write “Chasing Adonis” for a while, but it kept failing because a third-person was too distant, and the first person “I” didn’t allow for any remove. It just made the narrator an unbearable narcissist.

Ironically, I was watching a cooking show one day, and listening to the host list off the instructions “You do X,” “You do Y,” and it clicked. The listing of ingredients was no different than the listing of a workout regime. Plus the “You” trapped the reader in the experience, and I think that was imperative. With the “You” there is much less ground for moral judgment of a character. I started writing it like that, and it all just seemed to work.

So, by the time a reader gets to “On Halloween you dress up as Jesus…” they, hopefully, see how far the character as fallen both mentally and emotionally.

The story entitled "Go Piss on Jane" carries a number of autobiographical details. What prompted you to write that story?

I’m going to paraphrase Martin Amis here and say that as a young writer, all you really have to go on is autobiography, and I feel that in many regards that is true. The trick is being able to bastardize your own experiences enough to make them interesting to people that don’t know you and who have biographies of their own. For “Go Piss on Jane” all of the pieces for a good story were already in place from certain instances of my own life, I just needed to find a way to express them in a way that would be more a story and not the therapy writing that should be kept in a journal.

Honestly, it’s difficult for me to discuss “Go Piss on Jane” because it was probably the hardest story for me to write, not because it had so many autobiographical references, which it does, but because it could have so closely erred on the side of melodrama or sentiment. I didn’t know how far to push certain aspects of it, and I didn’t want to feel as though I was using the suffering of others for my own personal gain. I know that as writers we do that all the time, but there are certain areas that I think should be left to those who can actually articulate them best. I felt I was treading very closely to that line. And what I find interesting is that there are so many varied readings of it. Some people have thought it laudatory; others a strong anti-war piece. I never intended it to be a statement piece. I don’t believe writing to make a statement. I believe in writing to question and examine. To probe. I guess I just wanted to examine what I thought was a flaw in my own character—a cowardice perhaps—and the vehicle and characters of “Go Piss on Jane” allowed me to hopefully make an individual feeling accessible to those outside of myself.

After completing your MFA at University of California Riverside, you are now pursuing your PhD at University of Exeter. Can you tell us about your studies and how your research informs your fiction writing?

I’ve always been an avid reader, especially when I am working, and I’ve always been surprised by people who say they cannot read while they are doing their own work. I find that I need that mental break, and that if I’m struggling with a scene or a moment I can return to writers better than myself and attempt to examine how they managed.

My dissertation, at present, is still developing, but the goal is to examine the writings of Per Petterson in the context of his images and presentations of “the masculine.” I was immediately struck when I came upon Petterson because, I feel at least, there are very few writers like him working in America today—writers who are concerned with mature notions of masculinity, who aren’t afraid to leave their comic books behind or who aren’t simply getting by using hyper-realities with hyper-violent, almost caricature images. Petterson isn’t afraid of subtlety, and I think that there’s been a movement away from subtlety in most American literature presently. I’m not arguing that we return to the bare-bones minimalism of Carver, but that writers shouldn’t be afraid of making a reader work a bit, of displaying people in moments of duress that can be as simple as opening a jar of jam if handled correctly. And that male writers shouldn’t be afraid of being vulnerable in their work. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that writers like Cheever and Yates are suddenly experiencing a re-birth in America. I think the current curiosity with Petterson feeds into that. But what I found most interesting when discussing him with people in the UK was that he hasn’t had nearly the same impact on the literary landscape here. That cultural difference, of why a writer can resonate with one group, nationality, however you want to term it, really intrigues me, and that is something I hope to explore more fully.

Can you name a few of your literary cousins?

I’m indebted to a lot of writers, most of them dead, who, each time I read them, make me wonder why I’m even doing this because I feel there’s no way I can approach their level of skill and insight as craftsman and just as catalogers of humanity. Graham Greene for one. Ernest Hemingway and the bits of Henry James I’ve managed to get through. I’m not sure I’m smart enough for Henry James at this stage in my life. W.G. Sebald, Bolano. The prose and poetry of both Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski. Milan Kundera, whose best work I think is his writing on writing. There’s a weight to these writers, people tasked with not only keeping alive the identity of a people through their literature but also, because of the events of the 20th Century, inventing the idea of what it meant to be Polish or Czech and keeping that relevant for a generation that came of age under the Soviets or in the wake of other totalitarian regimes like Hilter or Pinochet. It’s something that writers here in America, thankfully, never had to address, but it shows in our work—especially in the work of writers of my generation, millennials or whatever we are called— which often seems puerile and trivial when stacked against the Europeans for whom writing, quite literally, meant life and death.

Cousins Reading 2: April 18th

Adam Gallari grew up on the outskirts of Manhattan and received an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. He currently lives by a train station in Exeter, England where he is pursuing a PhD, listening to train whistles blowing in the night and working on a novel. His collection We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now: Stories (2010) is forthcoming from The Ampersand.

Marc Lowe’s work has appeared in 580 Split, Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, >kill author, Farrago’s Wainscot, Pindeldyboz, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Storyglossia, and is forthcoming in the anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of Arts (Crossing Chaos Press). His novelette, “Girl with Smear,” was featured in Prick of the Spindle. Having received an MA in Japanese Literature in 2004, he is completing an MFA in fiction writing at Brown University. His eBook Sui Generis was recently published by ISMs Press (UK).

Rob Stephenson is the author of the novel Passes Through (Fiction Collective 2) and the novella U (Rebel Satori Press). His writing has appeared recently in Invert(e), Golden Handcuffs Review, Sidebrow, Madder Love, Entangled Lives, and The Lost Library. He performed part one of In Between / Inzwischen, a bilingual multi-media piece with video projections and sound, at the &NOW Festival in Buffalo.

Amish Trivedi is the author Museum of Vandals from Cannibal Books. His poems have appeared in La Petite Zine, The Backwards City Review, Cannibal, RealPoetik, and the e-chaps The Breakers (Absent Magazine), The Ink Sessions (Scantily Clad) and Selections from Episode III (Beard of Bees). He is pursuing an MFA in poetry in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

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