12 or 20 (second series) questions with Evan Kennedy

Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist. He is the author of I Am, Am I, to Trust the Joy That Joy Is No More or Less There Now Than Before (Roof Books), Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), Terra Firmament (Krupskaya), Shoo-Ins to Ruin (Gold Wake Press), and Us Them Poems (Book*hug). He runs the occasional press, Dirty Swan Projects, and was born in Beacon, New York, in 1983. He lives in San Francisco, California.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Until my first chapbook, Us Them Poems (Book*hug, 2006), I hadn't brought any project to completion. For years I thought I had moved past the stuff in that book, but now I understand that the same concerns play out in all I've written since, just differently.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
A poetry anthology in my grandfather's attic. I was wowed by the urgency of Chidiock Tichborne's poem written on the eve of his execution. I grew committed to scratching in notebooks.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Six months to a year to determine the ground rules or armature. I try to approach each project differently, to make one or two drastic changes to throw myself off balance, or step into the waters until they're lapping at my nose. On the other hand, I worry I'm fooling myself into thinking I'm innovating when I'm only repeating the past. I edit my drafts till they're slick.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
My books are formed around a topic: Francis of Assisi, Ovid, my biography, a sex robot with body dysmorphia. Usually enough material or ideas accumulate and require they be cohered into a single poem that serves the manuscript's subject.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings provide an unequaled opportunity to shepherd the work into the world. I can best test and plead my case for the work by reading it. But I try not to let my voice get in the way. Early in a project, I like to debut a new project at a Bay Area reading for my friends. Preparing the writing to be tested is as important as gauging the room and hearing their thoughts.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Uniting it all in the tree of life. Making an appeal to its creator. Reconciling myself with it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Perhaps like monks, poets work separate from society to offset its sins. I don't see poetry playing a significant role among the general public I find myself among. It's not like Zbigniew Herbert reading at labor gatherings. Yet it's essential to life, or mine at the very least. I never want to join the poets who claim its uselessness. They have careers in poetry to protect, so they gotta say it's useless.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
My editors have been supportive but mostly hands-off. I like to submit a tidy manuscript.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
If you see an item of clothing that appeals to you, buy two. My distant relation Jackie Kennedy recommended that.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Because I work a job separate from literature, I have to find pockets of time. On days off, I read or write in pajamas until two or three, then hit up Amoeba Music in Haight-Ashbury. I check out what Doc recommends in the metal section.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I continually ask my friends for book recommendations and to read whatever they're working on.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
A mown lawn.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
INRI, the debut album by Brazilian black metal legends Sarcofago, is a masterpiece. I'd love to shape a manuscript consistent with that tracklist. I mention that because there's no way I could approximate Myra Hess's arrangement of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." Or Mozart's String Quartets dedicated to Haydn. My creative process is closer to David Bowie's than any poet's. I'm interested in pastiching styles and imagery. I wish I were a scientist, but that would require too much recalibrating of my fundamental being. I wish I could identify more plants and animals than I do now.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My book Metamorphoses springs from Ovid, who becomes increasingly dear to me. I fantasize about writers the way people imagine themselves befriending Alyosha Karamazov or Elizabeth Bennett. Among them is Herve Guibert, Ovid, Kafka, Ronald Johnson, Simone Weil. Real friendships with Noah Ross, Jacob Kahn, Jackqueline Frost, and Jason Morris are crucial.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I wish I could sing but I'm incapable.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I were capable, I'd prefer a career like tenor Ian Bostridge's. It's probably too late for me to become a priest, a projectionist, a mopper at The Cock. It's probably not too late to scalp tickets.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I didn't have perseverance for anything else. Abilities in other things like music plateaued.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Emanuele Coccia's Metamorphoses. David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A book-length poem with the same concerns as my Metamorphoses (transformation, talking animals) involving the two birds from the Scottish ballad "Twa Corbies," a poem I first read as a child in Texas public school.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Elizabeth Robinson, Excursive

 

On January 1
                                    for Norma Cole

Time is light,

that’s all. Her tongue

a version, a map

version, where star maps

are always off-history whether

translating light

from a far galaxy or a local

starlet. “Oh!”

she said, a figure of herself,

“Yes.” Whereupon the light

threw itself down and pierced

her tongue, where it remained

like a stud, that she licked against

her teeth as she spoke.

The latest from Bay Area poet and editor Elizabeth Robinson [see the recent festschrift I produced on her work here] is Excursive (New York NY: Roof Books, 2023). Excursive follows an array of Robinson’s chapbooks and full-length collections, including blue heron (Center for Literary Publishing, 2013) [see my review of such here], On Ghosts (Solid Objects, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Rumor (Free Verse Editions, Parlor Press, 2018) [see my review of such here]. Subtitled “Essays [Partial & Incomplete],” with addendum “(on Abstraction, Entity, Experience, Impression, Oddity, Utterance, &c.),” the seventy-seven poems in Excursion include titles such as “On Beauty,” “On Depression,” “On Epiphanies,” “On Happiness” and “On Mortality.” Robinson has been playing the form of “On _____” for a while now, threading through multiple of her published full-length collections, allowing the structure as a kind of linked “catch-all” across her poetic. The “On ____” is reminiscent of Anne Carson’s infamous collection Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992), with each Carson prose poem in the collection titled “Short talk on _____,” but the ongoingness across multiple collections that Robinson employs is comparable to Ontario poet Gil McElroy’s ongoing “Julian Days” sequence, one that has extended through the entire length and breadth of his own publishing history across more than three decades. “While the body,” Robinson writes, as part of the extended “On [a theory of] Resolution,” “why, it // remains aligned to its // thirst. You know this. // You deny this. The theory // of resolution is meteorological / and not eternal.”

The poems are also set alphabetically by titled subject, throwing off the collection’s easy narrative or thematic sequence, allowing the collage of her lyric to hold the collection together, akin to a fine tapestry. Throughout, she utilizes her declared subject-title as a kind of jumping-off point into far-flung possibilities: choosing at times the specificity of her declared subject, but refusing to be held or limited by it. “To her who assumes / this identity,” she writes, to close the poem “On Numbness,” “a citizen // befuddled by destination, / it’s not possible / to have arrived here from anywhere, // not possible to assimilate to new fluency.” In many ways, this is a book about the body and how the body reacts, moving from physical to physiological reaction, action and purpose, allowing the echoes of references and sentences to form a coherence that a more straightforward narrative might never allow. “I was a lung,” she writes, to end the poem “On Extinctions,” “a hardening lobe, while // the moving air curved as though an ivory horn // and lay still.” She writes out the body, using her titles as markers, and at times, anchors, providing a weight that occasionally prevents her lyrics from floating away entirely. At times, it seems she works from specifics into a rippling beyond the limitations of how each poem begins, as though the title is the pebble dropped into the pond, and the poem is the rippling effect on the water. She writes the body, and even the betrayal of the body, one that echoes across a prior period of illness, perhaps; and there is almost something of being only able to write of something directly by coming at it from the side. “Time was a tumor in its very own landmass.” she writes, to  begin the poem “On Krakatoa,” “It couldn’t have been more intrepid.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ted Rees

Ted Rees is a poet, essayist, and editor who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent book of poetry is Dog Day Economy, published by Roof Books in February 2022. Thanksgiving: a Poem, published by Golias Books in April 2020, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His first book of poetry, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame, was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2018. Chapbooks include Dear Hole, Big Dearth in Whir, the soft abyss, and Outlaws Drift in Every Vehicle of Thought. Recent essays have been published in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Libertines in the Ante-Room of Love: Poets on Punk, Full Stop Quarterly, and ON Contemporary Practice’s monograph on New Narrative. He is editor-at-large for The Elephants, as well as founder and co-editor of Asterion Projects with Levi Bentley. Since summer of 2020, he has been running Overflowing Poetry Workshops, an extrainstitutional online workshop space.

1 - How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My most recent book, Dog Day Economy, is indebted to the prior book, Thanksgiving: a Poem, in that the latter is a book-length poem written entirely in haiku, and probably marks the first time where I really wrestled with "the line," so to speak. Previously, much of my work had relied on the rhythms and sonic textures of the longer line, but the syllabic restraint of the haiku forced me to reckon with the way shorter lines can allow more ambiguity and uncanniness into a poem. Dog Day Economy takes up many of the same issues that my previous work has addressed— nihilism, personhood, autonomy, the third landscape, drugs, violence, queerness— but does so in a way that hopefully feels less didactic and more about being a person within those concerns rather than person describing those concerns. It's also important to note that the book was written over the course of about nine months, six of which were the first six of the pandemic, so that references to surveillance, exposure, and catastrophe are much more present than in previous poems, in which these themes played no small part.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Honestly, these sorts of even broader genre boundaries don't mean much to me, because everything is poetry in one way or another.

Also honestly, when I was younger, I was told that my poems were more interesting than my fiction, so I focused my attention on poetry. I've always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I'm not sure I have the patience or discipline for it.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I have no idea how to answer this question— poems come how they come, and each has its own demands and constraints that can be broken depending on mood and whim. I do usually conceive of some sort of general idea for some poems in my head, but that's more to keep me on track whilst writing them, as I glide away from that general idea all the time when I'm actually writing.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Like some of my favorite poets, I tend to arrive at a loose subject or constraint as I begin a project— that is, I will often be writing a poem and think to myself, "You could keep writing poems within these sorts of boundaries" and things go from there. That said, I began Thanksgiving with a book-length poem in mind.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
The poet Evan Kennedy described Thanksgiving as a book of "honky ventriloquism"— that is, me utilizing the cadences and gestural utterances of white people as a way of getting at the soul death at the heart of whiteness. Doing public readings for that book allowed me to really push the idea that I never want to sublimate these voices into my own, but rather have them work as spoken gestures that are meant to be read and heard as other than my own. Almost like interruptions, or bad impressions.

I love giving readings, and I love attending them, too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The theoretical concerns of my recent writings have much to do with the boredom of suffering, but that's not really what you asked. In one of her essays on closed and open poems, Lyn Hejinian writes about the space between lines, phrases, the leaps in logic of parataxis that marks so much Language writing. I like to think that my writing is concerned with the space of those leaps, the unsaid elements of those spaces in language that are often elided. Instability.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The larger culture is mind detergent and soul rot, so I'm mostly interested in writing that works against it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have loved working with every editor I've had, and also love sharing work with others who are not necessarily the publishers of my work, but the readers and supporters of my work. Eric Sneathen has been particularly helpful in this latter regard— perhaps someday we will work together in a more formal capacity!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"First thing you learn is that you always gotta wait."

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find any prose writing to be torturous, and I agonize when I'm writing essays and reviews.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write every day, though sometimes more actively working toward a goal in mind. I do have a very active reading practice which begins in the morning, when I make sure to wake up early enough to read for about 30 minutes while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. This practice is essential to my mental and emotional well-being, and I become angry when it is interrupted.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Music with lyrics is a big one for me— dumb pop music, Guided by Voices, nasty lines from obscure R'n'B songs. I also listen to a lot of instrumental music, particularly jazz, but have recently been inspired by the band Crazy Doberman, a midwestern group that plays truly out there freeform music.

In terms of writing, I am always inspired by Hejinian, Jean Day, Prynne, Lisa Robertson, Clark Coolidge, Norma Cole, and recently, James Purdy.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My parents are also book fanatics, so their house has a sort of musty smell of books and old carpets. I like that.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I don't really think I can answer this question in any sort of sufficient way, partly because I don't think of my work as separate from any other forms.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I don't really think of an inside or outside of my work, but the writing of my friends is immensely important to my life, even if that is rarely evidenced in my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Impossible question!

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
If I'm being real, I'd probably be a lawyer. I hate the legal system, grounded as it is on a field of pain and death, but I've done legal research and paralegal work, and I have a knack for understanding its machinations.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I love reading more than most activities, so that's a big part of it, probably.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently finished Far Out West by Clark Coolidge, which I enjoyed quite a lot. I admit to having a pretty lazy and uninspired film-watching practice at present, but we've been doing horror movies since the month began, and I loved Basket Case— so much of a world that no longer exists contained in a single film, kind of incredible.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished a newish manuscript on cancer and counter-narrative, so at the moment, I'm mostly prepping for a commissioned essay on the cult gay filmmaker Curt McDowell, and searching for my next poems.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lawrence Giffin

Lawrence Giffin [photo credit: Michael Ian] is the author of several books of poetry, including Untitled, 2004 (After Hours Editions, 2020), Plato’s Closet (Roof Books, 2016) and Christian Name (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). He is a co-editor at Golias Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Christian Name, changed my life in two ways—for the better, because I was finally done with it and done wondering whether or not I was really a poet, and for the worse in that it fooled me into believing I really was poet.

Certainly, publishing has nothing to do with being a poet (I’m unclear how one is ever a poet when not actively writing a poem); still, as meaningless as it is, it really is everything. As far as how my work has changed, I’m not sure I’m the best judge, since I can only describe my side of it. There is a greater desire to say “something real,” but also a greater suspicion as to the very possibility. There is a greater fear of turning out to be a bullshit artist and greater recognition that likely this is the case. Does any bullshit artist think of themselves as such? The value recognition of praise, even simply in the form of a publisher’s willingness to print it, inevitably diminishes, and one is forced to reckon with the various motives, noble and ignoble, that have been driving one’s practice for so long, often unconsciously, and which now may appear shameful or misguided. This revaluation generally has a positive effect, but it is equally painful and frightening.

It’s good to have something else to fall back on. Adam Phillips tells a story of a poet who told him it’s good for poets to have day jobs, “otherwise they start to believe that they really are poets.”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t. I tried my hand at fiction first, but I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t have the smarts or attention-span to write non-fiction or, god-forbid, philosophy, so I became a poet. I have a hard time putting myself in the reader’s shoes, and poetry rewards that.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
If the work comes at all, and it does, though rarely, it comes out fairly close to its finished form. For me, if a poem requires heavy revisions, it’s because something isn’t working on a fundamental level—in my case, usually, it’s trying to do too many things at once, without a cohesive frame—and quickly falls apart under the tiniest of revisions.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I begin by writing. It always begins with actually writing something, whatever, on and on—abandoning some poems, returning to others, starting over—until something takes, that is to say, a line or a phrase, some actual string of words, seems to me compelling and generative, and then I follow that until I get bored or feel like it’s over. It doesn’t mean that what I write will be any good, only that I have to stumble on it—I can’t plan it out ahead of time. I hardly ever come to the page with an idea or theme. I always have to start with some bit of text that happens to evoke more text.

I rarely set out to write long poems or short poems. Since I never set out to write this or that kind of poem to begin with, it’s equally unknown ahead of time how long a particular poem would be. I’d like to try writing shorter poems because I think most people prefer to read less rather than more.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t often enjoy attending them, and rarely enjoy giving them. That said, they aren’t counter to my process any more than they are necessary to it.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Nothing explicit, though I certainly have interests and preoccupations which cannot fail to give the work a vague sense of coherence. Poetry is particularly poor at answering questions (or even forming them), and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you a load of bullshit. If poetry is anything, has any being, it can’t be the sort of discourse about which questions can be posed ahead of time, as if the answers already exist and are merely waiting to be uncovered. People who look to poetry for answers to life’s most pressing questions are already beyond help.

I do think poetry can bring us into contact with our insignificance and congenital fragility without turning it into the substance of a supreme (and supremacist) nihilism, though it might do that as well (the Iliad is an example of this danger, though Thersites’ objections to the war and his subsequent humiliation gives the poem a whiff of the absurd). Poems make fools and knaves of us all, writers and readers.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Clearly the role of the poet is to assuage our fear that, really, no one knows what is going on. Poets relieve us of having to hope or believe ourselves. They believe for us, on our behalf. Maybe this answers Hölderlin’s question, “what good are poets in lean times?” They get us through rough patches by spouting reenchantment propaganda.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both. Neither.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Make mistakes.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I can’t keep any routine at all, much less one around an activity as frustrating and demoralizing as trying to write a poem. I long ago gave up on the hope that I would learn to schedule things with a sufficient level of granularity or wake up early to compose my silly little verses. As long as my kid is safe, my partner feels supported, and the laundry is done—success. Were poetry a similar prerequisite, I’d have given up long ago.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
If the writing gets stalled, it’s usually because I’m trying too hard. The only way out I know is to keep writing, to stop trying to write and write, whatever comes out. Like I said, something has to take, but that something has always to be already written before I can stumble upon it. It's a dilemma, like Baron Munchausen pulling himself up by his own ponytail, and one which can be addressed only by a mad scribbling.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Foul river mud. Diesel exhaust. Casseroles.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Philosophy, physics, psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology, game theory, algorithmic information theory, Greek mythology.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Perennially returning to Bataille, Heidegger, Schuyler, Ashbery. Have of late been reading Wittgenstein, Adam Phillips, Montaigne, Nicole Loraux, Seth Benardete, Hans Blumenberg. Diderot still manages to scandalize me. Recent poetry that sticks out includes the late Iliassa Sequin’s collected, John Coletti’s Deep Code, Josef Kaplan’s Loser, Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (reprinted by NYRB with the remarkable Time Lived, Without Its Flow), and Gordon Faylor’s Want.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Inherit a fortune.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Who can say? For one, writing is not my occupation, if that means what occupies the greatest amount of my time or where I get my money. Certainly, thinking I am a poet occupies great swathes of the day, but actually writing, no.

Were I not who I am—every capricious decision and accident of fate—I would be someone else, and since there are plenty of other people, I am already doing all the things I would be had I been somebody else.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always found reading—holding onto an idea, following a thread, understanding the stakes—difficult. And people are a mystery to me—their motives, why some things make them happy and other things sad, why they want the things they want. I suppose writing addressed those twin mysteries and promised not only access to them but the privileged access of a poet. But such access is not truly possible, and even if it were, certainly poetry would not be the means.

I find the idea of a reader to be utterly incomprehensible, so that when I try to write for an idealized reader, the figure in my head quickly becomes monstrous, and when I don’t write for the reader, I seem to default to addressing some bitter and hateful deity.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was either Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy or Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. I think Thor: Ragnarok was probably the last time I left the theater perfectly satisfied.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Either a pretentious and likely fatuous book on the uselessness and unavoidability of mythic delusion in daily life or an inspired and fascinating book on the uselessness and unavoidability of mythic delusion in daily life. Regardless, it will never see the light of day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ted Rees, Dog Day Economy

 
 

He would sniff Ajax just to feel the burn
asynchronous to my youth in ditches
the grey matter of free will crunching
its way through the forest of worship
shame of clashing melodic intervals
self on screen not always so synched
but fun for a while ‘til a fanatic walked,
they all walk.

It’s why our scrambled intention to learn
how to trache the horizon was initiated.
Sadly, its execution was tragicomic,
deeply compressed yet histrionic, accurate yet
subject to the whims of the board
on which we all opened fire. Damn Ambien,
fucked five ways to Friday keep it down down,
landed into a house that ain’t mine,
baton gauntlet psychic scan
and where are my contours, my slop?

Did you reel in the sandtrap rubbing slamming
against illusive green? (“Economy, a Reshaped Spit”)

From Philadelphia poet, essayist and editor Ted Rees comes Dog Day Economy (New York NY: Roof Books, 2022), a suite of paired suites: from the sixty-odd page sequence “Economy, a Reshaped Spit” to the triptych “Dog Day Scrolls”: “I: Dog,” “II: Day” and “III: Scrolls.” There are curious echoes of Kootenay School of Writing language gymnastics in Rees’ articulations, one that has rippled across multiple writers in the interim, including Jeff Derksen, Colin Smith, Louis Cabri (who studied in Philadelphia in the 1990s), Colin Smith and even Philadelphia poet ryan eckes, blending a collage of sound and meaning across critiques of politics and policy, social justice and late capitalism. Rees composes collage-poems of despair and shifting foundations, poems that articulate a deep uncertainty and urgency, each of which feed off the other, writing savage, slant and skant across the body of a culture infused with its own sense of self-annihilation. “One day we’ll tickle again,” he writes, towards the end of the opening section, “but cold gin, / automatic rifles, discerning smiles / beneath masks, my binky.” His poems articulate simultaneously a savage, pessimistic critique and a hopeless, even desperate, optimism. As he offers in his “Notes on the Poems” at the back of the collection:

The poems of Economy, a Reshaped Spit were composed by writing with and around language that was physically cut and pasted from issues of The Economist magazine and Wikipedia articles on people who have disappeared mysteriously, with special attention given to those who seem to have disappeared voluntarily. They were written in Philadelphia between November 2019 and May 2020.

The poems of Dog Day Scrolls were first composed on large sheets of butcher paper utilizing luggage markers, permanent markers, packing tape, scraps of paper, and pens, in a rather physical process. They were written in Philadelphia between 2020’s summer solstice and autumnal equinox.

Brenda Iijima, Bionic Communality

 

contact at marrow, bloodletting river flow suction
graphic impact reaches limits of space (grandiose)
inseparably from now until awakening
brutal jewel of war presently centered as zenith of gravity
the troops former civilians armed and primed
relent all factions
limelight theater
battle cry emitted from thickest fortress
come home, soldiers, lie down

Brooklyn, New York poet, editor and publisher Brenda Iijima’s latest is the full-length Bionic Communality (New York NY: Roof Books, 2021), an expansive book-length poem composed out of lengthy, layered lyric stretches and fragments. Bionic Communality is a book of movement, of water; a book of action, crisis and reaction. As she writes as part of her “AFTERWORD,” “Although this text resembles poetry it is an expression of changeable forms. The work necessitated undoing the stricture of genres of language and relation to embrace raw impulses and facts of body and presence of many means and modes.” Her “AFTERWORD” begins:

This text is a choreographic account of somatic involvements in my hometown of North Adams, Massachusetts between 2010 to 2015, with after-effects that continued to be written in until 2020.

Emergent forms of movement I’ll call dance were performed unannounced in civic spaces, in the forest, on waste dumps, in cemeteries, in people’s yards, and around town for spontaneous audiences that came upon my body articulating in zones and transitional spaces. Experimental data absorbed and operative in 360 degrees generated language. When performing, I wore one of three distinct outfits: a men’s XXL black tee shirt with an image of a wolf on the front face, a red silk office dress or a green sateen ballgown. The garments affected the way I was able to perform and elicited a range of divergent responses from onlookers.

During my childhood, in the 1970’s, there was a spate of murders of young women, several of their deaths remain unsolved. The violence the women endured, and the underlying genocidal history of this place (and nation) have merged and resonate. The violence clings as a second skin for those who encounter this space.

The grief of those undermentioned, and or occluded histories are part of my orientation in the world. It became palpable that the town’s residents struggle with grief, consciously and unconsciously. The traumas of the past communicate and relate directly with the traumas of the present.

The structures of Bionic Communality are reminiscent of certain phrase-accumulation pieces of some of the loosely-affiliated assemblage of Kootenay School of Writing poets, whether Colin Smith, Dorothy Trujullo Lusk, Louis Cabri or Jeff Derksen, linked through the ways in which each allow the accumulations themselves to provide potential meaning and context. One offers the assemblage, with the final structures to piece together through the many and multiple collisions, collections and contusions. “dirt, my mother tongue,” Iijima writes, offering both the tangible and the experiential. Later on, “in a tiny white house where I was raised / under the velvet light of the horizon / working for a pittance / of relief [.]”

Hers is a lyric of movement, dance and constant motion. “lodged into the stream of the poem,” she writes, towards the end of the volume, “infiltrate tongue to fist assay / communication through external device / confluence of meanings rush headlong / body rounded out like a boulder [.]” It is curious to consider this work, as well, against such as the chapbook-length multidisciplinary poetry-dance work Grapple (above/ground press, 2016) by Chicago poet Carrie Olivia Adams, namesake of Samuel Adams, the American founding father who originally provided Iijima’s hometown of North Adams its name. Whereas Adams’ movement is collaborative and named, Iijima’s is singular, yet legion, existing simultaneously across a number of threads and considerations. Speaking on a previous project with Andy Fitch for the Los Angeles Review of Books Blog, posted October 6, 2017, Iijima spoke to a similar simultaneousness, responding that “As human animals we are always inside language and ecology as all-encompassing spheres of participatory reality. The experience of thinking and feeling through crisis and conundrum (and bonding in necessity is crucial), the exigencies of our times are overwhelming.” Iijima writes the overwhelmingness along with the communal nature of how we not only interrelate, but require for survival; she offers both the excess and that excess shaped into a form with which to direct our thinking.

it is called river and then grow silent about it
get dumpy dump into the river call it an enlarged
colon there is refuse all over not biodegradable waste
and accompanying nutrients see here industrial effluviums
get taciturn around the dump the river is seething
the river saturates dirt we call this the dump
municipal dumping ground and below
is the cemetery / the body dump don’t get all up in arms
placid by the company / objectionable funnel
longing stringy body goes nuts / scientific
also look at this communal wasteland
gorgeous radioactive features the land looks gorgeous
persons are gorgeous through filled with rumors
hyaline vault overhead / give the river a break
don’t be bored