On the Hood of a Cutlass Tour - Holy Land Stop

In support of her debut book "A Brief History of Time" Shaindel Beers has been doing a blog-interview tour. This is her Holy Land Stop.

And (in case you'd like a chance at a free copy of her book) Shaindel's doing a book giveaway (6 copies) on Goodreads. To enter click here.

Here's Shaindel's Bio:

Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary. She hosts the talk radio poetry show Translated By


RK: The Acknowledgements to “A Brief History of Time” includes, among others, a nod to your students: “To my students who teach me far more than I teach them.” Can you talk a bit about yr experience with the relationship between writing and teaching? I’m guessing for you the one richly informs the other, and vice versa.


SB: For all the complaining I do about the amount of grading my job entails, I love teaching. I think that, as a writer, it keeps me on my toes. Every ten weeks, I get a new group of intellectually curious students, usually about a hundred of them. They ask questions, and it’s my job to have answers for them. If they ask why a certain poet is considered good or how a certain poet accomplishes something, I have to get back to them if I don’t already have an idea about whatever it is. I know that I wouldn’t have that sort of curiosity on my own. Sometimes it’s like I have all of these brains thinking for me. Sometimes I’ll stand at the head of a silent classroom and say something like, “Come on, you have twenty-five brains; I only have one. What do you guys think about this?” and I really look at it that way. Of course, there are those frustrating teaching moments where you think half the class is asleep or comatose, but there are those days when the whole class is intellectually on fire, and nothing can beat that.

Students also have amazing lives and experiences, and those things give me material to write about. Teaching (at the college level, at least) is like having the world’s biggest extended family. I’ve never run the numbers, but I know I’ve had at least a few thousand students so far in my teaching career, and those students are people I care about and write about and write for. Teaching broadens my world the way that most careers wouldn’t just because of the numbers of new people in my life each year.


RK: “A Brief History of Time” could also be “A Brief History of Love.” Of relationships. Of how people need and treat each other. And “Time,” of course, doesn’t really exist without men and women. “Adam and Eve” and everything after. And the voice in yr book looks again and again at how people interact. Love and do not love. All the way to the end: you imagine yourself the “dying man’s wife.” Your thoughts on Love and relationships as a center of the book’s gravity?


SB: I hadn’t really thought about the book as having a center like that, but if readers see love and relationships as the “center of the book’s gravity,” I’d be pleased. I think life would be pretty empty without love. In “The Calypso Diaries,” I have a passage in which Calypso says that Zeus:

can’t understand the curse
of being alone
and immortal
in paradise.

Obviously, you can be happy by yourself, but I think that an important part of happiness is having someone to share it with. I think that it’s human nature to want to share experiences with others. When you see a beautiful sunset, if you’re by yourself, isn’t it almost instinctive to want to turn to someone and say, “Hey, look at that!” until you remember that you’re alone. And I think that we look at other people’s experiences and imagine them as our own. When we see someone going through a personal tragedy—losing a spouse, losing a child—it’s only natural to wonder how we would handle that, how we would cope.


RK: “A Brief History of Time” champions, again and again, the different, estranged, deformed. The underdog. The “benchwarmer.” The woman dying of cancer. The gnat. The still born child. And, yet, wonderfully, you’re able to keep a sense of humour (a complicated bittersweet sense of humour. I am thinking of the joke like setup of “A Man Walks into a Bar” which leads to more serious reflections. I am thinking also of the lines “Every day around the world, 120 million people make love./ Today is not my day.”) Your book is, in a way, a dark book. But it is filled with hope. With striving. Can you please respond to this generally and/or specifically. As you wish.


SB: For all the atrocities in the world that are caused by people, compassion is a fundamentally human emotion. There are animals that show compassion, but it usually isn’t a smart choice in nature. When we watch shows on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel, and there is the one wolf that doesn’t fit into the pack, humans automatically root for the animal. That isn’t how nature works. That’s the wolf who is chased away from the pack or is relegated to omega status and spends his or her life being picked on by the rest of the pack, eating alone, sleeping separately. Yet, we, as humans, continually root for the omega wolf, the white tiger, all of the ones who wouldn’t normally make it on their own.

As far as this being a dark book with a “complicated bittersweet sense of humor,” I guess that’s me. I’ve had one of those lives that you could make about a dozen “movies of the week” about. Something has to get you through it. I think that art and humor has gotten me through, and I’m grateful for that. I easily could have turned to other things that would have been more destructive.


RK: A note on the back cover of the book says the “poems span a wide range of styles” and indeed they do. One might think that this is the experimenting of a young poet. A finding of a way. Digging around, looking. But, just as much and probably even more accurately, I think this is a sign of your need and restlessness. Your curiosity and passion. To try new things. To keep seeking. Keep plugging away at the elusive shadows of life and poetic form. So, please, tell us about yr fascination with different forms.


SB: I think it’s important to always keep growing, to keep trying new things. And I think it’s important to take part in traditions that a lot of people have given up—so trying old things as well. In the case of poetry, this would include writing in form. I just know that I don’t want to be someone who keeps writing the same poems over and over or the same book over and over. I always want to be new and exciting and innovative. I think that’s important.

Female Grotesque and Female Pleasure: An Interview with Lara Glenum re her book of poems "Maximum Gaga"

To follow is the transcript of an email interview I’ve just concluded with Lara Glenum regarding her wild, monstrous and terrific “Maximum Gaga.”

Here’s the Bio that Lara provided:


Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No (2005) and Maximum Gaga (2008), both from Action Books. She is the co-editor, with Arielle Greenberg, of Gurlesque, an anthology of women's poetry and visual art (Saturnalia Books, 2010). Her translations of Czech poetry with Josef Horacek have received an NEA Translation Fellowship. She is currently collaborating with sound, digital, and visual artists on Meat Out of the Eater, a multi-media installation piece.



RK: It’s no secret that you’ve sucked some of the marrow (and swallowed some of the bone even) out of Aase Berg’s work. But, quoting Maximum Gaga here, “there are a variety of ways to become a monster.” And there are a variety of monsters too. And the ways to become a monster are complicated and intertwined sometimes. Your work, though it owes something of a debt to Berg, is clearly a different monster from Aase’s. When I read Aase Berg (especially With Deer, her only fully translated book available in English) I get a similar feel to when I’m reading Sylvia Plath. I feel as though at any moment the “voice” of the poem (the “person” behind, around, and inside it) is about to jump up and cut my head off. Or, perhaps more accurately, cut its own head off. I feel as though I’m always about to open a door and find this “voice” stretched out, pale, in a bathtub, bled to death. With Maximum Gaga I feel as though the “voice” is going to grab me, blindfold me, tie my hands behind my back, spin me round and round and drop me into a never-ending strobe-lit decadence of linguistic and erotic excess. Of course I’m not saying anything real clever here because in a way this is what the poems are: Berg’s a kind of Ecstasy of Dismemberment (Goransson’s term) and yours an orgy of empowering Eros. Can you talk a bit about your experience with Berg? What you’ve taken from her work? Differences, etc? A pretty open question. Take it where you want. Or don’t want.


LG: I came to know Berg’s work through Johannes Goransson several years ago, and by the time I came across her, I was already, more or less, my own variety of monster. I think the difference in our work that you’re pointing to is really a difference I have (more noticeably) with Plath, to whom I owe a great debt. I read Plath not as a Confessional poet but as a practitioner of the female grotesque, which places her closer to poets and artists of the historical avant-garde.

In “Lady Lazarus,” for example, the speaker is performing a female burlesque, a “strip tease,” that ultimately “unwraps” the female body not as an erotic object but the site of grotesque mortality and non-compliant subjectivity. In this poem, the speaker ironically wields her body as a souvenir of her own death-drive, both performing and mocking the idea of souvenir as a trace of authentic experience. Authentic experience, after all, always involves a myth of origin, and every time Plath goes back to access origins, she finds herself trapped inside a performance of Romantic Sublime, which spells the death of the female subject. Thus by the end of the poem, as in so many of Plath’s poems, the speaker feels compelled to disembody herself. I, on the other hand, insist on embodiment, and on getting a specifically female pleasure into the text.

Berg doesn’t disembody herself either, she dismembers bodies, fuses them anarchically with all order of animal bodies, with the landscape. There is a very palpable source of ecstasy in this melee. Berg is somewhere between Plath and me with respect to pleasure and embodiment. In the end, we are all attempting to inject a mortal, non-erotic female subjectivity into the poem, and it’s an almost impossible task—a task, according to Plath (in “Lady Lazarus”), nearly as impossible as reversing history or raising the dead. Thus Plath’s extensive use of grotesque figuration (i.e. there’s a female body/subject here, but it’s anarchic, diseased, covered in worms, houses a mechanical heart, etc.). Thus mine.



RK: “Maximum Gaga” is a world of its own. The language, images, characters. It takes a bit to get tuned in. You have to learn to read it. Have to learn to breathe in a very different atmosphere. But then, for me at least, the rewards are great. Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” come to my mind as works in which I also felt, with great excitement, that I was in a strange, wondrous place. A real world of its own. (For some reason, here, I feel like bringing up Coleridge’s quote about Shakespeare that goes something like this: Shakespeare’s greatness is that in reading him——in the act of reading—— you become a poet.) Can you respond to what I’ve said and tell us, if you like, what other works of this sort are important to you and/or were a real influence on you (and of course I’m not talking about how no two snowflakes, or people, are exactly alike)? If you want also, make this more of a generic tastes-and-influences question and talk about other sorts of work (other arts even) that have been and/or still are important to you.


LG: Octavio Paz claims that poetry is an act of magical intervention that redeems us out of the constraints and delusions of linear time. For him, the poem does not stop time but “contradicts and disfigures it,” producing what Paz calls “anti-history.” “The poet,” he says, “is the geographer of heaven and hell.” Each new poem is a code for a reality that is being unraveled as the poem proceeds. The poem is what he calls “the universe’s double: a space covered in hieroglyphics.” It is an act of deciphering the universe that produces a new cipher, the poem itself (which is, as you say, a world of its own).

In terms of structurally totalizing works, I’m an enormous fan of William Blake and all his world-germinating apocalyptica. Ditto for Rimbaud. Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette is another such work that’s important to me, as is Stein’s Tender Buttons, which rattles along nervewrackingly between cute, cloying domesticities and toothed monsters. And then there are poets like Paul Celan—though he writes shorts lyrics, the sum total of his oeuvre exists entirely in its own aether. One has to, as you say, learn to read it entirely on its own terms.

I’m generally under the spell of the historical avant-garde, especially the work of Blaise Cendrars, Mina Loy, and Vladimir Maykovsky, but I’m also heavily influenced by the visual arts as well: Hannah Hoch’s gender-bending Dada collages, Hans Bellmer’s ball-jointed creepfest dolls, Duchamp in drag, Baroness Else von Freytag’s proto-punk performance art, etc. And then there’s film: I’m a massive Hitchcock fan, and I love Goddard. Their wry, exceedingly dark humor is simply invaluable to me. Silent horror films (and only the silent ones) have a huge place in my aesthetic, especially The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with its rad German Expressionist sets.

And yes, absolutely, Joyce, and really, so much fiction in general. I eat fiction like cake. Right now I’m reading Can Xue’s Five Spice Street and nearly breaking my ribs, I’m absolutely rolling with laughter. I wish I’d written it!


RK: Help from editors (publishers). A lot of presses (contests, etc) give pretty much a yes or no on a manuscript. Or perhaps a yes with small edit requests/suggestions. Blake Butler, in my first interview on this blog, talked about how Derek White at Calamari worked really closely with him and was instrumental in bringing his book to its final form and structure. Because of Blake's help the book, according to Blake, changed radically. And for the good. Can you talk about how and to what extent your editors helped you in small and large detail (In the back of the book Johannes and Joyelle of Action Books are two of the four people you thank “for their invaluable feedback and support”)? And if you want any other thoughts on publishing in the small press world?


LG: It’s no great secret that I’m quite close to Joyelle and Johannes. I’ve been friends with them for a number of years (long before they became my publishers), and our aesthetic affinities run very deep. Their role as editors is augmented by their role as compatriots, vandals, and fellow rabblerousers. Their influence on my work is quite osmatic in that I am in near-constant conversation with them, even when I’m not writing.

I don’t give Joyelle and Johannes my books until I have a near-final draft (as they can tell you, I am an obsessive reviser), but by that point, their imprint is already all over the book, not from any overt discussion or editing but because of our ongoing conversation about poetics, aesthetics, and art in general. And then, yes, they’re fantastic editors of my work. They have a sort blinding clarity about cuts, edits, and what Baudelaire calls the secret architectonics of the book, that I find really invaluable. They don’t want to publish anything that resembles anything they’ve ever read before, which is a fantastic challenge and invitation to a writer. For example, I gave them a totally half-baked manuscript (a proto-version of Maximum Gaga) some time ago, and their immediate response was, “Why are you wanting to publish another collection of discreet lyrics? You’ve already done this.” This lit an all-consuming fire in me to forge the longer, interlocking sections that comprise Maximum Gaga. This kind of clarity, the clarity to question not only the work itself but also my conceptual moves, is a real gift.


RK: Decadence. Maximum Gaga is a call to decadence. “Run headlong into Maximum Gaga!” “Ferocious states in which your brain would luxuriate in fields of wiggity-wack.” Many authors lament the fact that one can’t say exactly what one feels or thinks (Neruda, famously, “between the lips and the voice something goes dying”) but that’s nothing to cry about in Maximum Gaga. The linguistic decadence (not to mention the erotic decadence) at play here is “the glorious cage of language from which we never hope to escape.” Some of my favorite parts of Maximum Gaga are where it seems the speaker is completely caught up in the rush of erotic and linguistic excess. “Minkycore” (pages 23, 24, 25) is poetry I’ve read over several times just for the sheer pleasure of it. Just to roll in it. Here the speaker is “riding the rat out,” “eye flaking” into, again and again, “rococo spasm.” These bits, in a way, feel like a woman on a mechanical bull waving her hat around, screaming. But, at the same time, these Minkycore decadences feel very organized. Feel very much like set pieces. And “Maximum Gaga” as a whole, for all its indulgences and excesses, is very organized and structured. Presented in dramatic form. Characters and all. Maximum Gaga is dancing wildly but dancing still on a dance floor in a dance room in a dance house. The structures you use (small scale and larger) are ways, it seems, to keep energies contained and to direct them. It is also, of course, very helpful to the reader. Gives him/her footholds. Railings to hold on to. Can you talk about the interplay of structure and decadence? Of organization and wildness? And, again, of course, take this in whatever direction you want or do not want.


LG: Decadence, in many ways, begins with Baudelaire. Baudelaire is the first to say that modern art has an essentially demonic character because it aims to negate the fatuous delusions and working values of the bourgeoisie (i.e. the doctrine of universal progress, claims of rationality, humanism, etc.). He describes what he calls the new modern subjectivity: in a perpetual nervous state, the modern subject’s nerves are stretched wide to take in a near-constant cavalcade of sensory input. Intensely sensitized, and totally disoriented. Baudelaire links this new subjectivity with the impulse to discard art as the traditional arbiter of moral truths; modern subjects don’t seek moral elevation, they seek only intensification of their perceptual capacity.

My writing is often labeled decadent because of the shocking nature of its contents, but that’s not really the decadence I’m interested in. I’m interested in formal decadence, which in my work surfaces in my use of characters and a kind of hyper-stylized staging that occurs across my books. While lots of narratives that drive contemporary culture have been discredited by critical theory (narratives about sex and gender, for instance), they are still massively afloat in popular culture. Like it or not, they still shape who we are. I don’t try to critique these narratives directly. I try to engage them in a way that reveals them as already crumbling structures, as monstrous in what they presume, what they dictate, what they ask of us.

Decadence, of course, is always linked to the unnatural, and I am all for railing against the cannons of the natural and realism. To be decadent is to announce a disobedience to classical aesthetics, to refuse to enter into a contract with mimesis. Lyotard wonderfully says, “Those who do not examine the rules of art [handed to them by their predecessors] pursue successful careers in mass conformism by communicating by means of the ‘correct rules,’ the endemic desire for reality with objects and situations capable of gratifying it.” For Lyotard, realist art is simply the name for art that refuses to examine the rules of its own construction, its own artifice. He goes on to say, “If they do not want to become supporters of that which exists, the painter and novelist must refuse to lend themselves to therapeutic uses.” Exactly.

Lastly, I would say that my work is an instantiation of yet another turn in the long history of decadence, the post-human turn. The post-human is essentially anti-humanist (the human subject is no longer the center of things) and puts forward a new paradigm of subjectivity in which the human body and mind are totally permeated by any number of technologies. In other words, Baudelaire on speed. The body is no longer a sensitive organ with which to perceive modernity but is the site of modernity. In the world of my poems, our bodies our not only permeated by technology but by other bodies as well. Thus the post-human automatically evokes a vision of the monstrous body, a monstrous subjectivity, which is so central to my work.


RK: Maximum Gaga is a call to decadence (a call to rush headlong into maximum gaga) but it is also a call to (or enactment or engagement of) “Gurlesque” action. There are, of course, many kinds of Gurlesque writing and the type that interests you (according to what you say on Delirious Hem) is the grotesque sort (violence and cuteness). Can you talk a bit about your interest and involvement in “Gurlesque”?


LG: To start off, I should say that the Gurlesque is an entirely descriptive project, not prescriptive. Arielle and I are not spearheading a movement or branding a product. The Gurlesque describes female poets and artists who draw on burlesque performance, kitsch, and the female grotesque to perform femininity in a campy or overtly mocking way. Their work assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.

Several years ago, I read a transcript of Arielle’s original talk on the Gurlesque, which she gave at Small Press Traffic in 2002. At the time, I was totally intrigued by Arielle’s take on the Gurlesque, but I was leery of the whole burlesque trope. There’s a branch of feminism that posits self-initiated female exhibitionism as empowering, and it makes me want to throw up in my boots. It’s freaking appalling. I knew that was not what Arielle was getting at, but still the whole burlesque trope made me wary.

All this to say, I thought Arielle brought up a number of fantastic things, particularly the way she linked the Gurlesque to Bahktin’s carnivalesque, and I began to study the history of burlesque theater, which was far more intriguing and radical than I’d suspected. For a long time, I’d been steeping myself in theories of kitsch, camp, the gothic, and the female grotesque—all of which are so important to my work—and I started to see my interests and Arielle’s as complimentary halves of the same line of inquiry. And while Arielle describes the Gurlesque in terms of female empowerment, I provide a (seemingly contradictory) reading of the Gurlesque that embraces the grotesque and the abject. Despite this, our readings of the Gurlesque really do overlap in many places—much more than they diverge—and I’m so happy that, via our multiple readings, the anthology has become a many-headed hydra.

For me, the Gurlesque has its roots in the women of the historical avant-garde—Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa, Djuna Barnes, Hanna Hoch, Gertrude Stein, Sophie Tauber, etc.—who first used their heightened sense of gender as performance to deconstruct gender binaries in their work. This tendency can be traced down the 20th C. through the work of Frida Kahlo, Sylvia Plath, Marina Abramovic, Kathy Acker, Alice Notley, Bjork—the list goes on and on. And of course, there’s Emily Dickinson, the original Goth girl.

And while I do enjoy tracing out a Gurlesque genealogy, the Gurlesque is a set of descriptive terms, it’s not a club. The poets in the anthology happen to be salient examples of Gurlesque poetics, but we’re not trying to corral them into a herd or an exclusive group. Each poet’s work can (and should) be read totally independent of the Gurlesque framework, and there are scores of poets and poems that can be read as Gurlesque and that aren’t in the anthology.

As to whether or not men can be Gurlesque (a question I am often asked), I tend to say yes. Look at Vladimir Mayakovsky or Matthew Barney or Johannes Gorannson or Marilyn Manson. As to whether or not it means something different for a man to queer heterosexuality, I don’t know. The question itself is perhaps more productive than any actual answer.

For my drive-by take on the Gurlesque, you can go here:

For ruminations on the Gurlesque and kitsch, look here:


RK: Something on Delirious Hem really stuck out for me: the title of the interview/conversation between Danielle Pafunda and Arielle Greenberg. “Disarming, Destabilizing and Creeping out the Patriarchy.” This could be a subtitle or description of Maximum Gaga in which the central feminine voice and pleasure force refuses to be “manicured” (a rich and wonderful word, by the way) by the Normopaths who believe “A central component of maintaining and reproducing social order/is the management of woman.” In Maximum Gaga the King is “impregnated... with ’coochie sight’” and “18 breasts” are “surgically implanted on his torso.” (reminds me of a 3 or 4 thousand year old pre-Greek statue I saw in the Louvre recently.) Etc, Etc. Can you talk a bit about how you think the Gurlesque is present (or engaged) in Maximum Gaga?


LG: The first section of Maximum Gaga, “The Normopath,” is a dialogue between a female character and her lover, Mino, who happens to be a monster. It’s Minky Momo’s defense of why she prefers Mino to the Normopath, a male character who is “pathologically normal” (and thus the really freakish monster).

Minky Momo imagines desire as the locus of a haunting peculiarity, a necessary engagement with deformity and the grotesque (the material of real bodies, in all their glorious asymmetry), rather than external glamour. She privileges “kink,” where “kink” is not what is done to the body but an alternate state of mind that privileges the quirky, unsightly detail above concern for the whole. As Naomi Schor has argued, the aesthetic of the detail is an explicitly feminine aesthetic that subverts neo-classical ideology. Classical aesthetics always marks the detail (i.e. blemish, protuberance, aberration, etc.) as a feminine threat to the masculine aesthetic of a perfected, unified whole. Minky Momo’s love is a love of excess over formal symmetry or restraint. Via her desire, she’s overturning entire cannons of classical aesthetics.

Ditto for Queen Pasiphae, a figure out of Greek mythology, who’s at the center of “Meat Out of the Eater,” the second half of Maximum Gaga. In the myth, the Queen lusts after an enormous white bull and has Daedalus build her a machine so she can copulate with it. Out of this union comes the Minotaur (the same Mino that’s in the first section of Maximum Gaga).

The Queen’s preference for an animal over her husband, the most powerful man around, is an act of abjection like no other. To human thinking, the bull comically embodies male virility, so she’s fucking a caricature. It’s an intensely performative act. It’s fascinating to me that she chooses to fuck something that can’t judge her in human terms, that can’t judge her as a woman, that doesn’t care what it’s fucking. Hers is an abject desire, no doubt, but it’s also liberatory. It’s very strange to imagine the Queen strapped inside this machine, as though she’s being subjugated and humiliated, while all the while, she’s the one calling the shots. The poor animal is totally prey to human caprice, to the Queen’s compulsory need for pleasure and provisional obliteration. It’s also an image of the post-human body in which human and machine and animal merge into one monstrous circuit of desire.


RK: In your answer to the first question of this interview you said that the attempt to “inject a mortal, non-erotic female subjectivity into the poem” was “an almost impossible task.” The fight that Gurlesque has on its hands seems also to be “almost impossible.” I’d be interested to know if you feel these near impossibilities weigh on how you’ve chosen to end Maximum Gaga. The second last poem ends with the speaker growing into “a girly empire” where “soldiers (are) “buried in acres of burnt-out flesh.” But the end of the last poem goes back on that (I think): “I said Dahling Shut your cuntbox / I was still veering/to obey/ my not-owned form.” This ending made me think of the ending of Aase Berg’s “With Deer” where things seem to veer back on themselves a bit, strangely: “Now it is time for the cutting to slowly start to heal.” Your thoughts, please.


LG: I more or less think that impossible tasks are the only ones worth taking on. Besides, I’m tantalized by the prospect of reversing or overthrowing orders in a totally naïve and childish way!

As to the “not-owned form,” it’s a challenge, isn’t it, not to be owned by something? And I’m not engaging in liberalspeak here, I don’t mean being owned by corporate interests or the media, etc. (though, that too) but by people and ideas, particularly our own ideas about ourselves and about our relationship(s) to power.

In the end, I don’t believe in a stable or coherent self; I think we all harbor conflicting multitudes. I think we’re all grotesque monsters. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s pretty freaking joyful.

Eating Kafka, etc - Interview with CAConrad re "The Book of Frank"

To follow is the transcript of an email interview I conducted with CAConrad re his book of poems, "The Book of Frank"

Here's the Bio CAConrad provided to me:

CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online here and also with his friends at Philly Sound

Scroll down to the bottom of this interview to see a picture CAConrad provided.


RK: Please tell us about the history and making of "The Book of Frank." I read somewhere on the internet (and by the way I really like your network of blogs) that the book (or a version of it) was ready in the early to mid 90's. Can you talk about this delay? Did you continue to work on the manuscript or did it just sit? How early on, also, did you know that the poems you were writing were going to be part of a full-length collection? How much co-opting of other poems took place as you organized and edited? etc, etc. Anything you'd like to share here would be much appreciated.


CAC: Thanks so much for this interview, I really appreciate it. The truth is I've been writing these poems all along, and the book contains 75 percent of poems written in the past 5 years. But 25 percent from the past 15. There are about a thousand of these poems now.

It's important to just COME OUT AND SAY that they are past life poems. Little levers from the corrupt miles of travel. HOW TO TRICK THE UNIVERSE when we die though, to KEEP the information for when we reincarnate, THAT'S THE TRICK. I mean, HOW do we REMEMBER we were poets, and pick up where we left off, that's the real thing. Some would say, "Well maybe you'll come back as something more useful." NO WAY! Until WAR and GREED are explained to be useful I will write my poems, and have NO GUILT in their construction, hovering over them with some of the love that war and greed intend to destroy.

THE BOOK OF FRANK is a piss in the holy water. And while it IS from the past lives, it's not an explanatory set of poems, it just IS the levers. My book coming out in June from Soft Skull Press, ADVANCED ELVIS COURSE is the explanatory note. The reincarnated Souls of Atlantis have a larder of special psychedelic snacks in store before the horrors being faced seem totally unanswerable. Elvis, He is He and dripping with unrepentant, unapologetic LOVE!


RK: Much can be said (and some of it has already been said) about the book's wildness, bible-throat-cramming, violence, sex, etc. But one thing that really struck me is the magical quietness that rests at the book's core, and which radiates through all of it, really. This Zen-like quality I'm talking about is present not only in what you say but how you say it. The book's last poem is, to me, pretty much a Death Poem (though in the 3rd person) and the next to last poem shows Frank as "a/young boy/asleep in/ancient/Tibet" and the reader's life is "really his/dream." Early on in the book (pg. 24) Frank eats around the "sleeping worm/of the apple" which is "magic." And when I say "not only in what you say but how you say it" I am referring to the clean, clear spring-water and willow-tree form of the poems themselves. The Japanese-like brush stroke phrases. Many of the poems, to me, have the feel and movement of Haiku. Could very easily be reworked into Haiku. The poem on page 88 is perhaps the most prominent of the many poems that struck me as Haikuesque (quoted here in entirety)

-----------
"May
flowers

Frank shuts
his legs

but

music

seeps

through"
--------------

Your thoughts on this, please.


CAC: Thank you so much for your thoughtful, close reading. Yes, it's surreal haiku-esque. But surreal in the best sense, meaning Super Real. Too often people understand surreal to be fantasy. It's NOT. But back to you asking me to respond to what you say. Editing is my passion, second to the original writing of a poem. Editing, preening, pruning, often pruning deeply, even if it draws blood. This particular example of May flowers was so bloated at first when the IDEA of the poem originally smote me, and smote me hard. At the time it was May and I had just had FANTASTIC sex with a boyfriend, and he went back to work, and I was sitting near a patch of flowers outside when Frank entered my consciousness the way he always did. But it was bloated, I mean a runny sloppy coil of verbosity at first, the poem. Chipping away, after hacking into it, was this, this lithe magic waiting to come out. Sex had everything to do with it.

Magic has more to do with it. As you point out Frank pointing out. Yes, the worm, letting the worm live, eating AROUND the worm. Humans must more than ever RISE UP and surprise ourselves with our many possible generous gestures, and we MUST, must must must. We need to let music seep through. Magic is real and magic is more apt to designate us for stillness when faced with a choice to kill.


RK: More on the surreal (Super Real). When I heard you read in Philadelphia a couple of months ago some of the Frank poems made me think of Russel Edson's poems. I mentioned this to you afterwards and you gave me a puzzled look and said something like "O, no. Kafka's much more of an influence." In preparing for this interview I've read through the Book of Frank 4 or 5 times (a pleasure, a real pleasure) but I can't really see the Kafka link (or shadow, ghost, etc) but many of the poems still seem to be quite Edson-like. Can you talk a bit about the Kafka influence? And Edson (or No-Edson)?


CAC: HEHEHEHEHE! Puzzled, I looked puzzled? OK, that's quite possible. Edson's great, yes. I don't know what else to say, except that, when Jonathan Williams first contacted me about publishing THE BOOK OF FRANK he turned me onto Edson. He was surprised that I had never heard of him, said I MUST read him. But my work was already well underway before every hearing about Edson. Jonathan Williams also liked to equate THE BOOK OF FRANK with the Carl Sandburg masterpiece ROOTABAGA TALES, which, is nothing short of A TRUE HONOR! I mean HOLY SHIT, really? Because those stories are classics!

Kafka was my first love. There is no other writer I would go back in time to rescue. The rest of them would just have to suffer. Kafka's bones, where are they kept? Who keeps them? These relics. More than most things on this planet I would like to be with Kafka's bones when the chill descends on our communities. I'm NOT usually a cannibal, but Kafka is one man I would have loved to have eaten after he died. Just a little morsel, just a teeny bit of him. Like, oh, I don't know, the tip of an earlobe dipped in soy sauce and sugar. MMmmmmmmm! MAKES ME WANT TO FRY A POTATO AND PRETEND IT'S KAFKA'S EARLOBE!

YES, YES, I KNOW, I KNOW, I KNOW, cannibalism is a NO-NO! But I'm unable to help myself. Powder his dry bones for a bit of magic snuff? MAYBE have the doctor replace my shin bone with HIS shin bone? Oh dear, it doesn't end in me, the many possible excitements of Kafka's body. He's so HOT! NO OTHER writer ever turned me on as much! And that's a little sad maybe. ALTHOUGH let me tell you I dated a man who looked EXACTLY like Kafka once. And dated him because of that, of course. That was such an awful experience, probably as awful as dating the real Kafka would have been.

It's a HORRIBLE situation, knowing FULL WELL that I was born decades too late to see him, feel him, court him, FUCK HIM. He's probably glad too, if his spirit could ever read this. I'm not sure I wouldn't scare him off, but that's the risk I guess. But it kind of irritates me that my parents were SO STUPID to have me too late in time for me to meet Kafka. I think about suing them every now and then for this RECKLESS, selfish act of neglect! OH, but what's the use!? Judges always side with the parents, right? Even when it's PERFECTLY CLEAR AS IN MY CASE THAT THEY WERE EVIL AND WRONG!


RK: I'm not very familiar with Berryman and his Dream Songs (I've only read a handful of them and listened to a couple on Poetry Speaks- God, he's an interesting reader!) but I was intrigued by a couple of poems in the first section of Frank (pg 29-30) where Frank engages with "Huffy Henry sulking in a dream song." Here are the two poems in their entirety:


Frank met Huffy Henry sulking in a dream song
and zapped him
with the miniaturizing gun

Henry was kind of small anyway

Frank decapitated the
old boy with a pinch

tied his body on a
stick for a slingshot
and sent the little fucker's
screaming head up to
the great knee of Orion
(page 29)

----------

"come any closer" Frank
warns Huffy Henry
"I'll pull you in
my sleeve!

anyone wants to know

the lump is just a
meal I'm digesting."
(page 30)


As I said, I've read very little of the Dream Songs so I can't venture a guess as to why Frank (a part of you) would treat Henry (Berryman) with such disdain and violence. Or am I off base and Frank's just being playful/mischievous? Your thoughts, please.


CAC: Huffy Henry deserves it alright! Well, I'm just not happy with Berryman as a human. Suicides make me nothing but angry. Experience in despair for the loss of these lovely people can do that, and has done that to me. This planet is the BIG GAME BOARD and those chickens who check out too early are a gargantuan nightmare that complicates the rest of us trying to keep steady feet. Berryman was a fucking idiot, he and his mobster CONFESSIONAL POET friends, all of them suicides! Ah, fuck their cliche-ridden extortionist tactics of fake praise for life! I hope he comes back in his next life as a figure skater. Give him a little pizzazz, something to give him balance and JOY. Sloppy drunk, suicidal, suicided poets give the BIG GAME BOARD a tip in the stupidest direction. IF EVERY sloppy drunk were a poet, MAN OH MAN would this world be a basket of TNT! What we need from suicides is for them to find their strength, because I'm tired of feeling the guilt frankly. None of us deserve that from them. Love is no good answer, you can love them with all you've got and it still goes down.


RK: Over a 1,000 Frank poems! Wow! Getting that down to a 100-odd must been quite a task ("Editing, preening, pruning, often pruning deeply, even if it draws blood.") It's quite useful to the reader that the Book of Frank is organized, by and large, chronologically. (I- Young Frank. II- married, sad and "emerging" Frank. III- Like a God, suicide Frank.) But what I really enjoyed, and what really impressed me, is the richness and variety of tone in the poems you've selected and sequenced. An example of this is the beautiful and achingly sad poem on page 31 (first half of poem quoted here):

Frank's sister grew long blue feathers

she said it was worse than cutting teeth

she spent a month screaming in the cave
pushing them out

Frank would lie in bed at night
touching his own back

crying


This poem comes just after the altogether different Henry poems. And a few pages later there's a kind of off-hand dreamy Far-Side type snapshot:

boulders
rolled
into the
yard

a pair of dice

Frank climbed the ladder
to find a five
and a two

he never saw the hand that threw them
swinging down to swoop them up
(page 35)

Can you talk about the sequencing, variety of poems selected, and any details of the whittling down of the book that you'd like to share (I am sure that on a manic day, Frank, the book, could be every bit of the 1000 poems)?



CAC: It makes me happy you like the book. Makes me very happy indeed. Many of these poems CAME TO ME in different ways. Recently I did a conversation with poet Brenda Iijima on DIRT (first published in ON, now online with The Wild Mag), and I talked about eating dirt with my boyfriend Robin, and how eating that dirt literally created one of the Frank poems. I woke up rather violently with the poem in total.

There were just too many of the Frank poems, and many of them no good. There were some though that I wish I had added when I think back on the choosing process. Here's one left out of the book:

at night
the fern
the chive
the philodendron
kiss Frank's brow in
green conspiracy

This is one that Jonathan Williams didn't like, and I guess I listened to him too closely about it. The truth is though it's born out of a rejuvenation of the spirit of being here, loving this planet. Allowing the dirt and it's plants to say HELLO with their quiet loving manners.

This is one that got away. But now it can live on your website, so that's nice. But you can see at the same time it doesn't have the impact of the ones in the book. It's good for poets to write all the time, write write write, write every single day. And to STAY AWAY from novel writing. Poets and novelists should be mortal enemies in my opinion. Novelists who try their hand at writing poems always IMPROVE their novels. But generally speaking, poets who take to writing novels probably wind up writing good novels, but it often ruins their poems forever. There are only a few poets who write novels whose poems are as amazing as their poems are, and who continue to write beautiful, strong poems. Prose destroys the world.


RK: The Book of Frank is indeed a piss in the holy water (by the way I love the poem on page 33. "every churchtop crucifix" etc. maybe my favorite.). Yes, definitely, a piss in Holy Church Water. But Frank is also a piss in the holy water of all large and almost (sadly) inevitably xenophobic grouops. Lynch-mobs lurk in all nice quiet communities. When Frank's house burns down

his neighbors circled around him

"you will lose everything
and everyone
you love today
Frank!

and you
deserve it!"
(page 102)

But in spite of this all, and his outbursts of violence, Frank still manages to fill with love: "'they're waiting/ for me' he said/tears filled his eyes. 'good people/waiting/just for me.'" And here I can sort of see the Kafka comparison in that Frank is helpless against the large, cold machinery of humanity. Your thoughts on Holy Water,etc, please?


CAC: The circling mob and Holy Water have many links. Not that pagan cultures were peaceful (they invented war), but there were places in those cultures for us that have not existed in our Christian, Jewish, Moslem world where we CONSTANTLY seek fresh air to keep the lungs working. These modern and increasingly academic explanations of gender and sexuality for instance are attempts to build general acceptance, but by intellectualizing instead of actualizing. Most pagan cultures didn't need Queer Theory PhD programs, they already understood the value of multi-gendered, mixed-gendered beings. As a child Frank had crows for hands, crows being THE SOURCE for weighing the divine and human laws, always opting for the divine. Divine not as in Holy Water. Holy Water has as much lurid splash to the palate as a toilet drained into a jewel-encrusted goblet. Mother HATED Frank's crow hands. Mother was a Christian, his crow hands were nothing but dirty, and she was never sure if they were clean or not, and assumed the worst. Our TOTAL intolerance campaign against our bodies has controlled us with precise church and governmental enforced measure FOR CENTURIES! We have been working hard on our extinction plan.


RK: Gay-Drag-Frank emerges sometimes and somewhat in this The Book of Frank. But poems like pg 109 do not take over the book. Fyi, that's one of my favorite poems in the collection. Maybe I like it more than page 33. I've read it over three times while i've been phrasing up this slowly emerging question. Damn it's good. Okay, now it is my favorite. And here it is.

Frank added milk to the
instant Cowboy Mix and
herded himself into
the living room
mooing

the cowboy rode him slowly
around the TV playing a
lonesome guitar

when this was finally too
sad and boring
Frank ignored the warning label
and stirred a few more cowboys

his wife came home
to find him snoring
tied naked to the ceiling
bleeding from the rump
with a smile on his face and
a fresh brand upon his thigh


So, can you talk a bit about the overtly and brightly-feathered Gay-Drag Frank poems and why, in a way, they're a bit of a minority in the book? I'm guessing you didn't want too much spice in the broth. Didn't want those poems to take over. But didn't shy away from them either. Respond as you wish. Of course.


CAC: Frank sublimates and achieves desire through his own progression of anxious, personal napalm. To be honest I didn't choose Frank to be mostly straight, he chose that. And that is not my life. I've never been near a vagina, not even at birth as I was a C-section baby. But at the same time I LOVE vaginas and have seen many of them in person in many capacities. I'm just not interested in having sex with one, or in having one of my own. If I could replace my cock with an ice cream cone I'd be perfectly content. But Frank is Frank's own Real Fiction, to answer Bernadette Mayer's question on the back of the book. My past lives as a straight man, a fag, a thief, hermaphrodite, mother of twelve, none of it can be denied, and none of us should deny who we've been. When the courts finally get a grasp of past lives and past life regression techniques we will sure enough see lawyers lined up to make us pay for all we've done. Karma is a quagmire of opportunity in a REAL modern sense just waiting to be exploited. Frank reincarnated as a goldfish his wife fed to her piranhas named after my own childhood bullies.

But Frank getting fucked by the cowboys, yeah, sure, why not? His ass was bleeding because he's not a pro, and he didn't seem to mind, in fact he was more than pleased with the whole affair. They branded him, and that shit never goes away. The branding iron gives you something to touch and remember when you need a little pick-me-up.


RK: So, you want to eat and fuck Kafka. Interesting. What other writers and artists and great or not-so-great men or women would you like to get a hold of (in bed and/or at the dinner table, or kitchen floor, or phone-booth or bathroom stall, or boardwalk, or alley, or flower bed, or field of corn, wherever, wherever, wherever)? Madonna, Faulkner, Genet, The Bee Gees, Prince, Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, Pink Floyd, Ryan Eckes, Angelina Jolie, Catullus, Dan Quale, The Moody Blues, Van Gogh, Renoir, Hitchcock, Will Smith, Mozart, Ron Silliman, Ron Silliman's father, etc, etc? (I'd like here to remind you that in the lead-up to this interview, the foreplay if you will, you said you planned on answering questions with "the most insane part of (your) brain." Well, I think you've been holding out on us. I think you've been circling towards that most insane part. Made some runs at it. But, ultimately, have kind of shied away. Ha, Ha. Could you try now, please, to break with almost, almost, almost all of reality's strings and hinges and really engage the core, slop and all, of that "most insane"
part of your brain?)

CAC: The Moody Blues? I'm feeling vomitty. Prince, I mean who wouldn't?

Kafka is my only true love. My dance card is full. I mean being a fag has its advantages. Straight people think we're pigs, and they're right, I mean, fags are men after all, right? If women would fuck straight men as easily as men fuck men no one would question it. The straight men who call us pigs are just Haters. Lesbians are the coolest bunch in my opinion. Lesbians are the only ones OUTSIDE the consumption of men and don't give a fuck. Lesbians are a universe straight men think about but have no real clue. Well, it's all generalizations here of course, right? But I've had more lesbian friends than any other group, and working class lesbians mostly, and I can tell you from watching them punch one another in the face at the bars that they're not perfect.

Have I really been holding back? Ryan Eckes is in your list, and he's a good friend, and straight. I don't like fucking men I like, I prefer fucking men I don't like, it's far more fun. Fucking is our way back to pagan relief after all, right? Fucking and sex are the things boring poets like Louise Gluck snarl at. SEX is our best point of making it right again. SEX is how we get to enjoy ourselves if we give it a go. SEX is the absolute reigning champion of all we have at sharing instances of light. I've had "serious" relationships, but they were always open, which was the best way. I mean shouldn't you have sex with someone if you both want to have sex with one another? We spend SO MUCH TIME on this Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah crusade of WHO IS CHEATING, and WHY are they cheating? Cheating? I think the person being cheated is the person who DOESN'T have sex with someone they want to have sex with at any given time frankly. THE ABSOLUTE WORST THING IN THE PRESENT TIME is this bullshit of queer people wanting to give respectability a shot. AH! NO! HOW degrading! I came back to Earth this time to HAVE FUN having sex and taking it all the way and now I have friends saying that I have a fear of commitment. I'm now in the mood to just say Yes, I have a fear of being miserable like you, OK? Eliminate the whispers, just shut the fuck up and have fun. Why is fun so hard? We're all going to die. It's a terrible TERRIBLE fact. I LOVE being American because although queers are murdered everyday here, we have places we can live and not have our heads chopped off in public through the wishes of religious-governmental decree. Being queer in Saudi Arabia must be the worst thing. Or Amish in America for that matter, as I've met queer Amish who were shunned because they wouldn't conform to straight Amish ways. It must be awful being a dyke or a fag if you're Amish. And JUST IMAGINE being Amish and being transgendered, wow, that's just too much horror to put up with to even imagine! I'm so glad my white trash family was too busy with their selfish addictions to care to make me conform. There is NO freedom like the freedom of NOT being asked to be someone you have no desire to be.

Autonomy is possible in poetry. Novelists are slaves.



(photo by Janet Mason)

Pointers on Masturbation, etc---- An Interview

Just did a quick, fun and (hopefully) funny interview with Ryan Manning.


Here's an excerpt:


---Ryan Manning: did either of your parents ever talk to you about sex when you were growing up?


---Rauan Klassnik (Me): My mother bought me a Playboy and gave me pointers on masturbation. It was like she was describing how to put on a gas mask in WWI and then, suddenly, she was talking about the dying horses. It was agony. I had to pee.


The full interview's over at Thunk along with lots of other fun and funny interviews: people I know like Blake Butler, Brian Foley, Zach Schomburg, Andrew Lundwall, and other like Sam Pink, Ken Baumann, Ani Smith, etc, etc....

Radio Interview Podcast (Holy Land, etc)

An interview I did with Shelagh Shapiro a few weeks back aired on 105.9FM in Burlington VT this afternoon. Shelagh's show is called Write the Book.

In case anyone's interested in listening the Podcast's available here

But, I must warn you: I mumble a lot and I ramble. Really ramble. After listening to this Podcast I went up to my wife, put my hands on her shoulders, looked her in the eye and said "I can't believe you married me."

That being said Shelagh has a beautiful voice, enunciates perfectly, and masks any what-the-fuck thoughts she might have had really well.

Shelagh asked some really good questions and now and then I might have had something insightful to say.

And, I read a few poems as well. A couple from Holy Land and a couple from Ringing

Excuses: I did the phone interview with Shelagh a few hours before heading to the airport. So, I was stressed out. I was also suffering from sinus headaches which plagued me for weeks. I could, like Madonna, go on and on. I could, like Madonna, fall off a horse right now... ouch!

Interview with Rebecca Loudon re "Cadaver Dogs" (a wonderful, wonderful book of poems)

This is the transcript of an email interview I conducted with Rebecca Loudon re her book of poetry "Cadaver Dogs."

This is the author's note that Rebecca provided:


"Rebecca Loudon lives and writes in Seattle . She is the author of Tarantella and Radish King from Ravenna Press, and Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home and Cadaver Dogs, from No Tell Books. She teaches violin lessons to children."

You can find reviews, blurbs, etc at No Tell's site



RK: In the bio of Cadaver Dogs I see that you're a violinist and that you teach the violin to children. Your writing is then of course (to some extent or other) going to be influenced by your violin mind-life. And the titles of some of the poems in Cadaver Dogs might well be descriptions of pieces of music: "Romance #1 in G Major" for example. Also, I'm no musician and I'm probably tone deaf but sometimes your lines or phrases come to like violin strokes. I am thinking most specifically here of the short crisp bow-like strokes of "Dear Extinguished Individual." Am I full of shit? And, yes or no, can you talk a bit about the interplay of your poetry and your playing and teaching the violin? Some of the interplay must be unconscious. But sometimes I'd imagine you'd want, consciously, to bring the two together. Or consciously have to work to keep them apart. Your thoughts, please.


RL: Everything I do is influenced by music - the music in my head, my love of teaching music to children, my study of early music history, my daily practice and my absolute belief that mastery of practice should be the ultimate goal of every artist whether a musician, a poet, a dancer or a painter. I have been told that my poetry is full of music. I'm asked how I go about achieving that. Honestly, I have no answer for that, and I'm not even sure what it means, except that I have a natural and easy sense of sound and rhythm that I don’t have to work for. Perhaps it's something as obvious as my dedication to practice (writing/music/drawing), perhaps a sense of musicality has leaked into my poetry from studying unaccompanied Bach partitas and sonatas for practically my entire life. Maybe it is more subtle - a kind tissue memory, the way I rehearse Mozart, and I rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and finally Mozart is out of my head and resides in my fingers and I can play the concerto by just getting out of the way and allowing tissue memory to do the work for me. Like divining whether a pregnant woman is going to give birth to a boy or a girl by holding a crystal on a thread and letting it twirl clockwise or counterclockwise over her belly. Tissue memory. Writing poetry is like that for me. I practice every day by writing in my notebook or working on poems or writing my blog, and when time comes to put pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard, tissue memory takes over and my head can get out of the way. But practice remains an absolute for me, as far as art is concerned. This is not to say I don’t use the language of music consciously in some of my poems. Romance #1 in G Major is a piece by Beethoven for violin and orchestra. That specific poem also invokes the great singer Wanda Coleman. L’Orchestra du Roi Soleil, Raymond Scott, Sibelius, Mozart, The Beach Boys’ song In My Room, and the gravicèmbalo col piano e forte all make appearances in Cadaver Dogs, as well musical terms like hemiola and tactus. These words were the foundation of my first language, and it is no surprise they appear again and again in my poetry. As far as creating poetry that often looks like music on the page, this is sometimes intentional and sometimes unconscious, so you are by no means full of shit, but perceptive in asking your question.

I began writing poetry at an early age and I also began playing the violin while very young. Both the language of music and the English language felt the same to me, and I was lucky to be young enough to live inside my magical self, the self that doesn’t create boundaries where art is concerned. As I grew as a musician, I was told by teachers that if I wanted to be a great violinist I had to eat and breathe music, and nothing else. I ignored this advice and kept writing. As an adult I attended art school and learned how to paint and this too added itself to the landmass of art in my head. I still refuse to believe there are divisions in the fine arts. All creative energy comes from the same place. Only academia insists on separating the arts into individual countries.


RK: God. Your author photo (yes, I’m one of those dorks who pays too much attention to Bios and photos) shows your face half hidden by a copy of a book titled “The Messiah.” The voice of Cadaver Dogs leans towards God and sometimes this feels almost religious or spiritual. But more so, bleakly and blatantly, cold-stone, fire and fur, the narrator is a “talking dog” leashed to (and looking for) God who is also an animal—the “lap-red tongue of Christ.” Can you talk about the Cadaver Dogs God-View? The tension of concurrently yearning toward it (“oh lamb of God, I come, I come) and seeing it in such a plainly and basic feral light? (“it” being God).


RL: My author photo was taken by my son, Page Loudon, who is a professional photographer (Hepcat Photography). Reb Livingston (the editor of No Tell Books) wanted an author photo, while I resisted the idea. I am, by nature, a recluse, and after many years of pulling away from people, I have come to believe that being reclusive is not part of my pathology, it’s just who I am. At first my son took several photos of me standing looking terrified, angry, growly, scowly, rabid or like a badly stuffed (as in taxidermy) Miss America. Finally he came busting into my bedroom right after I had showered one lazy Saturday afternoon and was reading in my bed, and snapped the photo. I tried hiding my face behind Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah, and the photo turned out to be the only photo in the bunch that made us both happy.

I’m glad you caught the God/Messiah reference which I have never really written about or talked about, even though its presence snake dances through every single one of my books. In a review for my previous collection, Radish King, the reviewer called the presence of Jesus in my book a whiny bother. In Cadaver Dogs, the idea of god comes through as the animal in us, the protector, the giver of unconditional love, as well as the beast with teeth, horns and a long jagged tail. God as animal shows up in the book’s first poem, Double-plush Wolf in a Hungry Age, where the reader is told to go to hell. Later in the poem, the reader finds transformation (salvation) in

Lemon juice
Breast milk
Blood-letting

In the poem Dear Extinguished Individual, the narrator becomes god by transforming dogs into talking beasts

I replaced the dogs’ throats
with radios
my most lovely artifice.

My poem The Greenest Body, claims a genuine piece of THE TRUE CROSS as a portal. Other portals that appear throughout the book include Glenn Gould’s chair, and a list of things the narrator would take through such a portal, which may or may not be a way to reach god. Christ is invoked in Victorville Carnivàle, and The Reptile Monarchies. In Arthur Murray’s Dance Dictionary in Common Time, the narrator visits god’s house in a variety of disguises

A wolf’s head sewn to my head
Perfume
beetle-rich moss.

There are baptisms in this book, one of the narrators talks shop with Jesus, and the fork-ed tongue beast and goaty head man are engaged.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, baptized into the Catholic church, but later took a severe left turn and ended up in a Bible thumping holy roller version of a 4 Square Gospel Church that believed in spirit filled congregations, lots of singing, lots of swaying and fainting and thumping about on the floor in a way that looked eerily like people having seizures while white suited preachers shouted from their pulpits about a girl just my age (this would have been 11 or 12) who was wearing her nightgown one night, and was good and pure and loved the Lord with all her might but never accepted Him for her PERSONAL SAVIOR and of course that very night, that poor girl sure enough walked away from the church (or tent in the summer), and got hit by a train and went to ETERNAL HELL for her mistake in timing. All these sermons, it was always young girls, they were always wearing nightgowns and the deadly train was always only a few feet away. They were good girls but they still went to Hell. I never could figure out the nightgown thing unless the preacher thought it made the girls seem more like pre-angels or there were so young they were super close to their bedtime and the sermons were like late night TV, and I never did figure out how so many of them could be so stupid as to get hit by the very same train over and over. I didn’t buy into any of it. But it was great theater, and I got myself baptized yet again in the Spokane river, just to hedge my bets.

Being raised Catholic all we did was lower our heads when the priest said Jesus or the nuns snapped the rubber bands wrapped around their prayer books, stood, knelt, stood, knelt, etc., and made out with the boys at Gonzaga Prep. But the theater of the evangelical church stayed with me. And the music. At the end of each sermon the congregation and choir all sang Just As I Am, a song sure to bring tears to the eyes of even the most hardened Catholic or thief or prostitute or runaway girl or just a regulation girl in a nightgown inching toward a train, or any other type of sinner. The song ended with the words Oh Lamb of God, I Come, I Come, always used as an alter call, and people would come streaming up the center aisle to give their hearts and wallets to Jesus, night after night, tissues flying, old ladies squatting on the floor, their pantyhose cutting off circulation to their upper bodies, their helmet stiff hair never moving as they sobbed and thrust tiny bibles and Chick tracts and plastic crosses and mustard seeds in hermetically sealed packets in the sinners’ direction. Some of my friends got saved night after night, enough for a baker’s dozen of eternities at least. I remained unconvinced but I did enjoy the show. As I shortly made my way into the world at the age of 14 (the age I was thrown out of my house), I realized that animals were my true comfort, my true joy, my honest confessors and my best friends. They didn’t judge, they didn’t condemn, they didn’t ask for prayers or sobbing or hysteria or faith, they were just there warm and breathing next to me in the dark allies back seats of cars and rank hotel rooms I called home. They protected me and have ever since. The titular poem of Cadaver Dogs is central to the book, and central to my life as well. It is the most personal poem I have ever let romp out into the world, and it is the poem around which the rest of the book came into being. In that poem, Dog is indeed a feral god who keeps watch over the narrator, and sings when the missing girl’s voice is silenced.


RK: I'm suffering, these days, from a strange kind of disease. Most everybody I see reminds me to some extent of someone else (famous or just famous to me or not famous at all). Sometimes a "new" face (body, gesture, eye-glint, etc) suggests several others: church bells ringing in several churches. A mind-sky disfigured and excited by bells. Reading Cadaver Dogs I was nudged and thrust variously and sometimes concurrently into lots of other voices, images, feelings, memories, etc. The pure figures of pain (body in woods imagery, kneeling, on all fours, etc) brought to me Jack Gilbert (going down to cry among the trees after Michiko died) as well as Anne Carson (the visions of nudes in Glass, Irony and God). The stitched wolf's head, Clayton Eshleman's Juniper Fuse (separating the human, painfully, out from the animal, or vice versa i guess. but, thank God, without the childish tit-whining he's often guilty of). The bright fierce light of desire and high-strung disjointed voice-narratives-- Beckian Goldberg Fritz's "The Badlands of Desire." And the animal horror-world and sometimes rough language and end-poem gestures of an early to mid-career Ted Hughes. Is this all coincidental or have any of the above been anything of an influence on you? All of the above is probably, then, just a lead up to me asking you to talk about your influences: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, movies, t.v., paintings, cartoons, whatever, as you wish.
Please.


RL: None of the poets you listed above have influenced me and I am not familiar with their work, My poetic influences have been poets whose music climbs out of their poems and shakes me; e.e Cummings, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sharon Olds, Brenda Hillman, Robert Lowell, Linda Bierds, Wallace Stevens, Amy Gerstler, Cal Bedient, Lara Glenum, Maxine Kumin, Charles Bukowski. I am as strongly influenced by novels as I am by poetry. Charles Dickens, Jeanette Winterson, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Tolstoy. I was spoon fed on Robert Heinlein and I reread his books over and over every year. I love Toni Morrison’s work, Margaret Atwood, the Brontë sisters, JG Ballard, Rick Bass, the list of novelists I love is pretty much endless. I read like my life depends on it. Magazines, cookbooks, bus advertisements, pamphlets, chapbooks, road maps. I read them all with my mind open to the poetry inside them. I don’t watch much TV but I’m strongly influenced by movies, especially David Lynch, John Waters, Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Greenaway. Photography is probably my favorite visual art form. Diane Arbus of course, she who molded my brain when I saw her retrospective show in New York in 1971, and about whom I’m writing a fictional novel. Other photographers who move me are Sally Mann, Gregory Crewdson, Francesca Woodman. The painters Kandinsky for color, Larry Rivers for New York the way I remember it, Basquiat for his incorporation of text into color, Balthus for his cats, Camille Claudel for standing up to that bastard Auguste Rodin, and for sculpting many of his hands and feet and never getting credit for it. And last but not least, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Beethoven, Raymond Scott, Fats Waller. The endless list of music and musicians who fill my every waking and most of my sleeping hours.

Along with poetry, music and film, I take a great interest in what goes on around me every day. The conversations exchanged at my job, the movements of the tides, playing in the dirt, baking bread, watching clouds, knitting, dancing. I love to watch people though I rarely interact with them. This is probably my greatest pleasure in life, the simple things that happen in my city under my nose. I find the more attention I pay to them the richer my life, and therefore my poetry, becomes. I really don’t think poetry has much to do with poetics or writing. It has to do with how a poet sees.


RK: Revision. You say that you like to write with your head "out of the way." By instinct, gut, feel. Through your body, through "tissue memory." Can you talk a bit about your revision process a bit? Revising it would seem should bring more critical and engaged faculties to bear. Or do you revise also with your head out of the way (or kind of at least), sounding-out as it were by feel. Or is some sort of combination of tissue memory and critical application? (Some writers at a certain point in their careers say that they don't revise at all even. Some I think are telling the truth)

RL: Once I draft a poem, (with a pen in a crappy beat up notebook, this is important), I post it to a private (non-public) blog and let it stew. I am not overly fond of word-drunk poems, though that’s how I create rough drafts. I use the private blog for revision because I am terrible at document management. I used to revise my poems in Word™ documents, but I ended up having 40 revisions on my home computer and 15 revisions on my work computer, all in different folders, and I’d lose things and be looking at one poem while a completely different revision was waving its flag at me from some forgotten electronic corner of the universe. Now I revise on the blog and transfer my revisions to 1 Word document at home. I am a severe reviser and I believe that art and craft are different beasties. Art is what I get what I find what I create, and craft is how I make a poem viable, livable, a dynamic thing as opposed to a static bunch of words on a page.

This is how I revise. Does the poem have a galley? A loo? A comfortable place to sleep? Does it leak? Is it seaworthy? I revise a poem anywhere from twenty to seventy times. Often I revise poems after they’ve been published. I write long drafts and cut and cut and cut. It’s much easier to cut than trying to build a keel after the fact. My knives are sharp. I slap a piece of duct tape over the internal blasted critic/editor’s voice in my head when I write my drafts, but the tape comes off with a loud and painful riiiiip! during the revision process. This is why I always have to give my drafts some room, some time. Walk away from them while we’re still on honeymoon. I don’t believe that every word that falls from my pen is a diamond. I dislike the saying kill your darlings. They’re not my darlings. Not in that form. Not until I clean them up, strip them down, sand their edges, test their sea-worthiness and send them out on open waters. It is a tricky process and a difficult one. There is always the danger of revising the spark out of a poem. I think revision is the hardest part of writing but also the heart. It’s when my head moves back into the boat and starts cleaning up. There are a lot of metaphors in this paragraph and I apologize for them.

I used to go to poetry workshops. I brought my poems and the groups read them and responded. I did this for years. I lasted 4 years in one workshop and 2 years in another. As I grew as a poet, I became less dependent on outside feedback. The feedback in fact, became a negative thing when I found myself bringing more and more accessible poems to workshops so they would be easy for my readers to understand. I was dumbing or, according to Word™ spell check, dooming down for my readers. Once I realized that my revision process was intact, I realized I no longer needed the workshops or the feedback, though I miss the wine and cheese. But seriously, I think a poet has to learn to craft his or her own work eventually. And I had heard some pretty inane things over the years. Don’t ask a question if you don’t answer it at the end of the poem. Don’t ask a question if you answer it at the end of a poem. Don’t use italics unless you use italics somewhere else in the poem. NEVER USE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! Who the hell thought up all these stupid rules? And that’s exactly what I would ask the critic. Who the hell thought up all these stupid rules? The answer was, that’s just the way it’s done.

Artistic communities are good for some people, but they are no good for me. I’m not a social creature. I am never comfortable in groups unless I’m playing music and even then, I am in my own world inside my head. In complete disclosure, I’d like to add that I presently teach 2 poetry workshops, The Wallingford Irregulars and The Foundry. The Wallingford Irregulars workshop is 11 years old, The Foundry is 2. The difference between the workshops I teach and the workshops I attended, is that when I feel a poet has the tools she needs to revise thoroughly, when she brings poems that are consistently strong, I tell her that perhaps it’s time for her to fly the nest. My workshops are not social gatherings. They’re classes where we learn craft together. You can’t teach anyone to write poetry. You can ask them to read and teach them the basics of craft, but you can never teach them to have an interesting world view. You can’t teach them a sense of humor. Nurturing is about all you can do. Most poets need to be nurtured. And read. That’s what makes poets happy. I give my poets food and tea and I build big dangerous fires and I invite them to take their shoes off and I tell the truth and I encourage them to send their poems out into the world. And we laugh like hyenas because an artist who takes herself too seriously will sink. We are not ARTISTS. We are artists. The work is ongoing.


RK: You've talked about God in your life and God in your poems. Can you talk about enchantment now? Of the sort of magic (white magic that seems to be an important part of your world--you and your poetry.) You are as you say, "by nature, a recluse," and that animals are your true "comfort" and "joy." Your "honest confessors" and your "best friends." This all brings to mind the image of a witch out in the woods, stitching heads and performing other strange operations. You also talk, here in this interview, about "divining whether a pregnant woman is going to give birth to a boy or a girl by holding a crystal on a thread..." The enchantments though seem all to be natural ("different-natural" perhaps, rather than supernatural, in the way I understand that to be.) In "Thank You Dr. Grafenberg" you even suggest "maybe" that you ARE an "enchantment." (as well as a "criminal" and "a talking dog.") Some of this is overlap to what you've said already in response to my God question but can you please talk about enchantment here: how you are enchanter and enchanter (like you are in a way both master, wolf and dog), etc,...


RL: Enchantment is a large part of my life but maybe not your typical garden variety Leprechaun or even fairy tale types of enchantment. I did not come from a happy suburban family, but I don’t write about my upbringing, my family of origin. My enchantment, my idea of enchantment, my ability to be carried away to other worlds through enchantment (animals, books, music) was a gift I was born with. As a child I would collect bees in Mason jars and carry them to my bedroom or under the porch and I would pet their delicate fur and speak to them and I truly believed they understood me. I always set them free and I learned that once you have captured a bee in a jar, you can remove the lid, but the bee won’t fly away for an entire day after that lid is removed. I learned how to view and absorb the natural world by collecting bees and frogs and tadpoles and stray cats and vicious dogs who came to me and jumped on me in joy. My grandfather had two horses and I rode them from the highest hill in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, rode them every weekend down into the forest where I spent hours playing in the creek or simply talking to the horses or brushing them or singing to them. I found bears and wolves and cougars in that forest, but they never frightened me. I didn’t do so well with humans. Humans in my young world were dangerous. Animals were magic, yes. They brought comfort. They spoke a language I understood. I recognized their souls. Am I an enchanter? That’s what my birth name means in Hebrew; Rebecca, captivating, knotted cord. But I think there is something more complicated here. Pat Conroy once said that it is a great gift for a writer to be born into a horrible family. Perhaps this is true. Perhaps this forces the writer to see things differently, through different lenses. Perhaps an unhappy child can indeed find her way through the forest, fearless and alone, and come out the other side as a changed thing. After all, the key to being a great poet is to be able to see a world no one else can see and then tell that story. Can we become poets if our feet are never held to the fire? Maybe. But not me. I had to take an unknown route. I had to carve my name into the top of the tallest damned tree even if I fell out and broke my wrist and lay shivering in the ferns, until my horse came to find me.

As I get older I care less and less about my human nature and more and more about the land around me, the secrets the sea screes into my salty mouth, the dance between water and oil, the beauty of the unloved, the hungry, the ignored holy. I have become entangled with a homeless man, a spitfire of a guy who gets in lots of fights and has many knife scars and sells newspapers for a dollar a piece outside of a fancy grocery store. We have long intense conversations. I have told him that I am bipolar, an embarrassing disease for a poet these days since it is so popular, and every single poet who has a downlow day seems to lay claim to being bipolar. My homeless friend understands that it is a terrifying world and yes, enchanted sometimes. I tell him how difficult it is to trade my natural creativity, my burny little fire, for calm days and being able to function in the adult world. He has days where he is so high he can’t open his eyes, but he stands in front of the store selling his papers. If he sees me he asks if I’m still on my meds. I tell him the truth. We have found that in each other. Is this part of an enchantment? I can’t see from here. Not yet. But he has entered my dreams and now he has entered my poems. He is yet another wolf in disguise from whom I have nothing to fear. There is always something brand new to see every day every minute, if we just open our eyes.


RK: Okay, this is the trickiest question I've asked. And by "trickiest" I mean I've struggled most in figuring out how to ask it. In fact I've struggled most in making this question clear to myself. You say that "Cadaver Dogs" (the title poem) is the most "personal poem" you've ever "let romp out into the world." It's interesting that you use the word "romp." I just looked it up on Merriam Webster on line and "high-spirited, carefree, and boisterous play" is the clause that I think seems to fit (though other parts of the definition are not irrelevant either.) "Romp" suggests, too, for me an animal and it's the "animality" of your poetry that I'd like you to talk about. "Animality" versus "personality." Even when your poems are "personal" they seem to have a personality (voice, character, etc) that seems to be to more "of animal" than "of person." (Of course people are animals. I least I think so, and I believe you agree.) Okay, again, your poetry, carried along by music, its shifts (image, perspective, etc) seems more animal than human. And this for me, and others I'm guessing, is very strange and exciting. Again there's overlap here (with respect to your wanting, when writing, to get your head "out of the way") but can you please respond to this directly, indirectly, whatever. (And sorry for the fuzziness of how I've laid out my sketchy thought-feeling here.)


RL: Once upon a time, a 14 year old girl was forced out of her house to live on the streets of a deeply enchanted icy city. Her only companion was Brown Dog, a large terrier who never left her side. Brown Dog provided warmth, protection, conversation, love, acceptance, and a magical kind of healing when he licked the girl’s hands with his rough tongue. Brown Dog and the girl ventured to the city’s heart where they slept in abandoned cars, empty churches, and dangerous hotels with dangerous men. Brown Dog never left the girl’s side. They ate when they could, sometimes finding food in dumpsters or behind restaurants, sometimes stealing it from grocery stores, sometimes being given meals by kind strangers. Eventually Brown Dog and the girl banded together with other lost children, and they broke into a boarded-up house in the heart of the city’s industrial area. The house had no electricity, but it had a wood stove, so every morning the children took turns chopping wood and feeding the fire for warmth, and the occasional bath. Brown Dog slept by the fire and guarded the door in case the children were discovered by police or other thieves. The girl easily made friends with criminals, the insane, librarians, animals and outlaws. She was not comfortable around normal people and they mostly would not have her even though she had a gentle spirit, and all she ever wanted was to make music and write poems. Eventually Brown Dog and the girl made their way out of the enchanted icy city, and found a home near the ocean and the mountains. Brown Dog grew old and ill, and his fur started falling out. He died in a park in the deep heat of summer with his head in the girl’s lap. The girl grieved mightily, because she knew she would never again find such a loyal friend, but she made music and she pushed words together and discovered that moments of joy and moments of sorrow aren’t all that much different.

Pink Klassnik (an interview on HTMLGIANT)

Sam Pink has just posted an interview with me on HTMLGIANT

This is a very serious interview in which I discuss, among other things,

--Fan Mail
--Drawing
--Attilah the Hun
--Adam Pitluk
--Ron Silliman
--Pink Eye (wink, wink.....blink, blink)
--Dolphins
--Weasels
--that wily southern-atheist Flannery O'Connor
--everyone's favorite centerfold, Blake Butler

Next Interview-- Rebecca Loudon re her book "Cadaver Dogs"

For those of you who are interested the next interview on this blog will be with Rebecca Loudon regarding her fascinating book "Cadaver Dogs."

on the other side of the interview

i answer a few questions about prose poetry, the blog interviews i do, and my forthcoming chapbooks on No Tell's Blog (with Kurt Geisler)

Interview with Shane Jones re his debut novel "Light Boxes"

To follow is an e-mail interview I’ve just finished up with Shane Jones re his novel “Light Boxes”

Here's the Bio Shane's provided:

Shane Jones lives in Albany New York. LIGHT BOXES is his first book. He's also the author of I WILL UNFOLD YOU WITH MY HAIRY HANDS (Greying Ghost 2008) and two forthcoming books, THE NIGHTMARE FILLED YOU WITH SCARY (Cannibal Books) and THE FAILURE SIX (Fugue State, Jan 2010). Shane blogs at shaneejones.blogspot.com

"Light Boxes" is available at Publishing Genius



RK: Reading "Light Boxes", especially at first, made me think of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village," and, often, I felt as though I was watching a movie kind of like "The Village." Because of the lush and beautiful yet sparsely rendered visual imagery. And also because of the mood and feel that your style and voice generates and embodies. A sense of foreboding, too, in the beginning, and then again every time things take a turn for the good. Paintings too, specific and imagined, came to my mind repeatedly. Paintings made primarily of large swathes of undiluted primary colors. Or sometimes mainly whites. In a recent interview on this blog Johannes Goransson said that Aase Berg is influenced by B-Movies (addressing her lover as "leatherface" from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Certainly you've been influenced by other writers (more to follow on this later) but can you talk about how the visual arts have influenced your work, specifically "Light Boxes?" And if you don't think you've consciously tried to draw from these other arts can you please, anyways, talk about some of the movies, paintings, etc, that you are drawn to?


SJ: Paintings play a major part in my writing. Sometimes I think paintings have influenced me more than some writers have. I make a strong point in looking at every issue of New American Paintings and going to fecalface.com and seeing what is new there. Painters just blow me away with what they can do. I think it's important for me to look at art in order to write. The images that paintings can produce are so visceral and strange that my mind just begins exploding with ideas. Not all the time, but when a really interesting piece of art hits, I immediately think "wow, that's incredible" and I want to write something new. I wonder if this answers matters at all. My girlfriend just asked what I'm doing and I told her and she asked "why are you so selfish." Now she's talking to the cat and saying "Yes, he really is a selfish man." So yeah, paintings are really important to my writing that maybe a few dozen people will read this year.


RK: Structure. Milan Kundera, in one of his essay books on writing (The Art of the Novel ?) tells about the hundreds and hundreds of pages of preparatory and side notes Dostoyevsky would generate for his novels (unless he was trying to make a quick deadline for some quick cash). Notes sketching out plot and character. Pages and pages each for different "matches" or "foils" for an existing character. Some used, many discarded. Kundera said that anyone who couldn't understand this had no concept of what goes into the making of a novel. "Light Boxes" is meticulously structured, all the way from the care in the selection of words and making of phrases to the overall architecture of the book in which the point of view is constantly changing from one character to another (but by no means haphazardly or sloppily.) Also, near the end of Light Boxes you give us a description of the writer's workplace containing "the stacks of papers, the fragments, the half sentences and abandoned dialog" which suggests in its organization and disorganization most crucially a striving towards organization. Can you talk about the making of this book? (a bit more of a glimpse of how, specific to you and this book, the artist brings a kind of order out of chaos.) And, if you want, can you tell us what in yr striving was most difficult?


SJ: I wrote the first part of the book in April of 2007. Pretty much just the first page. But with that first page the whole book kind of unfolded in front of me and I knew exactly what it would be, from who February was, to the structure of the short chapters, to the feel of the imagery. I just hit it. I probably could have written the book in a few weeks but I was working a lot of hours at a book store. So each morning I'd get up and write two sections. And then maybe another section on my lunch break, then another at night. I wrote about 120 of these little sections, some out of order. What was interesting is that I knew what the book was going to be like, but I didn't really write it in order. I changed speakers, action, all that. Then I kind of cut and pasted it together. It was a very collage like experiment and I think that comes through in the book -- it's a tight structure but it also feel organic and kind of loose. I love that. Almost all of the book was written that summer with some changes in that fall. As far as what was most difficult, probably finding a publisher. I have to go get cat food now. I told my girlfriend "i'll stop being selfish now." She said "okay."


RK: Kundera, again in one of his essay-books, says the great and true novelist, in order to be a novelist, goes through an anti-lyric conversion (Lyricist meaning, I think, "I-centered." Lyricists being poets.) after which, Kundera argues, he/she is able to describe things as they are. Joyce hit on this also, famously, when he describes the writer as being off to the side paring his fingernails. But Joyce also, I think, suggested his wife take on a lover so that he could feel extreme jealousy and be able then, presumably, to write about it. In the middle of Light Boxes you've made a strange and wonderful little section where you list great artists who've channeled sadness into great works of art (fantasy worlds). In yr novel you manage, I think, to maintain a distance from your subject(s) but I get the feeling that, here at least, you're a lyric-novelist, not a novelist the way Kundera describes him/her. Am I right or wrong or both? Or kind of? Any thoughts, response, to the above, general or specific, would be appreciated.


SJ: I'm twenty eight years old and I started writing when I was 18. For the first few years all I wrote was poetry. Really really bad poetry. I was into Bukowski and Hemingway (I went through a period where I read all of his books) and I had this really lame macho thing going. All the writers I looked up to were these "manly" drunks writing about women and drinking and how shitty life was. Now, that's okay, there is a lot of that kind of writing that is good or interesting or fun, but the thing is, I'm a skinny white kid from a middle/upper class family who was just going off to a private liberal arts college. It was bullshit what I was writing. I'm probably not answering you question but it's okay. I knew I wanted to write something more and then did bad short stories like Raymond Carver knock-offs. I went through this whole period of copying the "realists." I don't know why. Eventually, and this is just in the last two years or so, I started really exploring my imagination. I have a good imagination and I wasn't really using it. Things just started to come together for me in terms of my writing and feeling comfortable with myself. I let poetry back in that I was pushing out before (an example being Anne Sexton). Does this even come close to answering your question? I think what I wanted to say was that LIGHT BOXES contains a lot of poetry. It's poetic in a sense.


RK: One of the things that I really like about Light Boxes is that you're not afraid to risk being sentimental. "Precious" even. And in fact there are many moments and gestures in Light Boxes that are just flat sentimental. But you counterbalance these sweet, delicate moments (often very beautiful too, I must add) that on their own, strung together, could create a gooey effect, with brutal and cold hardnesses. Roughnesses. And by this I mean things like the wonderful and, to me, absolutely essential character of Caldor Clemens. Or the brutal and messy way February is finally disposed of-- completely unlike the stylized, almost sweet, way in which this is envisioned. And all in all, this makes for a great mix. The writing culture (or gestapo-- workshops, etc) has lots of rules. Like you shouldn't mix metaphors. Like you shouldn't use the same word in close proximity to itself. (I'm not, of course, talking about prepositions, articles, etc, here). Use synonyms instead, it says. This, of course, is bullshit. Lots of terrible writing comes from breaking (or being ignorant of) these types of "rules" but they can be broken (and often are) to great effect. How, though, would you respond to critics who might feel that some of Light Boxes is too "precious" or "cutesy?" And yr thoughts, please, on what I've noted above: re rules, etc.

SJ: This is a really good question. I think the sentimental feel and being precious is really important to the story and all of my writing. I think this comes from liking children's stories and fairy tales. If critics feel that some of my book is too "precious" or "cutesy" that's fine with me. I actually like that. I think those things need to be in more books. I also think LIGHT BOXES has some really strange and dark scenes, so yeah, when you balance it with the more sentimental lines, it kind of works. You kind of get this breather. One thing I always see in "experimental" books is all these wonderful lines and bizarre images and it's really great, but it just keeps going. There are books that are just flat like this. I don't want to name any books specifically, but sometimes I wonder where the heart is. One writer that really balances the precious with the imaginative and strange is Jesse Ball. I've learned a lot from his two books on that front. As far as your mention of the "writing culture" and workshops I don't really care that much about that. I've done workshops before, one with Lydia Davis, and I didn't really learn anything from it. It pretty much just depressed me. A workshop would probably destroy my book. It would leave with little broken legs and a bloody nose. Poor little Light Boxes. See, I'm being cutesy there.


RK: Calvino and Garcia Marquez are two of the authors you list as having channeled sadness into fantasy worlds. Those guys, and their like, seem, quite obviously, to have influenced you, and to a great extent. Calvino's story "The Distance of the Moon" is similar in many regards to "Light Boxes" and when the hot tea from Selah's dropped tea cup burns "a path through the snow from our front door and down into the town" and then, immediately after (though at the start of the next section/chapter) Bianca is found I thought of how the blood from a dead character in One Hundred Years of Solitude curls its way through the streets of Macondo, up stairs, into the Buendia house, etc. I know the influence is obvious, and acknowledged, but can you please humour me and talk about it a bit. And if you're in the mood (and the cat's not hungry and your girlfriend's not around, or sleeping perhaps, and you're feeling good and selfish) tell us about other authors, of this sort or different, that you've admired and learned from. And how also you've broken away from their example.


SJ: 100 Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books of all time. I think that book really changed me, and I think a lot of the tone of LIGHT BOXES comes from Marquez. I remember reading that book and just being blown away. It was like someone poured lava into my hands but I could hold the lava. After I read that book I wrote the beginning to LIGHT BOXES. So the influence was great. Something happened to my brain, connections were made. It's funny you mention the Calvino story because that was also a big influence. Sometimes I think he's arrogant, but his imagination is unmatched. From Calvino, I learned how brave his imagination was, and that it was okay to write a book like LIGHT BOXES. I mean, in "Distance of the Moon" he has characters in a row boat going out in the sea to where the moon is so close that they lift ladders to the moon and climb up and onto the moon. It's incredible. It's mind blowing. I wanted to write something like that. I wanted to install that sense of imagination and vertigo and surprise but make it my own and I think I've done that successfully. I think authors like Calvino and Marquez just allowed me to more imaginative, which is one of my strengths, that before reading them I wasn't using properly. As far as breaking away from their examples, I think that was just a matter of staying true to myself and my personality and what I was comfortable with. So in comes the playfulness, the short chapters, some of the lyricism, etc.



RK: We talked about how Light Boxes is both dark and sentimental. I'd like now to talk about "humor." There were some moments in the book that I thought were absolutely hilarious-- strange off-beat really-damned-funny sort of funny. One example's an early scene with the children and the owls: "Now if you don't sir we are much enjoying ourselves by playing with these owls." These morsels of humor, for me, are brilliant and I'd love to see more. Is this something you're just now getting into your writing? (it doesn't seem to fit in with the brief writing synopsis you gave above). And can we expect more of this in the future. Any general thoughts on humor,etc, also appreciated.


SJ: I never really thought about the humor aspect of the book. I think there are a few kind of funny moments, but I never laughed out loud while writing those scenes. I was probably just having fun. I think Caldor Clemens is a ridiculous and humorous character. Fugue State is putting out my next book and there are some funny moments in that, but nothing major. The moments are probably more dreamy and strange than humorous. I think there are many moments in LIGHT BOXES that are light and kind of playful so maybe that's where some of the humor comes from. Most of these moments would probably just provoke a small smile for the reader. A little sense of delight and wonder. Humor is probably one of the hardest things to write. To actually really be funny in a piece is very difficult. At least I think so.


RK: Where do the priests go? Going through the manuscript for the 2nd time I wrote several times in the margins of early pages of the book: so, where do the priests go? I might guess that the priests disappear because the book moves into greater imaginative territory of making, destroying, abducting, etc. And here perhaps priests are nothing. But talking like this makes me feel like I'm a teacher explaining things. I might also say the priests are a casualty, among others, of the organic (your word) form of the book. That is to say the book just sorts of grows into a place that does not include priests. Can you tell me more about these priests and where they've gone? Use this space, if you want (I'd really love you to), to play a little more Light Boxes make-believe and tell us where the priests are.


SJ: The priests are a complete creation by February and February controlled them. So once the demise of February comes to, the priests disappear. They perish with the old town and everything that February created. If I was to venture back into the old town with February and the priests, I'd envision the priests living in the woods in a kind of elaborate tree fort, playing games with birds and each night huddling around a fire and writing out a report of the days activities. They would experience great levels of happiness during the day when they walked from tree to tree and feel severe sadness at night when everything was quiet and cold.


And, Three for the Road:

RK: Tea or Coffee?

SJ: Coffee.



RK: Palm trees or Thorn Trees?

SJ: Thorn Trees.



RK: Cum, shit, spit or blood?

SJ: Cum.