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MAPOFEST 2013

pokey mama — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:56:34 +0000

Somewhat appropriately (or ominously), the venue for this year’s MaPoFest is Salem, MA, notorious for its history of dunking any citizens suspected of being…different. What better place for a bunch of poets to gather?

Lots of great readings, workshops and music will be going on, including the Boston Typewriter Orchestra (going to that!)

I’m taking part in two events Saturday, May 4:

New Books Reading

with Aimee Sands, Jennifer Barber, Howard Faerstein, Annie Finch

Amy Dryansky, Steven Cramer & Michael Cantor

12-1:30

Omen (really, that’s the name of the venue!)

184 Essex St.

&

Our Side of the Pond

a reading by poets publishing with the Irish Press, Salmon Poetry–

with Lori Desrosiers, Amy Dryansky, Mary Pinard, Valerie Duff

Aimee Sands & Mary O’Donoghue

1:30 – 2:30

Hawthorne Hotel Library

Hope to see you there! (No dunking)

Sex and drugs and rock 'n roll - hold the drugs, side order of poetry: the John W. Sexton Interview

Bob Neilson — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:11:02 +0000

John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and is the author of four poetry collections: The Prince’s Brief Career, (Cairn Mountain Press, 1995), Shadows Bloom / Scáthanna Faoi Bhláth, a book of haiku with translations into Irish by Gabriel Rosenstock (Doghouse, 2004), Vortex (Doghouse, 2005), and Petit Mal (Revival Press, 2009). He also created and wrote The Ivory Tower for RTÉ radio, which ran to over one hundred half-hour episodes from 1999 to 2002. Two novels based on the characters from this series have been published by the O’Brien Press: The Johnny Coffin Diaries and Johnny Coffin School-Dazed, which have been translated into both Italian and Serbian. He is also the blog poet Jack Brae Curtingstall. He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award and his poem The Green Owl won the Listowel Poetry Prize 2007. In 2007 he was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. His fifth collection, The Offspring of the Moon, is due from Salmon Poetry in spring 2013.

Tell me one little known fact about John W. Sexton.

I suppose I could tell you a few things that would make me look both marvellous and intellectually credible, but most interviews are full of that sort of stuff. So I’ll just trust you to give me the opportunity to make myself look marvellous later on. Not many people might know that in 2001 I appeared on RTE’s Children’s TV show The Den, where I
exchanged jibes with Dustin the Turkey; and it was the considered opinion of viewers to the programme that it was one of the few occasions in which Dustin was outsmarted. However, I think I may have gotten lucky. At the time of the interview I still had young children and as a result I’d actually previously seen the show; that meant I was forewarned as to what to expect. It’s a rule in this business that you should never appear on the same show as a puppet. The reason for this is simple, for there are only two types of puppet: puppets that are complete bastards or puppets that are operated by complete bastards. It came about because I’d been walked into the programme by my publisher, in an attempt to publicise my first novel; under normal circumstances I would have avoided such a gig, but in this instance it would have been too awkward to have backed down. As it turned out, everything went well, but that was only because both the bastard of a puppet and the bastard behind the bastard of a puppet decided they kind of liked me. Getting them to the actual point where they liked me though, on live TV, was a bit of a challenge.

I know you were born in England but I get the impression that you feel 100% Irish. Tell me about that.

I don’t feel 100% Irish, I am 100% Irish. I don’t recognise the term second-generation Irish. Simply being born in Ireland doesn’t make you Irish. What makes you anything is a combination of genetic factors combined with cultural upbringing. My parents left Ireland merely because there was no future for them here. They did not consider themselves non-Irish once they left its shores however. They took their Irish identity with them and passed it on to me and my brothers. All my cousins in England were Irish, the neighbours were either Irish or Jamaican, half the school teachers in my London schools were Irish, most of the congregation in our local Catholic churches were Irish and all the priests were Irish. I have an old school photograph taken of my class in junior school. I’m in second class and the photograph was taken in a North London Protestant school in the early 1960’s. There was no room in the local Catholic school at that time and a new school was in the process of being built. There are about twenty-two kids in the class. Not all of them were Irish, that’s not what I’m about to say. Only four of us were Irish. Of the rest, there was a combination of Indian, Pakistani, Jamaican, Nigerian, Kenyan, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, and both Greek and Turkish Cypriot. There was only one English pupil and that was a boy. There was no English girl in that class. The boy’s name was Colin. There was no English upbringing in England in the 1960’s, unless you happened to live in the East End of London! All those kids in that class, including us Irish, were brought up within our own cultures and were given a strong and urgent sense of personal identity. Mine was Irish. Every year of our childhoods we came home to Ireland for the full summer holidays. We called it “coming home” and that’s what it was for us. When I came home permanently to live in Ireland as an adult at the beginning of the 1980’s I was shocked at how few people knew who the fuck Pádraic Ó Conaire was, or how few knew anything of the work of W. B. Yeats beyond the few poems they learnt by rote in school; how few had actually read anything by Joyce; at how little most of them knew about Irish history beyond the narrow political hagiographies. Being born outside my country I had made it my business to learn as much about it and its culture as I could; but when I got home to Ireland at that time I had barely anyone to talk to about it. They simply didn’t know, or else weren’t particularly interested to find out. But I did notice that many of them felt somehow superior to me because they were born here and I was a mere blow-in. But let me tell you this: during the IRA campaign in England, none of us London-born Irish denied our Irishness. We never condoned the mindless killing, but we never denied our country and we openly declared our pride in our history, our literary heritage, and our culture. We did that in a country that looked upon us with suspicion and sometimes with a sneering superiority, but it didn’t intimidate us into denying our origins. So no, I don’t feel Irish; I am Irish. I was born Irish and then I made an effort at consolidating that identity. Feeling has only a little to do with it; it’s a complete state of being. All cultural identity is like that. And it’s important to realize that fact as well. Because I was reared in a multi-cultural environment, being neighbours with individuals from other cultures but ones who had a similar pride in their cultures as we had in ours, I came to respect and take an interest in other cultural viewpoints. This is where my interest in European and Black literature came from. In London I not only sought out my own culture, but other cultures too. Not far from where I lived, just a few stops on the bus, was the New Beacon Bookshop in Stroud Green, where you could buy any book by any Black writer from any part of the world. In Manor House there was BOOK MARX, the Marxist bookshop, where you could get books on Communism and Irish Political History. Down the road from it was an Anarchist Bookshop where you could just about get anything, even arrested. I frequented all of them. Identity starts inside yourself; but if you’re wise you will go outside of yourself to find ways of enhancing it with new ideas. That was my upbringing.

So, despite being English… Only kidding. You stress the multi-culturalism of your upbringing. How did that compare to the Ireland you returned to in the eighties?

I came back home to a country not only in recession, but one that was politically and culturally reactionary. To compound my problems I had relocated to south Kerry and in those days it really was a backwater. The only non-National inhabitants in the whole of Kerry (but “foreigners” was the word used at the time to describe them) were two black Americans and one Turk, all three of whom had been brought over to play for some dumb-arse basketball team in Tralee. People would gawk at them in the street as if they had arrived from Venus in a cloud of green steam. It was fucking ridiculous. The nearest bookshop of any quality at that time was to be found two hours away in Cork city. I had come home with notions of committing myself to poetry and short fiction, but one of the most essential seedbeds for such an ambition is to have a constant flow of new reading material. Nowadays it would be difficult for younger readers to comprehend how this could have been a problem, but this was pre-internet. The only reading matter available back then was in printed form. Not only was the nearest bookshop so far away, but when you got to it there was nothing left-field or unusual to be had. In London I’d been used to buying individual Thomas Pynchon short stories (long before he’d consented to a paperback collection) in bootlegged chapbooks from the wire racks in the alternative bookstores. I was in the habit of strolling in and buying American science fiction journals like Fantastic (edited in those days by Ted White) and The Journal of Fantasy and Science Fiction (with Ed Ferman at the helm); I was used to buying poetry journals like Ambit and Stand straight off the shelves whenever I had the money; I even regularly bought Spare Rib, a feminist journal aimed solely at women, because it was the home of some amazing critical writing. Here in Kerry, however, there was no access to anything like that and nothing home-grown that I could find. And you must understand, I was far too poor to be able to take out a subscription for anything. I was totally dependent on what I could buy straight off the shelf. At that time also there was no current Irish literary journal that I could get any access to; they were to come a few years later, (like Tracks, edited by John F Deane and Jack Harte; and Stet, edited by Thomas McCarthy). But those later journals lasted but a few issues and then were gone, so the wait for them to arrive was doubly bitter. The only thing that saved my sanity was the daily newspaper The Irish Press. Every week, under the banner of NEW IRISH WRITING, they featured a full broadsheet page devoted entirely to short fiction and poetry. The editor, David Marcus, had made it a condition when he took up the post that the page would carry no advertising – every single word was devoted to new literary pieces. But the environment otherwise was oppressive compared to what I was used to in London. On every street corner in Killarney it seemed to me you’d find groups of nuns and priests, like they were in fucking gangs. I’d never seen so many priests in the one place in all my life, and the people appeared to worship their every idiotic utterance. It was as if I had arrived in Hell. Having said that, Hell was Ireland, so I was determined to stick it out. My plan was to do the reverse of Joyce and Beckett, and to give the country a shot. I was initially unemployed here for nearly three months and had no access to the dole. I had been wrongly advised in England that I could just sign on after I’d arrived here; but in Kenmare the dole officer had the position as an agent, and he was a foul, miserable creature who delighted in making “foreigners” beg. He told me to my face that I was nothing but an “English Hippy” and that I’d get no money from him. When my savings were just about depleted I landed a job in Killarney, working in a Department Store. I stayed there for eleven miserable years, privately learning and plying my craft in the evenings and weekends, balancing the few acceptances from journals with the countless rejections. I was isolated, totally devoid of any contact with other writers; yet I was constantly writing, devoted absolutely to the writer’s life. In my mind there was a kingdom comprised of nothing but poetry and fiction, and I retreated there and learnt how to live in it.

Did you start writing while you were still living in England?

I was nineteen when I began to seriously desire to write and be published. My original ambitions at that time lay largely with fiction, even though I was already writing poetry and considered myself a poet. At that time I’d been reading a lot of science fiction and came to think that the realm of the fantastic was a better way to express ideas. Even in mainstream literature there appeared to be a trend that confirmed this, for I was also reading Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Borges, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter and Beckett, all of whom seemed to work aspects of the fantastic into what they did. Ballard’s short fiction, especially, had an elevated hallucinatory effect in terms of how he seemed to treat time and space in a psychological way. He brought you inside his fictions in such a subjective, interactive way that was truly subversive; and all this was achieved largely through the manipulation of language. When I read that Ballard had said that “science fiction is the poetry of the 20^th century” I bought completely into the idea. So, although I was writing fiction I still saw it as part of the poet’s vocation. This is when I discovered the short fictions of Harlan Ellison, who frequently experimented with new ways of writing stories, many of which to me seemed to mimic techniques found in poetry, from repetitive patterning to prose poetry to concrete design of the page. At that time I was regularly buying the science fiction journals and also a few British literary journals, the most exciting of which was Ambit. Ambit, having Ballard on the editorial board, frequently featured writers who were card-carrying fabulists, so the concept of a literature of the fantastic was all-pervasive in what I was then reading. All these journals, however, looked very daunting in terms of sending off work to. At first I decided to try to get a name for myself and also make some money by trying a regular market that might be a bit more accessible. Of course, to the beginning writer all markets are equally inaccessible, but I didn’t realise that at the time. Every day of the week, from Monday to Saturday, there was a new short story featured in a daily newspaper called the London Evening News. We got that at home every evening and so I began to think this was a market I could try. The stories that were featured were only a thousand words maximum and the market was opened to everyone. Professional writers could have a story there on one day, and for the very next you’d have a story by some ordinary person. If it was somebody’s first publication, the paper would mention that, so the whole thing seemed extremely democratic. So, anyway, that was the first market I aimed for. Firstly, it was a good one to try to write to, because I immediately discovered how difficult it was to fit a complete story, with character and motivation and a solid plot, into a mere thousand words. It suddenly dawned on me that a thousand words wasn’t easy because of being few, but was actually possibly a more difficult discipline. Writing in that tight format was therefore a perfect beginner’s apprenticeship. Anyway, my first story was a ridiculous piece of nonsense about a man who misses his own funeral. I was nineteen years of age when I slipped it into the post-box. When it was rejected by the Evening News in the space of three days I was crushed; I’m now, however, somewhat relieved. To my credit I acted quite professionally and immediately sent the story out to several other markets, all of which promptly rejected it. I even sent it to the old London Mystery Magazine. They returned the story with a hand-written rejection slip, but the slip itself was a thing of beauty, containing as it did the magazine’s masthead: an enormous Gojira-type dinosaur rearing high over Big Ben, the City of London miniscule beneath him. In the meantime, I was writing other stories. It was a consequence of this continued writing, by which I suppose I was slowly improving and learning, that I was able after a few months to see why my first story was so terrible. With that realisation the story was torn to shreds and binned. I struggled for over a year, accumulating rejection slip after rejection slip and then I became impatient. I decided I’d cheat. Instead of sending my work to journals I thought it smarter to just go straight to a publisher. So I devised a sequence of stories, a kind of prose-poem concoction, and sent this off to a publisher. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a big hit at this time, so that was the kind of effect I was aiming for. Anyway, the book went off and began to collect rejections. Many of these were actually letters; all of them encouraging. Hodder & Stoughton told me they loved the book but that it had no discernible market that they could see. Allison and Busby said the same. The letter from the last was so encouraging that I did something that you should never do: I phoned the publisher. I had a lovely chat for about ten minutes with Clive Allison who advised me to break the book up and send it to journals. He said that no publisher was in a position to publish something like that from a writer with no publishing constituency and he told me I needed to get one. When I rather naively told him that I’d just sent out a collection of poems that had no publishing credits he was horrified. “Young man,” he said, “this isn’t the way it’s done; there are simply no short-cuts. Look, let me tell you, I have a second novel on my desk here from Ishmael Reed and it’s absolutely fantastic. But if it’s anything like his last one, which was also fantastic, then it won’t sell. I have no choice but to send it back to his agent in the States but I don’t want to. I will, though. We haven’t a bob here at the moment, and I need something that might actually at least get back the money I’ll have to spend on it.” The chance of an unknown writer having such a helpful conversation today with a publisher is probably nil. Regardless of the sound advice, I ignored it all and continued to send out my two books, both of which came back to me with depressing regularity. I began to dread the sound of the manuscripts falling onto the landing from the letterbox. They each fell like a dead lump, more like a small corpse, and I began to refer to each book as “the lump”. Suddenly it all seemed very negative. You could tell immediately that the work was returned because the envelope was obviously bulked up with your manuscript. In those days you couldn’t send “copies”. Only original manuscripts, because everything was done by typewriter and the copies were created by the use of carbon paper, so they were a blurred blue. Many magazines also prohibited getting photocopies, because in those days they weren’t much better either, often being blurred and smudged with black photographic ghostly smudges. Typing up a fresh manuscript for each submission was therefore not feasible, so the same one was recycled for every submission. After several rejections it would become not only extremely grubby, but it was also obvious, to anyone reading it, that it’d been round the block and rejected by several previous editors. (I once got a story returned that actually had cigarette burns and ash all through the pages. Either the editor was telling me something, or he smoked a pipe, spluttering embers over everything that came into him!) Unlike the prose sequence, the poetry collection garnered no letters, only cold rejection slips. Nearly a further two years went by and I was writing less and less; all my hopes were riding on these two hopeless books. In the finish I realised that I had become somehow paralysed by them. I looked at them dispassionately and could now see that they were bloody awful. I needed a new approach. My relocation to Ireland was imminent around this time so I thought I’d make a fresh start when I got to Kerry. I packed up all of my books and manuscripts and headed off for a new beginning.

So who was the first poor idiot (have you noticed how close idiot and editor are as words) to actually publish you? If they didn’t pay when was your first sale?

My first published short story was also a sale. As soon as I arrived in Ireland in 1982 I decided to write a story for New Irish Writing, the weekly literary supplement of The Irish Press newspaper. I worked on the story for about eight months. The maximum wordage for a full-page story in The Irish Press was 2,000 words, and I decided I’d use the maximum. My problem was, after the previous years of rejection I realised that my technique was fairly awful; so I had been studying short stories non-stop for about a year, pulling them to pieces to see how they really worked. Listening to theory is a complete waste of time, I had all that anyway and it hadn’t helped one iota in enabling me to write; the only way to do it is to take the story of another writer and rip it apart yourself, then you can see the living innards of it and you’ll soon get the idea of how it ticks. By this stage I’d analysed hundreds of stories in this way and I was beginning to get a real feel for it. I was yet to write a successful one of my own, however. Anyway, for my new task in hand I started by constructing a plot and then I laid it out on a sheet of paper. Once that was done I started it write it up. It was slow work, and inspiration wasn’t manifesting. I remember once sitting down for a solid two hours, actually writing continuously all that time, but at the end of it I’d written only a single serviceable sentence. I then began to take a hard look at my past writing. All the stories I’d done, including the tentative beginning of a ridiculous novel, were so truly awful that one evening I just put the whole lot into the open fire and watched the pages disappear into flame. It was actually a liberating moment. I felt strangely free, as if now there was no evidence of my past failure. I then reached for my piles and piles of unpublished poems, ready to throw them in too. But as I looked at the poems I realised that there was a lot of fairly good descriptive writing in there that I might be able to recycle for the current story, so I cannibalized some of that material. This was exactly what I needed to get back into the flow of the writing again and the story began to take shape. The writing was still slow, and I did it mainly in the evenings after work, but I always sat down to work on it every day. I went back and forth on it, polishing the sentences, tweaking paragraphs until it worked as fluidly as I could get it. When it was done, all those months later, I sent it off to David Marcus, the Literary Editor at the Press. I was expecting maybe not to hear for months, but I heard within a fortnight. When the envelope came through the letterbox my heart nearly exploded, because I could see that it was a small business envelope with a cellophane panel and the logo of The Irish Press in the corner, and not my entire manuscript being returned. The letter inside thanked me for sending such a strong piece of work and told me that I was being paid 70 Irish punts for it. That was a fortune of money in those days. I sat down and read the letter over and over again; I was like a small child getting his first letter from Santa. There was also a request to send a short biographical note. In the covering letter that I sent with the note I mentioned that I did the odd bit of reviewing “whenever I can get the work”. This of course was a total lie, but it was effectively a calculated attempt at dropping a hint to a literary editor. By prompt return I got a lovely little note from David Marcus asking for a list of my interests, with a promise that he’d do his best to send work my way. He added, however, that he was fairly over-subscribed with fiction reviewers, and suggested that I might stand a better chance if I was prepared to review anything other than fiction. Within three weeks I received a small parcel of books, all poetry, and was asked to write a 600-word notice. I did the review and received the truly princely sum of 40 punts. Over the next 18 months I became one of the paper’s most frequent reviewers, writing on anything from poetry to folklore to comparative religion. I also began to place my own poetry with David on the New Irish Writingpage. I was now earning fairly regular money as a writer, doing reviews and, just as importantly, getting my by-line on the books pages. It wasn’t enough on a regular basis to earn a living by itself, but it boosted my self-confidence and made me feel like a real writer. There was one other writer living near Kenmare at that time, Tomas O Murchadha, who wrote mainly in Irish but also did wonderful lyrical pieces in English for the weekly Arts page of The Cork Examiner. He’d just had a novella published in a collection called Triad, along with James Liddy and Ronit Lentin, which was brought out by The Wolfhound Press. But the thing was, when I was finally introduced to him he began immediately to treat me as an equal, and I realised that in a relatively short time I’d actually managed to gain a local reputation as “a writer”.

I feel you are primarily a poet (argue this one if you feel like it) but one that also works in prose. Would I be correct in thinking that prose is where the money (and therefore the profession) might lie?

I think that’s a fair description because poetry is hardly ever a profession, it’s more a calling. Some might even consider it an affliction, (and some poets actually do). I would consider poetry my vocation, but writing my profession. However, a calling still demands full professional standards of craft. I would also like to add that being a poet still requires the ability to construct coherent and elegant sentences; the fundamental elements of good prose-practice are essential before you can even dream to imagine you should be writing poetry. The only substantial money, generally speaking, to be earned from poetry is from bursaries and prizes, and every poet under the sun is angling for those. Poetry collections do not earn advances or any kind of payments for most poets. Prose, on the other hand, can earn money. Writing fact or fiction books, writing for radio or television, writing any kind of saleable prose, is really where the potential income is. Outside of any direct income from writing poetry, a poet’s other earnings will be fairly minimal. Fees for festival readings are generally quite small, and hundreds of poets are jostling for such work in the same marketplace. The best income potential for poets outside of poetry is usually from teaching, but that can be exhausting and certainly draining of creative energy. But the same is indisputably true, to a large extent, for prose writers as well. Unless you can turn out a book a year, or manage to produce a hot property or a best-selling series, or sell movie rights, then most prose writers are on the same competitive treadmill as the average poet. Foreign-language rights for novels, a few of which I have under my own belt, are usually sold for fairly modest amounts of money, and as glamourous as they may appear on paper the fact remains that short money is always short money. The amounts that most fiction writers earn is generally spent fairly quickly as the figures aren’t large for most of us. Sadly, there’s also a perception out there, certainly in terms of performance and readings, that poets are prepared to do things for free. This notion simply undermines the writer’s value. Contrary to what people might naively imagine, “publicity” isn’t worth much on its own. And as any writer will tell you (and as you know very well yourself from personal experience), selling books at readings and festivals is a hard, sometimes soul-destroying slog. Books sell at such events, if they manage to sell at all, mostly in ones and twos, not by the dozen. But even in teaching, poetry is a fairly hard one to sell. I get a substantial amount of teaching work through the writers-in-schools scheme (which is administered, as it happens, by Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann), but for the majority of it I’m asked by schools to teach plotting and story construction. I feel there is often an unrealistic expectation amongst beginning and younger poets that there is an income stream for them somewhere out beyond the blue ocean. The only thing out beyond the blue ocean is more blue ocean.

Tell me about your career as a poet.

I’m not sure that career is a useful term when talking about poetry. If, as some poets have come to think, poetry is a disease, then the terms “medical history” and “prognosis” are probably more applicable. In that case, as a poet, my medical history is bad and my prognosis is probably even worse. This might seem flippant but it’s actually a far more useful way of looking at the “career path” of the average poet. My first beginnings, with regard to publishing, was when a poem of mine at the age of nearly but not quite nine was pinned to the schoolroom wall, right next to the blackboard, by our teacher Sister Eugenia. The poem was called The Fly and had three four-line rhyming verses, the first two of which I can still remember, but which I have no intention of relating here. What’s interesting is that the metre was a deformed twin of Three Blind Mice, yet was unrecognisable as such because it moved at a different velocity. When I realised that, in much later years, I came to see that I had an innate ear for rhythm and balance. I mention this because this is the first start in the poet’s vocation. We start with an innate gift. Many poets don’t go beyond that point. They settle for the gift; but whereas such an unformed gift might be charming in an eight-year-old, in an adult it is merely childish. The next step is to develop that gift, and at first we tend to do that on our own, without any focussed direction or guidance. We begin to discover things for ourselves and one of the first things we discover is failure. From that point I wrote little verses on into my mid-teens, by which time I was writing impressionistic pieces of condensed prose. At the time I considered these to be poems but my teachers, for whom I submitted them as homework assignments, merely took them as half-formed and unfinished stories and considered me lazy. It was only at the age of sixteen that one of my English teachers, Miss O’Sullivan, began to encourage me. She’d write notes at the end like : “excellent quality, but needs more quantity”. It wasn’t really until I was about twenty, and in a dry patch with my prose, that I began to focus seriously on poems, and even began to send them out. I met with rejection after rejection but during this negative period I began to go back to prose poetry. From that I got the idea of constructing short stories in a similar fashion to the way folktales are structured: in imagistic runs or sections. At this exact moment I began to see a direct relationship between poetry and prose narrative. Of course, although I was forming theories I had neither the ability or the knowledge to apply them in practice and my writing was fairly dismal. Despite this I persevered and continued to send out work, despite accumulating rejections. In those days it was arguably more difficult than it is now because there simply weren’t that many literary and poetry journals out there. In those days you sent to American journals, rarely having much idea about such things as “reading periods”, simply because there were more journals to send to there. However, this is the first level of the writers apprenticeship: perseverance in the face of constant knock-backs. Once I received my first acceptance for a piece of short fiction things began to open up a bit and I started to place more work, but this was more likely due to the fact that my writing was better honed by that stage. Now, though I always considered myself a poet by principal vocation, I always endeavoured to keep my short fiction and prose in the marketplace, and this always earned a modest, if somewhat sporadic income. Maintaining this presence in prose was actually essential to my well-being as a poet, because it allowed me to hold my head up with proof that I was a published writer. Just on the eve of me throwing caution to the wind at the beginning of 1994, and striking out to write full-time (which I’ve been managing to do, precariously, ever since), I had obtained a commission to write a children’s serial for a weekly Cork newspaper, The Muskerry Leader. In the space of thirty-seven weeks, by weekly instalment, I produced a 55,000-word children’s fantasy novel called The Boy Who Fell Into The Hedge. Although seemingly modest now, at the time I received 10 Irish punts a week for each chapter, which garnered me a sum total of 370 pounds. I received this payment essentially on publication of the last chapter, but by the standards of the day that was more than most writers were getting from Irish publishers as an advance on a published novel! During this period, from October 1993 to July 1994, I earned something just short of 400 pounds from this single newspaper – for the novel, various short stories and poetry. At that stage I’d been a published writer and poet for ten years, contributing poetry and book reviews on top of it all. In those days I’d been a book reviewer for both The Irish Press and The Catholic Herald, both of which were paying markets. The point I’m making is that in my case, and very much in my mind, the career of poet and paid jobbing-writer went hand-in-hand. Without the self-confidence I acquired as a paid prose writer I would have been unable to manage as well as I did with the constant unpaid slog of being a poet. By the time I began to focus singly on only sending out poetry, (this was late in 1994), I had acquired a publishing cv that was quite impressive by the standards around me. By the late ‘90’s, determined to be more single-minded with poetry, I began to find markets in broadcasting, mainly with RTE’s The Living Word, for which slot I contributed prose poems and which paid quite nicely. Because I was good, and produced good radio, the producer took me on as a regular. Because radio is a national medium this increased my profile as a writer and also gave me a wider audience. This led to other work on radio but also to my radio serial and hence to the children’s novels. With the increase in poetry credits and with the publication of a book or two, I was able to acquire a place on the Writers-in-Schools scheme and eventually, through pure slog and determination, a regular income through teaching that could keep the bills paid. However, and this is the essential point, all those income streams, from RTE to local papers to work-shopping and working in schools, earned money that was largely for anything but poetry. But the regular income gave me the time to spend writing and submitting poetry. Most poets do not earn an income directly from their craft; and if they intend to earn a living from writing then they must write other things as well as poetry. By the mid and late Noughties I was picking up favourable reviews and in 2007 was granted a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry. This was possibly the most important point at that stage in my career as a poet, because it indicated a vote of credibility from the field. Thus today my standing as a poet is this: I have no regular wage, no pension, no savings, no discernible idea of what the future will bring, but I have a thirty-plus-year career behind me as a published poet and writer and the burden that today and tomorrow and the day after I must continue to write.

If prose is where the money was, tell me about how that area of your work developed.

Essentially a writer learns to follow the best possibilities as they arise and that’s more or less what happened to me. But in the middle of all the possibilities there will always be periods where work suddenly dries up. It’s happened to me in the past and generally speaking it’s a common cycle that I think most writers are familiar with. And when the income streams don’t actually dry up, there are other factors that will rear their heads, such as competition from other writers trying to squeeze into an already overcrowded market. One must always recognise, of course, that before they squeezed in on you, that you had squeezed in on somebody else. Things can also be compounded simply by a writer getting tired or creatively burnt out from doing the same thing for far too long. In the late eighties I managed to survive both changes of editorial staff and the presence of newer, fresher writers, and keep a hold of the reviewing work I was getting at The Irish Press. It was a constant battle and the strain of that can be draining in itself. But then The Irish Press went into receivership and that particular golden goose was plucked and gone. I cast around in the following years and usually got something, like that brief but regular work from The Muskerry Leader, but the money was always small. The secret is to try and land something where the money is good and where there’s no direct competition so that you can stay in employment for as long as possible. From the late eighties to the late nineties I lurched from one cackling goose to another, never quite getting a golden egg, but sometimes a silver one, and oftentimes just a fistful of feathers. Then, in 1998 I shared a poetry reading in Killarney with the poet Mary O’Malley. This was on a Friday and I thought that things had gone well and that I’d left a good account of myself, but really nothing more than that. A few days later, at the beginning of the following week, I received a phone call out of the blue from a producer in the regional Waterford studios of RTE, by the name of Jacqui Corcoran. Jacqui said that my name had been mentioned to her by Mary O’Malley who, after reading with me on the Friday, felt that I would be very good bet for contributing and reading radio pieces. It just so happened that Jacqui was at that time the producer for The Living Word, which broadcasts a two-minute radio talk each weekday. Essentially a writer is expected to write five two-minute talks, usually of a contemplative nature, and then read them for broadcast on a given week. I’m quite fond of writing short lyrical pieces and took to it very easily. Jacqui also took to my writing and my style of reading and gave me regular work for the programme for several months. At that time my two sons were very young, and my youngest son was at that phase where young children are always asking strange and even sometimes profound questions, so a lot of my pieces were about these conversations and even sometimes simply reminiscences of my own childhood. The pieces apparently went down very well with the audience, who thankfully responded by sending in their responses. Anyway, some months into this Jacqui was charged with getting together a radio programme for children. She was kind of lumbered with the job I think, as all the other RTE producers with clout expressed no enthusiasm for the project themselves. Jacqui’s dilemma was that she didn’t really know any children’s writers as such and she needed to turn something round very quickly, so she phoned me up and asked me, largely on the strength of my childhood pieces for The Living Word, if I’d be interested. I said yes without hesitation. In taking this on I set out three goals for myself: to write a classic radio show; to keep myself in employment for as long as possible; and to try to somehow turn all of this into a book deal. Written down like that, in cold print, such ambitions look big-headed and hopelessly aspirational, but it’s only through ambitions that we can ever hope to be ambitious, and I always try to set myself high goals whenever I get a fecund opportunity. And this opportunity, to write a radio show all on my own, seemed pregnant with possibility. The resultant show, a comedy science fiction drama called The Ivory Tower, garnered not only a cult following, but also a regular listenership and good reviews. I realised very early on that our success would lie not only in appealing to children, but also to adults. My intention therefore was to maximise our audience as much as possible; in order to achieve this I wrote scripts that worked on two levels. On one level they spoke directly to young kids and teens, but at another lever they also addressed themselves to adults. After only the seventh episode was aired on radio we received a glowing review from Tom Widger in the Sunday Tribune, who even took the unusual step of naming the scriptwriter by name, which of course was me. Initially we were told that we would have ten episodes, but within a few weeks we were ordered to take the show up to Christmas and stretch it to sixteen. Before that first run was finished we were also firmly informed to prepare to come back after the Christmas break with a new season. That second season ran to thirty-six episodes. In the finish we went for over two years and ran to four seasons, with a total of 103 half-hour episodes, all of them scripted by myself. This amounts to over fifty hours of radio-time and is a record for Irish radio for a single show of its type. By the time we got to the second season the buzz went round that this wasn’t just a kid’s show and we had an extensive write-up in The Evening Herald where Philip Nolan called us “Irish Radio’s most subversive programme”. By the third season I was contributing, through Jacqui’s producership, to other radio work and earning a steady income. On the foot of the series, as I had initially planned, I managed to secure a book deal with The O’Brien Press and two novels were issued over the next eighteen months. Once the radio show dried up, and quite frankly I couldn’t have kept going for another season at the quality of script I’d been attempting to turn out, other work began to emerge on the back of the show itself and also following on from the novels. From this point I began to work in schools, giving talks and then writing workshops, and that eventually evolved into the position I find myself in today, spending much of my time teaching creative writing and editing anthologies of writing by teenage students, such as annual The Unfinished Book and the Graphic Novel projects, facilitated in Cork City by the Arts Office there and also by Cork City Library.

With all that going on how did you decide to concentrate on poetry - or what decided for you?

Writers who are desperate for work can never quite understand why writers who are constantly in demand complain so much about their lot. Certainly when nobody was knocking upon my own door did I ever imagine that plenty of work could, at some crucial stage, be a negative thing rather than a positive one. However, over the years, being one of the few lucky writers whose phone will often ring, I have come to understand only too well some of the paradoxes and illusions associated with being in demand. My own experience with the initial success of the radio show and the children’s novels is a case in point. It is often remarked upon that working in children’s fiction can be something of a poisoned chalice, and my own experience really proved that to be very true. In the first eighteen months following the launch of the children’s novels, boosted by the popularity of the radio show, I was offered work that hadn’t previously been open to me, but this consisted largely of library visits where I’d give an hour’s talk to classes from a local national school. This work was relatively well-paid and was fairly frequent, but no writer really sets out to do this kind of thing as an ultimate aim, it’s always seen as a first step onto work that’s more satisfying. Because I was very good at what I did, and because word spread from teacher to teacher, I began to get invites to visit the schools themselves and to teach in a schoolroom setting. This kind of work was far more satisfying to do by comparison, so the classroom gigs began to replace the library work. At that time I was already on the Writers-In-Schools list that’s administered by Poetry Ireland, so this ensured that I was paid for my work at professional and decent rates. During this period I was also contacted by various Arts and Literary Festivals in order to facilitate workshops for children and young writers. Of course, because writing for children wasn’t my principal calling, and was really only something I’d gotten into in order to keep food in the larder and pay the bills, I also had the hope that this new exposure would also give me opportunities to push my poetry and adult writing as well. Unfortunately, the former proved to be an obstacle to the latter. Literary festivals were very happy to have me give children’s readings and workshops but were reluctant to offer me anything else. This wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been compounded by a common prejudice that children’s writers often encounter, which is usually revealed by phrases like “well, so-and-so is a real poet, who writes for adults” or “but you only write for children really, don’t you?”; after a while you begin to get the very strong suspicion that you’re not really respected and have only been brought into the festival so that no parent can complain that their children are being discriminated against by having nothing provided for them. Faced with this kind of nonsense, children’s writers quite understandably begin to feel a bit demeaned. The other very real problem with being on the children’s programme of any festival is that the children’s writers often feel segregated from the other writers. After a while many children’s writers, especially those who are accomplished and widely published in other areas, begin to resent this exclusion. After about three years of having to deal with this kind of thing I just felt I had to cut down on the children’s events and get back to writing and publishing poetry. Trying to get a foothold on the adult reading circuit proved difficult at first, because instead of opening doors the children’s work had often caused the doorkeepers to bolt the doors on me on the grounds that I was “really just another children’s writer”. Nowadays I ten d to keep the children’s writing very much in the background but this causes an added difficulty because the children’s writing earns money, whereas poetry rarely does. My principal vocation however, my true calling as a writer, is in poetry; so I dedicate myself to that no matter what. At the moment my principal income comes from teaching and editing writing projects, mainly in secondary schools or with groups of teen writers; but, although many say that I am a born teacher by both instinct and flair, teaching is not my vocation and never can be. I am a poet.

Is there a model whereby poets could make a living in the modern world - as the commercial, capitalist model just doesn’t work for poetry?

No. Any idea that a poet can access income-streams other than teaching (which becomes increasingly gruelling the more you do it) is naïve. Poetry is, for the most part, a vocation. Its usefulness, being emotional and metaphysical, is not easily demonstrated, so no one is really prepared to pay for it. In ancient times, when poets told fortunes and could transform themselves into animals and birds, poetry was respected far more. These days poets are seen largely as drunkards and pains in the arse; we’re greatly underappreciated. Until poets relearn the skills of charming away evil and foretelling destiny, the demand for them will wither. Far too much contemporary poetry is ordinary, far too many poets are mundane; the call of poetry is now seen as something open to everyone. With everyone doing it there is no essential alchemy imbuing it with power, and therefore no pressing need for poets anymore. And now, in a bankrupt world economy, there is no financial backup. The only model for poets is the one where we step off the edge of a building. All we can do these days is simply fall, but the total abandonment in which we do so often fills others with awe or surprise. What we do now is largely intangible; we have once more become magicians, true Fools of the Tarot. Unable to earn a living all we can do is become slaves to our obsession with words. First there is language; then all else will follow.

What other media – apart from those you work in – give you inspiration?

Art, especially painting, has been an inspiration and I often look to artwork, even photographs, for ideas. When I was younger it was the fusion of story and artwork in American comic books that fuelled my imagination and I like to think that this was the seed that led to the focus on imagery in my own work. I’ve been told that my writing is extremely visual and I believe that the image is central to poetry. Image is the source of metaphor. When I was around nine I came across Marvel comic books for the first time and was exposed to the visual story-telling of Jack Kirby in particular. His visionary and extrapolative visualisation of story is something that has stayed with me. But art inspired me in another way as well, and that was in the realisation that the image could be a vehicle for wit and concept. Abstraction doesn’t really propel ideas, just mires them in processes of circular and pointless, endless thinking; but the image can capture many ideas all at once and resonate through different levels simultaneously. So artwork, the visual image, is a major foundation for me.

So where does the future lie for John W. Sexton?

As Ireland, in line with most of the world, is currently struggling with a bankrupt economy, it is unlikely that arts funding for either poetry or for the continuance of the Writers-In-Schools Scheme will continue much more into the future. This will leave most of us quite seriously adrift but our only recourse is to continue writing regardless. In March of next year my fifth poetry collection, The Offspring of the Moon, will be published by Salmon, and that impending event is something I’ll be holding up as a lamp for the darkness. In the meantime I’ll be doing what every poet does and will simply be writing new poems and sending them off to literary magazines. Yesterday I received an acceptance from an American poetry journal which will pay me twenty dollars. Hardly enough to keep me in luxury, but it’s more than I’ve received for any of the other poems I’ve placed in journals over the past few weeks. The payment for poetry is usually nil and the future for most poets is generally bleak even at the best of times. I can’t imagine anything changing in that regard but, paradoxically, that’s the normality of the poet’s life; so the future can truly be said to be stable. That’s the poet’s lot, and that’s about it.

What about a change of career to rock star?

Funny you should bring that up. In 1998, just a short while before my fortieth birthday, I got introduced to the British guitarist and Stranglers frontman, Hugh Cornwell. At that time we had both been approached, separately, by Candy Records with a view to taking part in an arts projects they were intending to undertake with independent art publishers Booth-Clibborn. The idea, essentially, was to get writers and artists to collaborate with rock musicians and create tracks for a cd. The cd would be part of a coffee-table arts book that would also contain writing and artwork. It was quite an ambitious project and most of the budget was used up between the rock stars and the artists. It was a modest enough budget and no one was coming away with big money, they were doing it largely because it was interesting, but by the time the money was almost depleted they realized that they had nothing left in the kitty to include writers and poets. Coinciding with this was a fortuitous moment which impacted on me directly. Through some agency (largely just sheer luck) someone at Candy Records had come across my poem “Mantra of the Awoken Powers” and felt this would be eminently suitable for the project. Luckily for me they had contacted me about it fairly early in the proceedings, so the long and the short of it was that I ended up being the only poet, or indeed writer, who got into the finished project. They did feel, for some reason, that my name, John W. Sexton, wasn’t quite rock’n’roll enough, so they asked me if, ahem, I happened to have another name that I could use. I immediately turned my real name into an anagram and said, “you can call me Sex W. Johnston”. What happened next was that they sent the poem to the ex-Stranglers frontman Hugh Cornwell, appended with the name of Sex W. Johnston, and asked him if he liked it enough to turn it into a track. Hugh, I’m happy to report, absolutely loved it. I was hoping at the time that I might get to do the vocals on the track, but Booth-Clibborn were keen to have an artist involved, so they came up with the idea of asking the Irish sculptor Barry Flannagan to render the vocal on the track. Barry, being quite old at the time, was actually perfect for the vocal, because his voice had that unsettling hint of the ancient about it which thus gave an added resonance to the track. When the track had been cut Hugh asked Candy Records what we were going to be called, as he very much felt we should have a name like a band. Candy Records duly phoned me up then and asked me to furnish a name, so, off the top of my head I just said “you can call us Servants of the Vortex”, which I thought was fairly cool. Candy Records then phoned Hugh straight back and said, “Sex wants to call the project “Servants of the Vortex”. Hugh immediately agreed and said he’d send on the fully mastered track. When the track arrived, however, it became immediately apparent that he’d misheard the name, for the track was labelled Serpents of the Vortex. We all felt that was actually better, so we kept that version of the name for the record. I was then drafted in to work on some of the text for the coffee-table book, and so I had a further involvement in the project as a whole. The book and cd were eventually released under the album title of We Love You, and featured most of the British Sensationalist School of British artists, including Tracy Emmin. During this period I met Hugh for the first time, at the Graucho Club in Soho, and we just got on like a house on fire. I then met up with Hugh a few more times after that and on one of the occasions he suggested that we make an entire album together, with myself furnishing the lyrics. I sent him a few dozen poems and bits of text and to my surprise he loved all of the material. About three days after posting him the work he phoned me up one morning and said, “Sex, I’m sitting in the garden reading your poems and my mind is filling with music”. It was from that moment that our collaborative album was really begun. We put the tracks together over a few short months and the album was fairly quick finished. I ended up doing the vocals on the entire thing, which was a great experience. Before the album was completed Hugh turned around and said that he felt we should use a different name for this project, so we came up with The Sons of Shiva, (Shiva being the god of the Cosmic Dance). In the finish we named the album eponymously. Eventually we got signed to Track Records. The album has picked up a cult following over the years but I like to think of it as a sleeper; my hope is that one day it’ll just catch on universally and my pension will be secured! Hugh and myself considered a second album but we both just got caught up in other projects. Hugh is very much like myself and doesn’t like to do the same thing twice, so I suppose we just moved on into other things. A thing we both have in common is that we’re both restless spirits, forever reinventing ourselves through new projects. In recent times I’ve been playing with the idea of a new musical project, but would like to do something that’s more easily portable. Travelling on the road with an entire band is fraught with expense and troubles, so I’m thinking of maybe just collaborating with a dubstep dj or possibly even a bass guitarist, but at the moment that’s just an idea. If the right collaborator turns up then I might do something yet. A second musical project that fuses my poetry and vocals would be quite exciting and I’m in the appropriate frame of mind for that now, but it would all depend of finding the right person to work with.

On a light note, two questions to finish up with: You are on death row convicted of murder (in error) but tomorrow you die. What is your last meal?

I see this as a serious question and will attempt a serious answer. No one should have the power of life and death over anybody else, and I’ve always seen this idea of a last request or a last meal as a sop to the executioner’s and the jailor’s conscience. If I was condemned to die by another’s hand I would in no way enable their excuses for killing me and I would in no way allow them the idea that they had somehow given me a mercy. I would eat no last meal. I would go to death hungry. I may well indeed go there that way yet.

If you were an artist in any other discipline (painter, singer, actor, sculptor etc.) and you were to be a one-hit-wonder, what single piece of art (existing, by another artist) would you be content to have as your legacy?

The only work of art by another artist that I would have any interest in claiming as my own no longer exists, so you’ll simply have to be satisfied with that. No other work of art created before or since that particular piece has been so profound, though it probably lasted but a short time. The piece of art I have in mind was a sculpture, I think that’s the best way to describe it, and it was created by Michelangelo. In his “Lives of the Artists”, Giorgio Visari recorded that the ruler of Florence, Piero de’ Medici, after a great deal of snow fell in Florence, had commanded Michelangelo to make in his courtyard a snowman. The idea of a work of art that is fleeting and destructible, recorded only by hearsay and folk memory, appeals to me greatly. That’s the kind of thing all artists should aspire to, for it transcends the artistic ego. The idea of writing a poem that no one can remember, but at the same time one the effect of which is so memorable that everyone speaks of it through all of subsequent history, enchants me completely.

Next Big Thing

Shannon Ward — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 03:03:04 +0000

Many thanks to Megan Roberts, author of Matters of Record, for tagging me to participate in Next Big Thing, an expanding blog project of author interviews.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

My older sister Chelsea, to whom the book is dedicated, scared the hell out of me when I was little with these ghost stories about a butcher who had built our house, so I guess the idea was planted then. What surprised me was that as I got older, other people around the little town where I grew up began to elaborate on some of her stories: for instance, when I was waiting tables many years later at the Lumberton 68 Family Restaurant, one of my older regulars asked where I lived, and when I told her, she replied, “Oh, the old slaughterhouse. I looked at that place when it was on the market in the ‘80’s. You know the butcher used to drain the blood in that creek?”

So I guess you could say that the collection is part history and part ghost story, though sometimes it’s hard for me to tell those threads apart.

I should also say that the more I looked into the history of the place, the more bizarre the stories got—so much so that they would not all fit in the chapbook. In the full-length collection, readers can expect, in addition to the butcher poems, some poems about an elephant, Helen McGregor, who died while traveling by foot through the area with the circus in 1832.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Hmmm, I think I’d pick Winona Ryder to play my sister. Anthony Hopkins would make an excellent butcher, and Natalie Portman could play the ghost of his wife. For the parents, I would pick Kathy Bates and Jeremy Irons.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

These poems were stitched together with human hair and highway lines in haunted landscapes.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The oldest poem in the collection (“Stray”) is from 2007, and the newest (“Dressing the Hog”) is from 2012. So that makes something like six years. I would add, though, that I did not begin to think in terms of “a manuscript” until around 2009, and it took a couple of years more to muster the courage to write the poems that dealt with the theme of incest.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Well, I would say I was initially motivated by my sister’s death and a cathartic impulse, but I don’t think that counts as inspiration exactly. Some individual poems, on the other hand, were definitely inspired by people I know & love (shout out to my ever-supportive husband, Gerard) and by other writers, teachers, mentors, and peers who encouraged me and showed me how it’s done (I’ll save the complete list for a full-length collection, but for now, I’ll just mention a few: many thanks to Dorianne Laux, Michael Colonnese, and Robin Greene, especially).

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I attempted a poem that contains two dirty jokes.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Neither–it is being published by Longleaf Press.

The writers I tag will post their own interviews on March 20, 2013:

1. Kelly Michels, author of Mother and Child with Flowers (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press)

2. Rachel Herrick, author of A Guide to the North American Obeast (Forthcoming from The Institute for Contemporary Art.)

3. Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, author of Everyday Chica (Longleaf Press)

4. Michael S. Begnal, author of Future Blues (Salmon Poetry)

Looking for Grass Whistle?

pokey mama — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:30:02 +0000

Yes! My new book is out! But where?

So, the deal with Grass Whistle is that it’s being published by an Irish press, Salmon Poetry, and it comes out in Ireland and the UK first, and then it’s officially distributed in the US.

It’s available NOW at Salmon,and if you order 2 copies shipping is free. It’s actually quite fast, too. And Salmon gets to keep more of the profit if you order directly from them, so that’s nice because they are a tiny press under huge financial pressure and even so, they remain loyal to poetry.

But, if you’re a die-hard Amazon fan, you can pre-order it with Amazon now. And then write a review! That’s what they like there. And I would love to hear what you think of the poems.

Last, if you’re at AWP in Boston this weekend you’ll find me (and the book), where I’ll be celebrating and reading a couple of poems along with some other Salmon poets.

Salmon Poetry Reception/Launch
Friday, March 8
7:00 pm – 8:15 pm
Reception Room 303, Hynes Convention Center

and here:

Booksigning
Saturday, March 9
11:00am – 12:30pm
Salmon Poetry Booth, #203 Plaza Level

Come by and say hello, introduce yourself!

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Josephine Corcoran — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 06:00:21 +0000

Two poems

The Lunar Spread

On Half Moon Street
we eat Tunisian orange cake,
under a painting of a melon
that spills seeds like love.

Over Notre Dame
the moon is a plate,
tossed by a Greek waiter
from rue Hachette.

Clear of Galway’s rooftops
the full moon
– bald as a skull –
crowns the night.

When she is van Gogh yellow
and mooning above,
we close the shutters
to safely sleep.

(first published in Burning Bush)

Anger

The moon is battered tonight, bruised and swollen,
but she swanks above us, bringing joy to the chill.

Tallow-moon, electric-moon, she shoulders the sky,
a brazen spotlight over trees salted with frost.

And down here, eyes aching, we creep to the church
on the square, make peace with each other in song.

(first published in Southword and subsequently in The Juno Charm, Salmon, 2011)

Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway, Ireland. She is a novelist, short story writer and poet. Her fourth short story collection Mother America was published by New Island in 2012. Her third full poetry collection The Juno Charm was published by Salmon Poetry in November 2011.

the next big thing

pokey mama — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:37:14 +0000

Here it is–the cover of my new book, Grass Whistle, with beautiful art courtesy of Barbara Reid!

I’ve been tagged in a blogging project called ” The Next Big Thing,” so since this is mine, read on if you want to know more about the book.

First, thanks to Ellen Dore Watson for inviting me to do this blog-tag shenanigan. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it was totally fun. Ellen’s interview is here: http://www.massreview.org/blog/next-big-thing. Check it out! Ellen is an amazing poet and translator and all-around mensch of a human being.

So, here are my answers to:*Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing*

What is your title of your book?

The title of my new poetry collection is “Grass Whistle.” Due out from Salmon Poetry in March! Since Salmon is an Irish press, even though it will be “launched” at the AWP conference in Boston, it officially comes out in Ireland/UK first, and then in the US in the fall. But it will be available for pre-order and on Amazon very soon.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I didn’t really have an “idea.” I don’t usually know what I’m writing until after I write. But I certainly have obsessions and those surface throughout the book. The title of the book, and the epigraph I chose definitely reflect those obsessions. The epigraph is from Richard Brautigan’s, “In Watermelon Sugar:”

“Wherever you are, we must do the best we can. It is so far to

travel and we have nothing here to travel, except watermelon

sugar. I hope this works out.”

The idea of “watermelon sugar” being all we have to find our way, and making “music” from a blade of grass and our breath comes from a feeling/notion (fauxtion?) I have about making what we need from whatever materials are at hand, even if those materials are limited or flawed.

I think that idea comes from my childhood, being part of a family that valued the act of making things (art, writing, cooking, furniture, clothes) and also of working toward something—a goal or ideal. So if I wanted something I was expected to figure out how to get it, and make what I had work as best I could (this was way before re-purposing, mind you). Anyway, most of the time what I ended up with didn’t resemble what I thought I was making, but it taught me a lot about process, and the value of mistakes.

I’m pretty sure this notion also comes from my early years as a parent, when I felt like I was always messing up, and trying to figure out how to adapt to my new life: the total lack of time and space for writing. At first I kept banging my head against the wall about not being able to go to my desk first thing in the morning and not be interrupted, blah, blah, blah. After a while (a pretty long while, since I’m a slow learner) I figured out that I needed to let go of my old way of doing things, quit whining, and just get stuff down when I could, jam in the time between feedings or whatever and make that my new process. Make it work.

In a larger sense, the poems in the collection are “about” where we find ourselves in life at any given moment, and what we do with that. The speakers in my poems are often either moving (physically or psychically) or stuck, and waiting to move. Maybe deep down the book is about the illusion of progress and how I need to believe I’m moving forward even when I’m still the same old me.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Well—Lili Taylor would play me. I don’t even need to think about that. And maybe Liev Shreiber—because I have a crush on him–can play my husband. And Meryl Streep can play everyone else.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

How about: “Girl refuses to read map or ask Siri, resulting in ‘Lost’ meets ‘Lost in Space’.”

I can’t actually explain it in one sentence, so here’s the official description:

“In her second collection of poems, Dryansky’s intrepid speaker sets off once again, this time into the deceptively open field of adult life. Along the way she pushes at the boundaries of identity and connection, questioning our perceptions of selfhood and motherhood, marriage and relationships, fidelity and faith. These poems have a sense of humor; they play with language and meaning, but the questions they ask are serious: what do we want to be when we grow up? How will we know when we get there?”

(Other people have also said some really nice things about the book, but that’s for another post.)

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

An agency. That’s so funny. I’m a poet! Who writes these questions?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

This book was a long time in the making. I started it when I was an Associate at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where I was trying to figure out what I was doing as a woman/mother/poet. That was 2004. Yikes!

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Mostly, Dante’s inferno. But shorter. And I didn’t have Virgil as a guide, which could be why it took me so long to get to hell and back.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Well, I can’t not write. It’s the only way I can figure out what I’m thinking or feeling. But I did struggle mightily with the making of this book, and trying to figure out what my “context” was in my new role as what I like to call a Mother AND…I felt so snowed under by the idea that somehow my work would be labeled as “domestic;” it really stymied me. So, I believe I was mostly inspired by my own struggle and by other women poets, past and present, who are writing challenging, complex, and inspired poetry and managing to raise kids/work multiple jobs/care for aging parents at the same time.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

There are some sexy poems. Not many, but you can always skim the rest. Also, there’s food, pets, jealousy, murder and true love. The usual.

and so it goes…

Interested? Stay tuned for info about how to get the book. In the mean time, I’m tagging more folks in this project, and their posts will be up next week. I’ll put those links up very soon.

The Boating Party - with Patrick Chapman

David Milligan-Croft — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:58:38 +0000

Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881. By Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The Boating Party is a brand new feature on my blog. It’s a series of interviews with writers, artists, photographers, filmmakers and the like.

In times of economic hardship the Arts are usually the first things to be axed. But, in my view, the Arts are the most important aspect of our civilisation. Without the arts, we have no culture. Without culture, we have no society. Without society, we have no civilisation. And without civilisation, we have anarchy. Which, in itself, is paradoxical, because so many artists view themselves as rebels to society.

Artists aren’t rebels, they are pioneers.

And perhaps, most importantly; without the Arts, where’s the creativity that will solve the world’s problems? Including economic and scientific ones?

I hope a brief glimpse into their lives is as inspiring to you as it is to me.

First up, Irish writer, Patrick Chapman. Poet, screenwriter, short story writer and all round raconteur. Not only is Patrick a great friend, he’s been a constant source of encouragement and inspiration, for my own writing.

Patrick Chapman

What’s your greatest personal or career achievement?

I hesitate to nominate a ‘greatest personal achievement’. As a person, I’m not entirely sure I’ve achieved anything apart from not dying. As a writer, I could nominate working with the Daleks on a Doctor Who audio play – but that’d be just the most fun. It’d have to be my New & Selected Poems, A Promiscuity of Spines, which spans 25 years of work. The book has an elegant cover art-directed by Vaughan Oliver, one of my design heroes. It was a pleasure to be able to commission him and find out that he’s a lovely bloke to work with.

What’s been your greatest sacrifice?

That’s difficult to say, as I live in the so-called First world. Someone takes away my iPad and I cite the Geneva Convention. You could say I’ve sacrificed having a regular life in order to be a writer – which to me isn’t a sacrifice.

To whom do you owe a debt of gratitude?

Too many people to list them all. There was Macdara Woods, a venerable Irish poet who, 25 years ago, gave me vital encouragement starting off. Before that, my teacher of English, Paddy Nangle, let me write short stories instead of essays.

Who and what inspire you?

People who don’t think they can write but who really can. I taught budding writers a couple of years ago and was struck by the quiet ones in the class – they hesitated and even resisted reading in front of the others but when they did, their work shone. Quiet geniuses inspire me. As for what rather than who? Everything and anything. I tend to get obsessed by a thought or an idea that won’t let go until I’ve wrestled it into a poem. Happiness, therefore, is a blank screen filled.

What was the last thing that inspired you?

It was Steven Shainberg’s film, Fur, which is an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus. Not at all biographical in the conventional sense. Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr are both superb in it. The poster for Fur showed Downey without all the hair – for most of that film he looks like a Wookiee but the marketing department, presumably, didn’t want it to come across as a sequel to Beauty and the Beast.

What makes you unhappy?

Right now it’s the thought that we’re quite possibly heading into a world of six degrees of global warming. That’s not Earth, it’s Venus. Nobody in power wants to think about it and it’s almost too terrible to contemplate, so people carry on regardless.

What makes you smile?

Woody Allen when he’s on form. His early, funny ones still crack me up, especially Take the Money and Run, and Love & Death. Annie Hall and Manhattan are my two favourites. I also have a fondness for his darker films, such as Husbands and Wives and Deconstructing Harry. Cassandra’s Dream was terrible, however.

What are you reading?

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I loved his earlier book, The Fabric of Reality, and this one is as good. I recently finished Wetlands by Charlotte Roche, which was a hoot, especially as I was about to undergo a colonoscopy shortly after reading it.

Who, or what, are you listening to?

Dark Wood, the new e.p. by my current favourite band Abagail Grey, plus the Go-Betweens compilation, Quiet Heart, the Pet Shop Boys album, Elysium, and the David Byrne and St. Vincent record, Love This Giant.

What’s your favourite film?

Blade Runner. For thirty years I’ve loved its melancholy and its pessimism and its art direction, and Sean Young with that hair and those shoulder pads. It’s such a poetic portrait of lost souls in hell, and it’s got a great soundtrack by Vangelis. It’s also Harrison Ford’s finest two hours on film.

What frightens you?

The future. I have no idea how to manipulate it so that I don’t end up dead within the next hundred years.

What can’t you live without?

Apart from the obvious – air, water, coffee, etc – it’s the ability to write. This is what keeps me going. Without writing, I don’t really exist.

What’s your motto?

“The world is not enough.” If it’s good enough for James Bond, it’s good enough for me.

If you could be anyone other than yourself, who would it be?

J.G. Ballard, for his vision but not necessarily for his demons, though the two are inextricable. He gave a very good answer to the Paris Review when asked about his writing schedule: “Two hours in the late morning, two in the early afternoon, followed by a walk along the river to think over the next day. Then at six, Scotch and soda, and oblivion.”

If you only had one year to live what would you do?
Ignore all the warnings.

Up whose arse would you like to stick a rocket, and why?

The Catholic Church. But that’s a lot of rockets and a lot of arses. It would be only part payback, and poetic justice, for their former practice of torturing infidels to death by shoving hot pokers up their bottoms. That said, let’s not even get started on the Catholic Church and bottoms.

Who would you like to be stuck in an elevator with?

Steven Moffat. He’s a writing hero, not just for Doctor Who and Sherlock. I loved Coupling and Jekyll as well. I assume from all of this, plus his former Twitter feed, that he’d be interesting company at close quarters. I’d just let him do all the talking, and would write everything down.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’ve just put the New & Selected Poems to bed and am now turning to a collection of short stories, due out next year. Also, my physique. One of these projects is going better than the other.

Which six people would you invite to your boating party?

You know when you’ve just come down with a sudden, life-threatening illness in public and someone asks ‘Who’s your doctor?’ and you say ‘Tom Baker’? That’s how you know you’re a nerd. I’d ask Tom Baker first, not just because he was ‘my’ Doctor growing up but because I really enjoyed the tales of Soho in his autobiography – getting drunk with Francis Bacon – and his disturbing and brilliant book for children, The Boy Who Kicked Pigs. Jessica Hynes would be on the list too because I’ve admired her work since Spaced. Kate Bush, simply because she’s Kate Bush. Richard Dawkins, because he’s fascinating as a scientist, and I’m in his camp when it comes to religion. Alan Turing, just so I could tell him he’s been vindicated. And Douglas Adams, because he was very, very tall.

What question would you have liked me to ask?

Would you rather be happy than right?

I’d rather not be happy than wrong.

Thank you, Patrick.

A Promiscuity of Spines by Patrick Chapman

Patrick Chapman was born in 1968 and lives in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of six poetry collections, the latest of which, A Promiscuity of Spines: New & Selected Poems, is published on October 10th by Salmon Poetry. His other collections are Jazztown (1991), The New Pornography (1996), Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (2007), A Shopping Mall on Mars (2008), and The Darwin Vampires (2010). He has also written a book of stories, The Wow Signal (2007); an award-winning film, Burning the Bed; episodes of the Cbeebies series Garth & Bev; and a Doctor Who audio play, Fear of the Daleks. In 2010 his work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Weblink.
http://www.salmonpoetry.com/

Paul Casey

Josephine Corcoran — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 05:26:30 +0000

The Speed of Cat’s Eyes

His eco-ship purrs silver-smooth
past shores of bastard-amber stars,
chases the veined twist of tail-lights,
long spaces poised for sudden red.

Earth’s skin, spinning culture
at past the speed of sound
around its centre, skims the sun
many thousand miles per hour more.

He turns up his thoughts in stereo -
lick the cream from these lips honey -
sees movement from the passenger seat,
a reason to steer with his knees.

He stirs honey into chamomile,
skins up, scribbles a quatrain ending –
no hands, see? Her mirage smile,
her eyes that flicker. Her invisible fur.

(from home more or less, Salmon Poetry, 2012)

Poet and filmmaker, Paul Casey, is the founder of the Ó Bhéal reading series in Cork. As well as his debut collection, home more or less, he has published a chapbook of longer poems, It’s Not all Bad, (Heaventree Press, 2009) and in October 2010 his poetry-film, The Lammas Hireling, after the poem by Ian Duhig, premiered in Berlin.

Event Announcement: A Celebration of Ireland's Salmon Press, September 9 at 4PM

Miz B — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 07:01:34 +0000

The Sunday Best Reading Series kicks off its 2012-2013 season on September 9 with “A Celebration of Ireland’s Salmon Press.” This event will showcase the work of four poets published by Salmon Poetry founded in 1981 as an alternate voice in Irish literature. (The name “Salmon” derives from the Salmon of Knowledge in Celtic mythology.) Patricia Brody, Philip Fried, Bertha Rogers, and Estha Weiner will read selections from books already published by or forthcoming from Salmon.

As always, the afternoon’s program will begin at 4PM and takes place in the Hudson View Lounge. A suggested contribution of $7 covers admission to the reading as well as to food and drinks at the after-reception where audience members can meet and mingle with the writers. However, due to ongoing renovation in The Lounge, the event will take place in the foyer area of the Lounge rather than the auditorium proper. Those who have attended events in The Lounge know that the foyer is considerably smaller than the main area of The Lounge. As a result, seating will be limited, and advance reservations will be required for this event. Please make your reservations by email to fabulara@earthlink.net.

Please read on to learn more about the four poets who will be sharing their work with us on September 9.

Poet Patricia Brody.

Patricia Brody’s first poetry collection, American Desire, was selected by Finishing Line Books for a 2009 New Women’s Voices Award. Her second collection, Dangerous to Know, is due out from Salmon Poetry (Ireland) in 2012. Her work has appeared in BigCityLit, Western Humanities Review, Barrow Street, The Paris Review, and on Poetry Daily. Poems also appear in the anthology Chance of a Ghost (co-edited by Philip Miller) and in Psychoanalytic Perspectives and International Journal of Feminist Politics. Brody works as a family therapist in NYC and teaches “Seeking Your Voice: a Poetry Workshop” at Barnard College Center for Women. She taught English comp and American Literature for many years at Boricua College in Harlem. Her awards include two Pushcart nominations; English Speaking Union of New York, 1st Prize for a poem; and two Academy of American Poets prizes.

Poet Philip Fried.

Philip Fried has published five books of poetry: Mutual Trespasses (Ion, 1988), Quantum Genesis (Zohar, 1997), Big Men Speaking to Little Men (Salmon, 2006), Cohort (Salmon, 2009),and Early/Late: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2011).He is also the founding editor of The Manhattan Review, an international poetry journal.

Poet Bertha Rogers.

Bertha Rogers’s poems appear in journals and anthologies, on Poetry Daily (poems.com) and Verse Daily (versedaily.com), and in her collections, Heart Turned Back (Salmon, 2010), The Fourth Beast (Snark Press, 2004), A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press, Maryland Poetry Review Chapbook Contest Winner, 2000), and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, NY 1991). Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press), and her translation of the riddle‑poems from the Anglo‑Saxon Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, is forthcoming from Birch Brook. She has received fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and Hawthornden International Writers Retreat. Her poem suite Three for Summer’s End was set to music by Jamie Keesecker for the MacDowell/Monadnock “Music for the Mountain” series and performed in 2010.

Poet Estha Weiner.

Estha Weiner is co-editor and contributor to Blues For Bill: A Tribute To William Matthews (Akron Poetry Series, 2005)and author of The Mistress Manuscript (Book Works, 2009) and Transfiguration Begins At Home (Tiger Bark Press, 2009). In The Weather of The World is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2013. Her magazine publications include The New Republic and Barrow Street. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she was the winner of a Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Visiting Scholar at The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford, England. Estha is founding director of NY Alumnae Writers Nights Series for Sarah Lawrence College, and serves on the Advisory Board of Slapering Hol Press, Hudson Valley Writers Center. In her previous life, she was an actor and worked for BBC radio.

'Phrase Books Never Equip you for the Answers', by Sarah Clancy

C. Murray — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 08:59:11 +0000

Phrase Books Never Equip you for the Answers

“on the morning of the fifteenth time we went through
our sleep-with-your-ex routine, I had the usual optimism
thing about mistakes is to not keep repeating the same ones
I said disregarding the government health warning
on the cigarettes I was sucking, crossing the road without
stopping speaking or looking, ignoring the red man pulsing
on the lights at the junction, I was wired direct and I said;
I know, I’ll write you the definitive user manual for me.
You said I was arrogant that we should make it up as we go,
and I said; well could I do a mind map then? With
here be dragons marked clearly in red, so we won’t flounder
like last time end up washed up dehydrated and drained
well I was, fairly wired, I said ‘in each shipwreck we’re lessened
embittered, come on, let me at least try to fix it, I can write us
a blueprint for the new improved version, and you laughed
and said well damn you for a head-wreck, go on then and do it.

So I wrote, but it came out all stilted, like a work in translation
see when I say, let me fix that or give it here and I’ll do it
it means I need you, and if I tell you for example how
I’ll re-arrange the universe to your liking it doesn’t mean
I’m superior in fact, translated it’s about the same as the last one-
‘can you not see, how I need you? And when I come out with all those
‘you-shoulds’ that drive you demented, there’s no disrespect in ‘em
verbatim they’re whispering I’d be desolated without you
and when you call me control freak, the tendencies you’re describing
are inherently rooted in my fear of you leaving and how I’ll react.

Less-wired more hopeful I brought you my phrase book
on our very next meeting but you kissed my cheek and said
let me stop you a minute and then those awful words that never
signify good outcomes, listen I’ve been thinking… I know
we’ve got this weird cyclical attraction thing going and I’m sorry
for my part in it but really I can’t see it working, the problem
for me is how you just don’t need anything and my phrase book
had nothing listed under that heading.”

Thanks to Sarah Clancy for the poem, Phrase Books Never Equip you for the Answers , which is taken from Thanks for Nothing Hippies , which will be launched in April 2012, by Salmon Poetry. Hippy Get a Job , by Sarah Clancy, is here.

93. Dramatis personae

practiceofzen — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:43:43 +0000

“Man is least himself,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist,* “when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Wilde was speaking of Shakespeare, who, in Wilde’s view, revealed more of himself in his plays than he did in his sonnets. Over the years I have often recalled Wilde’s maxim, and I have had occasion to test it against my experience, both as a teacher of imaginative writing and as the author of poems, essays, and a verse novella. And by and large I have found Wilde’s notion to be true, though perhaps not in the way he intended.

During my tenure as Professor of English at Alfred University, I taught an advanced writing course called Dramatis Personae. In this course each student created a character—a mask, if you like—and wrote from that character’s’ vantage point throughout the semester. The first assignment was a dramatic monologue; subsequent assignments included familiar letters, diary-entries, and first-person narratives. By mid-semester, if there were fifteen students in the room, there were also fifteen characters, and toward the end of the course the students artfully combined their characters in scenes and stories. The final assignment was a valediction, in which the students bid farewell to the characters they had inhabited for the past three months.

As might be expected, Dramatis Personae drew students interested in theater and psychology as well as imaginative writing. With few exceptions, they took to the work with gusto, crossing boundaries of gender, age, and ethnic background. Among their more memorable creations were a concert pianist who placed a marble bust of his mother on the piano during his concerts; a nineteenth-century American Indian maiden; a feisty, teen-aged boy from the inner city; a seasoned, outspoken journalist with reactionary social views; and a harried suburban woman modeled after the author’s mother. Perhaps out of deference, no one ventured to create an English professor, though one did create a venerable tree and managed to write from that standpoint.

To a contemporary reader, Dramatis Personae might sound like an early version of Second Life. But in spirit and purpose the course differed fundamentally from that online phenomenon, insofar as the intent of Second Life is to project one’s present self into an “avatar” and live a life more exciting than one’s own. For if Dramatis Personae served, in part, as a training ground for potential poets, playwrights, and novelists, it also provided a setting in which to cultivate—and often to demonstrate—imaginative empathy. Rather than foster self-concern, the course encouraged self-forgetfulness. Rather than promote the making of fantasies, it sponsored a difficult realism—that of seeing others as persons in their own right, rather than as figures in one’s private psychodramas.

Practice what you preach, my mother used to say. And in the spring of 1991, after teaching Dramatis Personae for nearly two decades, I discovered a way of obeying that proverbial imperative. At the time I was immersed in the study of Irish history in general and mid-twentieth-century Ireland in particular. And early one morning, I found myself dwelling in Ireland in the 1940s and writing in the voice of a middle-aged American lexicographer, down on his luck, who had come to Ireland to heal his wounded psyche:

I can’t begin to say what brought me here,

Unless it be the Irish predilection

For whiskey and horses, both of which entail

A certain loss and a less-than-certain gain.

Thus began a blank-verse monologue of some nine hundred lines, later entitled “The Word from Dublin, 1944.” Over the next two and a half years, this monologue would be followed by five more of similar length, in which my unnamed lexicographer meditates on Irish history, his “bungled” personal life, and his violent century, exploring such themes as loss, dispossession, and reconciliation. In time, this sequence of monologues would become my book Midcentury,** which is at once a verse novella and a book-length meditation. Apart from its integrated themes, what holds that book together is its “mask”—a narrator whom the Irish poet Patrick Chapman, in his review of Midcentury, likened to an Irish storyteller and described as “a man of our own time, slightly at odds with the ways of the world but human and recognizably one of us.” And yet that all-too-human storyteller never lived. From first to last, he was a persona, a fictive presence whose voice and vision gave coherence to otherwise disparate events.

Drama and meditation are sometimes viewed as opposites, the one centered in conflict and catharsis, the other in the cultivation of inner peace. But the practices of dramatic writing and Zen meditation share a common objective, namely the study of the nature of the self. And what both practices can reveal is the extent to which that fabled entity is a fabrication, be it a character in a novel or the personal “self” we construct and re-construct from day to day. Having fabricated a fictive self, we are in a position to see how the mind can fashion a seemingly solid character out of thin air. And by practicing Zen meditation, we can come to see how we make characters of ourselves, constructing illusory, separate “selves” from the stream of discrete experiences and the dynamic web of life. That may or may not have been the truth that Oscar Wilde had in mind, but it is one of the most important fruits of meditative practice.

_______________

* Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything. See http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/1305/?term=man+is+least+himself.

** Ben Howard, Midcentury (Salmon Poetry, 1997). Patrick Chapman’s review may be read at http://salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=126&a=6.

The Darwin Vampires

David Milligan-Croft — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 15:11:41 +0000

Declared interest.

If you want to know what contemporary Irish poetry is all about, then look no further than The Darwin Vampires by Patrick Chapman.

You not only get an insight into modern-day Ireland, but also a glimpse into the mind of an extraordinary writer.

It has everything from science fiction to science fact. It’s sexy and seedy, provocative and profound. Sometimes dark with Gothic undertones, other times, witty and wistful.

The Darwin Vampires by Patrick Chapman

If you love poetry then you’ll love Chapman’s unique voice. I guarantee you won’t have read anything similar. And if you don’t read poetry, this is a good place to start as The Darwin Vampires is brimming, not just with verse, but with ideas.

The Darwin Vampires is Patrick Chapman’s fifth collection of poetry and is published by Salmon Poetry.

Patrick Chapman

The Darwin Vampires

for Catherine

Being loth to sink in at your neck, they prefer to drink
Between your toes. They revel in the feet; they especially
Enjoy those places in between, where microbial kingdoms,
Overthrown with a pessary, render needle-toothed
Injuries invisible; where any trace of ingress, lost in the fold,

Is conspicuous – as they themselves in daylight are -
By its absence. You will hardly notice that small
Sting; might not miss a drop until the moment
That the very last is drained. And when you’re six
Beneath the topsoil, you will never rise to join them.

Rather, you will be a hint; a fluctuating butterfly;
A taste-regret on someone’s tongue; a sudden tinted
Droplet in the iris of a fading smile; a blush upon
A woman’s rose; a broken vein in someone’s eyelid -
Always one degree below what’s needed to be warm.

Salmon

Native Student Council — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 20:46:30 +0000

First from the salmon river the bear is wandering down salmon creek He sits haunching, feasting on

pokey gets a yes

pokey mama — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 01:59:02 +0000

I’m treading the edge here, a line that shifts beneath my bare feet, salt and wrack swirling around my ankles. I’m noticing how it’s not just me that’s shifting, not just one edge but all edge, overlap and flip-flop, blurring and gradation.

I believe this lack of faith in permanence may be what’s called an adult view, but I’m just guessing.

Which is kind of the point, if a point can be made to stand still: nothing’s really solid, everything is subject to change, perspective reigns supreme, there’s no such thing as good, better or best, there is no judge,

instead there are stars, in alignment or not, burning bright or burning out. Instead there’s weather, unequally apportioned and never when you need it or sometimes when you need it most: five days of rain interrupted by three hours of sunshine just in time for six 10 year-old boys to race around the yard pelting each other with Nerf bullets. Mama is so grateful. Thanks are given, alliances shift and it pours rain again.

But thanks for that three hours. And thanks for all the green.

I know a lot of folks who could use a yes right now; Pokey’s one of them, and gets to share her yes with you, being that my second book of poems is coming out. It’s been taken, meaning, I get to give it away, send it out into the world with a raincoat but no cab fare. Bye, don’t forget to write.

I mean that literally.

Those of you who visit Pokey regularly know she’d hesitate to use the word “journey,” as in, it’s been quite a journey: making this book, revising it, sending it out. She might say what a long, strange trip it’s been, except she’s way more into punk and funk than Dead.

If Pokey did use the word “journey,” however, she would say that this book is extra special to her, because it spans that lengthy patch of bumpy road that Pokey traversed after her children were born, and her parents passed away, and she walked around and around in circles kicking at dirt, trying to figure out what she was supposed to be doing NOW.

Instead she’ll say Hallelujah and thank the guiddesses for smiling down on her. Because a boatload of talented poets are out there, trying to publish their books, and there’s just no saying what betokens a yea and what a nay. At least no logic Pokey’s been able to crack.

I’ve had my share of no’s on this book, plenty of near-misses and almosts. I’ve decided several times that no one cared or would ever care. I stopped sending it out for long stretches when I just couldn’t bear another rejection. And now that my book has been “accepted” and will move into the next, public phase, Pokey’s having her usual mixed reaction: fear and adrenaline mixing it up.

Ambivalence aside, Pokey is grateful, and excited. The book is called, “Grass Whistle,” and it’s being published in Fall 2012 by an Irish press, Salmon Poetry, headed up by a lovely woman, Jessie Lendennie. Jessie found me (she found me!) when putting together the Dogs Singing anthology Salmon published. And when she discovered I had a second manuscript cooling its heels, she took that, too. The book comes out first in Ireland and the UK and then in the US. I’ll let you know more when we’re closer to the pub date. But if you have any fabulous ideas for readings and festivals and such, send Pokey a message. I want to be creative about this whole reading tour thing. I want to connect!

In the (wonderful, you must see this!) film “Who Does She Think She Is?” one of the women artists tells the interviewer that as mothers AND we must keep going at all costs. I have an artist friend who I saw the movie with and it’s what we say to each other now. We write it on postcards and in emails and we say it to each other like a mantra. Pokey is telling you, too, reader, because I want you to believe.

Whatever it is you’re dreaming on and however much the ground shifts beneath your feet, don’t stop, keep going, never give up.

Salmon Poetry Books Launch tonight at Irish Writers' Centre

dublinzine — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 11:23:20 +0000

Three poets, Joseph Lennon, Padraig Moran and Adam Wyeth will be reading from their respective books tonight at the Irish Writers Centre. 7pm (June 10) Titles of the books are-Fell Hunger (Joseph Lennon), The Blue Guitar (Padraig Moran) and Silent Music (Adam Wyeth) Kudos to Salmon Poetry for the launch, and the wonderful books covers!

Source: Salmon Poetry

PRISM INTERNATIONAL'S ERIKA THORKELSON INTERVIEWS DAVE LORDAN

Jordan Abel — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:08:33 +0000

I met award-winning Irish writer and performer Dave Lordan on an unseasonably glorious April day in Bray, County Wicklow, just outside of Dublin. He’d recently returned from a trip to New York where he had been introducing North Americans to his bombastic oratorical skills. That day, we talked about the recession, pop culture and politics— basically, everything other than poetry. A couple weeks later, I thought I’d back up and get to his opinion on his specialty. The results are below.

How did you come to writing poetry?

By means of blank tapes, flagons, unmanageable and incomprehensible teenage lust, diesel-soaked dope, paper strawberries and homemade bear-traps. Is there any other way?

Poetry for me is a way of surviving others and of making myself as separate and distinct from other people as possible. I’m hoping it will help me evolve into another species altogether.

I also thought poetry might be a good place to hide from the police and executioners, which, in certain circumstances, is everybody else in existence. Everything but me to me is death.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?

Whether or not it is in reality, in the poetic medium of language, everything is connected. Therefore, there isn’t anything we can speak of that, when concentrated on, doesn’t offer up material for poetry. So I often write about what I choose to write about. Other than that, random lines enter my head when I am out walking, or when I am falling asleep, or feeling a bit manic, and I try and build something up out of them.

How extensive is your revision process? Do your poems change a lot between the initial spark of an idea and the published product?

All the fun and all the life is the writing and revising. Writing is an autoerotic and even narcotic distraction to which I am addicted and which I am in mortal fear of losing supply of. Other writers go on about hard work. I don’t know what they’re talking about. If it were work, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. It’s play, it’s excess, it’s the height of irresponsibility, or fuck it. When I’m writing (writing is revising), which is fairly often, I go into a kind of trance of composition. I’m high. I don’t think about or even much take notice of very much else. It’s a good thing I don’t drive a car or operate heavy machinery.

When a poem is finished I don’t really care about it anymore because I’m on to the next one. Does anyone care about the hit they took yesterday? I might be concerned, vainly, about what other people think of the poem, for a little while, but not about the poem itself. Finishing a poem is a way of discarding it. In fact, I have to believe that I would write poems for the sake of being involved in writing them, whether or not there was anything to do with them after they are finished, or whether or not I ever finished them.

What are the most important mechanical facets of a poem to you—rhythm, line breaks, word choice, narrative voice? How would you describe the use of form in your poetry?

I use the forms I am capable of using variously, as I please, to say what I want to say in the way that I want to say it at the time. Every poem is different, separate and has its own unity, and all of those mechanical elements will come into play in individually varying proportions. Again, the formal aspects are only a way of containing, refining and promoting the impulse to write, which is for me the most important thing. I had the madness of writing before I knew a thing about form.

You began as a spoken word poet—what’s the relationship between performance and written poetry for you? What’s gained and lost between the two forms?

I didn’t begin as a spoken word poet and I won’t end up as one either. An artist is allowed to have phases. The spoken word scene will peak and decay like any scene, and I’ll still hopefully be writing poetry, and performing it.

There’s a few bob in spoken word occasionally these days and I can give most crowds what they are looking for for twenty minutes or so. Everyone I knew as a kid was a manic performer, a street-screamer, a pub-thrasher, a tree-groper, a bush-shitter, a jacks-flasher, a midnight-ranter etc… but they didn’t get paid for it. I just bring the loud and grotesque repertoire bequeathed me up on stage for a while and it seems to please people. When I am on stage, I think I am like one of the twisted post-human characters in a Bosch painting, gone active. It feels great and I would do it even if there was nobody watching.

Much of your work lays bare the darker side of human nature and history—greed, corruption, and violence. Why do you choose these subjects as opposed to more cheerful ones?

I am interested in teleology and in metaphysics, and in the opposites or negatives of those. I wonder if we are going anywhere or nowhere, if we mean, or could mean anything or nothing, if there is substance, or if everything is a lamentable ghost. I am interested in conducting my own exploration into these questions, in finding my own answers or in satisfying myself that there are no answers.

Poetry is my way of asking and exploring and answering and discovering.

To these ends, I focus on the worst, which is obviously plentiful. I don’t think extremes are aberrations from the sociocultural order, but distillations of it, clarifying indications of its hidden structures and of its lines of advance. For me, the essence of the world shows up in its shadow, in what it marginalizes, excludes, represses, abuses, imprisons and neglects, especially in how it does all these things and to whom and at what time and place. Particulars are important—especially particulars of language, language being, among many other things, an architecture of oppression.

In “Definition of a Runner,” you refer to Jonathon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which is probably the most famous piece of rhetorical prose of all time. The story told in “Definition of a Runner” might easily have been written as straight prose non-fiction. How does the form of poetry work with this story? How might the effect of the story change if it was told in straight prose?

I doubt if the piece would have any effect whatsoever in poetry or prose, which maybe is really what it’s all about. “A Modest Proposal” had no effect on child poverty in Dublin or on the vampirism of the ruling class, then or now. I wrote “Definition of a Runner” as a poem rather than a prose piece because it pleased me to do so. Poetry foregrounds the playful and the sonic, the sensual and even libidinous side of language, which I like. It’s one of the paradoxes of poetry for me that, no matter how dark the material, I am always getting a buzz out of it. What I would like to effect—if I could ever effect anything—is the vengeance of the downtrodden. I’d like to be writing the marching songs for the advance of an unstoppable red rebel army. All other art is quite useless.

I’m curious about the line, “That more clerics have not been torn to pieces by the adults of the children they abused is, for me, the great conundrum of modern Irish history, of modern Irish spirituality, of modern Irish philosophy, of modern Irish culture and identity. Of modern Irish poetry.” What do you think is the relationship between your work, Ireland, and Irish identity? How does it come out in “Definition of a Runner?”

That modern Irish culture has not sought in any serious way, aside from extraordinary individual exceptions such as the late Paddy Galvin, to address the church-state child-abuse-system of our so recent past is proof enough that modern Irish culture does not exist, or has only chimerical existence. Therefore, myself and my work can have no proper relation to it. Modern Irish Barbarism on the other hand…

It’s enough to remember that the Irish state wasn’t founded on a revolution for freedom, which is the amnesiac romantic version of it, but on a counter-revolutionary victory in the civil war which followed our war of independence. All our problems, up to including those of the present day, flow from this original and profound—but in no way final—defeat of the people’s revolt.

So what I am saying in that part of the poem quoted in your question is, to my mind, tautological. The only question worth asking anywhere, anytime and in any medium—the only question which offers the prospect of a meaningful response, to which indeed the answer might be the unleashing of meaning itself—is why the oppressed and exploited have not yet arisen with success.

What do you think the world needs to know about poetry in Ireland today?

I’m not sure there is that much to know. “Poetry in Ireland” isn’t a category I’m all that interested in. Most mainstream career poets are oriented on publishers and universities in England or the States anyway, so I don’t know if “Poetry in Ireland” is anything more than a set of hopeful directions to publishing houses in London or admissions in Princeton.

There is a lot of spoken word now, in alongside other live arts forms, giving people a cheap night out during the recession. Some spoken word is poetry, and some of it is circus. It will be interesting to see how that scene develops. As in the States, I imagine some of Irish spoken word’s leading figures may be destined for power-compliant careers in the local culture industry. These people are more properly called entrepreneurs than artists and fair play to them: they are surviving the recession, which is all that matters. There are others in the scene with an active-minded orientation on historical and contemporary avant-gardes, who may choose or be forced into a more challenging and perhaps more luminous spaces.

When is your next book due? Where will we be able to get it?

I’m due to put a book of poetry out with the experimental Wurm Press later this year. I have a book of short stories Out of My Head coming out with Salmon Publishing next year, who also publish my poetry.

Definition of A Runner by Dave Lordan

Do you know what A Runner is in Ireland, where I’m from,
in the year that I was born?
A Runner is what the other children call a child, a boy or a girl,
who keeps trying to run away
from the institution where they are being held prisoner
by priests or by nuns or by ‘brothers’.
I found out what A Runner was at a gathering of artists and
surviving survivors of clerical child abuse in our
National College of Art and Design last year.
We were all there at the invitation of the poet and performance artist
Lisa Marie Johnson to talk to each other about art and survival,
art and memory, art and redemption.
About a lot of stuff I don’t really honestly believe in.

During our conversation I asked the table’s length of surviving survivors
some questions that have perplexed me for a very long time:
Why has nobody taken revenge? Why is it none of you have ever bare-handedly slaughtered a priest or a nun or a brother? Or even arsoned a convent or church?
That more clerics have not been torn to pieces by the adults of the children they abused is,
for me, the great conundrum of modern Irish history, of modern Irish spirituality, of
modern Irish philosophy, of modern Irish culture and identity. Of modern Irish poetry.

I think the surviving survivors had been expecting these questions,
or they had been asked them many times before
by friends and relatives,
or these questions were so at home in their own minds
that the answer came automatically
and simultaneously from the half-dozen of them:
Because we are still afraid, they all said.

Because the terror takes root so deep down inside you
when you are small and it grafts itself to your bones
and it splices itself into your cells and it grows as you grow;
although it always grows faster than you
it always weighs more, is always stronger, always taller than you are,
is always there, in a hood and habit, towering over you,
its big fists hammering down like a Brother’s.

The surviving survivors then started to talk about another man,
a regular of their group,
who had not turned up at our meeting
though he had promised the others to come.
I am going to call the missing man Paddy.
Paddy had not been well recently,
not since, on Westland Row,
he had spotted a priest who had been
one of the chief torturers of his childhood.
Bumping in to that old sadist had brought an awful lot up for Paddy;
all the fear, all the rage, all the hurt, all the despair.

This absent Paddy had been A Runner
the surviving survivors told me.
What’s A Runner? I asked. And they told.

Paddy got caught every time he ran.
Paddy would be half way up the high wall,
(all these theologised borstals had high, blank walls)
or three quarters of the way up,
or struggling to the top and nearly over it,
and a Brother of Christ would catch him by the leg
and yank him back down. Paddy always got caught.
The Brothers had a special way of punishing A Runner
in this vile prison for the innocent. They broke the child’s bone
with a good clatter of a hurley stick,
a weathered one kept handy for the job.

Often it was a wrist they broke,
sometimes an ankle. To make the children crawl. To make them beg.
To make them think twice about attempting to run away again.
But Paddy never stopped trying to run, no matter how many times
his wrist or his ankle got broke.
Freedom was a-beckoning just beyond that wall.
Freedom to be a child like the other children.
Paddy heard laughing and jousting just beyond that wall.
If he could only just make it over the once
Paddy thought he’d have a chance to laugh and play along.
He was that innocent. He was that holy.
He was that much of A Runner,

You had to run away a few times to
get the name of A Runner. You had to show repeatedly
that your desire for freedom was greater than
the fear of broken bones, or of dying.
The clerics often killed children in those places.
They killed them for hate and for rage and they killed them for pleasure.
They killed them with savage beatings
and they buried them hurriedly in unmarked graves
and the Guards ignored it
and the doctor signed the death certificate as accident
and that was that: covered up. Forgotten.

A Runner: the most noble title of my nation.
So much more than Taoiseach, or President, or Saoi.
But we have never been a nation.
Our nation died in 1923 at Ballyseedy.

Swift saw us coming: a nation of bonechewers,
a nation that dines on the bones of poor children.

Paddy’s aged a lot, the surviving survivors were telling me,
since he had the misfortune to run in to that toxic old goon of a priest
- still in his frock and all.
He doesn’t come to meetings or take part in social activities with the other
surviving survivors like he used to anymore.
He stays in his bedsit talking to himself
because he can’t run away
from himself.

Cowering in his bedsit: the cherished one
of all the group,
totem of the uncrushable will to be free
against all odds,
Paddy the Runner:
a shivering snivelling child in his fifties
behind four blank walls

afraid to try climbing over
in case he gets caught.

Red Light, Green Light

pokey mama — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 01:07:44 +0000

In regard to posting a full-length essay with accoutrements on a weekly basis Pokey has given herself the green light to forgo the self-flagellation and instead allow for occasional blathering and newsy news in between the fabulousness of the longer posts, hence, the following items that may be of interest:

Pokey Reads! Words will be served!

Wednesday, October 27 at 7:30pm

Reading by Catherine Sasanov & Amy Dryansky

Green Street Café, Northampton, MA

Yes, I’m reading with a poet from Cambridge next Wednesday in Northampton at the cafe and would love it if you could come. You can certainly have dinner there, but it’s also fine to just come and listen, just refrain from heckling.

Dogs Sing! Good behavior rewarded!

Pokey (writing under her pen name, Amy Dryansky) also has three poems in the new anthology, Dogs Singing, published by the Salmon Poetry and available in November. You can read more about it here.

Cover Artwork: 'Blue' by Margaret Nolan

That’s it for now. Longerness will soon return.

Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow - Aideen Henry Poetry Collection

mpbyrne — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:05:08 +0000

I’ve been reading Aideen Henry’s first poetry collection, Hands Moving at the Speed of Falling Snow (Salmon Poetry). We both attended the poetry workshops given by Mary O’Malley and Mick Gorman as part of NUI Galway’s MA writer programme. I have good memories of listening to Aideen read some of these pieces in a room that looked out on the city’s Quincentennial Bridge.

So taken was I by that particular view that I even wrote a poem entitled ‘Quincentennial Bridge’, where I experimented with the ghazal form (rhyming couplets with a refrain repeated in the 2^nd line of each couplet):

Gulls float above in their worldliness, like they’re licking Heaven

and a rat crawls on broken glass at the base of Quincentennial Bridge.

Aideen’s collection is an intriguing world of Irish language speech, west of Ireland places, anatomy references and emotions of searing loss. Above all, the writing is visceral and instinctual: the child eating brown bread and fresh duck eggs with the Seanchai; the bone-crunching handshake at mass; the steel surgical knife on soft flesh. The heightened experience of the body and the flesh in all its senses is at the heart of the collection.

In a humorous poem, and one of my favourites in the collection, an undertaker tells the writer that she will make a great corpse and when she asks why, he replies: Those cheekbones. Time won’t touch them. The collection is wonderfully illustrated with several images by the artist Carmel Cleary, taken from her photographic tour of Utah and Arizona.

It’s good to see the fruit of all those hours spent overlooking Quincentennial Bridge!

Stephanie McKenzie's "The Disciples of Winter"

gunnersrocker — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 10:43:01 +0000

Winter has come and gone for another year, but there are always remembrances, little leftovers both tangible and beyond our reach that remain to let us know there’s more to come down the road. A couple months back I read just such a remebrance; Grace Must Wander, Stephanie McKenzie’s second collection of poems published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry in 2009, and was delighted to find “The Disciples of Winter” at the very end of the book:

Grace must wander even with the lonely sight of crows,
the purple and the purple black, each one spotted
like a snowflake, fingerprint. Birds sing of other worlds
that are not grown here but happen somewhere out there
in the land of blow away the dead and make a wish
we give to children. They have learned to stretch their necks
out, offer up their throats on blue platters of the sky, do not seek
pity, feel shame. Their feathers fallen give us leave to ponder.
Consider the city. It mimics the crow, black throat
caught at the chords sings out a promise of day.
Evening, and morning, and at noon, transparent
and bound to truth, the knowing of winter is clean,
like a scar storied and sure of where it’s been.

There’s a sense of longing to be elsewhere, to explore those “other worlds / that are not grown here”; to wait out winter for the eventual revelation of spring. The crows are more than birds; they are messengers, prophets preaching a future full of grace that is open to those who keep the faith, patiently watch the world, the city, the days passing hours at a time. The risk in this kind of faith, whether it be in the Christian god, nature or the general passage of time is something very personal and not to be taken lightly. That said, it must be taken, just as the crows “offer up their throats on blue platters of the sky”; they know what they’re doing. There’s a belief in them synonomous with who they are and reaching that realization is the greater part of the journey.

The World is So Much in Us: Curtis Derrick on Paul Allen's Ground Forces

Daniel Casey — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:53:06 +0000

Ground Forces, Paul Allen, Salmon Poetry, 2008 Miles Davis once said, regarding jazz improvisation—“

Ireland, Oaxaca, and the Soundscape

molossus — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:04:57 +0000

The Watchful Heart: A New Generation of Irish Poets, ed. Joan McBreen (Salmon Poetry/Dufour Editions) €18/$32.95

Acclaimed anthologist and poet Joan McBreen has compiled a selection of younger Irish poets, the majority born in the sixties. Most names will be unfamiliar to even quite avid readers of poetry in America, but include Loius de Paor (in translation from the Irish), Mary O’Donoghue, Patrick Quinn, and Nuala Ní Chonchúir. Despite its origin in a Derek Mahon poem, the title retains some triteness: it is hard, in America at least, to seriously consider any volume of poetry with the word “heart” in its title.

In her introduction McBreen writes that these poets should be considered part of the ongoing dialogue of Irish poetry and poetics. Owing to the limited space allotted each poet—a mere three poems—the book reads just like that, a sort of introductory conversation with the poets themselves, all who have published at least two books, none of whom the reader can fully comprehend here. Unlike Graywolf’s New British and New European anthologies, which are generally more generous in their selection of poems (especially the former), The Watchful Heart does not offer any critical introductions, however brief, but instead begins each selection with a simple biographical note.

Like several other UK anthologies—notably Carcanet’s OxfordPoets series—McBreen’s pairs original poems with brief essays by the poets. The essays are particularly noteworthy, often contextualizing the poetry that precedes them or more satisfyingly expounding on topics ranging from the relationship between poetry and work to poetry in the electronic age to Patrick Chapman’s “Fortune Cookies” aphorisms, a sort of Irish Sargentville Notebooks without Strand’s whimsical surrealism.

The poetry itself is contemporary, fully engaged in conversation with European, American, and world poetry. Irish in origin but universal in theme, the poems within make for good, enjoyable reading. Like the best anthologies, one can open to any page and find something worthwhile. Leontia Flynn, in her poem “Art and Wine,” writes,

And would you, I mused, perhaps understand me more,
if I could, for a single second, shut the fuck up?

Though in context the question is certainly rhetorical, I speak to the included poets as well as their anthologist when I request that they not shut up but continue to dialogue with world poetry.

Oaxaca Siete Poetas, ed. Raúl Renán & Jorge Pech Casanova (Almadía/Luna Zeta) $75 MXP

In his introduction, Jorge Pech offers a thumbnail sketch of contemporary poetry in the Southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico, beginning with its relative absence—owing, he argues, to its role as a solemn keeper of tradition rather than the innovation needed to fuel good poetry—then detailing the oral poetry of mystic hero María Sabina, the rise of the Isthmus Zapotec poets of the 1970s—whom he claims, with some truth, have never been translated well enough into Spanish to reflect their skill—the eighties, when Oaxacan poets began to write in earnest, and today, whose poets he praises for having shed the provincialism of past generations.

The volume’s poets, born between 1967 and 1978, are represented generously, in Spanish only, with over ten pages apiece. If trends in translation continue, it’s unlikely that English-language readers will see much, if any, of these poets’ work within the next few decades, when availability is more often the result of professional relationships than quality. Still, for Spanish readers and translators alike the volume is a valuable snapshot of contemporary Mexican poetry. My favorites include Abraham O Nahón, aphorist and aphoristic poet:

Light

Darkness converts us into mystery
& cedes to other senses.
Light has no limits,
its wounds are infinite.

*

Definition

Night:
XXXthe scum beneath day’s fingernails.

*

Tactic

There exists a word that draws our shadow,
that we inevitably are,
that I will never tell you,
that will make me necessary.

*

Creation

Poetry
has created more monstrosities
than God.

the considered nostalgia of Alonso Aguilar Orihuela:

Floor 3

XXXI
We had to walk up 72 stairs
to arrive at our paradise
—which was also a hell—:
a kitchen without a stove or fridge,
the room with its crazy dreams,
the balcony where we made love
& a bedroom to be lulled by the ocean.

XXXII
We lived with so little!
You put on the Beatles CDs,
you danced & sang across the space,
I brought home a few pesos,
everyday stories, a pair of dreams
& poems that we’d read that cat at sundown.

XXXIII
I miss
Everything
that inhabited this
empty
house.

and Guadalupe Ángela’s mythic tales:

XXXI
In the well, a carp lives
there’s no space or horizon
only falling & darkness

XXXII
The carp rises to the surface
& looks at the light,
blind, she falls again.

XXXIII
The carp floats in her solitude,
a mosquito approaches
& she, stunned, eats it.

XXXIV
The carp draws
the thousandth circle
of her existence.

XXXV
The carp crashes
against the curve of its house
& dies for negligence.

XXXVI
There is no carp
in the well
just a cloud of mosquitos.

all translations mine

Essential Pleasures: An Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, ed. Robert Pinsky (W.W. Norton) $29.95

The fattest of these three anthologies, Pinsky’s is also the most predictable, certainly because its target audience is not the same. The volume’s concept sprang from one of Pinsky’s most public passions: the auditory appreciation of poetry, which he manifested with his Favorite Poem Project as Poet Laureate of the United States (from 1997 – 2000) and in his short book The Sounds of Poetry.

Even with a general interest audience in mind, Pinsky is keen to include a diverse line-up of contemporary poets. Among Shakespeare, Byron, Whitman, and Dickinson: Simic, Kenyon, Koch, Harper Webb, (C.K.) Williams, Hass, Dobyns, Collins, Corn, and even Hejinian. The poems are grouped into seven categorical chapters, with titles like “Short Lines, Frequent Rhymes” and “Parodies, Ripostes, Jokes, and Insults.”

To further maximize the volume’s accessibility it includes a CD of 21 tracks of poems by 20 different poets, all read aloud by Pinsky himself. While certainly a noteworthy reader, the CD is difficult to listen to in its entirety, as any reading of poetry at that length. Still, the book is altogether a pleasure. As Pinsky writes in his introduction:

Pleasure in poetry, like speech itself, is both intellectual and bodily. Spoken language, an elaborate code of articulated grunts, provides a satisfaction central to life, with all the immediacy of our senses. Though complex, the pleasure is not arcane.