#magic helicopter

3.This cover design by Evan Bryson, vibrates and glows, the whole book seeming to pulse out of it. That is to say this cover is perfect. And I really loved his post about reading the book and designing the cover. How did Evan get involved? How do you feel the cover (re)presents the book?

Evan (a fiction writer who just graduated from the Notre Dame MFA program) was introduced to me by my ex-boyfriend (a PhD candidate in my program), who knew him from tumblr. Mike thought we shared something at the syntax level. I immediately agreed with him. Evan and I both like to mess with shifting sentence pieces around in measured and precise ways, and we share a rhythm that is both playful and grows from a kind of melancholy. I started writing to Evan, who writes extremely generous / beautiful / hilarious letters. The way texts pull him and the way the world...looks to him / at him is magnificent. Also. Goddamn if he doesn’t make the best dance videos.

Basically, in Dec., while I was visiting my parents, I decided I would finish NODS. and send it out by the end of the Spring semester. I thought having a picture of what the end might look like would help me get there. I knew Evan had just finished designing website headers and etc. for Actuary Lit. I knew that what he designed ended up like a picture of Midwest color burning fire and alive-ness and that was what I wanted my book to look and feel like.

I think Evan’s blogpost explains how the cover represents the book better than I can. That’s a reality I really like. To me, that means the text has the ability to exist and transform without me. However, I love the fat wide of the book’s cow shape. I love the startled eye of the horse falling through the O in the title, its open mouth. I love the chaotic, but gridded color around the mane throwing itself around in desperation and because wind. I love the similarly alarmed woman face on the back, the art party patterned and ever dissolving hippogriff (I accidentally typed hippogrip!) also agaped in a mouth breaking apart. I want my work to be an open mouth, something that is about to widen, about to taste, about to speak the unspeakable, about to release and / or take something in at the same time. That potentiality is poetry at its most full, its most mysterious, its most susceptible. That is poetry in an uncorral-able / untranslatable space apart from dominant discourses.

4. I love that part you say up there about how you, like Evan, “like to mess with shifting sentence pieces around in measured and precise ways, and we share a rhythm that is both playful and grows from a kind of melancholy.” Those are the many major shiny spots in this NODS. of yours. Like the beginning, facing pages, these sputtered statements in a white storm, going “everyone who had a feeling” and then “everyone who had a feeling was there with me.” Like the “s c a t t e r s t a t e” starting, “i cud can build a thing too. i have done it. made blurs mash so that they billow right up to the porch screen and moo their ruts. they scrape it out loud to us.” Like the “c a t t l e h u r t e r” that rattles off, “do you want to raffle a peach? or the sand canned over it? your heaping pangs bang and bag. they pause only to make a pulse.           my most       mouth is wide tape, is never//actually anything at all. or all the graveplot you want.”

Matt Hart has a poem that says you can’t be out of control and in control at the same time, a purty thought, but there’s a layered-ness, a layered mess, that your poems pulse out that attempts to disprove this, or at least stand next to the thought as if to say, “Tweaked a bit and it is possible.” One layer might be out-of -ontrol emotionally and another “measured and precise” in their ways, all in the same wrapping. What do you think of this? How do you manage to go reckless without going wrecked?

Oh, this is interesting. My ribs giddily step on each other’s toes to this. I am pretty terrified to try and answer. So, there’s one thing I try to sell to my comp students and it’s that all the words matter in any written thing (including grocery receipts). There is no throw away, no filler. Words have practical uses, some words can provide a means to an end, but like computer passwords, they become infinite (they subvert their own practicality) when you think about them in terms of combinations. They rattle together differently based on SO many things. (NODS., itself, rattles different colored and new to me now that it is in book format and not in the word document format I spent a year with.) There are many undiscovered species there that I look forward to seeing and thinking about everytime I touch the page with ‘poem’ in mind. People have guessed a few times that I’m a fast writer because of the number of words present in these poems and possibly also because of the presence of what could be labeled or perceived as ‘randomness’ (not in a negative way...it’s just that what might begin as randomness for me can almost never be randomness for me because I end up interrogating it / insisting it orbit). However, I would say I’m slow. I sit for 7-8 hour stretches with regularity and it can still take me a week or often longer to finish a poem. I delete and re-do and edit big and with little attachment to what I wrote the previous time I sat down. I also sit with one poem and one poem only until it’s done because it has its own atmosphere, its own temperature fluctuations, its own hops from Paleozoic Era to Mesozoic Era that I want to be spooling my deep attention towards. I’m not advocating, so much as trying to describe what, for me, creates the writing I feel compelled towards / that inhabits something about my eyes and throat and maybe even heart.   

So how does this relate to this presence of unbridled emotion film stilled into poem, of emotion with the top screwed off allowed to stretch and stretch? The preciseness, the obsession with how each word combines to the next during the process, I see as drastic and different exploratory measures taken. I mentioned previously that I build a lot of the poems sound by sound. I read them out loud or record them constantly throughout their construction to get a sense of how play can proceed to get involved or how I can substitute for oddness / defamiliarization to produce powerful and gripping image / intonation while still lingering in and perpetuating a RHYTHM. Music, is a thing that we actively acknowledge as undoing this idea you mentioned, that you can’t be out of control and in control at the same time. The song put together makes you lose your shit at the stoplight and you don’t care who sees.

It might also be important to say that I do view this total receiving of my out of control via bodily receptors and language receptors as a life-saving floatation device in some way. My intense emotional life has or can make my ability to ‘function’ difficult. Did you read this great Hyperbole and a Half post about depression? It’s so good, but I wonder about the opposite of the zero feeling of emotion that she talks about. I sometimes wake up and can’t move because I feel a barge size of FEELING(S) sitting / burning on my chest (like the folk tale of the old hag that sits on your chest while you sleep) that doesn’t go away / that scares me. However, why the writing feels like lifeguard pulling me away from the tiger shark is because I’m not interested in teaching myself to take it down a notch, to turn it off. (Would it be for the sake of protecting myself? Then, I fear I would not be able to give as much to others as I would like to.) We’re definitely allowed to go nuts when we find out we win the lottery. I need to go nuts when we find out we hurt each other, too. I need to find a way to flail with it in a way that brings me into both the dark and the light. (As Feng Sun Chen would say, “Don’t give into the tyranny of happiness.” This doesn’t mean you can’t be happy, it just means you don’t always have to prioritize that as THE only goal you need to achieve to reach some semblance of ‘personhood.’) I want to live with all of this and love it about myself and make it this thing that can mature rather than have it eventually be tamed or extinguished for the sake of exuding ‘control.’ And I’m getting there, and it’s making my work do things I didn’t expect. It makes my reaction to reading and writing rewarding and productive and personal. It makes me see all these directions I can and will go.

5. At AWP Boston, you told me the IT CAN'T BE LOVE/IT MUST BE LOVE pieces were "like essays." (Editor Note: check out Carrie reading one of these pieces here.) What did/do you mean by that? Do you still feel this way?

(This will be long. I’m sorry.)

In the fall, I took a workshop. There were people in my workshop who were confused by the scatters/cattlehurters. I was confused by their confusion. Not like, HOW DARE YOU, but I became unsure with how to progress. I felt the pulse of my work, of my body as it threw its kickballs around, and IT FELT SO STRONG TO ME. My instincts were telling me what I was doing was the right thing, but I felt an anxiety that was I too saturated in the building of the poems to see what was really happening with them? Does that make sense?

So I wrote a cover letter to my workshop that began DEAR CHOPSHOP and went on to attempt to briefly explain and use some George Bataille quotes. However, everyone thought DEAR CHOPSHOP was a poem, and put comments all over it. My teacher asked me to read it out loud. I looked around the room and starting laughing (internally) at myself and decided this was the best thing that could happen. There was some disconnect there I immediately wanted to play with and explore and exploit. The confusion / the mistaking of clarity and explanation for a poem! It became clear to me, as well, that I have some inability to distinguish everyday language and conversation from poetic language and conversation.

I decided to keep writing about what the cows and I might be doing to each other (w/the IT CAN’T BE LOVE title) from inside the pages. I wanted to do it in this way that still left the explanation hanging / dangling from the poems themselves / poetry itself. The poems would forgive me and the 'essays' for their inability to reach resolution and precise, static weight. The poems would forgive me and the 'essays' for not living up to any expectations one could have for them. I wanted to live through that, to get somewhere, but on my own terms. And I think they do get somewhere that is more about the possibility to participate in explanation / a critical space. This part faces something towards the reader with statements that cut through the sincere happening taking place around and inside the cow world of this book. “This is creaturehood.” “That girl bombed out force.”

I also want to insist, briefly and finally, that essays and their common structure are patriarchal in some way. Most forms are. Period. There will never ever be a day where I can say the essay format (or poem) was developed / birthed by women. There will only be days where I can say the essay is being changed by women. I want to insist that is something I think about consistently, and that's a choice I love and resent and have no choice in. HELLO, MY NAME IS BITCHCOW. IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN. The everywhere-ness of deliberate containment is part of this place I write and read from. Poems don't begin and end and neither do most forms of oppression that are still active. I don't give a single fuck who rolls their eyes at me for saying something like that. Calling this recurring part of the book 'essays' is an important and needed point of resistance to me. This part wants to insist that essays can also be fragmented, poetic, difficult, womanly, cut open, snagged on something, bloody, even if the sentences thrive on making their own sense of organization. Part of that is because I think it genuinely leads to more generous sense of encounter and existence and process. Part of that is because that is what a world still being run primarily by powerful, white men makes my interpretation of being alive like. I turn to this because everyday (re)constructions of language and world and what is a poem / essay do not have women / me / many others in mind.

6.This book ends with FLASHBLOOD, this massive summation, this LOUD combo growl of the spirits of each type of poem you’ve got here--This Can’t Be Love/This Must Be Love, c a t t l e h u r t e r, and s c a t t e r s t a t e. There’s the erratic essay-like chatter, the big tabbing thumps, and the wild imagined worlds like only you can create. Where in the world did this piece start? And how did you see to its end?

Flashblood is a word that’s been swamping around my brain for a long time. Feng Sun Chen read one of the cow poems a long time ago now and said, “These are like the opposite of erasure.” Flashblood, as a word, appeared to me as soon as she said this sentence that made me think of floods, of what they do and how they work inside a person / between persons and their spaces. Flash is almost flesh is lightning is voltage. Water is blood is full of detritus and voices both dead and alive (Raul Zurita and his insistence that we are always torrents for the dead / others). I kept thinking about it, but couldn’t really get the word to be a being inside any of the poems. I thought maybe it needed its own poem. And once I got to the end of NODS., I wanted to collapse some of the pastures / space places I’d created between the three kinds of poem and the tiny in-betweens. I wanted them to destroy each other and clean each other and fuck each other and repeat against each other in further ways. Things had changed so much. Things were exactly the same. This is how they are their own animals and also how I ride my horse in and around them, sort of keeping traffic going and testing them in various ways. I let myself just write it out, even a little more chaotically than usual because I knew something needed to come to a head, to explode, to foam, to get a little far from me. I put some pieces of scatters/cattles that didn’t make it into the manuscript because recycling (we always do it. we need to do it.) and because I wanted to be giving them different herd lives / wear the same t-shirts on a different day. I don’t think the rhythm is as sound (no pun intended / pun intended) here in FLASHBLOOD. The other poems rocket every time I read them out loud. They have their veins. I’m not sure I’m meant to read FLASHBLOOD out loud? I haven’t decided. I’ve recorded it a bunch of times, but there’s something there that is a little resistive in terms of becoming readable. (“Would it be possible to suggest / evoke / amplify / proliferate different ways of being inside and listening to and activating the space that we call language, which doesn’t belong to any one language group, doesn’t belong to any one particular set of ideas about the benchmarks of language such as rhythm, syntax, intonation, inflection?” - Myung Mi Kim on (let’s call it) transformative / productive unspeakability.)

I also found that Edmond Jabes quote (“There’s no such thing (spoken or written) as a dialogue between persons.”) that precedes the piece just after the title wave of FLASHBLOODS somewhere on my computer and was reminded of how much that was a steam engine for what began this project. The parentheses breaks up the sentence into two separate fragments that become people of the sentence body trying to talk through a cloud in the middle. The parentheses institute the feeling of an aside, an intimate mouthing behind the hand to you and only you. The sentence is in a book written by Jabes for you or I to converse with and maybe talk to each other about. The first time I read this book I read it with A.T. Grant. Jared also happened to be reading it at the time I think? It’s immediately trying to prove itself wrong at 110 percent. However, it’s also not giving into this illusionary ideal that communication works because we’ve decide it does, that their aren’t corpses inside of it, that it isn’t wounding, that that can’t be beautiful. (Another thing Jabes says: Two men are never at the same distance from language.). The humility of that...feels like these immense palm trees currently outside my window.

I think it took me a month to get to the end? Maybe a little less. The end couldn’t be anything but the mmhmmm. It is half hum!! The mouth closed but buzzing (half-speaking)! It is the nod stretched into word! It is the noise I make and hear others make at certain times during poetry readings. It is a sex sound. It has a little echo naturally built into it. It is a gentle, but firm decision to carry on with nothing but the potential to say moremoremoremore.

7.If NODS. were a painting, what would it look like? If NODS. were a song, who’d sing it?

Painting / Drawing: A Week of Kindness / Une Semaine de Bonté by Max Ernst. So many hybrid animal desperation people littered in cloths and losing their clothes.

  Song Singer: Erika Wennerstrom from the Heartless Bastards or Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs or maybe even Sharon Van Etten (I wrote a lot of NODS. to Epic). Every time I hear these kind of deep down singwoman voices, I think all speeches could be written by old trees covered in blooddust. Dome time for blue dresses.

8. You recently gave a talk on the state of contemporary poetry and your own poems at the University of Minnesota, where you’re getting your MFA. Can you chatter at us a bit about that talk and how the audience responded?

I was a TA for Joe Hughes’ Contemporary Literature course last year and gave a couple lectures on Zach Schomburg’s book Scary, No Scary. He invited me back this year to talk poetry / my poetry in a more general way. I skipped talking about forms and literary devices, etc., since mostly my objective was to give them a radiation treatment / particle bombardment that would hopefully make their hearts perk. It’s great to get to be the one to tell students that poetry might be exactly what they’re hungry for, which is the chance to believe uncertainty is fine. I tend to say, HEY, ACTUALLY, LET’S GET DRUNK ON UNCERTAINTY. Let’s all wear out of order signs. There are lots of systems out there that would prefer us to be as sleek and fast and clean as our computers and our smart phones and our food processors. Poetry says fuck that, you are covered in hair and there’s a smell coming out of your armpits. Poetry says fuck us for thinking this language thing isn’t always difficult and exciting and utterly heartbreaking. There’s little that makes me hurt more than when the back of a book says HERE HE ISSSSSS (Cue the Miss America music) THE MASTER OF THE SENTENCE. I don’t know. How dare we. How dare we believe one person could be such a thing. And why would we want one person to have that much power? WHY? Because it’s easier than believing shit is a little more rhizomatic? These things we value highly (despite all the mass (TUMOROUS) marketed commodity bru-ha-ha out there trying to retreat it out of us), namely love and trust and beauty and adventure and surprise, are often not linear or made of glass or easily pinned down by anyone with a good sense of plot development. I don’t think many of us are here because craft is like this crossword puzzle we just do. We come to the page with craft, but stay on the page because of what happens in spite of it, what remains untouchable and godforsaken in spite of it. Poetry, this unstoppable zombie resurgence of it that you (T-GOB) and I are participating in, knows this and pays all attention /all antenae to it.

Joe’s class was whip smart. I gave them that silly locker room talk above and they were into it. Once I started showing them poems, they just started ripping off their jerseys and became these glorious, running jungles. It was amazing. Their observations of the two poems we talked about primarily, Mark Leidner’s “Yellow Rose” (saying ‘boner’ like 100 times in a giant lecture hall is the greatest) and Wendy Xu’s and Nick’s poem, “I Was Not Even Born When You Reached the End of Everyday Language” went beyond what I even prepared for. This is what I mean when I say students are hungry. This is what I mean when I say we might underestimate the power creativity could have to get real, critical wheels spinning in the classroom. My main teaching objective has always been to find a way to give students a challenging inch they need and watch them turn into a swarm with it.

They were generous to me, too, about my reading. Some of them sent me kind emails they didn’t have to send. One kid bought a NODS. as a mother’s day gift. Isn’t that wild?

9. What’s next for Carrie Lorig (writing projects, tours, school, etc.)?

In the middle of answering these questions, I got on a plane and went to San Diego, California. I’m here to read with Joe Hall for the Agitprop Reading Series and to look at the Hannah Weiner archives at UCSD. (PLUS OCEAN BURRITOS.) Since I’m about to enter my third year in the MFA program and since I’ve finished with the cows, I am starting something new that will be longer, that I would like to be the first full length book. I am hopeful that it will try to kill me multiple times, whatever it will be, and also buy me new mason jar to drink out of. I’m here in this library shaped like an alienworld’s YMCA to read and start responding to Weiner’s work. (The page on a pair of protective foam blocks right now from “Welcome in Sentences” says: “These bodies could also choose a good sportsperson to take vacations.” The O’s are blacked / blocked out.) I’m here to explore these two quotes and their odd shaped sleeping patterns that have been cutting the lawn in my head for months now.

“Before I was introduced to myself. The book was published last. Last sentence. Before I became my clairvoyant writer myself.

That’s the belief introduction.”

-Open House, Hannah Weiner.

“Tell me the story

Of all the things

Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.”

-DICTEE, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

I’ll be touring some (the HAIR PWR/NOD ALONG tour) and licking a few Greyhounds this summer. I’m reading in Minne., Milwaukee, Chicago. In August, I’m running out to the East Coast to read for the great, great Mark Cugini and the Three Tents Reading Series in DC. I’m going to crash Nick Sturm’s tour for How We Light (H_NGM_N Books) from there and go a few places. Reading is one of my favorite things in the world, so I’m donut-ed with excitement. Slay bells.