Poetry is a Gift Community: An Interview with Reb Livingston

You are the founder and editor of No Tell Motel and No Tell Books. What need did you see in the industry that you wanted to fill with No Tell Motel?

I don't think I'd use the word "industry" to describe poetry publishing and don't consider it to be some sort of capitalist venture. I don't approach publishing with a supply/demand model. If I approached it in those terms, I never would have done any of it. In those terms there's a poem glut and a dismal demand for them. In those terms there should be 2 publishers putting out 5 books a year and maybe 4 or 5 poetry magazines. Publishing poetry means you're very likely to lose money. Publishing poetry books generally means sales numbers in the low hundreds. Success is selling over 500. Any "industry" person would pick anything other than publishing poetry.

Luckily poems aren't widgets. There were then (and are now) hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals contributing to the poetry community by supporting (i.e. publishing) the work of other poets. I wanted to be one of those contributors. To me it wasn't enough to just write my own poems. I wanted to do my small part to contribute. Poetry is a gift community. People who care about and are dedicated to poetry make sure poems get out there. They're not profiting, they're likely spending their own money and they're definitely donating their time and work. I do think that anyone who is serious about poetry is responsible to contribute in some way to the community, whether that be publishing/editing, curating a reading series, writing book reviews or essays, translating foreign-language poems, etc. That is how poetry thrives and I don't care what any studies or reports declare about poetry, it thrives and will continue to do so because it is not an industry. As other art forms come and go based on industry and market demands of the century, poetry will continue to exist because it does not fit into such models. Poetry won't become popular or profitable, but it will endure.

Tell us about the books you publish. What are you looking for in a poet?

Our most recent title is Rebecca Loudon's Cadaver Dogs (www.notellbooks.org/cadaver) . It's been described by readers and reviewers as evocative, spiritual, primal, bittersweet, unconscious, outrageous, titillating, brutal, lustful, crisp and musical. You can probably use those adjectives to describe other titles from No Tell Books, but the books are VERY different from one another, but on closer look, similarities abound. In 2008 the three books I published each had spiritual undercurrents -- and I didn't even realize that until one of the authors pointed it out. The upcoming title PERSONATIONSKIN by Karl Parker is really unlike any book the press has published, yet there are links.

There's not a particular style or subject that I'm specifically looking for. Basically I publish books that I love and think are wonderful. Usually these books don't fit easily into a specific style category. You can get idea of the range of types of work I like by reading No Tell Motel (www.notellmotel.org) and the books I publish.

As a publisher, what I look for in a poet is someone who's responsible, responsive and easy to work with. Someone who will contribute to the process, not hinder it. I have very limited time to work on these books and have little tolerance for hand holding or drama. When I'm working on other poets' poems and books that's time I'm not using for my own writing, or my family for that matter. I consider my time precious and expect the poets I publish to respect that.

What's the most difficult thing about publishing poetry? What should poets understand about the business side of things?

The first thing to understand is that publishing poetry really isn't a business, or at least not in a capitalistic sense. As I mentioned in the first question, poetry is a gift economy. Very few poets make any kind of a living from publishing their poetry. Sometimes people can get jobs or grants, like teaching positions, based on their poetry publications, but that too is a small percentage.

So remember that people who work to promote poetry whether through publishing, writing reviews and essays, curating reading series, translating, etc. are contributing to poetry's existence. While they are certainly providing service, they do not exist to serve -- and in most cases, they're poets too.

What I find most difficult is explaining the above to poets who look to me as someone who can help them. Now, I help lots of poets and many poets have helped me in all sorts of ways (gift economy in action). But I don't exist to make things happen for anyone and everyone. First of all, I'm just one person (pretty much like anyone else) who can only do so much. But also, there are a lot of poets who I have no interest in giving any kind of hand. For instance, poets who ask me to consider their manuscripts without ever reading or buying a single book my press has published. That's wasting both of our time and more importantly, it's incredibly self-centered and disrespectful. If I had a quarter every time that happened, I could afford to give away books for free. This is why there are things like reading fees and contests. Many people who most want to be published don't support the presses they wish would publish them, in fact, they often know very little about those presses or the work they do. So presses have figured out that while they might have a hard time selling books, they have a very easy time selling the *hope* of publication. I think that's a very defeating situation, for all involved.

How has running No Tell Motel affected your own poetry? Are you working on something now?

Running a magazine and a press has opened my eyes to a range of poetry and poets that I was before unfamiliar. It's been a rich education, at least as valuable as any MFA. It's taught me that I am not helpless to the whims of others, that there is no one who will make or break me or my poems, no one except myself.

I'm finishing my next book, God Damsel, which I'll be publishing with No Tell Books in early 2010. Coconut Books, my publisher for my first book, offered to publish God Damsel and although I have a very good relationship with the editor, Bruce Covey, I'm choosing to do it myself. Why? Why not? I must know something about publishing books because people keep asking me to publish theirs. Most of the poems in the book have been published in magazines, so other editors must see quality in the poems. Why not take control of my own poems, take control of my art? Why don't more poets take back control of connecting their poems to an audience? I know the standard answer to that question and find it all a rather foolish "business."

About Reb Livingston:

Reb Livingston is the author of God Damsel (forthcoming, No Tell Books, 2010), Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, 2007), Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series, 2006), among other titles. Her work appears in literary magazines and her poem ”That’s Not Butter“ appears in The Best American Poetry 2006 (Scribner). She has Creative Writing degrees from Bennington (MFA) and Carnegie Mellon (BA).

She keeps a poetry blog that is updated on a regular basis.

Reb and Molly Arden edit No Tell Motel, an online poetry journal devoted to meaningful and discreet poetic encounters, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel anthology series.

Reb is the editor and publisher of No Tell Books.

From This Embodied World: An Interview with Melissa Tuckey

Melissa Tuckey is author of Rope as Witness (Puddinghouse 2007, chapbook). She is recipient of artist fellowship awards from DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Ohio Arts Council and a residency from Blue Mountain Center. Her poems have been published in numerous journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, Verse Daily and others. Melissa is co-director of Split This Rock and a host of Sunday Kind of Love. She's taught writing courses at George Mason University and Univeristy of Maryland.


You’re an activist and a poet. In the ‘60s Dylan balked at being called a “protest singer.” What would you think of the term “protest poet”?

I’m not a protest poet. I don’t write poems to protest. I write poems because I love the music of language and I enjoy the process of writing a poem. I don’t think poets or poetry can be so easily categorized.

I care passionately about social issues and have been involved in a lot of activist work, so it’s been important for me to find a voice in my poems that can encompass these experiences as well as other experiences. So I write about these things, but I wouldn’t call my poems a kind of protest.

Poetry is a kind of internal resistance. It’s the part of our minds that can’t be colonized or recruited or controlled or categorized. It’s the part of culture that can’t be destroyed. The poet Mahmoud Darwish said, “every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” I love this idea.

When angry over current events, it’s easy for writers to let their emotions sway what they’re writing. How should poets—all writers—approach topical material so that the raw emotions don’t overwhelm the art of craft?

The answer for poetry always comes back to craft—structure, form, music, originality. Poetry is a process of discovery. So to start with an issue or something to say is very difficult.

I don’t very often start a poem knowing what I’m going to write “about”--it’s more an image, or phrase that starts the poem, and I follow it. At some point I recognize that I am responding to a current event, or that I have the opportunity to do that. It’s usually something that was deep inside – I’d slept on it, dreamt with it, walked around with it rattling in my head somewhere. Every poem is different though! I would encourage writers to read as much as possible, look at how other poets deal with these issues in their poems.

Adrienne Rich writes, “The poet today must be twice-born. She must have begun as a poet, she must have understood the suffering of the world as political, and gone through politics, and on the other side of politics she must be reborn again as a poet." I like this idea because it implies is that social consciousness is something that must be lived and breathed and understood. Poetry comes from this embodied world.

When we begin to “understand the suffering of the world as political,” this shapes the stories we tell and the way we perceive our own experiences. We cannot keep the suffering of the world out of our poems, anymore than we can pretend we are somehow immune to politics. We learn to see that all things are connected. Not only that, but there are systems of oppression and histories. None of this makes for instant poetry, but our world-view does come across in our poems.

You’re one of the founders of the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Can you talk about what motivated you and the others to found this organization?

Split This Rock was born out of the poets against the war movement. It came about as a result of the tremendous need poets were feeling to come to Washington and speak back to the monsters in the White House. It’s challenge is to speak to social concerns within poetry. How do we begin to speak about these things with an authentic voice? We wanted to celebrate those poets who are doing so courageously and with such power. We also wanted to celebrate DC’s poetry community and literary history, and to link a national network of poets who are writing what we are calling “poetry of provocation and witness,” not just relating to the war, but relating to a wide range of topics.

Sarah Browning, founder of DC Poets Against the War, had the idea to organize a national festival, and there was huge excitement around the idea. It garnered all kinds of support and took on something of it’s own life thanks to Sarah’s tenacity and vision. The festival addressed a deep need so many of us were feeling to speak out, to be involved, to be part of a larger community, to reclaim language, to name names, to imagine change, and to do this with poetry. We also had the opportunity to connect with activists and thinkers, and to learn about and celebrate the many ways that poets are active in their communities.

So now we are establishing a non-profit organization, Split This Rock, to build upon the work of the first festival. We’re working on the line up for our next festival in March of 2010 and we’ve got a call out for panel proposals. Our website is <splitthisrock.org> .

With all your work supporting local poets and the poetry scene here, how do you manage to write your own poetry?

This is a challenge that all writers have, right? I am grateful to work with poets and poetry. Making time for my own writing, means setting everything else aside sometimes. Finding the right balance is challenging. This month, I’ve been trying to keep up with the write a poem a day challenge, and though I’m behind, it’s been instructive. So much of writing is about stealing time for it. In September, I have a one-month residency at Blue Mountain Center. I’m looking forward to that.

What are you working on now?

I’m shopping around a book manuscript, which has been a finalist in several first book contests. I’ve also been working with my friend Ye Chun to help translate a book of poems by the Chinese poet Yang Zi; and we’re working on getting that manuscript in order and into the world. Meanwhile, I’m writing new poems, revising, shuffling poems around, reading as much as I can. I’m always jealous of those who have clear “projects” they are working on. My project is usually just to write the best poems I can and to keep writing.

Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: An Interview with Marjory Heath Wentworth

Yesterday we featured an interview with Tom Lombardo, editor of the poetry anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events. A number of poets in that volume will be reading at The Writer's Center on Sunday, April 26. To see the complete list of readers or to register for this free event, click here. Today's blog post is an interview with contributor Marjory Heath Wentworth, the poet laureate of South Carolina. Her poems have appeared in numerous books and magazines, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times. Her collections of poetry include Noticing Eden (Hub City Writers Project 2003) and Despite Gravity (Ninety-Six Press 2007). Her most recent book is a children’s story called Shackles.

How did you become involved in After Shocks?

I think I first heard about After Shocks through a call for submissions on the WOMPO list serve.

Your poem, "Linthong," depicts the story of a Laotian refugee. For many years you worked in the field of refugee resettlement. Can you discuss what you did in that capacity?

In 1979 I won a fellowship to to work at UNHCR (UN HIgh Commission for Refugees) in Geneva. I was assigned to the eduction section, where I worked on developing materials for the refugee population in Somalia. The Boat People Conference was taking place at the time, and I was sent to some of these meetings for my department. This was the largest refugee crisis since World War II, and I began to learn about the genocide in Cambodia and became passionatley involved with their plight. When I returned to the US I studied the cultural assimilation problems for dispaced Laotion and Cambodian refugees and went to work in the field of refugee resettlement at The Whole World Institute in Boston and then at Church World Service in New York City. Over the years I worked with refugees from Eastern Europe, Haiti, Africa, and Latin America; as well as those from Indochina. Their stories continue to both haunt and inspire me. Sometimes a poet's job is to bear witness and give a voice to the voiceless. There's something inherantly redemptive about that process that is very rewarding.

The boy in "Linthong" is a kind of composite character. Every detail of his life is based on direct experience - from meeting incoming flights at JFK Airport to doing home visits in places like Lowell, Massachusetts. Imagine walking into an apartment where shoes were stored in the refrigerator? These kinds of specific details inspired the poem.

Water plays an integral part of "Linthong." I'd like to ask you about your creative process: Do you look for such images when you write the first draft—that is, do you know exactly what you're aiming for—or do you return to the material during rewrite and look for those images?

The role of water is important, and I am thrilled with your question. Geography plays such a pivotal role in political situations. Ports, for example, are critical places where battles are fought. Cambodian's juxtaposition to Vietnam determined its role in The Vietman War. Cambodia was neutral, but because of its location, the country was drawn into the conflict. I won't get into that particular history - the US bombing, Pol Pot, genocide - because I assume this is widely known. Water, it seemed to me, is a kind of metaphor for the global connections that exist. In "Linthong" it is the one constant element that ultimately controls his destiny.

I have always lived on the Atlantic, and I lived on a barrier island for 10 years, so it's hard to escape that imagery. With "Linthong," I wanted the water to unify the poem and reinforce the importance of geography in terms of his particular story. My poems often start with a specific image or group of sounds. This poem started with the description of shoes stored in the refrigerator and cooked food out on the cupboard, and it grew from there.

Creative writers are commonly told "write what you know." But, from your experience, what are some of the dangers of writing what you know?

The dangers of writing what you know can stifle the imagination or make novice writers worry about the facts of the poem than they should. What is actually true many not be best for the poem you are writing. The poem wants what it wants, and the poet needs to follow that thread.

You're the Poet Laureate of South Carolina. Can you tell us about your role? What exactly does a Poet Laureate do?

Right now I am in RI with Poets Laureate from all over the US. We are doing readings and teaching in schools throughout the state; as well as discussing what we each do back in our home states. There's a lot of public service involved, because our "job" is to bring poetry into people's lives in a variety of ways. There's no requirement - beyond writing poems for occasions like the governor's inauguration, the opening of a bridge I write a newspaper column on poetry that is published every other Sunday. I assume I am writing for a non-poetry audience, and I try to be informative and interesting. It seems to mean a lot of people.

I started a writing organizatin with my friend, poet Carol Ann Davis. It's called LILA, Lowcountry Iniatiative for the Literary Arts. We provide services to the writing community and the greater community. (www.lilaconnects.com) For example, we offer a reading series and writing workshops at the public library, poetry in the schools etc

Read Wentworth's poem "Hurrican Season" here.

On the Lookout for Falling Pianos: An Interview with Sandra Beasley

Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her first poetry collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by Marie Howe. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she writes for the Washington Post Magazine and is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown. She blogs at http://sbeasley.blogspot.com/



First, congratulations on winning the Barnard Women Poets Prize. I Was the Jukebox will be your second book of poetry (following Theories of Falling). Can you tell us what it’s like to win this prize and to publish with W.W. Norton?

Who gets this kind of luck? I am on the lookout for falling pianos. I don’t know much yet about publishing with W. W. Norton, but there is much more machinery for design, marketing, and publicity than with smaller presses. My contract is three times as long as the last one. When I first got the news I sifted through my poetry library and plucked out every Norton title I owned. I stroked the hardcovers. I surveyed author photos. I scrutinized the inside jacket box where the layout people tuck one more blurb. The roll call of Norton Poets: Rita Dove, Marie Howe, Kim Addonizio, Stephen Dunn, Stanley Kunitz, e.e. cummings—is staggering. I’m honored and flustered.

You’re definitely on a roll lately. In addition to the Barnard Prize, you’ve recently sold a book of nonfiction (Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl) to Crown. Readers might like to know: What are the challenges you face in writing your manuscript now that you’re on deadline?

Like many writers, I work well under pressure, but that has always been on projects where short and frantic bursts of drafting could sustain the task at hand: the poem, the 750-word column. I’m now looking at a 60,000-word project that needs to have a consistent emotional tone throughout, and strike a balance between memoir and a cultural history of food allergy. It’s a bit daunting. On the other hand, I now have days when I can sit down in front of the laptop and think Today it is my job to write, and my mind doesn’t question that as a priority. Book advances are just a way to ensure that the writer gives herself permission to do what, really, she wanted to do anyway: get lost in the flow of drafting. Ideally while still in my pajamas.

How has your experience editing literary journals shaped your writing?

On a micro level, working at the small office of the American Scholar cultivated my eyes for line edits. There’s no point of rushing past sloppy writing because sooner or later—before I can sign off on each issue’s blueline—it has to be fixed. It’s not enough to flag a rough spot with “this isn’t quite right”; you have to be prepared to suggest a specific correction. This all adds up to being a fierce reviser, and making those revisions as I go along, which saves me a lot of time.

On a macro level, serving as the editor of Folio (the literary journal of American University) cultivated my understanding of trends and clichés. When you’re reading two hundred poems in one sitting and eight of them use flowers as a metaphor for cancer, the bane of cliché takes on a more tangible quality. I became less likely to indulge in familiar language because not only did I suspect it was being said elsewhere, I knew it for a fact. The evidence was in our slush pile. But I also saw a lot of wonderful things come across the transom—fresh work using styles I’d only been barely aware of, stars on the rise. I’m proud to look back and see some of the people I published before they were “known.”

Along a similar line, how would you say writing workshops have helped you develop as a poet, editor, and teacher?

Here’s my basic take on workshops: what you’re cultivating is not really the individual pieces—a piece can be workshopped to competence, but never to brilliance—or even your ability to critique the work of others. What you’re developing is the ability to critique yourself. 85% of workshop comments I hear are not about the draft on the table, but about the speaker’s larger craft concerns or his hopes or frustrations with his own work. And that’s okay—once you’re outside the constant feedback loop of an MFA environment, the ability to revise is more critical than the ability to critique.

During the workshop itself, it’s important to remain in good spirits, indulge in bagels, and always feel free to crack a joke—especially one that breaks the tension. My favorite workshop bonds, and I have some very important ones, are all with the people who were able to do that. At the end of the day we’re all in the same mucky trenches.

Many young writers—of all genres—sometimes make mistakes when submitting to journals or book contests. In your experience, and as a prelude to your upcoming one-day workshop on book contests, what would you say are common errors young or inexperienced writers absolutely must avoid when submitting their work?


Don’t summarize the work or instruct me as to why I should admire it. Better to use a generic “Dear Editors” than to make a personal address to an editor who no longer works there. Don’t cop attitude—cute, sarcastic, sycophantic—in the cover letter. It’s not that we don’t want to see your personality; we do! But that’s what the manuscript is for. This is all welcome-mat advice, getting your foot in the door. But once a full-length manuscript is in an editor’s hands, strong individual poems are not enough. There are higher-level questions to be asked. For some insight on those…come to the workshop.

Your Own Voice: An Interview with Bernadette Geyer

How did your interest in poetry begin?

I specifically remember becoming interested in poetry in high school. I had a great English teacher who encouraged my writing and suggested I submit a poem to a small local newsletter, which they accepted and published. I have a diary from that time which includes various short poems I liked, including Résumé, by Dorothy Parker. I wrote some poetry within the context of English classes in college, but never thought of poetry as a serious vocation until I participated in a poetry workshop, sponsored by a local bookstore, back in 1996. Now it’s hard for me to remember what it was like to NOT feel the need and/or urge to write.


You’re widely published in a number of literary journals, and your manuscript The Inheritance was a finalist for two prizes. What literary journals should young or unpublished poets be reading? And should they worry about prizes?


Young or unpublished poets should be reading any journal they can get their hands on, and any journal they come across on the Internet. Even when I read something that doesn’t necessarily rock my world, I come away with a better idea of what types of poems do blow the top of my head off. Reading a wide variety of publications (both print and online) will introduce you to kindred spirits, and will also help you figure out where are the markets in which your poems may be best suited.

As for prizes, poets should never worry about prizes. Sure, it’s great to win one and pay off your debt to the post office, but it’s completely unproductive and harmful to your psyche to “worry” about winning. It’s far better to worry about whether you’re being true to your poems and your own voice. I’m more concerned with finding connections with readers. When you find a connection, publication will come.


In the age of Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Good Reads and all the rest--a glance at your Web site suggests just how involved you are with the Internet—what must a poet do to market him or herself?

I think poets should find their niche, their community. The people whose poetry speaks to them and to whom they want to speak through their poetry. Where do they hang out? Which journals, which presses, which online forums or conferences? No poet can be everything to everyone. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you try. With the other web sites I manage, I saw gaps I thought should be filled. My Resources for Poets site grew out of my own need for a way to continue my education in poetry/poetics when I was trying to hold down a very stressful, full-time job that didn’t allow me to take one month off to go to Greece or Russia – or even Vermont – to take workshops. The web site began as a list of resource links I could use for myself, but I realized it might be valuable to others in the same situation.

I think the best way for a poet to “stand out” is to find his/her voice and nurture it. You are the only person who thinks and writes like you. Don’t try to be like “so and so famous poet X”… just be who you are with your unique perspective and way of writing. If you just try to write like everyone else or do things the way everyone else does them, you’ll sound just like everyone else.


How do you manage it all—being a mom, poet, and literary promoter?

I work a lot. I probably push myself to do too much. I also have a few regular proofreading and writing gigs that bring in a modest income. I watch less than an hour of TV a day, on average. And, thankfully, I have a husband who understands how important my own writing is to me and helps me carve out time for my writing. I also don’t really think I “manage it all.” At least not all at once. I don’t consider myself to be a very prolific poet, but I feel if I can write a few really good poems each year (and maybe a couple of pretty good ones as well), then it’s been a good year. Since my daughter started preschool a few mornings a week last fall, I’ve been able to say “I’m not going to work on weekends or after 10pm during the week” and pretty much stick to it (though I am writing this at 10:50pm, so it’s not a hard-and-fast rule).



Last year, you and Sandra Beasley participated in a 32 Poems reading featuring a live musical performance by the local band The Caribbean. What is it about poetry and music that works so well together? Would you do it again?


I would definitely do it again! That event was a lot of fun. As for why poetry and music work well together I think perhaps it is because they stem from the same roots. Before writing, cultures were purely oral. History was passed on from generation to generation in song and story. The songs were the stories. It’s just a shame that so much contemporary music seems to be generated by a cliché-compilation machine. That’s why I appreciate bands like The Caribbean…you’re not simply hearing something written to purposely tug at heartstrings or to be sung drunk in a bar at 2am. I appreciate music where the lyrics are a little more complex and unique. I think it all goes back to not trying to sound like everyone else. I appreciate bands that have their own unique perspective and sound, just as I am drawn to poets whose work exemplifies distinct perspectives.

About Bernadette Geyer:
BERNADETTE GEYER is a poet and freelance writer/editor in the Washington, DC, area.
Her poetry chapbook, What Remains, was published in 2001 by Argonne House Press. Her full-length manuscript, The Inheritance, was a finalist for the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Poetry Prize and for the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Geyer's poetry has recently appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Marlboro Review, South Dakota Review, The Midwest Quarterly, 32 Poems, The Evansville Review, and other literary journals. Geyer's non-fiction has appeared in Elle.com, Sustainble Development International, The Montserrat Review, World Energy Review, and Marco Polo Magazine.


You can read another interview with her at savvyverseandwit.blogspot.com.

An Interview with E. Ethelbert Miller

Q.What makes good poetry (to you)?

I often asked myself this question when I was teaching in the Bennington Writing Seminars. What did I expect from my students? It's also a question I find myself "going steady with" each time I sit down with a stack of Poet Lore submissions. The good poem begins with its beauty. Selected words placed in an order that gives pleasure to the reader. The good poem kisses me and promises a second read and another date. I look for work that is memorable- the after taste that lingers or the nakedness that seduces again. Visual beauty is important. Control on the page. Order and clarity.I also want to inhale a degree of freshness. The good poem surprises me like magic or a one night affair. I want to take something away with me -even if it's just a fragrance.

Q. Can you talk about the ideas that went into the writing of The 5th Inning?

My second memoir is waiting for the critics to arrive. Don Allen who works at Teaching for Change cast the book as being post-modern. One will find me using excerpts from letters and blogs. I once again created voices to include in the text. This memoir is built around baseball as a metaphor. I refer to the fifth inning as not just middle-age but perhaps the last point in one's life. In baseball the fifth inning can be a complete game - something for the record books. I've written a dark tale but an honest one. When you see my reference to Ettta James then you know I'm also writing about the blues. My book is shaped by loneliness, depression and despair. One will find me constantly exploring what is happening inside the home. Marriage and children. In baseball all things begin and end at home (plate). One must either learn how to pitch or hit in order to survive. Too many people just know how to swing; too many people just know how to throw. Hopefully the reader of my memoir will understand the difference.

Q. What was the greatest word of criticism you ever received, and how did it make you a better poet?

I've been fortunate to have been around a number of writers who gave me excellent criticism. I will always be grateful to my mentor Stephen Henderson. He gave me almost daily feedback on much of my early writing. Haki Madhubuti (then Don L. Lee) provided the encouragement I needed to become a poet. June Jordan gave me the love I needed to write. Ahmos Zu-Bolton gave me the criticism of friendship. I remember him rejecting some of my poems for publication. He claimed I didn't know how to write "hoo-doo" poetry. He tried to teach me. Tom Dent reviewed one of my first poetry books for Freedomways and I saw in print what I needed to learn. He said I would one day find my voice. But maybe it was the writer Steve Cannon (one day sitting in my DC apartment) who looked at my work and said it was just the stuff of a beginner; Cannon's tough comment I had to swallow but it made me stop writing poems about p oetry. I stopped making love to myself. I became a poet with something to say and share.

Q.Any advice to emerging poets?

This is a tough question. I really don't have any advice unless someone is seeking it. I think it's important for all poets to ask the basic questions:Who am I? Why am I here?It's important for poets to find pleasure in their work but to understand that it's work and not just pleasure. I often talk about the heart because each day I find so many of us failing at love. Much of my work was created out of desire. Hopefully emerging poets will always attempt to hold their hearts in their hands and try to figure out what makes it go- how the beat creates the line. Only language can hold us together. Emerging poets must find the common language and seek the Beloved Community. If we fail, history will be forever a mistress.

E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist. He is the board chair of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank located in Washington, D.C. His most recent publication is The 5th Inning,a second memoir, published by Busboys and Poets Press. Mr. Miller is also one of the editors for Poet Lore magazine. Website: www.eethelbertmiller.com.

Photo Credit: Shyree Mezick

In the Interstice: An Interview with David Keplinger

This Saturday, The Writer's Center is pleased to welcome poets Michael Collier (Wild Dark Night) and David Keplinger (The Prayers of Others). To get us all warmed up for that event, which is here at the Center at 7:30 p.m., I asked David Keplinger a few questions. You can view more about the Collier/Keplinger reading here.




The poems in your book The Clearing are influenced by poets throughout the ages--Blake, Keats, Frost, Donne, Lorca. Did you deliberately sit down to write a group of poems involving major poets?

I think the first poem in that series was Keats'. I had read a poem by Auden that used that form (a very loose iambic pentameter structure with five line stanzas, the rhymes varying from stanza to stanza) and the poem seemed to write itself. In the first section of The Clearing I was meditating on departures, departures from form, departures from ideology, and literal departures from the known into the unknown. Part one soon became an effort to simultaneously honor and clear away the influences who represented form, ideology, and the known. In part two I was focused more on honoring form and limitation; so certain other poets were evoked in that section. In part three, where the Lorca poem appears, I was thinking about the poets of the 20th century who could so beautifully embody tradition at the same time they were able to seem apart from it. Having that structure helped me to craft the manuscript and, of course, it got me to write all kinds of poems I otherwise would not have written.

Your poem "Pig Slaughter" in that same collection is absolutely stunning. Could you tell us a little about its genesis?

This is a strange story because it is one of those eerie examples of how a poem can sometimes lead the way without your (the writer) knowing it. I wrote "Pig Slaughter" in a few minutes. I rarely hold on to the first draft of a poem, but this one I did. It's based on a tradition called "zabijacka" in the Czech Republic. "Zabijacka" means "slaughter," but it's not simply that. There's a gathering of the community to kill, cook, and eat this pig together. When I witnessed one, I thought it had a kind of religious tone to it. After the collection came out, one interviewer noted that I had been using the Anglo-Saxon form -- three alliterations per every four or so beats, with the line breaks serving as the caesura. I looked at the poem and was amazed that he was right. But I hadn't intended that at all. Now I sense there is a part of every poet that moves the poem towards form without our knowing it - and form is always a product of the place and time out of which it came. The Anglo-saxon form is an evocation of the stoic search for dignity; how duty in that tradition supercedes what we desire for ourselves. The pig takes me as an unwilling but necessary martyr; he's killed, cooked, and his body and blood are taken in. In this country we eat plenty of pigs but we avoid confronting the messiness of their deaths. Having to look at it and participate in such a death, I sense the Czechs were honoring the pig, in the old way.

How did you get started translating Carsten Rene Nielsen from Danish?

When I worked in the Czech Republic in the mid-90s I spent one Christmas in Copenhagen with a friend. One afternoon we were sitting in his apartment trying to get the feeling back into our toes (we had just gone on a hike to the water and back), when he pulled a small book from his shelf and started to extemporaneously translate. I so fell in love with Nielsen's poems I contacted him later that year, and, with his help, starting translating him. We worked on email at first, and then Skype. Probably about fifty of the poems were published at different places before we started thinking about a book. In 2007 the book appeared; it was for me just like having my own book published. We had spent so many hours on it! This summer I'm returning to Aarhus to start working on his new collection.

How much has your translation work changed you--if at all--as a poet? Do you think your collaboration has changed Nielsen in any way?

I don't think it's changed him much as a poet, but I sense his English is much better. Sadly, my Danish is still practically non-existent. Without his literal translations in the first draft stage, none of this would be possible. But to answer the first part of your question, I do think that his poetry inspired my third book, The Prayers of Others. That's a collection of short-short prose poems (each about 80 words), which, I'm sure, would never have been written without Nielsen's playfulness and ingenuity to lead me.

Final question, why should young poets read or even translate poetry?

You should read poetry only if you feel drawn to poetry. If you're not, there are plenty of other media and literary genres that could delight, surprise, challenge old ideas, and inform. As for translation, I always say that being a translator means being an intensely close reader. You see that the levels of meaning exist in these untranslateable gaps, and your job as the advocate of this poet in the new language is to try to recreate a kind of environment in which the poem might live again. Charles Simic says, "The idiom is the lair of the tribal beast." I love that, because it suggests that in order to translate well you have to worry about the words, of course, but also the tone; that translating is like trying to create the perfect environment so the poem can be read in the new language without sounding translated. It's about as difficult as getting Pandas to mate in captivity. Young poets should translate poetry because they see their own work should be so rich in subtext; their own work should be breathing like that, in the interstice, the in between.
***

David Keplinger is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Prayers of Others (2006) , which won the Colorado Book Award, and The Clearing (2005). His first collection, The Rose Inside, won the 1999 T.S. Eliot Prize. David has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the SOROS Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Katey Lehman Foundation. From 1995 until 1997 he taught at Gymnazium Petra Bezruc in Frydek-Mistek (Czech Republic) and creative writing at the University of Ostrava. His essays on creative writing pedagogy, now a book-in-progress, have appeared in The American Voice, Teacher & Writers, AGNI, Radical Pedagogy, Theory and Science, and in various anthologies. His co-translations with Danish poet Carsten Rene Nielsen, World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors, appeared in 2007.

Good Writing is Just Good Writing: An Interview with Charlie Jensen

Photo: Shyree Mezick.

You are the author of 3 chapbooks of poetry—The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon, Living Things, and Little Burning Edens. Your first full-length book, The First Risk, will appear this fall. How many of the poems in that collection have appeared in the earlier chapbooks? And for those readers who may be less familiar with chapbooks, how does a poet shift mentally from the chapbook to the book?

All of my chapbooks are excerpts from full-length manuscripts; in the case of my forthcoming book The First Risk, The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon serves as the fourth and final section, and I think any of the other sections could stand as chapbooks too, but taken together they have an emotional and thematic arc they lack when taken separately. I tend to write in longer forms—Living Things is part of a book-length series of poems, for example—so excerpting work into chapbooks isn’t too difficult for me. I feel almost as though I write chapbooks that build up to books rather than writing books that break into chapbooks, if that makes sense.

There’s a storyteller’s immediacy to your poetry. While reading The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon, I was pleasantly struck by how storylike the chapbook was. Can you tell us how you view “storytelling” in poetry?

By and large I prefer poetry that resists straightforward storytelling. I believe the poem is a made thing, a structured thing, and that’s one of the ways we set it apart from other forms of literature. Although The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon has a clear central narrative, it’s fractured, splintered, told out of order, so that the narrative isn’t the driving force of the book; the urgency is built through the reader’s desire to investigate, fill in blanks, draw conclusions. The form trumps its narrative. I don’t enjoy poems that just let a story unspool as if the story itself were poetic. It’s the job of the poet to use all the tools at hand—language, diction, rhythm, form, etc—to turn narrative into art.

In a similar vein as the last question, some of your recent poems concern real life figures (such as Mathew Shepherd). In telling their “stories” you employ the fiction writer’s tool of stepping inside the character. Of course, I don't mean to suggest this is solely the domain of the fiction writer. But for those readers out there who see poetry and fiction as relative opposites, you prove there is in fact overlap. What would you say, as a poet, to a fiction writer who says he or she doesn’t read poetry because he or she doesn’t write poetry?

A fiction writer who won’t read poetry is like a person who likes ketchup but won’t eat a tomato. I just don’t understand it. I read fiction so often, especially lately, and have found so much to love there—writers like Mary Gaitskill, Carole Maso, and Mark Z. Danielewski who are able to turn all my expectations upside down with gorgeous language and lyric narratives. I think fiction writers who resist poetry do so most likely because they’re just not familiar with it, don’t know what to read, etc.—or have read things they don’t like and therefore think “I don’t like any poetry” rather than “I don’t like this poetry.”

My poetry is much more informed by and influenced by cinema and film form than any other kind of art, which may be why you sense a connection to fiction and storytelling. I think people who like movies would like my work.

The online lit journal you founded, LOCUSPOINT, focuses on a new city each issue (the most recent issue is in New Haven, CT). What motivated you to this concept?

My working life has long focused on communities and community development, starting back in college when I was a resident assistant. As a poet in my MFA program, I came to depend on my “in-person” community of classmates and colleagues a great deal. When I graduated and started blogging, I got connected to poets around the country in a different way that was also helpful. LOCUSPOINT bridged those two interests—on the one hand, I really wanted to know more about the connections among poets in different cities and regions around the country—like how Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton both workshopped with Robert Lowell at one time—and how place affects us. And on the other hand, I wanted to help communities by bringing people together, identifying resources, educating and inspiring people to get involved…LOCUSPOINT for me really brings together the solitary art of writing poems with the collaborative act of fostering an arts community, both of which I would consider the overwhelming motivating forces in my life.

You’re a fan of television, and you’ve written about such shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gossip Girl on your blog “Kinemapoetics.” What role could/does/should television play for the creative writer?

I think good writing is just good writing, and there’s a lot of innovative and interesting writing on TV these days. I’m a sucker for melodramatic storylines and operatic highs and lows (I think Maribel Dixon really demonstrates that affection) and draw that kind of inspiration from TV. LOST was a huge influence on me while writing Maribel Dixon.

But I also enjoy a lot of shows because they’re serial in nature—they build, over time, toward a massive conclusion, and I feel that’s a guiding principle for my poetic practice. I like to write in sequence and I’m kind of obsessive. I’ve seen Buffy about 7 times through now. Along with Gossip Girl, I love/have loved Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Hills. Right now I’m so intrigued by the lines we draw between “fiction” and “reality,” and that’s popping up in my poetry a lot—I’m writing in the voices of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz and Joseph Smith who founded the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in the same sequence—because in my mind, their concerns aren’t mutually exclusive.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to rationalize my obsession with America’s Next Top Model in poetic terms, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.
***

CHARLES JENSEN is the author four collections of poetry: The First Risk (Lethe Press, 2009) The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press); Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award; and Little Burning Edens (Red Mountain Review 2005). In 2007, he received an Artist's Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, FIELD, The Journal, New England Review, No Tell Motel, and West Branch. With his collaborator Sarah Vap, he published interviews with Lynn Emanuel, Beth Ann Fennelly, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Frank Paino, and C. D. Wright. He serves as the director of The Writer's Center, one of the leading literary centers in the United States, and maintains a blog on culture, cinema, and poetry at kinemapoetics.

Unanswerable Questions: An Interview with Brian Brodeur

Brian Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and So the Night Cannot Go on without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Margie, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, and are forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving. Brian lives and works in Fairfax, VA. He blogs at http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/



When did you first know you wanted to be a poet?

I didn’t start to get serious about writing until college. While studying abroad for a year in Galway, Ireland, I took a class on W.B. Yeats and James Joyce. Ulysses bowled me over. I remember reading that episode in which Bloom huddles behind the rocks on Sandymount Strand to “admire” Gerty MacDowell, getting so excited I kept thinking: this can’t be literature, can it? By the end of my first semester at UCG, I had drafted ten short stories, much to the detriment of my course work. When I returned to Salem State College the next fall, I enrolled in my first creative writing workshop. The instructor, J.D. Scrimgeour, introduced me to the poetry of Garcia Lorca, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O’Hara and many others who would become touchstones. He also encouraged my own fledgling attempts, exposing me not only to the vastness of modern and contemporary poetry but, as a poet himself, exemplified writing as a way of life.


If you had an opportunity to prognosticate the future of poetry in America —as you do right now, in fact—what would it look like?

I love this question because it’s impossible to answer. When I think about why poetry matters, I often return to Wallace Stevens’ “Disillusionment of 10 O’clock,” which ends with these lines: “Only, here and there, an old sailor, / Drunk and asleep in his boots, / Catches Tigers / In red weather.” That drunk sailor seems the perfect stand-in for the artist, the outsider, the dreamer, the one who preserves the health of a culture by living far enough outside of it to subjectively criticize it, even if that culture despises or (worse) ignores him.

When Plato and Socrates banished the poet from their Republic they were completely justified. Poetry provokes unrest by upsetting the status quo, by raging against complacency. What do I think the future of American poetry will look like? Beats me. But I hope it continues to push itself into new territories—to find new forms, new subjects, new tones. I’d like to see an even heartier inclusiveness, an entirely different breed of drunken sailors.


Last year you published your first book, Other Latitudes. How different is it to be working on your second book from your first?

I’m not sure how to answer this question either. Though I keep a regular writing schedule, I feel far away from a second manuscript. Basically, I’m trying to write poems that are better than those in my first book. Which is proving to be difficult considering OL is an assemblage of the best work I produced over a period of five or six years. Writing for me, especially the writing of poems, is mysterious at best, painful at worst. Can I say that I’m superstitious, would rather not comment on what hasn’t yet been finished, and hope the muse will still return my calls?


Tell us about “How a Poem Happens.” What prompted you to start that blog?

The project began in selfishness. I wanted an excuse to contact some of my favorite living poets and ask them how they wrote some of my favorite poems. So I came up with this scheme of an online anthology, like the print anthology Alberta Turner edited in 1977, Fifty Contemporary Poets: The Creative Process. “How a Poem Happens” is a collection of interviews with poets who discuss the making of specific poems. I choose one poem, ask the author of that poem to answer ten to fifteen more-or-less standardized questions about it, and post those answers on the blog. As of April 6, 2009, fourteen posts have gone live, featuring interviews with Eric Pankey, Stephen Dunn, Adrian Blevins, Daisy Fried, Dorianne Laux, Michael Ryan, Ron Slate, Steve Scafidi, Richard Newman, Dan Albergotti, Sandra Beasley, Richard Frost, Philip Levine, and Oliver de la Paz, with posts from many others forthcoming. Honestly, the generosity and graciousness of the writers I’ve contacted has confounded me.


If you shaved your beard, would you, like Samson, lose all your superpower?

Yes, sir. Try it and die.

National Poetry Month Interviews

I've been preparing a lot of interview questions of late.

For the rest of this month, this blog will feature local poets in "mini-interviews" about their work and the craft of writing poetry. This is, after all, National Poetry Month. So look for interviews with a bunch of poets, including Brian Brodeur, Charlie Jensen, Bernadette Geyer, David Keplinger (who'll be reading at The Writer's Center on Saturday, April 18 with Michael Collier), E. Ethelbert Miller, Reb Livingston and many more. We're still lining up interview subjects.

Also, on Wednesday I'll have a special interview post with a musician who knows the history of music here in DC and at The Writer's Center in particular. That'll be part I of a II-part interview.

During the first week in May we'll have our first ever Member Week on the blog. I'm busy collecting submissions for that right now. We've got enough for one week, but if I get any more (hint, hint) then I'll extend that to two weeks (or longer). Contact me by posting a comment on this blog.

For those of you interested in checking out a completely unrelated interview of mine, visit Art & Literature today (all weekend) for my interview with sportswriter and author Brett Friedlander, who co-wrote Chasing Moonlight. Chasing Moonlight is the untold story of Moonlight Graham, the baseball player who in 1906 got one stinky whiff of the Big Leagues when John McGraw of the New York Giants put him in a game. He never batted, and he would never return to the majors. Later he was immortalized in W.P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe (which was then turned into the film Field of Dreams).

I guess that's it for now. Please look for all the interviews in the coming weeks.

Donald Hall, Baseball

Donald Hall begins his poem "Extra Innings" this way: "My friend David tells me that Jasper Johns/ never takes his advice, so when David/ suggests "Extra Innings," K.C. picks up/ a bat. Last April the Boston Red Sox/ beat Toronto opening day, then lost/ three straight. At least, Kurt, the season started,/ and even losing three out of four is/ preferable to off-season--as life/ despite its generic unpleasantness/ appears under almost all conditions."

Hall is a New Englander, and a lifelong Red Sox fan. "Extra Innings" appears in his book The Museum of Clear Ideas, a very fine collection that includes, in addition to "Extra Innings," a sequence of baseball poems: The First Inning, The Second Inning, The Third, etc.

To celebrate the start of baseball's regular season AND National Poetry Month, I thought I'd post on this book. See how he discusses baseball and poetry (the crafting of language):

Who can say what his or her work is?
I write out these tentative verses
--K.C. at the Desk, Mudville at bat,
last of the ninth--working in the dark
morning while a cat climbs on my lap
nibbling at pen and paper. For sure,
my pleasure is an habitual
recreational tapping at blocks
of the language, absentmindedly

Or later, life itself:

The bodies of major league baseball
players are young. We age past the field
so quickly; we diminish, watching
over decades, observing the young
as they dodder.

What I find so magical about the poems in The Museum of Clear ideas is how langauge is crafted from the hard block of mythic baseball. That is, baseball serves as a metaphor--a very apt one, in my estimation--for the passing of time.

I am no poet. I read poetry, sadly, sparingly--and it's been a couple years since I read this book. But a glance through its pages reminds me of just how much the book spoke to me. You don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate the magnitude of Donald Hall's gifts as a poet. His is a sharp tool that taps smartly at "the blocks of the language."

Nothing I write here, especially this late in the day, could do the work justice.

Dylan Matters

In an earlier post Abdul referred to Dylan as a poet, alluding to the fact that I'd called him that. To be honest, I don't remember doing that. The truth is I don't think of Dylan as a poet (nor would I think Dylan himself). Dylan's a songwriter, and it's his songs that touch me deeply, not his "poetry."

But heck, today marks the start of National Poetry Month, so it's probably rotten of me to call Dylan more a songwriter than a poet. He certainly has done great things with language, and you could probably make an argument--somebody could, anyway--that the troubadours in the middle ages were poets in the same way that Dylan is today. But that's another day's discussion.

(Remove the music from Dylan's "poetry," his lyrics, and I'm not sure you'll find the same kind of life as in, say, a poem by Pablo Neruda or Emily Dickinson. It's just different. But this demands the question: What makes poetry poetry? But I'm not going to really ask it here. Someone else can answer that.)

Barbara's letter to Abdul on Monday got me thinking about how I got into Dylan back in college and what that experience has meant to me creatively. More than any other "writer," Dylan's songs/music have been a powerful creative engine for me. I can honestly say that his music has had a larger impact on my creative writing than any of the writing from any of the great authors I've followed over the years: Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann, Gunther Grass, James Baldwin, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Don Delillo, Herman Melville, etc.--all have influenced me during different phases of my life.

Dylan's impact has been longest, and I think it's because his musical repertoire is so vast. I loaned three albums to Abdul, one early album (Another Side of Bob Dylan), one middle album (Blood on the Tracks), and one fairly recent album (Time out of Mind). The reason: he would get a good sense of the changes Dylan has undergone in his career. More than any other songwriter of his generation I can think of, with the possible exception of Tom Waits (and somewhat grudgingly, for me, Paul McCartney), he has had a career that was continually being developed. From his early days singing folk ballads a la Woody Guthrie, to his mid-sixties rock phase, the 70s born again phase, etc., Dylan has reinvented himself throughout.

(Here I need to pause to declare: Some very good books have been written about this, and more will be written. Write on you Dylanologists!)

That appeals to me. His voice appeals to me too. I can't sing, but I've had a long and rocky apprenticeship as a writer, and I definitely understand what it's like when someone says "he can't sing." Used in a writing context, it's like saying "I don't like so and so's voice."

So it's inspiring. David Berman, lead singer of another of my favorite bands, The Silver Jews, wrote in one of his songs "all my favorite singers couldn't sing." And I realize that's true with me too, with "sing" being highly subjective here. Speaking broadly, most of my favorite singers are people many others would say can't sing: Tom Waits, Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie Prince Billy), Leonard Cohen, John Prine. It's a scratchy quality in their voice, a deep gruffness that I find mesmerizing (Lucinda Williams has this quality too, but I suppose most people would say she can sing). It helps also that they write beautiful lyrics.

Following Matt's comment on the blog post Monday, I too have seen a number of Dylan shows, including great shows from Zurich to Stuttgart (where I slept in the train station following the show). There's definitely a good mix in the crowd these days, and I think of all the songwriters of his generation--and yes, I'm probably hopelessly behind the times in my musical tastes--Dylan will "live" the longest. Much of that has to do with marketing, but I won't go into that now.

Look for another Dylan post from Abdul tomorrow, a follow up to his earlier post. And on Friday I'll discuss something else Dylan related. I'm not sure what yet.

Later this month he'll release another album--this was a surprise album, that's for sure. It's called "Together Through Life."