"NOT KNOWING BUT AS PROXIMITY": HANK LAZER'S N18 (COMPLETE)

"Given to the delight and terror of contact at edges, the Notebooks evidence curiosity and an increasingly desperate yearning to better understand 'us/ that fact what were' because it has changed despite the impossibility of doing so (“8/19/10—8/20/10”). They face a sharpened, bittersweet awareness that the poverty of limits exposes us to a much wider range of activity where the 'darkness' seen at 'horizon of the end' abandons forms we love for unprecedented visions: 'what we are to get a glimpse of what we might become' (“8/28/10”)." My review of Hank Lazer's meticulous and incredibly expansive N18 (complete) (Singing Horse Press 2012) is finally available in the review section of Drunken Boat 17. Thanks to Shira Dentz for putting the review section together!

DIE WILDEKINDER, LIKE YOMI: BRENDA SIECZKOWSKI'S WONDER GIRL IN MONSER LAND

"As the shoreline of Monster Land erodes, we find wrenching departures that cut in both directions. Loss leaves us alone with ourselves (no one to help us read it)." Check out my review of Brenda Sieczkowski's harrowing and radiant chapbook Wonder Girl in Monster Land (dancing girl press 2012) in the incredibly energetic review section Shira Dentz curated for Drunken Boat 17.

COUNTRY MUSIC (DoubleCross Press 2013)
Poetics of the Handmade series

“Historically, friendship has housed poetry not only in terms of readerships (think of all the poetries born of friendship), but also in terms of presses. When good work was not/is not able to find an equally good home for too long, friends start their own press. They publish their friends’ work; they make new friends in the process. These small presses are the no kill shelter for experimental writing.” 




I am tremendously grateful to MC Hyland for publishing COUNTRY MUSIC, a collaborative essay that Kirsten Jorgenson and I wrote about our first summer running Ark Press and the Ark Press Summer Reading Series in Todd, NC (Summer 2011) with such tenderness and patience as a part of her stunning DoubleCross Press Poetics of the Handmade series. 

Pepper Luboff's And when the time for the breaking (Ark Press 2013)

"Pepper Luboff is so brilliant it breaks my heart. Get a copy of her chapbook. Weep, rejoice. Rinse, repeat. It's the sort of work that I find totally generative--it propels me to respond."
                -Joseph Massey












Ark Press is thrilled to announce the arrival of our second limited edition chapbook, Pepper Luboff's And when the time for the breaking (Letterpress Printed on 100 lb. Mohawk Superfine Paper. Metallic gold vellum fly sheet). Visually and linguistically acrobatic, And when the time for the breaking meditates on the fracturing, "can't say uh-merica / without splintering" ("Versus"), and resilience of community in Oakland and the surrounding San Francisco Bay area as it calls us to consider our culpability to one another:
if we
look into
the ingredients (makers &
pasts) of
those around us
words we reproduce
our laws & manners
places we work & live
what we wear & eat
distanced
how to go about it
either, or, or as ("the lack of distance, a kind of closure")

Sneak peak::

THE NEXT BIG THING

Megan Burns and Mike Sikkema asked me to take part in The Next Big Thing.

What is the working title of the book?

INDIAN SUMMER RECYLING (words on a building I pass on the way home…)

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Where did the idea come from for the book?

Appalachian North Carolina is magnetic. Living here necessarily means participating in a commotion of overlapping fields of energy that continue to activate and challenge so many parts of my personality. The landscape is varied, lush and gorgeous, gnarled, mossy and shady, rough, spacious, foggy, isolating, expansive, littered with industrial bric-a-brac and shot-up with light. Appalachia is full of hollers, wild and carved out for tree farms, wrenched barbed wire fences, old tractors and trailers, sweet clover, crows and wild turkeys, rotting barns mid-collapse with slow-flowing windows, ghosts, horses, flurries of roadside chickens, shot gun blasts, abandoned cars with trees growing through their windshields. It’s warm and talky, dangerous, biblical, alien, and no-nonsense.

Lit me right up the first summer I was here and I was wide-awake all the time. I was up early jogging along the New River in the fog, doing yoga, (re)reading Smithson’s essays and Thoreau’s Journal, walking the dirt road into the holler behind the farmhouse where we stayed with my wife Kirsten’s Aunt Emilie, hanging out in and around the Old Gymnasium/ junk yard behind my wife’s Aunt Martha and Uncle Tom’s place.

I was writing in two or three different journals and suddenly felt compelled to cut them up into pieces. When I started moving the pieces around in the grass, across dusty old refrigerator coils and the wall of a rusted-out stove, I ended up taking pictures. At a certain point, I found some abandoned slats of glass and realized that I could layer the pieces on top of each other to varying degrees of clarity, shatter them with rocks, photograph them through stagnant rainwater with flies drifting in it, river current, etc.  I’m not sure whatever really came of any of this, but I was writing all the time… Just writing and playing, trying to catch stations and stay out in the weather. I never even typed anything up.

I was also listening to a lot of ambient music like Sean McCann’s Midnight Orchard cassette, Mountains’ Mountains and Mountains’ Choral among others, thinking about layers and melody in relation to Thoreau’s CLEAR AND ANCIENT HARMONY. I was listening to a lot of blues and roots music too: RL Burnside’s Mississippi Hill Country Blues, Roscoe Holcomb and the like; I heard Elizabeth “Libby” Cotton for the first time on one of Emilie’s old blues records, Blues at Newport, 1964.

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What genre does your book fall under?

This compost

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

I’m not sure who would play Appalachia and who would play Libby Cotton…

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What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

This morning Bob Dylan was singing, “I’m a-walking down the line.” Then, he was singing, “Don’t think twice; it’s alright”x4. Or, like K says, after a storm, our dog Franklin smells with his teeth.

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

Three summers.

I teach a lot, like a lot of folks, and I’m half underwater all year… I usually don’t have much time to write until summer… I’m circulating another manuscript that was mostly written during the winter while I was finishing my Ph.D., but those were different times… Thankfully, I’m molting all year and I’m usually hungry when school lets out. Returning to INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING has been pretty effortless so far, like stepping out into a current. It seems like I scotch tape the whole manuscript up on the wall of our bedroom and cross things out, here and there, a few times a year, but mostly I write in the summer and type it up in the fall.

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Who or what inspired you to write the book?

Writing is, happily, always a mysterious process to me. I can usually point to interests and energies that were part of the circumstances that poems grow out of, but I never really know how anything happens. It’s like Huck Finn says, “In a barrel of odds and ends…things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”

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

We’ve got Sun Drop Cola.

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

Horse Less Press just published a chapbook of poems that comes from this book project called Honeybabe, Don’t Leave Me Now and the title is a mash-up of a Libby Cotten lyric and a Bob Dylan lyric. Otherwise, we’ll see what happens. Mostly, this one and the other, just hang around collecting dog hair and stray feathers.

Tagged writers for the next big thing: Shira Dentz, Joseph Massey, Abe Smith, and Stacy Kidd.

HONEYBABE, DON'T LEAVE ME NOW (horse less press 2013)

Thrilled and so grateful that horse less press has published my chapbook Honeybabe, Don't Leave Me Now alongside Molly Brodak's Essay on Parts of Day. Special thanks to Michael Sikkema for sliding on decks in the snow when we were kids, a hundred years ago +every day since, and for designing such a beautiful cover.

E-Ratio

Thanks to E-Ratio for including my poems "Leaves where light carves your eyes" and "Saying Jesus" in issue 16.