Susan Landers, Franklinstein

In the beginning of this writing I thought: I must make alive the feeling of importance these little lost gentle things hold, existence being not very strong in them.

            Some connections to place are patronizing.

At the Small Press Distribution website, Brooklyn poet Susan Landers’ remarkable Franklinstein (New York NY: Roof Books, 2016), subtitled “Or, the making of a modern neighborhood,” is described as a “hybrid genre collection of poetry and prose [that] tells the story of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Germantown—an historic, beloved place, wrestling with legacies of colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Drawing from interviews, historical research, and two divergent but quintessential American texts (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans), Landers’ Franklinstein is a monster readers have not encountered before.” Franklinstein certainly riffs off Franklin and Stein, as well as the idea of the collage-creation (creating new life out of dead parts), but, as she responds in an interview conducted by Christopher Schaeffer, posted in issue 7 of the online TINGE Magazine (spring 2014): “To call this project ‘collage’ is probably a misnomer. While the project had started out as a mash-up, at this stage in my writing, Franklin and Stein operate more as muses. Searching for language in their texts enables me to get fresh perspective and enter the poems from new angles. And because writing is difficult and I can get stymied by the enormity of Germantown’s history or the challenge of writing autobiographically, turning to these texts is a kind of release valve when writing, like letting the steam out of the radiator.”

At the beginning of this writing I was reading. Reading two books I had never read before: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Making of Americans. And as I was reading, I thought: I should make a new book. A new book from pieces. A new book using only Ben’s words and Gertrude’s. And so I did that. For months. Cutting and pasting little pieces. To make a monster. And it was so boring.

                        It was so boring, my dead thing of parts.

Then the church I grew up in closed. The church where my mother and father were married. The church where they baptized their babies. A church in Philadelphia in the neighborhood where I grew up. A kind of rundown place. A place of row homes and vacant and schist.

And when I went there to see that place – the place that was with me from my very beginning – I thought, this will breathe life into my pieces. This will be the soul of my parts. I thought: if I could write the story of this place and its beginnings, this writing would be the right thing, a kind of living.

                                                This is where my writing began.

At the beginning of this writing, historian David Young told me there is Germantown the place – a place of demographics, statistics, boundaries – and Germantown the constructed historical place – what people have chosen to save and memorialize, ignore or forget – and how some of those who talk about its history are plagued by nostalgia, by notions of an idealized past that never existed. He warned me that strong personal connections to this place can intensify a sense of decline, and that this melancholy does little to interpret the past in ways that do justice to the neighborhood as it exists today.

This is where my writing began: in a church I felt compelled to visit before it closed, before it became another vacant, beautiful building in a neighborhood of vacant, beautiful buildings. At the beginning of this writing, I was participating in behavior long practiced in Germantown – that of white people mourning what was. (“IT WAS MY DESIGN TO EXPLAIN (PART 1)”)

As Wikipedia informs: “Germantown is an area in Northwest Philadelphia. Founded by German Quaker and Mennonite families in 1683 as an independent borough, it was absorbed into Philadelphia in 1854. The area, which is about six miles northwest from the city center, now consists of two neighborhoods: ‘Germantown’ and ‘East Germantown’. Germantown has played a significant role in American history; it was the birthplace of the American antislavery movement, the site of a Revolutionary War battle, the temporary residence of George Washington, the location of the first bank of the United States, and the residence of many notable politicians, scholars, artists, and social activists.” The collage-elements in Landers’ Franklinstein are an intriguing and incredibly powerful blend of what American poets Susan Howe and Juliana Spahr have also long done in their own work, as Landers utilizes both personal history and prior knowledge against research to attempt a portrait of a neighbourhood that has gone through numerous shifts and iterations both before and since her time there. Structured in sections that fragment and fractal, she blends prose with the lyric with the archive, setting research beside memory, and contemporary photos alongside scanned archival documents and testimonials by residents past and present. This is the sort of book that others, including myself, attempting to capture and comprehend geography through writing might wish they’d written. Much of the strength of the book, apart from the obvious clear force of her writing, is in how personal she allows it to be, without being entangled or hindered through a sentimental lens. Combined with her awareness of larger communities, Franklinstein is not simply about her and hers, but a larger context of geographic and cultural spaces, shifting perspectives, each utilized to reach an impossibly complex portrait, as she writes: “To come closer // to come to see // this writing must meander.”

This is a poem about pulping bibles to make bullets for a revolution – a bladder full of pokeberry juice – a portrait drawn in blood – about how impossible it was to get the right kind of mortgage – and how savage the lenders were in foreclosing – a postcard of a cemetery with the words still living scrawled across the front.

This is a poem about Sydney telling me we can get there wherever there is to have a decent life where the poetry happens – a poem about John and his bowl full of prayers – and Vashti who gets asked why she doesn’t live in Mt. Airy – and Rachael who says places like this are hard to navigate, all tied up with romance and symbolism and baggage – a poem about a poem about Kevon who gave me a hug – and Bernard who gave me a ride – and that guy who wanted to give me one of his minutes since I didn’t have one – and Tiptoe who called me a vampire.

These are the makings of an autobiography of America. (“THIS WAS THEN THE WAY I WAS FILLED FULL OF IT AFTER LOOKING”)

Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came

My body is unremarkable, not at all singular, as I walk up to join these other bodies, and it remains unremarkable, not at all singular, as it walks with others, takes off into the street when others do, usually after someone yells block up block up into a megaphone. Then we walk together and yet unevenly out into the street, darkly clad because the facebook invitation said to wear black, in small groups, some faster, some slower, some holding hands, some on bikes, some with canes, sometimes someone in a wheelchair. There is always a megaphone at the front. And then a second later, someone usually on a bike, off to the side, blocking traffic until we cross the intersection. This person calm, smiling.

I have a tendency to anxiously slow down. I also stay to the side. I am nervous, anxious. I want to keep saying this. I am an anxious body. Shortly after we step out into the street, the white vans, which have been idly waiting nearby, pull out and the motorcycles drive up from behind. Engines then and bright directed lights. (“Brent Crude”)

American poet, editor, collaborator and critic Juliana Spahr’s most recent title is That Winter the Wolf Came (Oakland CA: Commune Editions, 2015), a collection that furthers her engagement in social justice, environmental concerns and political anxiety, as well as her use of repetition, chant and unrelenting accumulation. Really, to call Spahr’s poetry books “collections” is a bit of a misnomer: her poetry books are created very much as book-length works, and less a “collection” of scattered pieces that somehow group together, whether deliberately or accidentally, into a theme. That Winter the Wolf Came is a direct result of, and response to (as the inside flap informs), “this era of global struggle.” The blurb continues: “It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.” Spahr is both author and co-editor/publisher of Commune Editions [see their collaborative “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview here], a press founded to produce works very much in keeping with the kinds of poetry Spahr writes around global social and environmental issues. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become far more aware of poets across North America working such social and political issues into their works (some of whom have been working in such veins for years), from Canadian poets Stephen Collis and Christine Leclerc to Jordan Abel and Marie AnnHarteBaker, and Shane Rhodes and nikki reimer (among others), as well as Commune Editions Spahr and Joshua Clover [see my review of his recent Commune Editions title here]. It seems a number of the language poets have reclaimed what was once referred to (neither enthusiastically nor complimentary) as “political poetry,” allowing the language to enhance and beautifully articulate what had been done so rarely well, and far-too-often presented as dogmatic.

It was all good and it was all fucked while it lasted. But eventually Non-Revolution and me were over. It was not that one day I woke up and knew it was over. What we had, Non-Revolution and me, was like all relationships, built to last. But unlike many relationships, everything was against us. Yes, we cared for each other. Yes, we learned to tend to each other’s wounds too, to medicate and to bandage. But we suffered from a larger social lack of care or worse a relentless disdain. We were together but we were in it alone at the same time. Except the state was there with us in all sorts of ways. And we suffered from too much of a different sort of care from the state. And we knew history. We knew we would not be together long. (“It’s All Good, / It’s All Fucked”)

In nine extended poems, including prose-poems, Spahr is adept at pulling apart an idea and stretching it across a wide canvas, composing pieces out of a staggering amount of small detail. Hers are incredibly complex, complicated and straightforward poems made of multiple working parts towards a single purpose. One element I’ve always admired about Spahr’s poetry is the way in which she uses the direct statement (akin to Canadian poet Lisa Robertson), pushing the use of accumulation and repetition so relentlessly that the poem reads as a kind of chant, or mantra. Her cadences are hypnotizing, and hold such incredible beauty.

I am waiting.

Said this out loud.

Said to no one in particular.

Said we are waiting.

Some of us are waiting.

Waiting for the assembly of fish.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to storm the waters.

Also waiting for the assembly of trees.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to be infiltrating the land.

And waiting for the assembly of animals.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting for the assembly of birds.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to fly the sky dark.

Waiting for the impossible.

Said waiting.

Meant waiting.

Waiting to fly the sky dark.

Waiting to be complete. (“If You Were a Bluebird”)

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr on Commune Editions

On the press, from communeditions.com

Commune Editions began with Bay Area friendships formed in struggle: the occupations in resistance to UC tuition hikes in 2009-11; the anti-police uprisings after the shooting of Oscar Grant that continued with the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner; and the local version of Occupy, referred to by some as the Oakland Commune. In these moments, the people committed to poetry and the people committed to militant political antagonism came to be more and more entangled, turned out to be the same people. This felt transformative to us, strange and beautiful. A provisionally new strain of poetry has begun to emerge from this entanglement with communist and anarchist organizing, theorizing, and struggle.

This work inspires us. Because there was no existing venue attuned to these changes, we decided to start one. We committed first our own work to this project, and brought our experience with other presses. We hope to publish poetry for reading and writing explicitly against the given world, always aware that it begins inside that world—and to put this work in dialogue with poetries from other countries and from other historical moments, times and places where the politicization of poetry and the participation of poets in uprisings large and small was and remains a convention.

We are curious about, but not overconfident regarding, the capacities of art. Poems are no replacement for concrete forms of political action. But poetry can be a companion to these activities, as the “Riot Dog” of Athens was a companion in streets. A dog, too, might start barking when the cops are about to kick down your door. Perhaps that’s it, for now, what we’re doing, what is to be done, with poetry. Some barking. Some letting you know that the cops are at the door. They’ve been there for a while.

We have plans to publish two or three books a year for as long as these specific orientations seem magnetic. We have our list for 2015-2016 and are not presently reading manuscripts. But we will be. Check back here for details.

Commune Editions is published in partnership with AK Press and distributed in the US and Canada by Consortium.

1 – When did Commune Editions first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Commune Editions began as a press in 2013. It was Joshua’s idea, originally, and he approached me and Juliana about it. But in many ways the project began much earlier, with the politicization of the Bay Area poetry scene over the last five years or so, beginning with the antipolice and student movements of 2009 and 2010, and continuing with Occupy in 2011. Commune Editions is, in some sense, a formalization or recognition of a process that is much larger than us, and which involves the integration of somes Bay Area poets and their projects into a much larger political milieu with other urgencies and animating concerns.

Our goals remain fairly consistent, even if we’ve come to understand that realizing them is more difficult than we first presumed. We want to act as an outlet for poetry that is uncompromising in its opposition to capitalism and the state, patriarchy and racism, and to do so in a way that creates connections between poets and political radicals. We’ve learned, I suppose, that this makes a number of poets very uncomfortable. No matter how many times we explicitly state that we’re uninterested in telling poets what to do or how to write, nor possessed of any strong convictions that what we’re doing is of crucial importance for the struggles to which we’re committed, we seem to be responsible for all manner of guilty or resentful poet-feelings. We’re not sure why that is, but perhaps this is a role someone has to play.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

I had always assumed that it was dauntingly complex. But I came to know some people involved with subpress, and that made it seem more plausible. About that time I had gotten a job with a regular salary, and a friend (Michael Scharf) asked me if I wanted to start a press (this would be In Girum). He seemed relatively lacking in trepidation, which I admired. And so, armed with the desire to be (or at least appear) as dauntless as the subpress folks and Mike, and armed with a few extra dollars from my job, I entered the fray. I was fortunate that just around this time I went to a reading, I forget, someone famous, and the opening reader really knocked me out; that was Jasper, who at that point I didn’t really know. But his manuscript, Starsdown, would be the first In Girum publication.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

 “Small” publishing is just the way that literature other than the realist novel circulates. Its role is to distribute the literatures that do not have a lot of national or international reach but that a certain smallish group of people want to read. Responsibilities, I’m not sure about. But it does a fairly decent job of publishing a lot of books. The harder part is just finding them or knowing about them.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

Well, I don’t know that we’re unique. I’m sure there are other presses that define themselves in a similar way. I suppose that the way we’re beginning the press, publishing our own books first and defining our vision for the press in that way, with our three books, is a bit different. We’re being honest, in that regard, about the kind of work we want to see, and our commitment to a certain poetry that’s rooted in our experiences, convictions, and friendships. We don’t claim to be committed to a pseudo-objective notion of “the best,” and there are many books we consider quite good which would nonetheless not be right for Commune Editions.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

I’m not sure I understand this question. Mailing? I don’t think we have any particularly innovative ideas for publicity; we’re a mix of social media mentions and conventional circulating of review copies. I think the question of whether there is some untapped audience that might pick up the books — this seems to me to verge on the metaphysical. Mostly poetry books seem to overflow the banks and move into new meadows because they orbit around a social matter with particular charisma in that moment. I think the most effective way for us to get books out into the world is to continue our engagement with the world that interests us, with readers who do not necessarily identify as poets but who are interested in, and engaged with, the political antagonisms that write us.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

Light touch. Although if asked, some of us will give insane large feedback. But I also see that more as “discussion” and comes out of “admiration.” But I can’t imagine accepting a book and then being like you have to cut this or that.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

We are an imprint of AK Press, an anarchist publisher which has distribution through Consortium. We are printing our books in runs of 1,000 or 2,000 this year. We also produce chapbooks in very small batches through a local printing collective, Loose Dogs, and distribute these for free.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

The three of us edit as a team, though each book project has a de facto lead editor who takes a book through the production process. We also have a design editor Tim who is awesome, and another friend who helps with the website. It’s hard to find the balance between wanting to share work, people’s shifting schedules, the efficiencies of having someone in charge. Often the work falls to whoever has least to do that week, in a sort of hydraulic model, which means that the press has the function of making sure that we are all busy all the time, that no one ever has a down week. This can be a bit maddening, to be honest, but it’s what needs to happen. It’s really worth underscoring how much friends help us in small but repeated and generous ways: letting us use a print shop for proofs, helping us cut and bind galleys (and teaching us how to do these things!), just, you know, folding chapbooks. Thanks to Chloe and Ian and Tim and Bruce and Jenn and lots of other people.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

Of course. I have had entirely new thoughts enter my brain because editing is about reading people’s work. 

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

I don’t see any reason for us to be anxious about publishing our own work. There isn’t that much difference between what we’re doing and what we might do otherwise: publish our books with the presses that our friends run. The poetry community we operate is largely based on direct, personal relationships, for better or worse. If you define the self a bit more broadly, everyone is always already self-publishing, and if the work is good it will get read.

11– How do you see Commune Editions evolving?

If all goes well it will evolve until it is no longer a poetry press but an actual commune. That may sound flippant, so perhaps there is another way to put it. The press arose from a concrete situation, wherein the particular contours of a shifting social antagonism — for which the Oakland Commune was briefly a living emblem — led the poetic and communist/anarchist communities of the Bay Area, already overlapping, to become entangled. The press is an expression of that entanglement and that antagonism, and will evolve alongside it. We’re one of the many things that you can do from within such a situation. We hope this will happen on expanded grounds, and happen in relation to similar entanglements and antagonisms in other places.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

How to make cheap galleys is my biggest frustration. Along with how to use Mailchimp.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

Oh, I don’t know. Of course it is easy to name the small presses that have been inseparable from own developments as people. We mentioned subpress. I have a special place in my heart for Edge, and Black and Red, and North Point, and Broadside, and AK Press. One of the things that communists and anarchists in the US have had in common with poets is that they are mostly going to be proceeding within the assumptions of collective, local publishing. It’s like, who weren’t our models?

14– How does Commune Editions work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Commune Editions in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

This is probably already answered in #11. We’re resistant to the idea of a literary community as some autonomous thing; one’s first relationship is always to a lived situation rather than to other literary circles. Many many many of the people we love sometimes make poems or other kinds of writing, but that doesn’t mean they and we are poets any more than the fact that we often wash dishes makes us dishwashers. All of that said, we feel pretty attached to a lot of presses, either because we see them trying to attune themselves to the same situations that we ourselves struggle to grasp, or because they do things that are beyond us. We are especially grateful for presses that do work in translation; we have done some of that, with more coming, but we’re limited in what we know and what we can do — thus very grateful for that work happening.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

Readings are one of the ways that literature circulates. I’d go for important.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

We have a website and we sell books there. We use facebook and twitter, and we try to release digital versions of everything we publish. The internet is an interesting topic, but I’m not sure our internet use is all that interesting. It’s largely a mode of distribution for us.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

Not currently. We probably will at some point. We are looking for the end of the world as we know it, and aren’t looking for improvements.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

We’d like to answer that question next year! Our first three are by us; we’ve probably talked about them enough, and there are blurbs here: http://www.akpress.org/catalogsearch/result/?cat=0&q=commune+editions

Next year we are publishing Cheena Marie Lo, David Lau, and Ida Borjel (in translation). We’ll have a lot to say about them when the time comes.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;