Collagist Podcast Episode 5: Christopher Merkner Reads "We Figured On A Lifetime"

Christopher Merkner's "We Expect and Feel" and "We Figured On A Lifetime" appear in Issue 30 of The Collagist. Here's Christopher reading "We Figured On A Lifetime."

Episode 5: "We Figured On A Lifetime"

"How They Begin, How They End": An Interview With Robert Lopez

Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River. A collection of short fiction, Asunder, was published by Dzanc Books in November 2010. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute and Columbia University. He is a 2010 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

His story "Family of Man on Isle of Wight" appears in Issue Thirty of The Collagist.

Here, Lopez speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about his work.  Enjoy!

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “Family of Man on Isle of Wight”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

The piece began in Brooklyn on a day that was every day. I’m not sure what “here” refers to in this question. The end point? The Collagist? All of it’s a mystery to me. The questions, the answers, the origins, the families, the stories, how they begin, how they end.

You’ll have to forgive me. After a while one gets asked the same questions over and again. I understand there is nothing to be done about this and I’m grateful to be asked any questions at all, ever. Still, answering the same way over and again seems boring, colorless. Were I a politician I would refer you to statements I’ve already made on the subject. Here, though, I will say it started with the first line, as always.

2. This piece is one sentence, one paragraph; commas are the only punctuation.  I love the way these formal decisions make the work feel like one side of a one-sided conversation—at moments, this magnetic narrator comes across as desperate, confident, earnest, deceptive.  By the time I reached the end I felt as if I’d just read the speech of a dying man.  What went into your decision to structure the work this way?

It seemed appropriate, that it should be one sentence, that there should be no stopping. One should trust intuition.

3. Many of your stories in Asunder are in first person, as is your novel Kamby Bolongo Mean River.  What is it that draws you to first person?  Has your approach to this mode changed over time?  I’d love to hear about what you do to honor the narrator, to discover and follow voice.

I suppose for me first person feels more authentic, a testimonial. Here is this I and this I is telling us what’s happened, what’s happening. It feels closest to how we perceive the world, through our own consciousness. Third-person by its very nature has a different texture. Every fiction is a construct, there is artifice involved in the story itself and the telling of it. Every fiction we encounter we know is written by an “author”, but third person can seem very written by an author in a once upon a time-like way. Sometimes this construct feels less compelling to me, less urgent. Here’s another so and so telling me a story, like it’s something I haven’t heard before, like it makes a goddamned bit of difference. But first person has an immediacy somehow, this happened to me and I have to tell you about it. This is why I employ the first person most often. For me it feels like a performance, like an actor playing a part. Discovering that character/voice and following it, trusting it, is the fun part.   

4. From your bio I learned that you teach/have taught for at least three universities.  Has this range of teaching experiences affected your writing?

I don’t think so.

5. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

Stories toward another collection. There are two finished plays, as well, that might well be worked on again soon.

6. What great books—or sentences, or paragraphs, or pages—have you been reading in this new year? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

The new issue of Unsaid will be great. Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby will be great. Brian Carr has a new one coming out that will be great. Others, too, I imagine.

"As if Suggesting Nextness": An Interview With Michael C. Peterson

Michael C. Peterson is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, but is currently without a state to call his own. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Fence, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, american letters & commentary, and elsewhere. He has been recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

His poem "Glossa Ordinaria" appears in Issue Twenty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, he speaks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about old books, the erotic, and the wiles of lineation.  Enjoy!

1. How did your poem, “Glossa Ordinaria,” start and then grow into the poem that it is today?

It began strangely, as I remember it, and continues to be strange to me now as I see it in print. What are now the final two lines were once the first and second. What was once a poem which extended across the page became distilled, compressed into these little ruined couplets. The italicized lines were actually borrowed from an old seventeenth century broadside which reported the sinking of British merchant vessel off the coast of America; the lines in question were, in fact, marginalia written in what appeared to be a female hand. The poem she was commenting on (or glossing) was quite dull, as I recall. Pretty typical hack balladry for the time, but her notes were troubled, contemplative, and significant to me for their devotional quality. They were honest in their prayer for a dead so far from her – this “long-distance” relationship having something of an eros to it in the way romantic eros always claims the devotional stance. There were bits of unnecessary syntactical ligament in those places where there is now white space. It made sense to do away with them given the poem’s plea both to itself and to its beloved.  The title came last, the glossa ordinaria being the standard compilation of biblical glosses attributed to the early Church Fathers. But it also literally means common tongue; perhaps fitting given both the poem’s process and its meditation.

2. Before this interview, I did some brief research on Balthus, whose painting of the same name inspired “Les Beaux Jours.” From this research, I read that he rejected any sort of critical writings about his paintings, even biographically so, preferring that people just view his work, instead of viewing it through the lens of a critic or otherwise.  How do you think your poem fits into this ideology?

Yeah: Balthus was a pretty stringent guy about all this kind of stuff. He was especially deflective when it came to pieces like “Les Beaux Jours,” paintings which located young girls in erotic situations and yet which he insisted were not meant to be erotic, as such. By this, I think he meant that they shouldn’t serve the imagination in the way pornography might.  There’s no question that it’s troubling work which demands explanation. But his not wanting to give any is also, perhaps, a counter-suggestion: that the mind that asks for explanation has, in fact, more to answer for. I found myself disturbed by these images and I suppose wanted to write myself into what I saw not just as a moral problem, but also an inherently metaphysical one. There are elements of the painting in the poem, but they operate more as facts which the voice converts to rhetoric. An attempt to re-enact whatever this painting’s weird causality is? Not entirely sure. I suppose too that I could be a bit coy and say that if I knew exactly what I was trying to say, I wouldn’t have written the poem in the first place.

3. The form of “Glossa Ordinaria” is so different from “Les Beaux Jours” in that the lines aren’t as tethered to the margin in the first as in the second.  Do these choices of line placement arise in your writing early on or are they something carefully added in later?

You know, at first I was surprised that these two poems were paired. They’re older poems and different from each other in some ways (despite being written around the same four month time frame). But the editors did me a huge favor by way of pairing them – they’re both fundamentally erotic poems – not in the sense of desire so much – but in the sense of the boundaries they want to encounter (your question about “margins” brings this to mind), and so one explanation would be a psychoanalytic one. In “Glossa” the mind works like the image of the mainline and gangion, a fishing rig where several weighted lines are tethered to a central one which is then lifted by a buoy to the surface of the sea. To be in a state of desire, to submerged like that is also to be in touch with a kind of self-knowledge that is not always pleasant. But you do surface. Hopefully. The lineation of “Beaux Jours” feels conservative by comparison, closer to a kind of tight, epigrammatic register. Its lineation is, maybe, protective in the way that certain formal choices can afford one a degree of protection amidst danger. In the end, protection is always a lie one tells oneself – and it is a lie, or should be seen as such, I think. The poem never believed it in the first place. If I find myself shuffling lineation around too much after the fact, I become sort of suspicious of my motives – and of the poem’s integrity to begin with.

4. What thing have you read most recently that’s really stuck with you?

Elaine Scarry’s Thinking in an Emergency. Kevin Starr’s history of California, California. I’ve been reading Robinson Crusoe for the first time and wondering why I haven’t read it sooner. I seem to be drawn recently to books which speak to wilderness somehow, with all of its implicit connections to exile and isolation, whether imposed or chosen. There is, of course, that wonderful section of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”: that we choose to see Crusoe as rescued. Or that we project our own desire for rescue onto him. Perhaps I should have started with Crusoe and then looked for the appropriate evacuation procedure in Scarry? Then again, bewilderment is good. Good for apotheosis, William Everson would say.

5. What are you looking forward to writing in the new year? 

Something willing to shake itself to pieces. A sestina, maybe? I don’t like sestinas, but maybe it’s time for me to confront my Grendel.

"The Underrated Field of Logic": An Interview With Tomás Q. Morín

Tomás Q. Morín's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Threepenny Review, Poetry International, New England Review, and Narrative. His collection A Larger Country was the winner of the 2012 APR/Honickman Prize and is forthcoming in the fall. 

His poem "Microscopy" appears in Issue Twenty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, Morín speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about hot dogs, tuberculosis, and facebook statuses.  Enjoy!

1. How did you go about writing “Microscopy”?

At the time I began writing “Microscopy,” my wife was working in a tuberculosis lab at the Health Department. One of the many tasks in that lab was to look through a microscope at tuberculosis samples and determine the level of infection of the patient to whom the sample belonged. Curious about what she saw through that microscope, I asked her what tuberculosis looked like. She explained that bacterium is either round or rod-shaped, with tuberculosis being the latter. After she sketched me a picture to help me better see what tuberculosis would look like, my mind leapt to hot dogs and before I knew it I had the kernel of a poem.

2. When reading through your poem, I loved the way that the small, three-line stanzas made me feel like I was looking through a microscope; the small sections let me view each one closely, though I’ll admit I don’t think your stanzas look like hot dogs.  Could you talk about how form informs content and/or vice versa?

Frost famously wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” When I write poems that are a single sentence as this one is, they tend to melt really fast. My hope is that the tercets, by bringing more white space into the poem, will turn the heat down just enough that the reader can take in every detail before it all melts away. Taking in every detail is what the folks in my wife’s profession have to do. What I hoped to duplicate in the movement of the poem was my wife’s patient, careful eye searching through that microscope lens.

3. I loved how the speaker of this poem fumbles through understanding the lab work that the you in the poem is doing.  How does science—or other fields of study—influence your writing?

The fumbling is true to life. What my wife does is incredibly technical and complicated. While she does her best to explain it all to me, there are certain complexities of her job that I will never fully understand. When I was younger I would have tried in a poem to fake possessing that knowledge and ended up looking foolish. What I tried to do is incorporate my shortcomings into the poem. That’s more real, and thus I hope more relatable.

As for other fields of study influencing my writing, that hasn’t really happened. Now because I’m a sucker for facts and just naturally curious about everything and anything, there’s no telling what bits of information from other areas of knowledge might end up in a poem I’m writing.

4. What writing has caught you off guard and pleasantly surprised you recently?

This may sound surprising, but the most recent writing that has completely caught me off guard are the Facebook statuses of fiction writer Richard Bausch. His statuses that deal with art and the challenges of making said art are incredibly inspiring and wise and feel like they would always be timely to anyone pursuing this difficult, often thankless, kind of life we’ve chosen for ourselves. For example, here’s a short one: "About your vision, or your grand theme--forget all that. Write about what matters deeply to you, what moves you, what frightens you to death, even what makes you angry or sorry, but do it with the viscera, the nerve-endings, get into it beyond your opinions about it and beyond what you think you know about it, and be CLEAR, make it count in the reader's nerve-endings. And everything else will take care of itself." I don’t know about you, but when I signed on for Facebook I never expected to read something wonderful like this. I’m hoping that one day soon some smart publisher will collect and release The Collected Facebook Wisdom of Richard Bausch.

5. What else are you writing right now? 

I’m not currently working on any new poems because I’m teaching. A few years back I gave up writing during the fall and spring semesters because I just didn’t have the energy to do both. What I decided to do instead whenever I felt an idea for a new poem coming on was to write detailed notes about character, plot, imagery, as well as potential first and last lines. My hope was that when the winter or summer breaks rolled around, I’d be able to rekindle the original burst of inspiration and write the poem at my leisure. So far this has worked out well and I’ve been very happy with how the poems have turned out. One unexpected consequence of this change in practice is that I’ve gone from writing an average of 15-20 poems a year to 4-5. I’m happy with the arrangement, though, because those 4-5 poems have tended to be keepers. 

"Writing Like Hell and Stirring Up Dust": An Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek

Danniel Schoonebeek's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, La Petite Zine, The Awl, and elsewhere. He was born in the Catskills. 

His poem "Inscription (Vault)" appears in Issue Twenty-Nine of The Collagist.

Here Schoonebeek talks to Amber L. Cook about placement, pronouns, and propulsion of a poem.  Enjoy!

1. How has “Inscription (Vault)” changed or remained the same since its point of origin? Where exactly did this poem start?

I wrote “Inscription” in May, at dusk, sitting outside my apartment in Brooklyn. There was one of those terrific blood orange sundowns to the west over Manhattan and I was wearing a small Hohner harmonica around my neck.

I don’t feel I can hide behind “the speaker” anymore in my work. There’s too much absolution and pardon in that phrase. So you could say that “Inscription” is me, Danniel, voicing a list of demands. I had relationships going to waste. I’d met a woman with very fine teeth. And against all of these occasions I had the sensation that American culture and civilization were ending. When I first drafted the poem it was titled “Injunction.” As I started to build and dismember the poem on the page it required something more elegiac. I landed on “inscription” because it bears so much on its back as a word: one happens upon an inscription or dedicates an object with one, and the purpose of an inscription is to carry language into a history that is beyond the occasion it marks. So in part I wanted folks to see the lines inscribed on a headstone. “Vault” is there to focus and distort that placement. I wanted folks to also see the poem carved into a buried safety deposit box or, in the archaic sense of the word, to see the poem skywritten.  

2. The poem navigates many pronouns, which is both admirable and thought-provoking. The ending, especially, traverses through them seamlessly: “I want him to sing/ in your language brother remember/ god damn this was their song/ not ours/ I’m singing/ this was their wind that fights its way through the teeth.” How do you envision the audience working through the pronoun shifts within the poem?

Shifts, I like that. Like everyone in the poem is working the same job but different shifts.

I knew “us” had to be the first pronoun. It’s an intimate and fleeting word. The United States, it’s been said, is inherently a taunted country, since its acronym—the US—is a name to which it can’t live up. The bevy of pronouns in the poem (and the way each is called upon quickly to be the subject of a line) was my way of building a populace in the poem. As it should be in the States, the populace in the poem can’t wear any one name or language, and so it exists as a mosaic, a salmagundi. Readers of the poem, I want them to feel both present and disoriented. It’s their world but they don’t know the faces. It’s their time but it’s belated. It’s their song but they aren’t the ones singing it.

3. I noticed that the only form of punctuation used is parenthesis. How does the punctuation, or lack of punctuation, inform the poem and what is happening in the poem?

I’m finding that I won’t allow punctuation into my poems if it can’t aggravate or antagonize the language. I’m fascinated by end-stopped lines, the way the period polices the language and disrupts the propulsion that the poem is trying to establish. I’m willing to say that every poem worth its salt should engage a conflict. And at its worst, punctuation feels to me like a vestige of a false law. The conflict in “Inscription” is that the old law can’t be depended upon. If the poem is governed at all it’s governed by desire. And desire to me is rhythmic—it needs to be convulsive and decrescendo and flare up again. It can’t be impeded by punctuation. A parentheses, though, is a rhythmic gesture that expresses a desire. It’s like speaking into the camera or breaking the fourth wall in drama. You want people to know you’re aware of their presence. It’s a way of looking them dead in the eye when you speak.  

4. What works have you been invested in lately? What makes them so enticing for you?

I’ve been spending a lot of time with de Kooning. I want to create a tantrum in language the way his Women are tantrums in paint. John Hurt’s performance in Krapp’s Last Tape, which I saw in December, that was staggering. It was the first time I physically experienced that absurd and terrifying silence in Beckett. I can’t stop listening to Listz and Chopin. Death dances, etudes. I’m reading Mandelstam before bed nowadays. “It’s not Rome the city that lives on, / it’s man’s place in the universe.” Poetry lost a wild and matchless writer when Christopher Logue died. His work teaches me a lot about patience. And C.D. Wright I think is composing the best long poems I’ve read since Frank Bidart’s.

5. Is “Inscription (Vault)” part of a larger project? Are there any other projects you’ve been working on?

It’s an early poem in a manuscript I finished before the new year. I’m still letting those poems stew and ferment with each other as a collection, like a bucket of dandelion wine. As for projects, I’ll quote Dorothea Lasky: poetry is not a project. I’m vexed that poets feel compelled to bundle their work into series and projects and little digestifs. I think language, like paper or food, has become this substance that we feel comfortable wasting every day. If it won’t carry information or tell them where to spend money, it’s like people no longer feel the work of struggling through a poem is honest. To me that’s an impulse that writers need to strike down. So I’m just writing like hell and stirring up dust and it isn't a project. My friend Del tells me to “keep the friction in my brain.” I’m trying to honor that advice.

"A Prayer I’ve Forgotten the Words to:" An Interview With Sara Tracey

Sara Tracey is a poet and teacher in Chicago, Illinois. Her chapbook, Flood Year, was released by dancing girl press in September 2009.  Her work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Laurel Review, Arsenic Lobster, Hiram Poetry Review, and Harpur Palate. She is a regular performer in The Chicago Poetry Brothel.

Her poem "Spring Flood" appears in Issue Twenty-Six of The Collagist.

Here, she speaks with interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about her work.  Enjoy!

1. How did you go about writing “Spring Flood”?

This poem is a product of my first year living in Chicago, but it actually took a few years to find its shape. It started as part of a much longer prose piece, organized by season, that narrated my moving to the city and all the inherent troubles that caused for this small town girl. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a prose writer (though I love the prose poem and lyric essays) and the piece was an utter failure. I started dismantling it, and “Spring Flood” emerged. The other seasons are still lingering in my files, but I don’t think anything will ever come of them.

2. You use a lot of wonderfully specific images in this poem, from the “chalk dust / and Hennessey” to the “Church bells / and lilac blossoms.” These things feel very much like a list of items, something you might find in a scavenger hunt.  Yet, the last image, the fogged up windows only letting the speaker see the color of the brick, evokes the exact opposite of the other images—something blurred.  Could you talk a little bit about your relationship with images and how you think they work?

Thanks! I love the idea of this poem being the product of a scavenger hunt! I tend to think of it—and many of my poems—as a verbal collage or scrap book, a collection of images or impressions that have kind of latched themselves to my memory somehow. When I’m writing, I try to choose the images that are most likely to evoke the emotions of the experience that inspired the poem. I want my readers to feel what I was feeling, even if they don’t know exactly what’s happening.

In that sense, the fogged up windows and the brick walls beyond them are meant to represent a lack of clarity and focus. When I first moved to the city, I found myself constantly in a state of sensory overload. Everything was unfamiliar, and one street corner blended into the next. The relationship that inspired this poem was deceptively clear to me—but the world around it was completely blurred.

3. I found the lines “How could I stop / laughing? At some point, the spell will break” to be where the poem stops and turns.  Could you talk about how you got to this part of the poem?

Ah, the challenge of being a semi-confessional poet. How much to share? This moment in the poem was dictated more by experience than craft, though you’re right that it marks a turn in the piece. The first half of the poem is about finding joy in an unexpected place. The second half of the poem is about the aftermath, or what happens when “the spell” breaks.

4. I read in your bio that you have a chapbook called Flood Year.  Floods seem to be pretty important to you. What draws you to them?

This is a really interesting question for me because I actually never thought about it before. I’ve been caught in a few floods (nothing too bad, thankfully), but I think the two you mention are the only ones that have made it into poems (no, wait, I just remembered a third). What I do know is that weather is one of my obsessions—especially rain. Remember that Garbage song, “Only Happy When It Rains”? That’s my anthem. This winter, everyone’s been complaining about the unseasonably warm weather and I’m like, “What, it’s raining in January? Let’s go jump in puddles!” Seriously, though, I love it when the world outside mimics what’s going on inside, and in this case, the deluge of spring rain and melting snow (it was one of Chicago’s snowiest winters in decades) felt hugely symbolic to me. I remember going home one morning and getting soaked by a passing car while waiting for the bus. Chicago likes to kick you when you’re down, and one of the ways it does that is with the weather.

5. What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?  The thing that you’re most excited to read? 

I just finished Luis Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which was lovely and haunting. After reading tons of literary criticism and modernist poetry for my PhD exams, I’ve just wanted to read fiction the last couple of months. But I’m looking forward to picking up contemporary poetry again, and have a huge list of recently published or soon to be released books that I want to read. Off the top of my head: Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, Amanda Auchter’s The Glass Crib, Roger Reeves’ King Me. The list goes on.

6. What other writings are you working on right now? 

I’m playing around with a couple of projects right now, trying to decide if and how they fit together, and which of them might become my dissertation. One is about a mobster’s wife in the 1940’s, another is about a young man (I’m calling him The Musician right now, but that may not last) traveling in Italy, and the third is inspired by my dabbling in roller derby and is really interested in the body and its fragility/resilience. Then there are, of course, poems that spring up out of no where and don’t seem to fit clearly in any of those categories. I also just finished revamping my first book manuscript (where “Spring Flood” finds its home) and will be getting it out into the world soon, I hope.

"To Tailor This Book Around a Budding Body": An Interview-in-Excerpts With Gretchen Henderson

Gretchen E. Henderson's first book, GALERIE DE DIFFORMITÉ, received the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Prize from &NOW Books (2011). Fall 2011 also sees the release of her second book, ON MARVELLOUS THINGS HEARD (Green Lantern Press), an extended lyric essay on music and language, and WRECKAGE: BY LAND & BY SEA (Dancing Girl Press), a cartographic poetry chapbook. Her musically-structured novel, THE HOUSE ENTERS THE STREET, is forthcoming from Starcherone Books. Gretchen is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, where she invites participation in the collaborative deformation of her GALERIE DE DIFFORMITÉ: difformite.wordpress.com. 

An excerpt from Henderson's GALERIE DE DIFFORMITÉ appears in Issue Twenty-Seven of The Collagist.

Here, she answers questions "in the form of excerpts"-- every answer includes further excerpts from GALERIE DE DIFFORMITÉ.  Enjoy!

1. What is writing like?

Though I believe it will be readily admitted that no subjects seem so proper to form a School of Deformity in Art—This much, however, I will venture to say: that the Works collected for this Gallery—unlocked from Wundercammern & Mvsevms, culled from publick & private Whatnot—bear something for you, Subscriber, to consider: the Nature of Deformity.

Or, to say another way: 1. The action of the verb DEFORM, q.v. 1552 HULOET, Deformynge, vitiatio. 2. That deforms: see the verb. 1870 Daily News 19 Dec., Incongruity is a deforming feature. 1892 LD. KELVIN in Pall Mall G. 1 Dec. 6/3 He had now..a..demonstration of elastic yielding in the earth as a whole, under the influence of a deforming force.

Or, more generally speaking: Bea’s beauty—and, I would add, her uncharted deformity—are left to the eye of each beholder, so the many faces of Bea, taken together, suggest what’s missing. The seeking of Bea becomes the seeking of “we,” ever changing. More than trying to decipher her, then, her ability to change may serve as a better guide. (See “Exhibit A.”)

2. What isn’t writing like?

In the process of factualizing and fictionalizing Bea, of deliberately erring, I’m following the lead of Lewis Thomas who wrote in “The Wonderful Mistake”: “The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA.…Biology needs a better word than ‘error’ for the driving force in evolution. Or maybe ‘error’ will do after all, when you remember that it came from an old root meaning to wander about, looking for something.” Keeping in mind this notion of “error” as the foundation of our species, I imagine Bea not as singular and stagnant, but multiple and moving: as one who errs, who wanders, who’s looking for something. And in looking, there lies potential communication.

A gallery assumes that its “narrative” [insert literary term: _____________] is told through visitors’     [ my / your (circle one) ] circumambulations.  Docents, captions, and maps [noun, plural: _______________] guide the way.  Other aspects—especially organization, method of display, architecture, lighting and shadow, and [noun, pl.: _______________]—contribute to the overall experience.

In other words: As the plaint beeswax / Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer / What once it was, but changes form, and still / Is plaint wax, so do I…

3. When you do it, why?

Where does a person know to find and leave a heart, and how? Is it a matter of calling losses ‘discoveries,’ dismissing what went before, what lies behind our eyes? How do we navigate the world, terra incognita, marking or erasing or retracing bodies? How do we dig beneath our own skins to feel what pulses inside?

For every quantum-mechanical branch point in your life…you have split into two or more you’s riding along parallel but disconnected branches of one gigantic universal wave function.

Or, what words might invite you to get lost in whatever way you need?

4. When you don’t, why?

Facing the text, I wouldn’t call myself a breaker so much as seamstress, enlisting your help to tailor this book around a budding body: the once-and-future corpse of this corpus. To survive, I need your help to evolve. To deform and reform, to dream and metamorphose (or otherwise risk misreading: me & Bea.)  Open Sesame: “During / dressmaking / time good shears…” Snip, snip…or start by sketching manicules in margins…or merely manifest a set of hypothetical instructions: “how to” build, operate, repair, maintain, recycle materials (paper, stitching, board, letters, &c).  “How To” Deform This Book… A virtual prototype can be found at http://difformite.wordpress.com.

To consider this form in terms of content, turn to page 5 or 77 or 230.

“This is a book just like any other book. But I would be happy if it were read only by people….who know that an approach—to anything whatsoever—must…traverse even the very opposite of what is being approached.”

Notes (i.e., Ligare: at the root of binding, and being unbound*):

1. Pages 14-15, 141, 235-6.

2. Pages 238, 74, 23.

3. Pages 56, 245, 239.

4. Pages 230-231, 156, 8.

* Page 157. Generally speaking, all page references here correspond to the novel Galerie de Difformité (&NOW Books, 2011). To turn to page 133, to echo Karen Armstrong: “Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?’”



"The Combination is at Once Incredibly Specific and Totally Vague": An Interview With Ryan Ridge

Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collection Hunters & Gamblers and the poetry collection Ox. In 2013, Mud Luscious Press will publish his novel(la) American Homes. He lives in Long Beach, California, and is working on the second book of his American trilogy, American Literature. Visit him online at ryanridge.com.

Ridge's story "American Literature" appears in Issue Twenty-Eight of The Collagist.

Here he talks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about his work.  Enjoy!

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “American Literature”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

“American Literature” began as a title, something I wrote in a notebook a couple years back. I was finishing graduate school at the time and when we turned in our theses the library required us to categorize our manuscripts by subject and I remember “American Literature” was one of the menu options and so I checked the box and later I said to my wife: “American Literature. That’d be a good title for something.” She thought it was an ambitious one, but liked it okay. The thing I enjoy about seeing those two words in proximity (American Literature) is how the combination is at once incredibly specific and totally vague. It tells you nothing and everything. In terms of the piece’s evolution, just lines––one after another. Riffs arranged according to the whimsy of the mind in time. Like Churchill said of history: one damn thing after another. “American Literature” is one damn sentence after another.    

2. This piece is made of short paragraphs, some of which are a single sentence or word.   I love the way these paragraphs at times read like personal journal entries, and at other times take on an almost scholarly authority.  Two of my favorite examples of the latter are: “The role of the critic in American literature is to coin consumer expectations” and “The Declaration of Independence is the foundation of American literature.”  The shift between seemingly subjective journaling and seemingly objective declarations creates a chain of delightful poetic “turns.”  What went into your decision to structure the work this way?

The tone shifts, or turns as you say, grew organically from the mode in which I’m writing. It’s just a deep interiority, a transcription of thoughts cut with quotations. The structure wasn’t a conscious thing. It manifested as is with very little rearranging/editing and if the word/idea combinations are delightful then I’ve found my ideal reader. Thank you, Joe!  

3. “American Literature” resists traditional nonfiction forms—it feels less like essay, memoir, or journalism, and more like what you’d find if you happened upon a writer’s lost notebook, a loved thing left behind on a park bench.  Can you talk a little about this? Where do you think this piece belongs (or branches from) on the   nonfiction family tree?

I think Benjamin says it best early in his Arcades Project: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show.”

I see “American Literature” as a descendent of David Markson’s later novels, Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks, David Shields’ Reality Hunger, and Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms. If it reads like a lost notebook that’s awesome. Thank God, so long as it doesn’t read like a diary.  Dear Diary, I’ll never keep you...

4. I’d love to hear about your trilogy of books, and how/where “American Literature” fits in.

The trilogy begins in 2013 with my novel(la) American Homes which the awesome folks at Mud Luscious will be publishing. It’s a book about architecture. The second work in the trilogy is American Literature. It’s to be a book about books. The final one is to be called American Water. It’s a collection of essays about the seminal Silver Jews’ album, American Water. Hands down the greatest rock record of the 90s. In terms of the trilogy really the only through line is the word American in the titles and the fact that they all feature the same narrator, me.

5.  What other writing projects are you working on right now?

I quit smoking recently after having smoked for many years and ever since I’ve had a lot of bad ideas. For instance, I was collecting all of the search terms I used on a daily basis (essentially my web history but just the actual phrases I’d Googled, not all the pages I’d visited) and compiling those phrases into a single document. I was then crosscutting that list of terms with the daily weather conditions, as well as my geographical coordinates and the IP address of the machine I was using. I was going to call the project “Terms & Conditions: an Unabashed Memoir” and it was to speak to the fact that certain private interests and entities are already compiling this information anyway, so my thought was why not beat them to the punch and make that information public in the form of a book, but after you’ve read a couple months worth of your own search terms (out of context) you start to rethink things. I abandoned the project. About the only thing I’m working on steady is “American Literature.” I blame the quitting smoking for this: my brain’s been scattered without the nicotine.

6.  What great books have you been reading in this new year? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

Well I started the year off with a bang and by bang I mean Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes. If there were more books like fuckscapes we’d see flatscreens floating in rivers and spontaneous orgies erupting in libraries. People would be fucking excited to read again. I also just finished a little book by Nicolle Elizabeth called one time all i wanted and it’s a tender, hypnotic book which I will pay the highest compliment and say: I wish I wrote it.

2012 is going to be a banner year for books. Some upcoming releases I’m excited about (and this is just a small sampling there are  far too many to list):   

            The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard

            The Sugar Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner

Then I always look forward everything Calamari, Dark Sky, Mud Luscious, Publishing Genius, Tiny Hardcore, and Ugly Duckling puts out. I read every word these presses print. They’re the best.    

Issue Thirty

Issue Thirty of The Collagist is live!

In this issue, we have exciting new fiction from Kristen Kaschock, Sarah Tourjee, Christoper Merkner, and Victor Infante, as well as an excerpt of Laird Hunt's The Impossibly. Laird Hunt was in our first issue with an excerpt from his novel Ray of the Star, and so its a pleasure to have him here again in our thirtieth, sharing some of the previously-unreleased material that's been added to the new release of The Impossibly.

Our poetry section this month includes work by Scott Beal, Luke Johnson, and Rose McLarney, as well as Charles Jensen, who was also first in our first issue. His recent chapbook, The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture, contains some of those Issue One poems, and we hope you'll check out the full book.

In our creative audio section, we have work written by Margaret Eaton and read by Eugene J. Bueschler, and our non-fiction this month includes two inventive essays, by Matthew Vollmer and Shena McAuliffe.  

Our book reviews include coverage of Your Wildest Dreams Within Reason by Mike Sacks (reviewed by Phedra Deonarine), Short Bus by Brian Allen Carr (reviewed by Laura Ender), The Ravickians by Renee Gladman (reviewed by Tom DeBeauchamp), Other Heartbreaks by Patricia Henley (reviewed by Jason Cook), and Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksander Hemon (reviewed by Anna Clark). 

Enjoy!

"Things Idolized and Fetishized and Otherwise En-pedestal-ed": An Interview With Gabriel Welsch

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Gabriel Welsch writes both fiction and poetry. His third collection of poems, The Death of Flying Things, is due in June 2012. Previous collections are Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (2006) and An Eye Fluent in Gray, a chapbook (2010). Recent work appears in Southern Review, New Letters, PANK, Whiskey Island, Knock, and Chautauqua. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College. 

Welsch's story "A Litany of Stupid Things" appears in Issue Twenty-Nine of The Collagist.  

Here he speaks with interviewer Joseph Scapellato about his work.  Enjoy!

1. Can you tell us about the origin of “The Litany of Stupid Things”?  Where did this piece begin for you, and how did it get to here?

Since about 2004, I have been working on a collection of linked short stories connected to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, and this story is linked to “Happy.” It gets its title from a combination of the song’s first two lines, “Well I never kept a dollar past sunset/ It always burned a hole in my pants,” and the fact of the longer plot involving the story’s speaker. The title is his bit of self loathing, realizing how much he spent (financially, emotionally, physically) on something doomed, and on his own abortive attempt to change something about himself. In the other stories, his lot does not improve.

I started it as a list, trying to find a core for the story, and once it hit me that the list itself might serve as a form to get through what is otherwise a fairly stock plot without having to rely on the usual connective devices of fiction, I began to expand the texture of the list and its specifics, so it could sufficiently suggest setting, plot, character and pacing. Then, the key was whittling it back down enough, and knowing when to leave it alone. J. David Stevens was helpful in that regard.

2. Although the title suggests that the narrator finds the objects and moments in his litany to be “stupid,” so much in this piece glows with rough charm, such as “a cheap mandolin with cigarette burns near the lower f-hole…a Peavey with a shredded cone gobbed up with nail polish.”  And certain moments are absolutely beautiful: “when we linger in the irrigation mists drifting over the production fields and let it cool our faces and later, in the orange haze of twilight, settling to condense in the small of my back, the caverns of hers, the fields fecund and earthy and pushing the sun’s warmth back into the evening.”  After my first read, I wondered: to what extent is the narrator struggling to nail down the relationship between “beauty” and “stupidity”?  (Has he been mistaking “the latest stupid, useless thing” for beauty?)  And—more broadly—do you think that this is an important struggle for writers to undertake?

The beauty is not lost on this character. As noted above, the “stupid” is more self-directed, an indictment created by the list and pointed back at himself. He obviously has some fondness for the pieces, as indicated by the details he keeps. For him, the relationship he struggles with is perhaps an embittered memory, recalling those things in which he invested much of himself, and being “fooled” into thinking the things would produce lasting stability in life, love, etc.

As for writers struggling with beauty and stupidity, you have me wading into philosophical waters in which my only answers are idiosyncratic. Without going too graven-image on you, things idolized and fetishized and otherwise en-pedestal-ed almost invariably lose that luster under scrutiny, and my own work has moved from investing greatly in iconic bits to being more skeptical. Hell, the collection from which this story evolved takes Exile as an artifact (given its importance to some of the other characters, all of whom are/were in a classic rock cover band at one time) and gradually finds its ideas, music, personalities, and critical praise complicated in different ways. From my own reading, it seems a common progression, whether that skepticism is directed at form, at devices, at language itself (see poets), at contemporary settings in which we work, and more.

3. I read in your bio that you write both fiction and poetry.  In what ways does “The Litany of Stupid Things” resemble your poetry?  Do you have a different writing process for each genre?   I’d love to hear about how/when you know that what you’re writing is a poem or a story.

I don’t know that “Litany” resembles the poetry I am writing now very much other than in its making use of very specific things. I still like what Williams said in that regard (no ideas but in things) and am a sucker, however uncool that is, for the specific and the literal, and the weight and implication they carry. While I struggle with the inefficiencies of language when you push at its edges, as I think most poets do, I am probably first and foremost a prose writer, and depending on who you ask, you can see it in my poems.

I don’t have a different writing process for the origins of each genre. Writing for me still comes out of a morning free-write, journal style, from which ideas develop. For the collection of linked stories that produced this piece, I actually have a little more deterministic a process. Once I had written a few of the stories and realized they had an artifact around which to organize, I sketched out an (evolving) set of notes about plot, characters, timeline, etc. Now, as I finish one piece and find the next one to work on, the start is more deliberate.

I usually know when what I am writing is going to become a story or a poem by the feel of the line that comes out. Usually, if the line suggests another voice, a different character than my usual poetic persona (that complicated pseudo-me), then I know it will be a story. Sometimes I will observe something in my day and it suggests a story, and then it will be a story. I occasionally work in persona in poetry (in fact, I am shopping a book now that is entirely in persona, Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse), and that is when the process, in its early stages, is the most uncertain for me—when I am not sure what form that particular voice and/or story will take.

4. What other writing projects are you working on right now?

I am kind of messy, so I am working on a number of things simultaneously most of the time. I’m in the middle of this Exile project, of which “Litany” is a part. I have a series of short-shorts that I am trying to figure out what to do with. I am always working on poems, and am in the middle of a pretty productive run. December through February is usually a good time for me, as my day job has me traveling quite a bit from mid-February through May (I am a fundraiser for Juniata College, and that keeps me hopping), so my current good run will probably be at a crashing halt once this interview is posted. I have a novel in the desk drawer that I can’t sell, and another abortive attempt stalled at midpoint. I have a review I’d like to write. So, there are things.

5. What great books have you been reading in this new year? Are there any upcoming releases you're excited about?

I am reading Tony Hiss’s On Travel, a very interesting meditation on the effects of travel on our ability to observe, on the elasticity of time, and more. It’s one of those books you can’t read quickly because every few pages you need to write down something and let it all sink in. I’m spelunking in Christopher Hitchens’ Love, Poverty, and War, and rereading Kunitz’s Collected. I also just started Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee’s anthology out from Iowa, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, and am enjoying the various perspectives there very much. I just read B.K. Fischer’s Mutiny Gallery, and she is not a poet with whom I was previously familiar, but the book is just incredible in its compression and narrative force. (That’s the review I’d like to write, incidentally. Here’s the short form: three thumbs, way way up!) I am looking forward to new books in 2012 by Mike Czyzniejewski, Paula Bohince, Judy Vollmer, and Mary Biddinger. I’m sure there are others, but those are top of mind.