Kelly Schirmann, The New World

How do you write poems in a country like this? I asked my friend, a poet. We were at a sunny brunch spot in a gentrifying part of the city. It was one morning of a typical bad-feeling summer—record-breaking temperatures and teenagers dying in police custody. Out the window, people in bright clothes walked back and forth on the sidewalk. I couldn’t bear my own identity anymore, which was a person who noticed things and sometimes wrote them down.

I had been under the impression that art should be visionary and instructive—that its most holy function was to transform the soul of the person experiencing it, and that this transformation would lead, eventually, to the improvement of our collective experience on earth. This impression had led me to pursue a life governed by creativity. But say an artist lived, ate, slept, and worked in a country defined by violence and competition—how could they create a vision that reproduced anything else?

In other words, it was a serious question—one I’d asked myself, in recent years, nearly every single day. I imagined my friend would know what I meant—at least about the country. That it was all so brutal and garish and cruel, and that to be complicit in the cruelty, by virtue of your citizenship, was too much to bear. I thought she would agree that the impulse to be an artist could no longer be totally trusted, at least without examining what it was you were making, and with whose resources, and why. (“ART DURING WARTIME”)

Northern Montana poet, writer, ceramicist and musician Kelly Schirmann’s latest poetry collection is the startling and stunning The New World (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2020), a book that opens with an important, and self-directed question: “How do you write poems in a country like this?”

Through the poems of The New World, Schirmann seeks to reconcile the world, and her place in it; she seeks to write, not herself into being, but her way into meaningful living, being and potential action. “We want evidence, I guess, that the world is not cruel.” she writes, as part of the lengthy prose-suite title sequence. She writes, and even claws, her way through the dark and towards an impossibility of light. How does one exist in a culture and country considered intolerable and impossible? “When you need a new world, it’s because the old world is no longer enough. It’s because the old world, as you’ve arranged it, is trying to kill you.” She writes of and up to the mantra of becoming the change one wishes to be, but how does one realistically accomplish that? There is such an openness and a vulnerability to these essay-poems, seeking out and searching for ways in which to survive and even improve the present moment, exploring a scale simultaneously as compact as a moment, and as large as an epoch.

Fruit season is coming around slow. We buy cups of fresh vegetable juice from the grocery store and walk the empty streets of town, the dark purple stain of beets turning the corners of our mouths upward, and red. People drive by in their cars, stomped-on seeming. They edge us out of the crosswalks, chopping the air with their palms. It makes me angry, but it’s also a chance to practice. I begin to invent different ways of looking at them, looking way deep in there, through their fogged-in little windshields, into their actual faces. The purpose of these looks is to touch them, to remind them that we both exist. One of t looks says, What the fuck is your problem, asshole? Another one says, I’m sorry you don’t have anyone to help you destroy your pain.

Schirmann is also the author of the full-length Popular Music (Black Ocean, 2016) and chapbook Activity Book (NAP, 2013) and, with Tyler Brewington, Boyfriend Mountain (Poor Claudia, 2014) and Nature Machine (Poor Claudia, 2013). There are ways in which one could refer to Schirmann’s work in The New World as an eco-poetic (themes I would suspect run through her published work-to-date, although this is the first title of hers I’ve seen), in its engagement with wishing to return to a more natural state, refusing late capitalism and seeking solace in more natural climes, such as the poem “DREAM OF GEOGRAPHY,” that opens: “We were walking through the woods / on a wide path // We were brushing for ticks / That’s what you do out here // It was a scrubgrass place / but lush and green // like all of American / It absorbed my projections // that it had been waiting for me / this whole time [.]” Interviewed by Matthew Sherling on her Popular Music for Entropy (posted October 24, 2016), Schirmann responds:

I constantly wonder whether writing is actually therapeutic to me or whether it’s just an old compulsion. I think it’s probably both. I write to work things out, and that can either be cathartic or aggravating, depending on how far in I let myself go. I think within any medium, what people respond to—that non-precious vulnerability you’re referencing—is the sound of a person honestly saying what they think. It is really difficult, increasingly difficult, to say what you think, to even know what you think. We can’t hear ourselves at all. And in addition, because we are being marketed to constantly, people are starved for real information, for feeling and humanity

 

Gina Myers, Some of the Times

 

New city same shit
Moving through
the streets
pre-fall golden
in late afternoon
sunlight / bright red
crumbling brick
& shoddy griffiti
asks freedom?
Each year I fight
& each year
the things that hold
me back feel stronger
Shirking the day’s
responsibilities
to sit by the river
this afternoon
I wouldn’t give this
up but no it’s not
freedom. (“PHILADELPHIA”)

From Philadelphia poet Gina Myers comes her third full-length collection, Some of the Times (Baltimore MD: Barrelhouse Books, 2020), following A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), two books I now regret having missed. Some of the Times is a collection of first-person lyrics that explore her lived experience and geography, that being the city of Philadelphia, a city that to her was fairly new at the moment of composition. Most of the poems are shorter, almost clipped, but provide the sense of being very much part of a larger structure, suggesting the collection less an assemblage than a suite of contained lyrics. Myers writes on paying rent, police brutality, tenuous employment, chronic illness, labour camps in Cuba, baseball games and thunderstorms. Her poems occupy the ground level of a city in ruin amid dangerous heat. There is a particular flavour of working class ethos that permeates the culture, and the poetry, of Philadelphia that is reminiscent (positively, of course) of work I’ve seen over the years out of Hamilton, Ontario, or even the border city of Windsor. Myers aesthetic, of course, is very much that, but blended with an influence from the lyric of the New York School of Poets, something she wrote about in her short 2016 piece “Is there room in the room that you room in?” for the ottawa poetry newsletter:

In an interview, Eileen Myles defines what it means to be a New York School poet: “As an aesthetic it means putting yourself in the middle of a place and being excited and stunned by it, and trying to make sense of it in your work.” This, putting one’s self somewhere and being excited to be there despite all that being there involves--the joyful as well as the heartbreaking and ugly--and trying to make sense of it, is what poetry is for me. And I am happy to be here. And I’m happy you’re here too.

The poem “PHILADELPHIA,” a longer sequence near the beginning of the collection, sits as a poem of arrival and of placement, rife with self-dismissal and regret: “How much of / an asshole am I / that I live / somewhere / for a month / & think I can / tell its story / Every day there / is news of / a new police / brutality / What use / is love / right now?” According to the notes at the back of the collection, the poem was composed from August to October, 2014 (which is, curiously, exactly during the time I was in Philadelphia, and was first able to meet Myers). In a conversation with Krystal Languell, posted at Entropy on September 26, 2017, Myers discusses the poem, which had appeared earlier that same year as a chapbook with Barrelhouse:

Philadelphia was written within the first two months of my move to Philadelphia, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability for me personally. The book wrestles with that instability along with wrestling with larger social and political issues. The world outside of me has remained to be uncertain and unstable, certainly hostile and perhaps increasingly so under the current government–or at least whatever veil of “democracy” and “justice” there was has been lifted. In that sense, not much has changed from the time of writing the book. However, personally, I am feeling more settled in, more at home here in Philly, though I’m reaching my three year mark, which is when my wanderlust usually comes on strong.

There are elements of influence in her first-person explorations of self and the crumbling infrastructures of city and culture, from Eileen Myles to fellow Philadelphia poet ryan eckes; structural echoes to her poems that run similarly down the page and through the excess of sirens, unkempt streets and the ravaged potential of human accomplishment. This is her restlessness, her “wanderlust,” as she calls it, alongside a hardscrabble lyric, one pulled together from lyric scraps, struggle and observation. “I don’t need your theories,” she writes, to close out the poem “4.18.14,” “to understand my lived / experience. There is / an anger I carry / inside I will never / let go of. Something basic / to hold onto while everything / else disappears.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dennis James Sweeney

Dennis James Sweeney is the author of Ghost/Home: A Beginner’s Guide to Being Haunted, as well as three other chapbooks. His writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, Five Points, Ninth Letter, The New York Times, and The Southern Review, among many others. He is a Small Press Editor of Entropy, the recipient of an MFA from Oregon State University, and a former Fulbright fellow in Malta. Originally from Cincinnati, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The feeling I had when I found out What They Took Away was going to get published is a feeling I've been trying to get back to for the last seven years. I liked that little chapbook, and magically, someone else liked as much as I did. But I think my relationship with my writing was very unconscious then. I wrote without intending. It was amazing to see someone approve of that.

Now, I'm much more intentional about what I write about and how. That comes with more disappointment, because if it isn't lovingly accepted I am too invested in the work to let the rejection go. But in the long run it's better, because if/when my writing does get published, I am committed to accompanying it into the world. I want to share it because I have poured myself into it, instead of being a little frightened of it, as I was with What They Took Away. My new chapbook, Ghost/Home: A Beginner's Guide to Being Haunted, does scare me, but it is a fear I know how to carry.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry has always been revelation for me. I began writing with fiction, but only because that was the form that found me when I was ripe to begin. When I found poems that I loved—when I saw Dorothea Lasky read in Boulder, and when I read Emily Kendal Frey's Sorrow Arrow—they gave me a sense of total possibility.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I always think I'm a fast writer, but I'm never done when I think I am. I'm only just beginning to view my initial attempts as skeptically as I should. That means revising is mostly emotional work, these days; once I've convinced myself that a work is not golden, the changes I need to make seem surprisingly clear.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It's always a book. That's my unit of reading, which is why I write that way. A style or form comes to mind to contain an obsession that has already been brewing—and I'm off, and the form holds, then breaks, which is how I know I can keep going.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like readings because I know I'll never be as nervous as I used to be. It's amazing: to stand and read from a page that you've nearly forgotten you've written. It's like reading someone else's work. That's the other reason I like it. I feel like the person I have a responsibility to is not me.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Theory doesn't guide my work. Internal conflict does. All my questions are ones I don't have the words for.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think your role as a writer depends on who you are. For me, a white man with familial wealth and a chronic illness, my role is to question the conditions of power that have given me the privileges I have. This usually means telling the story of some form of conflict or difficulty that I've been through myself, because these conditions of power create impossible-to-resolve situations even for the people who benefit from them.

I want to use my privilege to contribute to its dismantling. I want to put myself on the line, because many qualities that I've inherited contribute to my own suffering and the suffering of others.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both, although I've rarely done it. I hope that when working with an editor becomes more regular for me, I have the courage to appreciate it. More likely I'll resent it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Writing advice comes to me through osmosis rather than language. The best writers I know...just give off this feeling, which doesn't have to be named. I just know I need to cultivate the same feeling, and be precious with it, and allow it to guide me.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?

For me bouncing between genres is necessary. I have to write poetry in order not to lose my mind while writing nonfiction. I have to write nonfiction in order to make me feel as if my poems have a ground to stand on. I have to write fiction as a decoy, because I need a genre to convince myself I write while I am doing the other things.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My best two hours are in the morning, after having a smoothie. After that it's harder and more variable. But if I get those two hours in, that's enough to feel good about my day.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When I get stalled, I just keep writing very badly, and very angrily, until I have a crisis and stop for several weeks. To my amazement, rest actually helps. I never thought I'd be quoting Banksy, but a friend of mine told me about this quote that I remind myself of frequently: "If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit."

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Skyline Chili. You never smell it anywhere outside of Cincinnati, but sometimes there's just the right combination of spices coming out of a restaurant somewhere else. It stops me in my tracks.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

My partner and I have been realizing recently how much we have inherited from the music we listened to when we were younger. The Modest Mouse influences are clear, I think, in the slightly off-kilter quality of my writing, and its desire to be both weird and pleasant to listen to. I'm less sure how bands like Brand New and Taking Back Sunday fit in, but Jess Row's essay on emo in White Flights might have something to say about that.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I have a very bad memory, and a very high level of enthusiasm, so whatever I'm reading is always the thing that's transforming my thinking and my work. Here's a few small press books I've been amazed by recently: Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil, from Nightboat; All Hopped Up on Fleshy Dum Dums by Lara Glenum, from Spork; Under the Knife by Krista Franklin, from Candor Arts; NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) by Aby Kaupang and Matthew Cooperman, from Futurepoem; Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz, recently reissued by Nightboat; Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, from Wave; Days by Moonlight by André Alexis, from Coach House; nothing fictional but the accuracy or the arrangement (she by Sawako Nakayasu, from Quale Press.

I feel grateful to be alive at a time when works like these are accessible and flourishing.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I'm a bit superstitious about how I respond to questions like this. I'm grateful for everything. I don't need any more than I already have.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

My dad sells insurance. I think if I had gone down that road, which I never even considered, I would be very good at it. It would be hard, and I would probably long for something else, but I would also be pretty happy.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I was lucky. I made the decision to write before I knew what I was getting into. Happily, I didn't know how hard it was until I was too far in to quit. I am thankful to my past self for whatever made him choose this path—probably some combination of hubris, imagination, and a desire to be listened to.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

For books, see question 15. As for film, I don't know much. But I saw Czech new wave film called Daisies at a writing residency recently. It was strange and good.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A memoir in essays about living with Crohn's. And poems, when I can't fit myself into prose.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jessica Q. Stark, Savage Pageant

Name Numerology K-Hole: 11 Weeks

Hope is a thing with a name, and

  I am a personality calculator.

I hunted for you in Internet lists.

  This stranger sea—each route

too wayward by edge and vowel.

  A name is a settled home

for the indefinite. Unknown love-

  born, murky-watered babe, let

me call you. Nothing. Mix in salt,

  melody, and ventilate. Voilà

elegy for an exact flaw, for self-

  knowing. We are only here for a

short time. You have ten fingers and

  ten toes, I have a black-and-white.

In it, your head is cast down from

  view, your face obscured.

American poet Jessica Q. Stark’s full-length debut is Savage Pageant (Birds LLC, 2020), a book that includes incredible sharpness, quick turns and powerful images, such as this, the last few lines of one of the opening poems, “Savage Pageant: A Genealogy,” that reads:

My grandmother had eleven pregnancies and

      an infection.

My mother had four and wished for boys.

Sometimes you can’t put all the bones

back where they’re supposed to go.

I had a boy and they took you out with a               knife.

Savage Pageant writes on pregnancy and the body, connecting both to family, genealogy and very real and physical elements of differences the body experiences, from within as well as reactions to those changes. Hers is a book marking shifts, articulating changes large and small, and providing a context far larger and far more visceral than I’ve seen before. Constructed with an “Explanatory Note” and a “Prologue” (which is made up of the above poem), Savage Pageant is structured in four sections and three single or two-poem intermissions—“Act I The Soil,” “Intermission,” “Act II The Ghosts,” “Intermission,” “Act III The Animals,” “Intermission” and “Act IV The Illness”—with a single-poem “Epilogue” to close. I quite like how the dense language of Stark’s poems twist and gyrate, punch and swagger, managing to speak of pregnancy and parenting and the body in new and unexpected ways, from the fragmentary elusive to the incredibly direct, as she writes as the second of the trio of stanzas of one of the poems in the second “Intermission,” “A. Know Your Symptom: 17 weeks”: “contempt from strangers, faster heartbeat, / decreased libido, high blood pressure, breast / and nipple changes, noticeable weight gain, / low back ache, breast tenderness, leg swelling, / flatulence, heightened allergies, leakage of urine, / shortness of breath, leg cramps, headaches, / sensitivity of olfactory senses, increased libido, / constipation, diarrhea, vaginal discharge, / mild uterine cramping, stuffy nose, [.]” This is a remarkable book, and one that rewards further with multiple readings. As she responded as part of the “JESSICA Q STARK IN CONVERSATION WITH VI KHI NAO,” posted at Entropy in February, 2020:

The title came to me after studying the complicated history of pageantry and feminism. I wanted to examine the tension around historical storytelling as a form of pageantry in reducing complicated facts for public display and easier consumption. Stories about street signs, ourselves, our nation. Stories about pregnancy and birth. In contrast to presenting history as linear and uncomplicated, Savage Pageant emphasizes unruliness, fugitivity, and wildness that are never fully contained in a still image or a linear narrative. “Savage” also, of course, refers to the earliest accounts of “otherness” by European explorers, in an effort to contain, subjugate, and excuse their own fearful misunderstandings of “new worlds.” In my mind, Savage Pageant is also a good way to describe the history of the United States and its symptomatic citizens—from the micro-narrative to macro-histories of place and violence; its real “savageness” lies in the elaborate forms of pageantry that (attempt to) manipulate or destroy evidence of violence, racism, ecological mistakes, and national shame. I also want to point to “page” in the word “pageant.” The writing in this book, or any for that matter, inevitably enacts its own forms of unintentional violence and reductions of history and hopefully, a simultaneous break in the tide of rote timeline. I am both a spectator and of course, a deep form of spectacle. Aren’t all poets? I do not miss New York.