hello, human

I have been tagged by the illustrious Katie Byrum to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour, which is wonderful, particularly in that she was tagged by Matt Hart and in turn tagged me alongside...

Hi Internet Fraynds,

  Here are my answers to the WRITING PROCESS BLOG TOUR questions. This project is pretty neat: self-interviews from writers I like a whole bunch, like Matt Hart, who tagged me for this week’s flurry of posts. Not only is Matt my editor at Forklift Books, he’s also one of the most hardworking, generous, badass geniuses I know. I pretty much can’t say enough nice things about him, and my poems are a million times better for having had his eyes on them.

You can (and should) read his WPBT here.

  1) What are you working on?

  I am just putting the finishing touches on a manuscript I've been hanging out with for about three years. It's my first book, called Burn It Down---a title Matt came up with, which, like many other good things, I initially resisted. But as the edits came through and the poems started to crystallize around a core, the title felt more and more true. We were going to call it Hello, Human at first, which is a line from one of the poems in the book, but that felt so first-bookish, like Ethyl Merman coming on the stage doing jazz hands or something. Burn it Down felt right for the spirit of a lot of the poems, which deal with, among other things, a fire that pretty much destroyed the apartment I'd been living in with my ex. There's a lot of heartbroken poems, which sort of swing tonally from tiny and confused to to fucking mad and belligerent, and finally I think (hope) make their peace with grief, and with not-knowing.

Now that it's pretty much done, I'm working on getting comfortable with releasing the narrative that's held me captive for the past four years or so. Making some room. What's next? Who knows? I'm excited to find out what the new story will be.

  2) How does your work differ from others of its genre?

  At least with regards to this book, I guess it’s different because the stories are mine, and (probably, hopefully) they only happen once.

I work in the food and beverage industry, so I think a lot about terroir and how it relates to arts other than distilling and winemaking. Everyone’s voice in some way or another takes the shape of whatever landscape grew them. The somewhereness of these poems feels essential to their being, just how where I’m from and where I’ve been is essential to my voice as a writer. I look at the poems I’ve written that feel very linked to being a Kentuckian, and I think of the character of so many folks from my state: there’s an inclination toward fibbing and whiskey and cussing like a sailor, and a kindness and humor in the way people rib each other. I just spent a week down there touring distilleries and meeting a lot of old men in the whiskey business, and it really reminded me exactly why I’m such a smartass.

  3) Why do you write what you do?

  There are so many places and people and emotions that hold me captive. I don't know how else to put it: when something concerns me, it puts my whole brain on house arrest and won't let me have any peace until I've looked into all corners: the attic, the basement, the edge of the yard. I have to walk the whole property line.

I’m looking at the same time-worn human concerns that every artist is dealing with. How to be a human being? How are any of us supposed to live? How to make peace with life’s extremes, from the joy of listening to Sabbath while eating a delicious sandwich to blackout grief over a breakup. How can I feel deeply and still keep the levity, how can I lose my stilt house to flood & still crack jokes about Baba Yaga?

When I’m trying to work out these kinds of questions in a poem, I can usually identify the fulcrum as an object or image that I’m stuck on because it feels totemic or alive. Something will get its hooks in me and I can’t shake it until I’ve examined it from all angles to see what makes it feel so significant. My dude Gaston Bachelard talks about this in The Poetics of Space, how the quality of attention you pay to something can bring it to life and imbue it with a sort of otherworldly significance. I think of Angela Carter writing “The Bloody Chamber,” looking at a lily & seeing "the strange, ominous calm of a sentient vegetable." I get that. Shit gets weird if you look too long. But also, you have to look, and keep looking. It’s always going to be weird.

In a Tin House interview, Rachel Kushner talked about wanting objects in her work to “reverberate under the sign of the book.” I like this idea because it asks you to really think about why certain “things” continue to pop up, and what work they’re doing. When you’re fully engaged with the universe of your poem, there’s never just a random candelabra; if it’s found a way in there, it probably has a question for you. The hard part, for me, is getting out of my own way so I can listen.

  4) How does your writing process work?

I think this clip pretty much sums it up.

Yes: it’s agonizing. Also, ridiculous, spastic as hell, and full of crises and ecstasies, which will not surprise in the least any human who knows me.

I feel like it takes forever, though once in a while a poem will happen very suddenly, in this strangely easy cast-off tumbly way, almost like I was sleepwalking or thinking about something else. I like those poems a lot. I think of them as my reward for all those others where I had to agonize over every word.

Usually I have to sort of circle around myself for a long time, like a dog trying to find that sweet spot for a nap. I make motions elsewhere, I dilly-dally, I avoid, I sweep, make lunch, Instagram, while whatever it is I’m circling just silently percolates in my head. I think I’m building up a backlog of kinetic energy so I can suddenly pounce on it with Extreme Force! Those poems never even saw me coming.

  *****

Tagged for next week are three badasses: Amanda Smeltz, Alex Crowley, and Wendy Xu, all of whom basically Slay at Life. I kind of wish they would start a band together, but to tide you over until that happens, here are some bios and links to the blogs where you can read all about their writing process this coming Thursday.

  Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013), and several chapbooks. Recent work has appeared (or will appear) in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, Hyperallergic, Gulf Coast, The Volta, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at CUNY.

Here's her blog:

  Alex Crowley is the poetry, science, and history reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and a co-curator of Brooklyn's MENTAL MARGINALIA Reading Series. Winner of the 2011 Paul Violi Memorial Prize, he reviews poetry for TLR and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Handsome, SHAMPOO, Big Bell, BORT Quarterly, and elsewhere. 

Peep his post here.

  Amanda Smeltz is the author of Imperial Bender (Typecast Publishing), her debut poetry collection, which was mentioned in the Chicago Tribune‘s Printer’s Row and on The Poetry Foundation as one of the notable poetry titles of 2013. She is the assistant poetry editor of Forklift, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prelude, [PANK], The Best American Poetry blog, Phantom Limb, Barrow Street, and others. Smeltz lives and works in Brooklyn.

You can find her blog post here.

“I am just inside the window, next to a world, and you

have to believe me, the edges stack and stray apart

in just this way: all appealing as a passage for everything—

  startling itself in our many versions and definitions

of attack, of defense, of the sky required to break you.

(April 1st, Hues)

  Russell Fucking Dillon, y'all. If you do not know his work I feel sorry for you. This past fall he released a rad book of poems with Forklift called Eternal Patrol, which is a goddamn perfect title if I ever heard one: it's the term they give to submarines & submariners that have been lost at sea. Gorgeous, no? To me, it’s a title that perfectly captures what's haunted/haunting about Russell's voice, captures all the restlessness and tenderness and badassery and reverence that I hear in his work.

From “Entirely Soundtrack”:

When a horse stands, sleeping, all else becomes gallop.

  To remember the small, dark work of footsteps

behind us, because the night is long, and we are waiting.

  (Read the rest here.)

I always think of a lighthouse, too: the brightness, the remove of the vantage point, that proud silent watchfulness: a guardian that longs for intimacy with a world that, though sometimes nearly invisible in the fog, is nevertheless believed in & cared for deeply.

I don’t think you can see the bridge out

there. I don’t think this means we’re not connected by a 

tether of string to every tiny insect buzzing. I mean bumbling.

(Dumb-Kafkan)

That sweeping light at the heart of the work--its humor and honesty--keeps it buoyant: in Russ’s words, “though it reveals my position, it also informs my aim.”

"And whoever shrinks back from this fucking? whoever’s AFRAID to fuck like a machine? Let them go Where their recriminations and tears will not DISTURB the Eleusinian Mysteries. "