Interviews

A conversation with Ruth Danon and Philip Brady

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Ruth Danon and Philip Brady, poets and prose writers, engage in a conversation exploring their shared love of Joyce, their complementary sensibilities, and the very different writing processes that resulted in their recently published books.

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Ruth Danon: Let me start by saying how much I enjoyed reading Phantom Signs. I love the passionate virtuosity in the way you handle the language and the variety in the essays. You kept me engaged because you are so engaged. And so a number of questions come to mind.

First, I’m interested that right away, in the second paragraph of the introduction, you invoke a kind of Manichean universe — “the writer’s dark, the editor’s light.” And all the way through it seems that binaries haunt you. “Written word” or “living breath;” what is outside of temporal limits and what is defined and constrained by them. I can’t help but think about matter and spirit and about what appears to be the deep influence of an Irish Catholic upbringing in your work. Could you address the way your early background shapes the distinctive and pervasive internal debate between “dark” and “light” in your work?

Philip Brady: I grew up in Queens, which in the sixties was a bit like nowhere at all. Now Queens has become everywhere. I imagined my own Queens, and reality didn’t object much. There were 60 kids per nun and we were arranged by height so the back rows were a no-go area where you could read or daydream as long as long as peace prevailed.  At home, I rocked in front of the hi fi to my father’s come-all-ye-diddly-eye albums, and as the poem says:

 

On hands and knees, speed adjusted to song,

I squinched my eyes and soared over the streets.

My heels kept me from regressing beyond Queens,

But I embodied an oceanic voyage,

Finding in rhythm a charm against time’s surge.

 

That’s from another book, not part of our conversation, but it shows that your question pinpoints my obsessions. I think that poetry is always just beyond our reach, and what we call “poems” are our attempt to reach them—to enter a world where language connects time and timelessness, and lines are conceived and spoken in one breath. This also seems a recurring theme of this mysterious and light and dark-striated book, Word Has It. The poems are, in your phrase, “Shot Through”—not only with light, but with musing and murmuring that attune “domestic” speech to “habitation.” Even the title, Word Has It—affirms and questions language. If Phantom Signs divides, Word Has It radiates into “a silence of my own making.” How do these poems come about? How to they work their frank and subtle magic?

RD: Magic? That’s a nice word to attach to the poems. Thank you.  I can say quite frankly that they come about without intention just as the book itself was discovered by looking at the many poems I had written without assumptions. I am committed to the notion that we write our way into the unknown and that what I can bring to bear on any instance of writing is my life as I’m living it and some ineluctable pull of language. My habit has been to write every day, late at night, and quite quickly. Occasionally, as in the case of the “Word” poems one night will provoke the next and so a series comes into being. I am also committed to the notion that the hardest task of the writer, after getting the words onto the page, is to read what’s there and to understand what’s there. I didn’t know I was writing political poems until I looked at them, hard. I found a narrative in the poems when I started to read them in relation to one another. I found the language of the last part in books and articles about Roman divination because I had taken it into my head that I was interested in augury.  So this work springs from deep, unknown sources – written without thinking but reflected upon with a great deal of thought and what I hope is an unsparing willingness to see what’s in front of me. Beyond that, I think, and have just discovered this, that the subtext has everything to do with my feeling that as a child of immigrants and exiles I, too, live in a condition of exile, longing for a home but never quite finding it and now, in view of what the books seems to have had as prophesy, in a state of despair about the home I have come to live in.

Another question: If I read you accurately at all you seem to be exploring the ways in which poetry and life as a poet expand beyond the activity of “making” poems. Is there a kind of vocation that transcends the idea of “product?” that is one of your concerns? In other words, even beyond the binary of process versus product, is there some existential condition or role implied in the way that a person might (ideally) take on the role of poet? I’m interested in this in part because it seems connected to the end of the second part and all of the third part of my book, Word Has It, and so I’m wondering if this is a point of connection and conversation for us.

PB: My enigmatic sub-title, “the Muse in Universe City” is meant to contrast the power and linguistic force of poetry with the fact that it has been appropriated by academia, which seems to be poetry’s bastion. Universities support poets and poems—and literary non-profit presses, like the one that I run, Etruscan Press, and Nirala, which produced Word Has It in a beautiful dual edition, cloth and paper. As you know, there’s a strange disconnect between the idea of poetry—which is generally held as an ethereal vocation—and the small, dedicated audience of poetry readers. While the readership is small, many if not most people turn to poetry at some time—or even begin with poetry. As I have it in one essay,

 

“Anyone touched by a poem burns to write one—or better, to have written. This is not true of novels or plays or screenplays or memoirs. Like acrobatics or opera, I love to watch, but do not seek to emulate. But poems look easy; they make us feel we too could ignite language. As a provost once asked, ‘Is that a real poem or did you just make it up?'”

 

At least part of the problem, it seems to me, lies in the definition. We apply the name “poetry” to literary poetry, but we tend not to think of all the other linguistic practices through which people receive an aesthetic experience. Poetry has always had this divide—between the esoteric and popular traditions. But now the name poetry has been usurped by the esoteric tradition—that is, the literary tradition. So, “Poetry requires a belief that within language, and outside of any particular iteration of language, there are possibilities that can never be attended at one time. They have one foot outside. They are beyond. They are what we used to call the Muse: not a persona, or a Star Wars Force, but a condition, a state of things. It flickers on the page and in the air. It circumnavigates the dead.”Another i ssue is the dominance of the lyric. Now that drama and epic have been ceded to prose, poetry’s most salient characteristic seems to be brevity. Coming to grips with this radical distortion of scale is lyric poetry’s gift and responsibility.  How do we get people to stay in this infinitesimally eternal moment—the line, the phrase, the word. You quote Yuyutsu Sharma, whom I had the pleasure of meeting recently, “to be a poet…you must set your house on fire and walk away.” One reading of this line would be that the house is prose—or even language—and that the poet walks away with only breath and utterance.  In Phantom Signs, I argue that “art is not a personal activity. It is a soulful receptivity. It is the impression left upon the mind when all writing has been effaced.” In their brevity, in their illumination of particular moments, and in their blending of line and sentence, the poems of Word Has It leave unique impressions. I’d love to hear more about the source of this lyric model.

RD: My first impulse is to say “I don’t know,” but that is a cop out, so I will try as best I can to take on your question. There is, of course, a fine tradition of short poems. Think of Sappho and Basho, of the imagists, many of Creeley’s poems, even, for pity’s sake ,the terrible instapoets of the moment.  Models of brevity are everywhere.  In both high and low culture.   I think of lyric moments as suspending chronological time,  the way the rabbis describe the Sabbath.  These brief pieces in the book, written usually late at night,  represent moments of suspended time. My days are generally long and I don’t usually get to the page until late at night. I’m tired. Part of me wants to resist the whole enterprise. So I write under the pressure of time and tiredness and resistance and the bits of poems emerge out of that mix. But then there is also the tradition of the long poem and I love those as well. My earliest and deepest influence was Eliot.  So because I also want to write long as well as short and because the fragments and bits seem to suggest a narrative, I end up putting the small poems together. They aggregate. In that aggregation I begin to understand what I’m doing.

PB: I find the notion that you are writing at night, “under the pressure of time and tiredness and resistance”—almost in an altered state–scary and attractive.  It implies a faith in the power of the connection between mind and word, as if you are tapping into some source that surfaces when the ego-self is less active. And it implies, for me, that that source is revelatory. I’m thinking of William Heyen, a poet I write about in Phantom Signs, who speaks of “The landscape within…,” and  “Faith in an inclusive and enabling aesthetic” requiring  “a belief in the idea of wholeness.” “Everything in the end,” Heyen writes, “comes to One.” I think of this kind of poetry as tuning psyche to song, and for me it requires enormous willingness to reveal that “landscape within.”

As they say in Queens, I dig with the other foot. I am less confident in whatever source I might unveil in an inner landscape. For me to write, and believe in what I have written, there must be many layers—what I’m calling in my new long poem, Counterclockwise Time—which is the time and craft layered in the making of the poem, which must appear in Clockwise Time—which has, in my poem, two aspects—time lived and reconceived as told. But I love the poetry that seems unfettered and unmediated—open to self and world.  I wonder if this speaks to your writing process and mission?

RD: An interesting question and not so easy to answer – or maybe there isn’t a singular answer. I think that in some ways we/I (at least) write one long poem that is the poem of our lives. My first poem (written when I was a child) offered concerns and poetics that have remained with me – namely the focus on language as a concern and a linking of abstract and concrete that seems to be something people comment on in my work. So in some ways I’m “fettered” to those preoccupations. How they surface is the mystery of the work and the joy. But everything I write is also in the context of other writing. In “Habitation” there is a little homage to Williams. I have often used found text, especially from Wittgenstein and the Renaissance architectural writer, Alberti.  Eliot has been a major influence, as has been Ashbery. But the mediation does, I think, occur at a very deep, subconscious level. What I steep myself in emerges in ways I can’t predict. I wish I were even more porous than I am, though I am, as you say, open to the world as it presents itself in an ongoing fashion. And much of that “world” is the world of other texts, the world of language, which is my real home. And that brings me to my next question, which has to do with the world of literature.

You and I share a deep love for Joyce’s “The Dead.” It’s a story I’ve taught a million times and the ending never fails to send chills up and down my spine.  I’m curious about a couple of things about your relationship to the story and how that relationship has shaped your own writing.  Do you think Gabriel is fully redeemed at the end? And by that I mean do you think he really discovers a kind of love for Gretta that he hadn’t had before? Or is he, at the end, simply drawn away from eros into thanatos — into an awareness of his own and everyone’s mortality that leaves him feeling pretty alone. I’ve constructed this as a binary and I’m wondering if it’s a false binary and I’m wondering if, as in the perplexing (in a positive sense of perplexing as in one that forces us to think hard without necessarily arriving at a conclusion) essay about Kirk Nesset, the question can’t be resolved neatly and that part of what you are up to in this book is the way paradoxes remain thus — not everything gets resolved – and is there an aesthetics implied in that? (Wow, that’s a mouthful.)

PB: I’m delighted at your delight with this wonderful story. I’m probably too personally invested in the character of Gabriel to be a fair critic, but I have always thought that his confession comparing his husbandly love for Gretta with Michael’s Furey’s youthful passion for her is the most poignant of moments. “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love.” For me, as a man entering the suburbs of old age, this confession is the most refined and intense feeling: his lifelong love for Gretta is far deeper than Michael Furey’s youthful passion. And I think you’re right—there isn’t a satisfactory binary. Gabriel is in love, and he is also alone; he is generous and also self-engrossed.  And in a sense, the ending—one of the most beautiful I’ve read—reminds us too that it is possible to fold irony into lyric, and identity into dissolution, and prose into poetry, just as the snow is general all over Ireland, and at the same time falling “on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns…” Vast and tiny—that radical dislocation of scale which is poetry’s colophon.

RD: Oh how I love your phrase “the radical dislocation of scale . . . poetry’s colophon.” So lovely! And that makes me ask the next question. I know that in my own life the conditions under which I write poetry and under which I write prose are quite different. Poetry requires a kind of urgent liminality.  Prose demands that I be clearheaded and focused and with a surfeit of time. Your prose is lush and rich and very poem- like. But your prose is prose nonetheless and so I am wondering if you experience the two modes of writing as two modes of being.

PB: Yes, I’m glad to come back to this—because it does speak to a question, which has occupied me as a poet, writer, and publisher. Etruscan Press was founded in a conversation with novelist Robert Mooney, asking whether poetry and prose were manifestations of the same impulse, immersed in different practices and traditions, or if on the other hand they were completely different arts, joined by the technology of the alphabet. We find the nexus in poetry, which partakes of movement and narrative, and prose which features moments of stillness. Composing poetry I imagine no audience. I write and read poetry to reshape my mind—as Seamus Heaney puts it, “I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” On the page, a poem remains, for me, a draft. If it has not made its way into my synapses, escorting me to sleep or accompanying on a walk or whispering in the subway clatter or taking me out of a seminar or tavern, it has not fully been realized. I love what my teacher Jerome Rothenberg once said, “I make those poems which I have not found elsewhere, and for whose existence I feel a deep need.” Rothenberg connects his own poems with those first conceived by others, but which he has creatively inhabited. For me, this is where poetry is distinct—in its failure to belong solely to an author, in the power of rhythmic utterance to braid many consciousnesses, in its invitation to joyful anonymity.

For me, writing prose is a conversation. It’s a human, social activity. As I have it in one essay from Phantom Signs, “I have a love-hate relationship with sentences. I love the freedom and the buoyancy, the smooth texture on your skin and the way they go on and on, executing a flip turn at the margin. But, they do go on. I compose them only in daylight or lamplight, always alone. They can’t be learned by heart; they can’t breathe for long away from print. They are—or at least my sentences seem—foreign. Sentences have no darkness. They are devoid of mystery. If you think of something that might go in a sentence, you stick it in. Bent on transposing whole cartons of toxic reality on to the page, you get woozy.”

Ruth, why don’t we conclude with a few poems from Word Has It.  Your choice.

RD: Hmm. How about if we each conclude with something from our respective books. I’ll put in three poems and then maybe you can put in something from your book that speaks to them. I like the idea of equal time.

Here are three that have to do with being a writer:

Habitual

In the circle of light that interrupts the early dark she pursues foreign mysteries. Do not take this as metaphor. Rather, she, the writer, has become obsessed, it’s fair to say, with mystery novels written by people she doesn’t know set in places she’s never seen. The crimes are appalling – serial murder pursued as performance art. Spike-loaded apples, aberrant snowmen, and so on. Clues are heavy on archetype. Some readers will recognize the allusions. It doesn’t matter, though; the point is clear enough. Murders in books are acts of imagination but after a while the mysteries become quotidian. The writer acquires mysteries with increasing frequency, first delaying the purchase to avoid guilt, then acquiring a mystery almost ever day because the pleasure is too intense to refuse. She learns that serial murderers begin to leave less and less time between crimes because the kick doesn’t last. The writer understands this. The body gone, there is only language. Serial murderers leave notes, write in code. They grow increasingly impatient. They hate the dark. They want to be found.

Large or Small

In a silence of my own making I wait to hear the death shriek of stars. Because they are so far away I will wait for a long time. I don’t even look into the darkness dotted with tiny lights. I turn over my hand to see the lifeline etched in my palm. Always a bad reader

of fortunes I have little to offer

in the way of threat or consolation.

 

Augury

Craters of ash,

Lost nouns naming and

Renaming themselves,

Unwinding the black ribbon

Around your lonely neck.

You had one finger to the wind.

You had shoes without laces.

You boiled away tea water

Until the pot scorched

Craters into unfathomable

Ash. You stuck you hand

In it. You stuck your fist in,

You scooped something out.

Something hollowed out now,

And unfathomable.

 

From the essay, “Nine Phantom Signs” from Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City, University of Tennessee Press, 2019.

From Hex

There is a word that I am loathe to say. It sends a small shiver up my spine. Not the usual—fuck, cunt, shit, prick, ass. Nor the sloppy ones like darling, pumpkin, sweetiepie, lambkins. Hearing “Yaddo” always made a friend wrinkle her nose, but I lack allergies to odd-sounding words like firkin or Iroquois. I pronounce with equanimity terms that portend evil, like triglycerides. I am not dismissive of tongue-twisters or ululation or jaw harping. I jabber to my cat. I sing alone.

It’s just this one word. It does not relate to sex, exactly, though one of its definitions is a body part. I would not say it out loud to myself, or to others if I could safely circumlocute. I would not have it uttered within earshot. The French version doesn’t squick me, which is ironic since the English is an obscenity in French. It is not a fetish; it does not fester behind a veil of incense and fishhooks. Though I can write the word, to write it while admitting that I would not say it—this I cannot.

I hex this word. I do not curse or swear. I hex it. If I spoke my hexed word you would not cringe. It is not shameful. But to say that I cannot say it would color my humanity; it would divide us, reader, in this particular. Hex is the lust of virgin silence, the tensing of the unfired synapse, the spell between bars of the equal sign. Hex causes and precedes. Sans hex, words perfectly denote. They mean the same to everyone. They lack gaiety.

Every utterance is spun, like a charmed quark, by its hex.…

“There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being”: an interview with Linda Watanabe McFerrin

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(Santa Fe Writer’s Project, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY LELAND CHEUK

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Since the 1990s, Linda Watanabe McFerrin has been a voice for those caught between cultures and genres. Her best-known works are the novel Namako: Sea Cucumber (1998) and the story collection The Hand of Buddha (2000), both published by Coffee House Press, but McFerrin is also an award-winning poet and travel writer. Her body of work is collected in Navigating the Divide, as part of Alan Squire Publishing’s Legacy Series, which is devoted to publishing career-spanning collections from independent press authors. I had the privilege of interviewing McFerrin over email, after reading this category-defying collection.

Leland Cheuk: I was so impressed with not just the array of poetry and prose in Navigating the Divide, but also the arrangement of the pieces. Though we were just getting snippets of your longer works of prose, broken up by poetry and travel writing, there’s a narrative build for the reader from beginning to end. What was your thinking as you chose the order of the pieces?

Linda Watanabe McFerrin: Although it is not arranged by genre or chronology, Navigating the Divide does cohere in a narrative way. True, it is built from pieces pulled from work written at different times and in various genres. In that way it is an abstract construction, but the bits are all from one source, a single worldview. So it’s my world—the traveler’s world, the outsider’s world—arranged with a narrative arc or a “story.” The through line is an emotional one, and it escalates. For me, it has to begin with the story goal, with “Love.”  In subsequent sections, the terrain becomes trickier, the footing less sound. In the final section, the reader is on the edge, and all I need to do is to give a little push into the surreal, which is actually a relief, I think, after “Death and Shadow.” There is loft; there is flight; there is the strange lightness of being that comes with acceptance and escape.

LC: Your pieces seem concerned with bridging the proverbial gap between Japanese and American cultures, but also with bridging the gaps between reality and surreality, life and death, and genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. What’s driving your desire to write about the in-between spaces and categories?

LWMC: The world I grew up in was quite multicultural and far-flung. I was raised in the U.S., in England, and in Japan. Family and friends came from many cultures, and we had quite a few writers and storytellers among them. Our house was sometimes a caravansary and our bookshelves—full of diversity, full of photo albums, magazines like National Geographic and books by writers like Paul Theroux, William Burroughs, and Walt Whitman—just another prompt toward exploration. I was constantly trying to find a way to integrate all of this. I’ve always used my work to create a personal path into and through it all.

LC: There’s a lot of attention to diversity in publishing today and many, many more authors of color are being introduced to American readers. Many are writing about some of the identity issues you’ve written about over the course of your writing life. What do you think of today’s writing about identity in America? Are we just covering the same ground or are we making actual progress?

LWMC: I love the fluidity; that this cultural business is not settled; that we seem to recognize what’s “in the circle” and what’s “out” and that it is necessary for this to constantly change; that we are not forced to identify in a predetermined and constrained fashion; that we can create our own identities and stretch the “definitions” that limit our understanding. I think we are beginning to realize that by embracing the outsiders, we grow the collective. That it is a topic of discussion and a point of contention is progress.

LC: I loved the poem “Legacy” in which you write: “I’ve thrown out the kimonos, the costumes and robes / I’ve made a new self out of flowers and surgical steel / a shiny new self that blooms every spring / And I’ve cast all the ancestors / back over the sea”. Have you felt constrained by your heritage in your writing (or in the publishing of or reception to your work)?

LWMC: I’ve never felt constrained by my heritage in my work. Maybe I have been constrained by my heritage in life, where I’ve danced the outsider’s dance, but not in my work, which is a record and release of that dance. In my work, I’ve always felt inspired by my heritage, challenged by it, sometimes confounded by it. It’s the same relationship I’ve had with my family: It’s part of me, not all of me, and I want to simultaneously accept and refuse it. I think it’s that tension that fuels what I lay down on the page. I can use that. I wish I had that kind of control over my life. I don’t. Others exert a certain power over outcomes in this world, and where that is the case—in publishing, for example—my heritage has worked to my disadvantage.

LC: You write beautifully about kamis (ghosts) in your novel Namako: Sea Cucumber and elsewhere in the book. Who are some of your literary kamis? 

LWMC: I explain the concept of kami in a childish way as Ellen in Namako. The kami are Shinto gods or spirits that take the form of things important to our lives. There are supposedly millions of kami. Ellen tells her friend Anne, “Almost everything is a kami.” So a kami is more a spirit than a ghost and that spirit can be found in the strangest places. Sometimes it finds its home in a being, but often it occupies some other aspect of the natural world. It’s the vulnerability of a baby bird, the power of the wind, the ferocity of a tiger and so on. A tree, a shadow, a musical note, the paper that sits on my desktop—I guess I find my literary “kami” in everything—dark or light—that moves me. 

LC: What I love about your travel writing in Navigating the Divide is that it’s very experiential and doesn’t read like glossy travel magazine writing. You’re not the tour guide; you’re open to wandering, meeting new people, experiencing the absurd. Where are you off to next and who are some of the travel writers that inspired you?

LWMC: I spent the first part of the year traveling in Hawaii, in France, in Greece. I’m off to Washington, D.C. next for the book launch. That’s where my publisher is located. Then there is the tour. I’m not sure where that will lead me. It’s an open road, isn’t it? I hope I will do some more exploring of my own backyard, but overall, I think it will be a surprise. I wish I could say I’m off to another swamp, another rainforest, another desert area, but I think I’ll be hanging out in bookstores and libraries for a while … which is fine with me; I love them. As for the writers who inspire me, they are, fortunately, all over the country and all over the world, and maybe on this tour I’ll get to visit some of them. Let’s see: Maureen and Tony Wheeler in Australia; David Downie in France; photographer and writer Alison Wright—along with so many other creative folk—in New York; Tim Cahill in Montana; Jan Morris in England; Paul Theroux in Hawaii; Haruki Murakami in Japan … and so many great ones right here in my neighborhood.

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Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a poet, travel writer, and novelist. She is the author of two poetry collections, two novels, a collection of award-winning short stories, and a travel guidebook. Her literary honors include the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction and various travel writing, poetry, and fiction awards. Her latest novel, Dead Love (Stone Bridge Press, 2009), was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Superior Achievement in a Novel. As the founder of Left Coast Writers, Watanabe McFerrin has taught and mentored a long list of writers and is a beloved figure in California’s rich, historic literary culture. She has led workshops around the world,  and with ASP author Joanna Biggar, she co-founded the Wanderland Writers series of workshops and anthologies, which they co-edit.

 

 

What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? An interview with Lacy M. Johnson

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(Scribner, 2018)

INTERVIEW BY JO VARNISH

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Lacy M. Johnson’s collection of essays, The Reckonings, is a powerful meditation on the issues of violence, justice and mercy.  Through writing that is at times deeply personal, and her commentary on politics and culture, Johnson challenges the reader to examine their beliefs and their actions.

Jo Varnish:  Your memoir, The Other Side, is a beautifully crafted account of an horrific trauma you experienced at the hands of a man who has evaded our societal norms of justice by fleeing the country.  How did The Other Side inform or inspire your writing of The Reckonings?

Lacy M. Johnson: I feel like I’ve already told the story of how a question I was repeatedly asked while on tour for The Other Side prompted the inquiry I pursue in this book, so I’m going to answer a slightly different question, which is how these two books work together. In The Other Side I write the story of a horrifying trauma — how it changed me to survive being abused, kidnapped, raped, and very nearly murdered by a man I once loved. It changes me still. The Other Side is a story about memory and experience, about the fiction of before and after, and about how, because I will never “get over” what happened, I have instead learned to carry that story of it with me in ways that feel more or less okay.

The Reckonings is a different book — different in form because it’s a book of essays rather than a memoir, but also because it is a book in which I allow that earlier trauma to become a theoretical tool with which to interrogate violence more broadly — sexual violence, ecological and environmental violence, racial violence, gun violence. In the process of that interrogation, I realized that the many violences I write about in this book spring from the same source, which is the particularly white supremacist patriarchal belief that power only ever means power-over, and that strength is only ever synonymous with cruelty and force. What can trauma, as a theoretical lens, teach us about justice? How can occupying a vulnerable subject position — open, candid, exposed, unarmed — help us to interrogate the stories we tell about how stories should end, about what we owe to one another, and about how to build a world that is more just and equitable than the one we live in today? — these are the questions I wrestled with in The Reckonings, which is rooted in my own experience of violence, but uses that experience as a lens for looking at the world.

JV:  Both The Reckonings and The Other Side were finalists for National Book Critics Circle Awards, and were widely critically acclaimed.  The Reckonings has been described as a ‘thoughtful and probing collection,’ (Kirkus) and you as writing with ‘palpable compassion and brilliance,’ (LitHub).  Does the validation of your words and sentiments resonating so strongly with your peers give you hope in this time of division and unease?

LCM: I don’t think of hope as the result of any kind of interaction — and certainly not of critics with my work — but rather as an “orientation of the spirit” (Vaclav Havel), or perhaps as an ethical commitment. When we look at the massive problems that face us in this moment — climate change, racial violence, sexual violence, mass shootings — the magnitude of each problem individually and collectively can feel like just too much to overcome from where we are right now. The scale is too massive, we tell ourselves, and we lose hope. But I think a lot about the trope in science fiction we have come to readily accept: that a person can travel to the past and make some small change that radically alters the future. But what we accept less readily is the idea that we can make small changes in the present that radically alter the future. I think hope is a commitment to action right now, an investment in a future that has not yet been revealed to us, and possibilities we can’t yet see.

JV:  Lily Meyer, in her review of your book for NPR, wonders if the #metoo movement might be a reckoning.  Do you view it as such?

LCM: Only partially. A true reckoning would require a more substantial shift in the balance of power. Perhaps you noticed how each time this movement makes a step forward, our stride is met with backlash, and a reframing of our collective narrative about the epidemic of sexual violence against women as an epidemic of false allegations about men. A real reckoning would make that reframing transparent and ineffective  — or, better yet, impossible. I think we’re moving toward that but we still have a long way to go.

JV:  Your essay On Mercy explores the meaning of mercy in relation to death row prisoners and terminally ill children.  You write with grace and elegant restraint, and it is, I think, impossible not to be moved to tears as you take us with you to the children’s ward, and give us a glimpse at the lives of the children and their parents.  Your threading of the inmates’ circumstances facing capital punishment and the terminally ill children feels natural and poignant in the context of mercy.  What inspired you to juxtapose what initially seem to be such disparate situations?

LCM: “On Mercy” is actually the first essay I wrote for this collection. I had been traveling in support of The Other Side and kept getting asked this question about whether I wanted my rapist to be murdered, and a friend who works in criminal justice very helpfully suggested Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow — a lawyer in Texas who founded the Texas Innocence Network to defend people on death row — and that book led me to Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, who is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. Both books engage the question I had begun rolling around in my head — how are we to say what anyone deserves? — but approach that question in order to make a critique of the death penalty. I had just recently completed a year of teaching writing in a pediatric cancer ward, and noticed that in the discourse around the death penalty, there is a lot of talk about mercy, about alleviating suffering, about dignity, and in some ways that mirrors the discourse around end of life care that I had overheard during my year teaching in the hospital, though what people meant by those terms when talking about dying children was very different from what they meant when talking about men who are scheduled to be murdered by the state. During a single year, several of my students died and thirteen men were executed by the state of Texas, and the circumstances of their deaths were the subject of two very different but overlapping conversations about mercy: in one case that word meant ending suffering for the innocent and in the other it meant ending life for the guilty. I wanted to think through how one word could have such radically divergent meanings.

(Lacy M. Johnson, courtesy of the author)

JV:  In Goliath, you write, ‘We human beings are not born with prejudices.  Always they are made for us by someone who wants something.  We are told we have enemies who hate us, who want to make war with us […]’   Do you think that it is easier to elicit fear in human beings than compassion?  Are there societal factors that predispose an individual to a reaction of fear instead of empathy?

LCM: No, I don’t think we’re predisposed to fear and suspicion and hatred. I’m writing in that essay about anti-Muslim racism following 9/11, and something that didn’t make it into that essay was that following the attack on the World Trade Center I spent a year working as an Americorps VISTA volunteer and my particular placement was to work as a Peace Educator. As part of the training for that position, I learned that by the age of 10 most children have witnessed 100,000 acts of violence in the media, and that because they are naturally compassionate and empathetic, bearing witness to such repeated and prolonged violence damages their empathy in profound and devastating ways. It is far easier to teach a person to fear another if they have already learned not to feel for them.

JV:  You describe admitting for the first time in public that you were kidnapped and assaulted in your essay, Speak Truth to Power.  You go on to detail a disgusting comment made by a professor in Georgia, jealous of your success, implying that you may have invented the story.  I know, as I am sure most do, women who have been raped who have not reported the violence against them.  Can you feel the tide shifting against the established patriarchal mindset towards one more inclined to embrace those who have been violated through harassment or assault?

LCM: Yes, It does feel like things are shifting away from a patriarchal mindset, and I think that is part of a broader move away from white supremacist patriarchal ideology. It also feels like the hold the petroligarchy has on our natural resources is slipping, that capitalism is about to collapse under the pressure of extreme economic inequality, and that part of the pressure on these institutions to fail is a growing collective awareness that these are not separate institutions but a single desire to bring the many under the control of the few, and that this desire goes by many different names. This isn’t happening on its own of course, but is the result of generations of social, political, emotional, and psychic labor, and usually the labor of people of color. I think it’s important to note that if it feels like we’re making any progress at all, we have our elders to thank for it.

JV:  In your closing essay, Make Way for Joy, you write, ‘Justice means we repair instead of repeat.’  This line struck me as call to action for conscious effort, in ourselves, and in the wider community.  Do you think today’s younger generation is more inclined, through their use of social media and their instant connection to an audience, for example, to fight for change, or do you think they are less inclined, perhaps in part due to the constant scrutiny that comes along with that use of social media?

LCM: I don’t think this is a generational issue so much as a cultural one. I notice that many of my students, for example, are reluctant to engage in activism, but if we look to the Parkland students we can see the ways that this generation is not only capable of very effective activism, but are committed to it because the generations before them have dropped the ball. (Fellow Gen Xers, I’m looking at you.) People often deride Millennials for our own cultural failures, but let’s remember that Occupy Wallstreet was largely fueled by the energy of Millennials, many of whom had been economically disenfranchised by the stock market crash and were protesting that there was no accountability for the corporate greed that got us into that mess in the first place, though there were bailouts to rescue those corporations from the consequences of their own actions. My advice to my students in Generation Z, who might feel that the pressure of various scrutinies inhibits their freedom to “step out of line” and into what Representative John Lewis might call the “good trouble” of civil disobedience, is that there is no one who will ever give you permission to practice your own freedoms except yourself, which is why we must support our collective liberation in all the ways we know how.

—

Lacy M. Johnson is a Houston-based professor, curator, activist, and author of the essay collection The Reckonings, the memoir The Other Side — both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists — and the memoir Trespasses. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Guernica, and elsewhere. She teaches creative nonfiction at Rice University and is the Founding Director of the Houston Flood Museum.

Having moved from England aged 24, Jo Varnish now lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.  Her short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Manqué Magazine, Brevity Blog and Nine Muses Poetry.  Last year, Jo was a writer in residence at L’Atelier Writers in France.  Currently studying for her MFA, Jo can be found on twitter as @jovarnish1.

 

Kervinen’s Cyber Poetics

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(ma press, 2018)

REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“What does poetry look like in the technological age.” Kenneth Goldsmith

 

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, an internationally recognized artist, is a Finnish composer, producer, writer, visual artist, publisher [ma press], and editor of the new journal, coelacanth—a venue for experimental poetry. His work focuses, mainly, on algorithmic processes, computer-assisted compositions, and various other methods based on cybernetics, chaotic dynamics, and stochastic systems, among others. For purposes of the present review, I am advancing Kervinen as a “cyber poet,” and his book, as little as a single point, can be read as a collection of randomly-generated prose poems or as a long-form poem. The following piece is representative of the works in the volume:

 

Limpness inverted psychoses black-and-

blue affidavit Not only within the breakdown

point of an L-estimator is bounds undertone

decontaminate merrymaker bloodsucker defend and

apocalypse fight bottom tacky manifestly infuse

refusal scenario aardvark sponge as a single

point dairy the image that tress thick resilient

nuclear energy difficult computationally. In

many circumstances L-estimators are adjacent

cymbal congestion temp unequivocally broadcaster

as in the median (of an

 

I asked two of my friends to read and comment on this piece. Walter, a senior citizen and serious student of classical, English-language poetry, responded that he did not understand the poem and that it might as well have been written in Finnish. Meghan, a young mother and a published poet who writes beautiful lyrics, including iambic pentameter and soft rhyming, said that the poem was not her style but that she would like to learn more about experimental literature. In a sense, these readers are correct to imply that, from a Formalist perspective, a lot is missing from these compositions, though many of the texts include elements of strong image and emotion [“repeater,” “orgasm,” “breakdown”]. For the most part, however, the compositions, in whole and in part, are “defamiliarized” and “strange,” as Viktor Shklovsky noted when speaking of poetry using common language in such a manner as to alter the reader’s sensation or perception—features relating as little as a single point to Futurism and Dadism.

Surely, the poems in as little as a single point are examples of avant garde writing, often characterized by repetition and redundancy [“L-estimator,” “breakdown” or “break-down,” “minimum or maximum”], intermittent punctuation and capitalization, as well as, non-sequiturs throughout such that words or phrases may not follow logically from one another [“collage” poetry]. Some of the phrases begin as if they might become complete sentences—then veer off into something completely unrelated [“The breakdown point of an L-estimator is given by antonym are basis of why upper and sarsaparilla accommodations transformation…”] Additionally, some cryptic meanings might have been built into the randomly-generated texts. The book’s title, for example, may refer to a “single-point rubric” [Education] or a “single point of failure” [Systems Engineering].

Further, like many innovative works [e.g., Joyce’s Ulysses], these compositions may be viewed as “language-games” [Wittgenstein], and this algorithmic prose poetry is a type of “performance art”—playful, probing multi-sensory experience, creating, for some readers, a type of [signal] noise. Also, consistent with many experimental poems, these pieces are “indeterminate,” challenging the status of the author’s and reader’s egos and lacking a “thetic” component of narrative or closure. Indeed, each word or phrase can stand alone, permitting the reader to combine and recombine them into novel [meta-novel] texts. I would urge Walter and Meghan to consider John Cage’s comment: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually, one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

(Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, courtesy of the author)

In an attempt to gain a better understanding of Kervinen’s methods and purposes, I solicited answers to four of my questions via e-mail, as follows:

Clara Jones: How would you classify this book of poems? i.e., What kind of poetry is it?

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: For me this is a series of prose poems, all written algorithmically by my own program[s]. More usually, I call my ‘poetry’ as ‘writings’, it somehow describes [what I do] better, especially computer-generated texts, but lately I have started more and more to manually change things I am not satisfied [with], which [in] some cases means I rewrite [the] whole thing. That means the direction is from computer-generated to computer-assisted. [A] few years ago I had strict rules to NOT alter/change anything generated by my programs. [I]t was just one binary choice: [generated] either by computer or manually. Getting older seems to mean getting a bit softer, too.

CJ: Can you envision ever working with an “intelligent machine” [robot] with haptic [human interface]  capabilities to create poetry?

JK: I have done computer-generated music, texts and images [since the] early 1980’s, and so far, I haven’t seen anything even remotely intelligent [in] any machines. [W]e are still far away [from] “thinking” computers. [T]here’s always [a] human behind [the machine], programming, collecting data, organizing information etc, and of course, someone need[s] to switch the computer on. For me, [the] computer is an extended pen, another point of view, [a] different approach, where I “convert” my ideas to the format the computer is able to handle and then write the program to generate stuff, according [to]  the idea I have already formed in my mind. So, basically, I write programs to emulate myself.

CJ: As a poet, what is the worst or best advice you have ever received?

JK: I have no formal education in writing or literature, I studied musicology, composing and computing in university. So, this is [an] interesting question. [P]erhaps because of [the] nature of my writings, I have never gotten any advices. Not a single one.

CJ: What poetry projects are you currently working on?

JK: I am mostly working with music currently, but I write 1-3 books per year, run two presses, Gradient Books and ma press, and I am editing [the] first issue of [a] new e-zine, coelacanth; these are ongoing projects. I work very impulsively, I have no idea what I am going to do tomorrow, or next three hours. I am [currently] working with some art-related, mostly music, processes [most of] the time. [My] children have all moved to [their] own houses; I am living with my wife and our four cats, and I work constantly, except when sleeping, time [that] is dedicated to [my] extremely stupid dreams, which can’t be related to anything in real life. And not only stupid, they are usually also unbelievable boring. I also eat, but that I have always considered as a waste of time.

Clearly, Kervinen has given much thought to his multi-faceted career as an experimental artist. Whether or not he considers himself an overtly “political poet,” his methods are oppositional—refusing to conform to mainstream standards established by Formalists such as Cleanth Brooks or Helen Vendler. At the same time, although we might classify him with the Post-modernists [fracture/fractured language and motivation], he shares with Modernists, such as Eliot, James, and Stevens, the acts of expanding our understanding of poetry’s forms and content. One is reminded of Kenneth Goldsmith’s observation: “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.” Surely this perspective suggests that experimental compositions, such as those in as little as a single point, share features in common with what most critics and readers think of as traditional poetry (e.g., originality, “interpretive power”). Indeed, it might be suggested that Kervinen’s poems are not anti-authoritarian as ends in themselves but, rather, innovative and exploratory commentaries on contemporary psycho-social ways of being and “events in the world”—both existential and veridical. This is an important book that is highly recommended to consumers of the avant garde, as well as, to any reader curious about the current and future direction of cyber literature.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/ (GaussPDF, 2017). Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art and technology.

Interview with Little Book Contest Judge — Logan February

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Editorial Assistant and in-house interviewer Erinn Batykefer sat down with Mannequin in the Nude Author and Little Book Contest Judge Logan February to discuss what makes a stand-out contest submission!

Erinn Batykefer: Logan, it’s a pleasure to be back here in the interview chair with you again! The last time we chatted, you were considering baby blue hair for summer. Did that experiment come to fruition?

Logan February: It’s wonderful to be talking with you again! The last time was, what, four months ago? Amazing. So much has happened since then. But the blue hair, not yet. I’ve been very busy this summer (with a lot of internal work) so I haven’t felt much need to modify my appearance. But it will probably happen at some point, still.

EB: You’re Associate Director of Dovesong Labs, which mashes up the literary and the digital in creative video experiments, lessons, a salon, etc. Does the work to curate that space come to bear on your approach to judging PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: You know, there’s always so much to learn from being a reader and an editor, but I didn’t realize how much of a learning experience it would be to work as an educator, as well. Curating syllabi, creating study guides; it has evolved my relationship with poetics, and literary craft in general, in a big way. Language lets us into newer, fuller understandings (and misunderstandings) of self and society. I am interested in that—in the intention and execution of language.

EB: How do you see the little book / chapbook form working differently from a full length collection?

LF: I love chapbooks because you can read them in one go, you know, there’s limited space for the work to establish its thesis and formulate its own universe. I like the idea of that concision, I think a lot of amazing things can be born within that threshold. Where I see the full-length as a musical album—where you have to spend a whole cycle creating a complete body of work—my idea of the little book or chapbook is like an EP or a mixtape. I think of them as an opportunity to try out new poetics, to experiment, to tease new work, and just generally have a little more fun.

EB: What do you hope to see in the submissions for PANK’s Little Book Contest?

LF: Well, my love for literature transcends genre, so I am hoping to see a wide range of styles and inventions. I particularly like prose poetry and fragmented essays of creative nonfiction, so I hope I get stuff like that. Or like, a chapbook-length single poem! That would be very cool, I think. Everything, really, as long as it’s excellent. One of my current favorite pamphlet-type bodies of work is Anne Carson’s The Albertine Workout—in which she examines Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—so I would be thrilled to read something like that, something critical and literary. Above all, I want to be amazed.

EB: You’re a student of forms, so you know the challenge and the skill it takes to write something that feels relevant in a form that is, in some cases, hundreds of years old—is that something that catches your eye when you’re reading new work?

LF: Ah, yes, definitely. Being written in a specific form makes a poem demand, I think, to be read a little closer, with a little more attention. It becomes important, then, to reward that attention with a well crafted poem, whose formal intentions are well realized. That’s what makes such poems worth all the effort they require.

EB: Your title from PANK this year, Mannequin in the Nude, draws on your global life as a queer African poet in its interrogations of religion, death, desire, grief, identity—one that is often dangerous to live. What, if anything, would you say to a writer who is facing similar risk in their work and life?

LF: I know firsthand how tough and terrifying it can be in that place, facing risk and threat externally, and many demons internally. All I can say is: have courage. Everything that must change requires your courage. Never forget to take care of yourself, and to stay as safe as possible. Do whatever you need to feel free. And you are allowed to get tired, to lose faith, to be afraid—fear is natural but it must not paralyze us. The important thing is to keep going.

EB: We can’t wait to see what you find among the finalists! Any last advice to the writers who are submitting work to PANK now or in the future?

LF: I can’t wait to get into it! All I can say is probably: have some trust in the writing, put in the work that it demands. And try to make wise decisions!

 

BUY LOGAN’S BOOK HERE

Friday Feature: Interview with Gabino Iglesias – Reviews Editor and Contest Judge

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK]’s very own Reviews Editor and Fiction Contest Judge Gabino Iglesias to discuss all things writing!

Gabino is the author of Coyote Songs, a novel in which ghosts and old gods guide the hands of those caught up in a violent struggle to save the soul of the American southwest. A man tasked with shuttling children over the border believes the Virgin Mary is guiding him towards final justice. A woman offers colonizer blood to the Mother of Chaos. A boy joins corpse destroyers to seek vengeance for the death of his father.These stories intertwine with those of a vengeful spirit and a hungry creature to paint a timely, compelling, pulpy portrait of revenge, family, and hope.

Buy Coyote Songs Here!

Erinn Batykefer: I found your novel, Coyote Songs at the library and it had one of those big HORROR stickers on the spine. Your fiction has been published in anthologies that specialize in horror and crime fiction as well. How do you see genre functioning under the broad umbrella of fiction?

Gabino Iglesias: I see it as non-functioning. The only thing genre does is give you a set of rules and expectations while simultaneously limiting your readership. I’m fine with my work being called horror or crime or bizarro or magical realism (reviewers and readers have called it all those and more), but I won’t stamp a genre on it. That’s why I made up barrio noir. It’s its own thing. I think writers should tell the story they want to tell using the elements and styles that appeal to them the most. And they should do it without thinking about genre too much. That can come later, and only if it’s needed.

EB:  You’ve also read for contests like Best of the Net and judged genre awards like the Shirley Jackson Award and this year’s Splatterpunk Awards. What excites you most when you’re reading through the slush?

GI: The gems! There are always gems. Anyone who reads through slush at any magazine will agree. You read good and bad and decent and mediocre and that’s part of it. Then, from time to time, you read something that shakes you to the core, something that blows your mind and makes you wish you wrote it. I love finding those books and stories.

EB:  What excites you about reading for [PANK]’s Big Book Contest this year?

GI: People generally don’t know me, but they know [PANK]. [PANK] is a household name. Folks know [PANK] publishes top-notch stuff. Will some writers send work that isn’t ready? Sure, there is always some of that going on, but I think writers will look at the Big Book Contest and they will work hard to send in their best. I get to see all that goodness before anyone else and than I get to give someone some great news. There is nothing about the process that doesn’t appeal to me. I love all of it.

EB: Your work– particularly Coyote Songs– uses elements of horror and suspense, magical realism, and even fantasy to pry open and make viscerally immediate narratives about the Frontera, including migration, border crossings, and colonization. Unless you’re living them, these are narratives that often get distanced and dehumanized on the news, but the experience of reading horror is the opposite: it’s spiked heart rate and
the anxious turning of pages, the satisfaction of vengeance and the squirm of terror. Do you think that immediacy is corrective?

GI: Yes, to a degree. I think horror, or almost anything else for that matter, work best in the presence of empathy. It doesn’t have to be frontera fiction. It ca be a narrative about a poor, uneducated single mother struggling to survive in this country. She can be white, brown, black, whatever. Her pain, if you have a heart, becomes your pain, her anguish and desperation affect you. If that happens, that piece of fiction is successful. It can be literary fiction or noir; it doesn’t matter because it works. What I try to do with the things my characters go through is to make it universal. Any parent in any country will do whatever they can to not have to bury their kids. If I make some folks realize that that is exactly what happens at our border from time to time maybe they’ll realize that distance doesn’t matter.

EB: What are you hoping to feel when you’re reading a winning submission for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a Big Book of fiction do?

GI: A Big Book of fiction needs to accomplish two things. First, the storytelling has to be there, and it has to be amazing. It has to make me feel things. If I smile or nod, a book has me, has my attention. It can make me cringe or laugh or clench my fists. Whatever works as long as I’m feeling something. The second thing it has to do is have style. [PANK] publishes amazing work. I want to read prose that can stand next to poetry in terms of beauty but that never falls into the trap of trying to be pretty at the sake of being meaningful. A Big Book of fiction should make me say, “Wow, this narrative is amazing! And the writing is superb!”

EB: You’ve translated work before, and your books have been published in other languages as well—what’s your take on the same story in different languages, with different nuances, connotations, and references at work? Are they the same story when all is said and done?

GI: I don’t think so. Translation is rewriting in a way. I’m fine with that. I recently wrote a piece for LitReactor about the importance of work in translation. It opens the world to you. As long as book retains its essence, translation works. I’ve read books in Spanish and English. That has made me appreciate the role of outstanding translators. Thankfully we have more or those working now than even, and they usually take the time to research, talk to authors, and offer a translated version that is almost identical to the original, but we all know that copies are never exactly the same. My first novel is about to come out in Turkey this June. I exchanged emails with the translator. We had to discuss what a ferret was…

EB: If you could encourage fiction writers to read one thing before sitting down to write their next piece– a book, a genre, a craft manual—what would you give them for homework?

GI: I wouldn’t assign them anything! Haha. Too many books come to mind: David Joy’s The Line That Held Us, Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome, Cynan Jones’ Cove, Laird Barron’s Black Mountain, Juliet Escoria’s Juliet The Maniac, Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brian Evenson’s Song for the Unraveling of the World…too many! They come to me because they inspired me, they made me want to write. What I would do is tell them to think about a book that matters to them, a book they enjoyed. The first one that comes to mind is the one they should go get, crack open, and start reading. Feel inspired again. Remember the power of storytelling. Remember why we do what we do. That is homework, now and forever.

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] suspects you know where to go for breakfast after an all-nighter spent reading scary stories.

GI: I love [PANK]. Share? Two things: 1. if you read anything lately that you loved, talk to me about a review. I’m always looking for more reviews. Indie books strongly encouraged. Bonus points for reviews of indie books written by minorities. Take trans people. They need to be represented and celebrated now more than ever. Give me all your trans poetry! 2. Come to Austin. I’ll make you some of the best breakfast tacos you ever had. We can read more scary stories while we eat.

 

An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City

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(Seven Stories Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA MANNION

—

Alex DiFrancesco has had a busy year. Their essay collection Psychopomps was released  by Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, and their novel All City is being released by Seven Stories Press on June 18. While both books are excellent, this interview focuses on All City. It is an important book, and very possibly a prophetic one. All City speaks for the people whose stories do not often get told, much less told with nuance and compassion.

All City takes place in a New York City of the near future. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, and climate change has sent superstorms of increasing violence to the shores of the city, tearing it down with wind and water. Those with the means always leave before the storms hit, but those without resources and means, those who have nowhere else to go, must remain and hold on to what they can by sheer force of will.

The book primarily follows three people, their struggles to survive, to regroup and find security after Superstorm Bernice, and to build new lives in a world that’s a mere muddy remnant of what they knew before. Even after the waters recede, life doesn’t get any easier; there is no new food being shipped in, medical care is practically nonexistent, roads and bridges are destroyed, and the wreckage of the storm is everywhere, bringing with it vermin and sickness. As resources diminish, violence increases, and there are few places where one can feel safe.

Alex lived in New York for about 15 years, but has since moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they are an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.

Jessica Mannion: Having just read All City for the second time, I loved it even more. There’s a lot to unpack. In part, I see it as a kind of hybrid love letter to and eulogy for New York City. Can you talk about the changes you saw during your time living in NYC and how living here influenced your writing, and your life as an artist?

Alex DiFrancesco: So now, when I think back to when I moved to New York in 2000, I realize I was a shock-wave gentrifier in Bushwick. I was a white, queer, artist who was specifically moved into a very affordable space at the time by people looking to develop it. I didn’t understand that at the time! I was just out of a small town in Pennsylvania, and thrilled that I could work part time as a lunch server in a little Middle Eastern place, write most of the day, and still pay my rent and have money to party a little. It was the dream, for me, to move to NYC and become an artist. I lived in a dirty loft and had a desk made out of a couple boxes and an old door, and I wrote every day. I was highly suspect about going back to school, and NYC provided so many ways other than that route to become a writer.

I remember in around 2005, I was working at some film-release party on a boat moored in the Hudson (those were the days when Craigslist still had the best odd jobs), and someone way slicker and cooler than me asked me where I lived, and then proclaimed Bushwick as “up-and-coming.” I had this sudden, distinct understanding that I would no longer be able live there, and that I had been the beginning of that process for people who had been there much longer.

I lived in NYC for around 10 more years after that. First I had to move all the way to the end of Brooklyn. Then I moved to Queens. Then, finally, just before I left, a friend was letting me pay way less than she could have charged for a room in the apartment she owned because there was no way I could live there and afford it anymore. What I made had stayed the same, and my rent had tripled.

But ultimately, living and scraping by in New York made me the artist I am today. I went to school at the New School, and learned from some amazing professors. I joined a writers’ group with some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with in it. I went to lectures, worked in bookstores, interned in publishing. It’s helped me build my life around the written word in so many ways. I’m sad every day that there’s just no place for me there anymore.

JM: What does All City mean and where did the idea for the book come from?

AD: The term “all city” is old graffiti slang for an artist who has painted in all 5 boroughs of New York. When I wrote the anonymous artist character into the book, I thought about how nearly impossible this would be to accomplish if you were working in the post-collapse conditions of the book. I decided to make him do it anyway.

The book was a mash-up of what ifs, really. I started writing a list of them after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of New York City, and also shortly after Bansky did his month-long NYC residency where he guerilla-installed a new project in an undisclosed location every day for an entire month. I’d also been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina. The ideas just sort of melded together.

JM: The novel is primarily told through 3 characters: Makayla, Jesse and Evann. There’s so much going on with the characters: they are all affected by this Superstorm Bernice, and they all experience displacement and a certain degree of trauma, but because of their social status and circumstances, each experiences / survives / processes that trauma differently. Why did you choose these characters to tell this story?

The first draft of this novel was a super sloppy 40,000 words written during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really participate in the community aspects of it, but I did challenge myself to write the proposed amount in the month of November. Once I had the list of what-ifs, I started to look at them from different angles. Makayla came first, because I wanted someone who would likely be without many resources besides her sense of community and her relationships. I added Jesse in because it’s very important to me to portray trans lives in the larger context of the world — in such a way that they’re not isolated, but also not in trans-only spaces all the time. Evann felt necessary, too, because you can’t show the have-nots without showing what it looks like to have it all.

JM: Another character – a mysterious mural artist – remains unseen, but his Art starts showing up everywhere in the devastated city like crocuses in the spring. What role does Art play in All City? How have the visual arts influenced or inspired you as a writer and artist?

AD: There are a series of works of visual art in this novel that are all carefully chosen and all mean different things.

Evann, the art collector, is given a Basquiat when she graduates from design school. This kind of started as a joke, because I made her collect Basquiats and first editions of Ayn Rand books. What kind of awful person wouldn’t get the irony there? Then, like a lot of the things I do to amuse myself in my writing, I started taking it seriously. Really, what kind of person wouldn’t get that? Certainly not one like me, or anyone I’d care about. But someone. So Evann was born out of love for Basquiat and Ayn Rand.

There’s a scene where two trans street punks go into The Met to look at Van Gogh paintings, and one of them starts crying because they’ve never seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers and never realized how dead they were. The other one says, no, they’re dead but they’re still moving and full of life, that’s how much life Van Gogh saw even though he was so sad. It’s one of the few times in the book that art is just enjoyed and not commodified.

Then, Evann owns two more paintings that play symbolic roles in the story. She owns Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Full Moon” and John Lurie’s absurdist watercolor “Bear Surprise.” The role of “Full Moon” (which shows one man beating another to death in a boat) is to show Evann looking into a world she has no idea about, but the other characters are all to familiar with. The role of “Bear Surprise” (which shows two people having sex in the woods and a bear yelling “Surprise!”) is because it’s Lurie’s most famous but probably least-skilled painting, which Evann totally doesn’t understand. It’s a little poking fun at her, to have it in there. I also learned while doing research for the novel that Lurie was one of Basquiat’s early mentors, so I felt compelled to write him in because of that connection.

Art is really commodified almost every time it appears in  the book. It’s made for the right reasons, but it’s consumed, often, in ways that are more about the owning it than the divineness of it. I have very silly and almost spiritual beliefs about art and where it comes from, but the art world and the world of the novel are both kind of ugly and gross and highly capitalist rather than about communicating the thing that makes art worth making.

JM: How does All City explore ideas of ownership?

AD: I’m thinking of the ownership of space as the main way it works. There’s a luxury condo, and when it’s not something that the rich want, it’s good enough for the poor. It’s a place they can make a utopia. But then it becomes something that the rich want again, and it’s too good for the people who have made it their own. This is a microcosm of the gentrification of New York, in the book. So really the way ownership is dictated is on the desires of those who have the money to protect their “rights” to a space, not those who work to make it their own.

There’s also something there about the use of graffiti as a way to take and remake public spaces as something belonging to everyone, for everyone’s use and enjoyment. It’s ecstatic and community-based, much like the true community-building that happens in the luxury condo. I don’t think I could’ve told this story without the addition of graffiti.

JM: How does All City explore the concept of hope – about the future, about a better life, about belonging – and who ultimately will see their hopes realized?

AD: Hope is fraught in All City. There are people like Evann who have implicit access to it, when they choose it. There are people like Makayla who make it out of what they have. But I want to say that the last scene is my probably depressive final take. Who gets to see that which is supposed to bring us hope? Who doesn’t? And who are the few people who believe that hope is a starting point, something they saw once, and carry that fire as far as they can?

JM: In part, All City is a story of survival. How do you explore survival and the things some people must endure in order to do so?

AD: Without giving too much away, I think the biggest traumas in the book are one character’s rape, one’s loss of a parent, and one experiencing a hate crime committed against the person they love. These characters all rally, at least for a while, or eventually, to use the trauma they’ve experienced to make the world around them better. It creates empathy in them rather than destroying them — but sometimes it destroys them too. I think the idea that some people choose to make sure that no one goes through the horrible things they’ve been through is the driving idea behind a lot of these characters. They’re not saints, and they’re not perfect — but they’re driven by the fact that traumatic things have happened and they’ve turned them into compassion, which then turns into community and survival.

JM: The characters Makayla and Jesse in other circumstances would often be seen as outsiders of society, but you put them front and center in the book. Why did you choose to tell this story from their perspective?

AD: This is always my goal, to put the outsiders at the inside. I think I have always felt like a bit of an outsider myself, so I’m not really sure how I could sustain an emotional and moral core to a novel without it being heavily focused on characters who see and feel and experience things outside the norm or the default.

Also, it’s a highly political act to write the stories that people say shouldn’t be told. I knew Jesse had to be in there because I’m a trans person, and queer representation means something to me. I was really a bit hesitant to write Makayla because she’s a minority I’m not a part of, she’s a woman of color. Certainly, a woman of color could have written Makayla in another way, and it would be entirely more appropriate for her to tell a woman of color’s story. But I also had been reading so much about the aftermath of Katrina, and the poor people left behind, and it struck me as absurd to try to tell a story of gentrification and climate change and survival from multiple perspectives without characters of color. I took as much feedback as I could get from folks more aligned with her perspective.

But it was incredibly important to me, outside of specific demographic, to tell the story of those who had been left behind, and, more terrifyingly are being left behind. All City is, in some ways, a warning. But it’s also the story of those who’ve been pushed so far out that they’ve had to make their own way, and know what they’re doing when things really go down.

(photo by Emily Raw)

JM: In many ways, Evann is a controversial character; she is probably the least sympathetic and the one who causes the most harm. Yet she would certainly not view herself that way, nor would much of society. How is her perspective important?

AD: I wrote Evann about 16 times. You might recall from when we workshopped this book in our writers’ group, people were referring to her in Snidely Whiplash terms, because she was just that bad. The somewhat less dastardly Evann who ended up in the final pages was born largely out of my wonderful editor, Sanina Clark, pushing me to make her less villainous. Sanina had asked me early on if Evann was a cipher, a stand-in for gentrification, and I said that no, she was a villain, for sure, but I also wanted her emptiness and need for consumption in place of being able to feel anything to be real and human. Sanina pushed me through rewrites to make Evann less of a complete monster, and more of a asshole human, if that makes sense.

In some ways, Evann is the most important character I’ve written thus far (at least to me), because she’s the life most outside of my own, which is what writers are supposed to be creating, I think. With every other character I was able to find something inside myself to return to like a compass when I started to go astray with them. I really had to work to find this place with Evann. I used to take walks in Green-Wood Cemetery to Basquiat’s grave all the time, talking to his ghost and think about Evann doing the same.

But she also plays an important role in the story in that we have to see the other side of this huge divide in the future world. If we see Jesse nodding out in a dirty IRT station from scrounged opiates, we also have to see Evann fucking a guy with pearl studs in his dick, you know?

JM: Your essay collection Psychopomps came out in February of this year. How do these books inform each other?

AD: I think people who read both will see bits and pieces that reflect each other. Sometimes I kind of feel like writing creative nonfiction can be like pulling back the curtain and seeing the little dorky man in a suit working the controllers. That’s me, the little dorky guy in Psychopomps, and All City is like the illusionary Oz.

I’m only half-way kidding. Anyway, read both; keep my cat in her favorite wet food.

—

Jessica Mannion is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Her writing can be seen in The Literary Review, Alliteratti, and other publications. She also does copy-writing on a variety of subjects.

Friday Feature: Author Interview with Trace DePass

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author and Contest Judge Trace DePass to discuss Trace’s incredible work what he’s looking for in a winning manuscript!

From the poem “The Tesseract Tethers Rooms”

i tire of death, relative to me, not passing, in 3D. i need this divorce.
you go writ(h)e,
go anthropomorphize rot incessant all thru my body. look! there’s ceiling to this
passivity: dirt. here’s this room i’ve named —
me.
outside that room lives just my other room,
another empty tomb, maybe
a separate cube,
which, after peering at it for long enough, i too
on some days become. watch: i’ve lost

track of my own tesseract face

Buy Trace’s Book Here!

 

Erinn Batykefer: You’ve edited and juried several awards and anthologies, especially for works created by younger writers. What excites you most when you’re wading through the slush pile for those contests?

Trace DePass: I get the chance to witness the heart & mind of a young person at work. Hundreds, if not thousands of them, at the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, for instance. I watch how the world turns. There are usually always gems to find. For Scholastic’s “Best Teen Writing of 2017” I was really trying to amplify works that changed me if not perhaps the institutions these kids walk into, or see, daily—there was this essay, “On Ableism” which centers the voice of disabled & differently-abled bodies in intersectional justice & climate activism, which eventually led me to the work I do know (in 2019) with the Climate Museum. It mentions the cold war term “sacrifice zones” as lands designated for oblivion in case of nuclear fallout & disabled people as the “quintessential sacrifice people.” So much work by young people gets lost, whereas it could completely change discourse if we were to give it the space to do so. It’s exciting to be able to teach or reference the published work of young people to other young people. I feel like I’m doing participatory action research by spreading THEIR participatory action research & stories, curating an ongoing literary conversation in the culture of children (even if only for as long as I can hold that attention).

EB: What excites you about judging this contest for [PANK]?

TD: I enjoy reading poems in the conversations or arcs that the author curates for them. PANK will always get works that are experimental, whimsical, or playful. I’m glad to be a part of this kind of world-building. It’s probably going to be pretty intense so that’s exciting, lol.

 

EB: Your own Big Book, Self-Portrait as the Space between Us came out in 2018 from [PANK]Books, a collection that seeks to place a reader “befuddled in what befuddles me.” The poems here resist drawing neat conclusions and instead embrace nuance and contradiction. Is that the point of poetry?

TD: Nuance is one of the drives of my poems. I can’t speak for all poet motivations. I like acknowledging we don’t only live in 3 dimensions; once you pick up an object & literally move it you’re witnessing 4 dimensions (not including the sensory or psychic), then shifting to love or death or my father, a National Guard veteran who also created presets for Korg & Yamaha pianos from scratch. I think English can be confusing & often misinterpreted or sometimes collapsed or sullied by interpretation. There are poems that are nuanced to speak aloud & bring into conversation, even if the voice in our head doesn’t hear that on the first read of the work. I’m not trying to necessarily be undeniable. I’m trying to delineate or make non-linear & up to interpretation through image & sound up until I’m not. Then, the questions: is about consent? Is this consent? How many childhoods, generations, stories, layers, and things like entry points are here? Life doesn’t resolve itself in a simple, mathematical answer & you can say that is a poem, perhaps not all poems.

 

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of poems do?

TD: I don’t have an absolute—probably not even a firm—stance on what exactly books of poems “should” do as an experimental, often described as musical + narrative + lyrical, poet. I believe there’s a stance taken for an author in how they want to be read or taught. I think a book of poems considers a lot of people & gives context, subtext, meta-text to those people. It’s completely up to the discernment of the author on how to tether or go about that. The book should have wants, drives, reckoning, character, among other things maybe. The poems will do what they want or need to do if you allow them to direct you. I hope to see what that looks like.

 

EB: One of the most striking iterative images in Self-Portrait is that of the speaker as Darwin’s Finch, scrabbling and transforming and evolving in his understanding of an absent father and his own identity. You’re also creating a fellowship program with the Climate Museum for high school students. Is science a triggering town for your creative work?

TD: The bird comes as goes like my father has for his own reasons. Some years I knew neither of my parents. Other years, I’m just like them. I see a lot of my own blackness in the migration of birds, yes. Leaving & loving for me are nuanced things.

I’ve worked with a climate scientist that has told me that there’s subjectivity & intention also behind science. I believe there is a nature to the questions we pose, experiment to answer, & thus a human behind the veil of “objectivity.” My book definitely dabbles with this idea. Given there is no absolute objectivity, what isn’t a little triggering sometimes? I question the nature of my own birth so I think I’m pretty strong-willed.

The kids as well as the staff I work with at the Climate Museum open me up to the idea of care & warmth in science, as much as scientific suggestion in the poems. One of our kids, Ota, has a poem that questions if love has a place in a world where we neglected it, this environmental predicament & man-made problem. I love that poem. All the poems in our program, Climate Speaks, feel nuanced in a similar. If you’re in NYC on the evening of June 14th, come check us out at the Apollo.

 

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their books to [PANK] for this contest to keep one thing in mind, what would it be?

TD: You’re not completely alone. Give it time. Give ALL of it time. Play with the script everyday. Keep editing. Don’t just edit for a prize. It doesn’t stop here. You will have to live with what you write & the context that brings you to the page. They are not exclusive. Don’t be afraid to play with form. You may be an entirely different person at the end of editing, likely after publishing it, & so on. Feel everything you feel. You have the initial & final say. Put the poems in conversation in real life & see how you feel. Learn from the process. Think of how you want you & this book to be taught. Get to know some of the author’s work at [PANK] & beyond! Being an author, especially of a book of poems, will not make you rich & it takes a lot of life for poems to make you any kind of wealthy.

 

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] loves you.

TD: If you’re looking for a reader, teaching artist, drummer, beatboxer, playwright, or poet for the summertime, I’m available!!!

Interview with Contest Judge Maya Sonenberg

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author Maya Sonenberg to talk about her book AFTER THE DEATH OF SHOSTAKOVICH PÈRE and her role as the [PANK] BOOKS NONFICTION CONTEST JUDGE!

Not all ghosts exact revenge or induce terror. Some emerge from a miasma of grief; sad themselves, they spread sorrow. Or perhaps those left behind—daughters and sons—create the ghost of a father, trying to find what’s surely been lost. Following the four-movement structure of Shostakovich’s Suite for Two Pianos and using a mosaic of story, memoir, photographs, literary analysis, and her own father’s journals, Maya Sonenberg’s After the Death of Shostakovich Père is an extended lyric meditation on the death of fathers, both biological and artistic, and the ways in which haunting can produce art. BUY MAYA’S BOOK HERE

 

Erinn Batykefer: The fiction and non-fiction you’ve published often have multi-media or hybrid elements: prose and drawings, flash mini-essays. Your nonfiction chapbook, After the Death of Shostakovich Père, came out from PANK Books last year and has a similar shape shifting quality, oscillating between literary analysis, storytelling, and a scrapbook of personal photos and journal entries. Do you draw lines between genres?

Maya Sonenberg: I just had a very interesting discussion with my graduate students about whether we thought of the hybrid literary object in botanical terms or mythological terms. For the former, think of the pluot, a cross between a plum and an apricot that has become entirely its own fruit. For the latter, think of the chimera, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The former is like a mosaic seen from the distance, while the latter is like a mosaic seen up close so that the separate tesserae are distinct. For the former, you might think of the prose poem. In the works of mine you mention, I see myself working in the latter form—the different genres are placed next to each other but remain distinct.

This is all a round-about way to answer your question: I do see distinctions between genres, and even when I combine them in a single section (the literary analysis in After the Death of Shostakovich Père also includes material about my personal experiences of reading the Borges stories), I’m keen to be clear about what refers to me, what is speculation, what is factual. Many thanks to my students Sarah Bitter, Boston Chandler, and Devon Houtz for the discussion, and to Rose Metal Press for their anthology Family Resemblance, which introduced us to thinking about the hybrid as a mythological creature.

 

EB: What excites you about judging the Big Book Nonfiction contest for [PANK]?

MS: These days both fiction and nonfiction are capacious, and I love that. Nonfiction in particular is a great big tent, including speculative essays and rather straight-forward memoir, essays about something big and important—or tiny and important—out in the world conveyed through a personal lens, essays that borrow forms from other sorts of writing and essays that proceed through collage or logic. I’m just excited to see the different sorts of nonfiction I’ll get to read.

 

EB: After the Death is listed as memoir / personal essay, but in a lot of ways it does its own thing to create an elegy for your father that mirrors the musical elegy Shostakovich wrote in the wake of his own father’s death. Was (mostly) nonfiction the obvious choice for this project?

MS: When I started this particular project, I actually planned to simply write a short story based on Shostakovich’s experience of losing his father during the Russian Revolution and going on to write the duet for two pianos. Pretty quickly, I realized his many biographers had already covered this, and I began to allow all sorts of material about dead fathers to accrete to the project. The ghost story that makes up the third section came from a novel I had never completed. I decided to write about the Borges stories because I was (and still am) in the midst of several other projects in which I pair a real ancestor with someone I think of as an artistic forbearer. I knew this project would be about my father, but I didn’t turn to including the material from his notebook until after I had figured out the structure of the piece. Each section corresponds to a movement in the piano duet, and within each section, the different literary and photo threads correspond to changes in melody and/or tempo. I suddenly had many different threads I needed to create and the material from his notebook fell pretty neatly into a separate categories

 

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of nonfiction do? What are you hoping to feel while reading a winning work?

MS: I honestly cannot make an over-arching claim about what a book of nonfiction should do, but when reading a winning work, I’m hoping to feel hit between the eyes—that I’m reading something really unexpected, forced to see or experience or think about things in a new way. I know—what does that mean? I want to read prose that is aware of its own power and has developed its own style, rather than attempting to be transparent. I want to read memoir in which the writing persona questions and re-questions itself or makes bold claims about itself. I want to read essays about the big bad world that are still somehow personal. I want to read lyric essays that get their components to sing to each other, hitting that sweet spot where the subtle and the obvious cancel each other out. I want to read content or form or style that I can’t even imagine as I answer this question. This is not to say winning works need (or could!) do all of the above. Some might do only one.

 

EB: The Finale section of After the Death includes a meditation on Borges’ “The Library of Babel” which was a literary touchstone you found ridiculous later on. Is revealing a state of balance like this (or perhaps coming to terms with the necessity of cognitive dissonance) the project of writing?

MS: As perhaps you’ve seen by now, I don’t think there’s only one project for writing to complete or accomplish, so I’m not really sure how to answer this. I like states of balance, cognitive dissonance, and friction in writing, but I also love a good novel that sucks me right in to its world. I love the calm world of a book like Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs! In my current writing projects, I’m trying to explore both-and, rather than either-or, thinking.

PS—I hope my continuing love, tempered now by many re-readings, of “The Library of Babel” still comes through.  [It does!]

 

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their work to [PANK] for this contest to read one book before they hit send, what would you choose?

MS: Ah, not before they sit down to write, but before they hit send! Before they sit down to write, they should read whatever book they love most and take inspiration from it. Before they hit send…. I’m not sure. Again, I can’t think of any one book that would give writers a quick window into my predilections.

 

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] would party with you any day.

MS: I would party with [PANK] any day to

Author Interview – Max Brett – Nor Do These

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with author Max Brett to discuss his first book, Nor Do These. If you’re in New York, join us to hear Max read tonight, 7PM at Dixon Place.

Nor Do These came out of a tandem exercise that quickly shed participants. It aims to address a series of obsessions, including the eroticism of accountancy, honed corporate strategy, dangerous unicorn hunts, the lives, phobias and phobia-related injuries of arguably obscure baseball players, and age and aging, among other things.

Buy Nor Do These 

Erinn Batykefer: You’ve worked extensively in journalism– what’s the relationship between poetry and reportage?

Max Brett: Fourteen years in journalism isn’t so extensive.

Reportage in the alternate definition of a “factual presentation in a book” to me definitely applies to poetry by someone like Susan Howe, who is constantly excavating realities, constantly researching and presenting and curating, library cormorant that she is. I’m reading “The Bench-mark” now. The list could really go on and on but someone like Reinaldo Arenas is presenting his reality in Cuba through a poetry-reportage in a sort of essential way. It remains very difficult for nonfiction-y narratives like that to get out. Poetry can assume some techniques of reportage to whatever end.

EB: The Introduction to Nor Do These outlines a 30-day creative exercise that grew into this book. Is all of your creative work time-limited or deadline-driven?

MB: Keep in mind the exercise conceit might be made up.

In a very literal sense everyone is time-limited or deadline-driven, but in the sense I think is meant in the question, here, I do better when I’m given an assignment and constrained by a deadline. It has to do with a whole-body inability to decide on my own. Left to my own devices, I re-litigate and re-litigate decisions until the people around me lose their will to live. When I am alone, the hours fly by with the weighing of potential decisions. Constraints really come in handy. But this isn’t always the case.

EB: A number of theoretical physicists make cameos in Nor Do These. Do you have a favorite physicist story?

MB: One from “Bomb Power” by Garry Wills any other accounts isn’t a story or an anecdote so much as a brief idea about the sexual appeal of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He had blue, blue, blue eyes, devastatingly blue eyes, icy blue eyes that everyone found totally irresistible. A lot of people don’t know that “The Bluest Eye” is about Oppenheimer.

Theoretical physicists entered into the picture of the book much against my will, as theoretical physicists will do. They are a very transgressive bunch. I don’t agree with the old theoretical physicist maxim, “Only theoretical physicists like us are interesting.” This obviously excludes many other nodes of interest. Perhaps that perspective also comes from journalism.

EB: Why science + art?

MB: I had very (underscore very) minor cancerous growth on my temple and I went into surgery to remove it and Dr. Hooman Khorasani of Mount Sinai made a perfect small drawing of what he was going to cut out of my face first and the drawing developed as he cut and figured out what of the growth remained and after five passes under the knife he gave me the drawing and it’s one of my favorite drawings. Surgeons cut out that type of skin cancer bit by bit in progressively smaller bits and it’s reminiscent of an open-pit mine. Last year I had the opportunity to visit an open-pit mine in Belitung, Indonesia. This was after years of covering the mining sector, in which I visited no mines.

EB: “In a book of thirty-nine poems, the fortieth poem is the book.” How do you see Nor Do These as both collection and whole?

MB: Myopically.

My response might be straight from the amygdala because I don’t know enough and feel insecure I or might just restate the question in answer form, e.g., pieces deal with disparate subject matter like unicorn hunts and personified coffee makers, so they are different and stand on their own, but the conceit binds these pieces together, it was made too concurrently not to be linked, and thematically there are linkages.

EB: Is there a text you would want a reader to upload to their brain Matrix-style before reading Nor Do These?

MB: No. A Matrix-style upload is probably where reading is going and I don’t like the passive role that assigns the reader. And I don’t think any pre-reading is necessary for Nor Do These. Maybe some Adolfo Bioy Casares.

EB: If you could take [PANK] on a date where would you go? [PANK] loves you.

MB: I’ve been in love with [PANK] for months. It’s a lot of pressure—you only get one chance with [PANK]. Probably the Irish Hunger Memorial followed by a bottle of white wine in a public park, with lots of talking, followed by coffee and more talking, followed by more walking.

Max Brett covered policing and immigration with The Chicago Reporter and possible instances of wrongful conviction with the Medill Innocence Project. He helped launch an English-language newspaper in Mexico City. Max was the global sector head of mining with a subscription-based news service. At time of writing, Max works for a nongovernmental organization focused on corruption in resource-rich countries. Max studied journalism, visual art and religion at Northwestern University.