Ongoing notes: mid-December 2023: Jack Davis, Katie Naughton + Yaxkin Melchy Ramos (trans. Ryan Greene,

I sure have been picking up a bunch of chapbooks lately (but I would welcome further, as you probably know).

Calgary AB: Parry Sound ON: The debut publication by Monica Kidd’s Whiskey Jack Letterpress is the gracefully-produced Guillemots Gillemets: AUDUBON IN LABRADOR: some poems (2023), by Parry Sound, Ontario poet Jack Davis. There’s much to celebrate in this lovely and sleek publication, including the fact that Davis’ work is not only searing in its attention to detail, and the fact that he doesn’t publish that often [see my review of his full-length debut, Faunics, published in 2017 by Pedlar Press, here]. A note at the end of the chapbook offers that “This piece is composed solely of words contained in select entries from John James Audubon’s journal of his travels along the coast of Labrador in the summer of 1833, making illustrations to complete his BIRDS OF AMERICA.” What is it about Audubon that always gets the poets worked up? Not long ago there was Béatrice Szymkowiak’s full-length debut, B/RDS (Salt Lake City UT: The University of Utah Press, 2023) [see my review of such here] set as an erasure project of Birds of America (1827-1838), and even Andrew Steeves mentioned an Audubon project he was working on as part of his own ’12 or 20 questions’ interview (whatever became of that project, Andrew?). There is something intriguing about how Davis moves from the short, sharp lyric moment to a continued moment in this particular seven page, seven poem piece, offering a detail of small somehow stretched or continued. The small moment, touching and touching down once more, again, and continued. As well, there is something reminiscent of Robert Kroestch’s own The New World and Finding It (1999) in terms of letterpress, book structure and poem structure, each page and poem of Davis’ work three couplets long, set on the right page:

Inside this linen enclosing a skin of tolerable French
braided with a grouse for its maker

I am of a peaty nature fed by the drainage of
decomposed truths and opinions I would call a song

What I know full well is renewed every few minutes
like the shy accuracy of drawing ‘somewhere’ on a map.

Vancouver BC/Chicago IL: I’m always pleased to see new work by Vancouver-based American poet Katie Naughton [see also her above/ground press title], and her latest is a second singing (dancing girl press, 2023), a chapbook-length extended suite of lyric fragments, stanzas and moments extended across an ongoing stretch and thread and thought. “this is the moment / of crisis / this is / the crisis” she writes, mid-point in the collection, offering grey spools of lyric across climate, capitalism and the “formal histories” of personal space, geography, being and loss. As she speaks as part of a recent interview for the Colorado Review blog, referencing her pre-Vancouver time in Buffalo: “At Buffalo especially I’ve been exposed to very socially conscious poetry, or work that is very interested in thinking about positionality and forces beyond the individual that shape the conditions of individual life. I started thinking about how to contain those in poetry, and how to write from a place of relative privilege or being somewhere in the middle in a way that doesn’t just reinforce the oppressive system that you are both negatively affected by and also, at least relatively, rewarded by.”

look at the trees their August shade
from the window of your life your one window
from the bedroom from the stairs
you went up and won’t come down again
the heat, the house, the laundry and breath
done there
your minutes transit the house from the bed
of all Augusts
same silent heat wind sun shade still
of time gathered there, that room
I lay on the floor
your child and not
the blonde wood and white linen
soap and ceiling
you had a room once
a bicycle a dusty road
the oak shade the sun
in another state
as children
as I did
do

Houston TX: I’m intrigued by the chapbook WORD HEART (2023) by Mexican and Peruvian-Quechua poet (currently studying in Japan) Yaxkin Melchy Ramos, translated from Spanish by Arizona poet and translator Ryan Greene. According to Greene’s author biography, this chapbook was produced as part of a project to translate (and presumably publish) the first three books of Ramos’ five-part “constellation-book,” THE NEW WORLD. I’m intrigued by the lyric Ramos (via Greene) offers, one filled with beautiful optimism; open-hearted, writing light, especially across the dark. Ramos’ narrative “I” is one filled with resolve and optimism, even when wading waist-deep in grief.

BLANKETS

I’m out of my mind when I sleep
because poetry is a song
where your axles sing over the asphalt

I travel toward the thought of your mouth
when I see how the hills run and
                                                        I leave them in my dust
I travel by night
while your stomach is your heavy heart
and it rolls down the highway like a ship across the Moon

and you hear an identical word
and tomorrow will be the day the beds
in the houses
in the hospitals
in the bedrooms
in the childhood kneeling on the blankets
will end up in our heart’s folds
piling up day after day unwashed.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul Cunningham

Paul Cunningham currently serves as the Creative Writing Program Coordinator at the University of Notre Dame, where he also co-manages Action Books, an international press for poetry and translation. He is the author of Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has also translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias: Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). Cunningham holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, where he was the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize, and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, where he was a Sparks Prize Fellow.

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

I published my first e-chapbook, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, with Pangur Ban Party in 2010. I added a listing to Goodreads with no expectations. Out of nowhere, DA Powell posted a wildly generous review comparing Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer to Fellini’s circus in 8 1/2. Dennis Cooper also posted about it on social media. Such early support from Powell and Cooper was incredibly significant.

 2 - 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 do a lot of research, a lot of notetaking. The idea comes slowly, but the writing itself usually happens quickly. Editing is my favorite part.

3 - 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?

For me, story always originates from some key image. I keep image journals. Sound is another important component for me. I never begin any project by considering narrative or plot. Those things are secondary to image or sound. The word “plot” reminds me of burial plots. Makes me think of death. A very boring death.

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

I write poetry that’s meant to be read aloud and performed. Again, sound—and performance—are very important to me. I also enjoy doing readings. Jake Syersak and I started a reading series in Athens, Georgia called Yumfactory (a tribute to Lara Glenum’s Pop Corpse). Nathan Dixon eventually joined, too, as a co-curator. Hasn’t been very active since the pandemic. But maybe one day Yumfactory will return. I’m focusing most of my attention on the Action Books Blog these days.

 5 - 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?

I’m an ecologically motivated poet. Very interested in the possibility of an Anthropocene poetics. I have an essay in the works on something I call “Ecodecadence”. I’ve been thinking about how people can approach art as a mycelic practice. A many-limbed artistic ecology. A poetics that is multilingual, invasive, excessive, transgressive, queer, degenerative. More to come.

6 – 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?

The role of a writer? Tweet less.

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

“Write what you don’t know” –Johannes Göransson

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2017/07/to-vibrebrate-in-defense-of-strangeness

8 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to translation to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I enjoy working in many different mediums. Especially when I have no previous experience with a particular medium. I always return to this quote from David Bowie: “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.” Poetry, translation, film, painting, etc. I love approaching a subject working in two or more mediums. How might my response to a subject via poetry differ from my response to the same subject via painting? How might I adapt a poem into a film? I like to feel challenged. Obstructed.

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

I surround myself with images and photographs. (Usually taped on walls, tacked on corkboards.) Francis Bacon also used this approach. He would look at specific images when attacking his canvas (i.e. a photograph of a wrestler’s back, an animal mid-strike). I’ve also learned a lot about this sort of thing from fashion designers. For example, Charles de Vilmorin, a new designer I’ve been following since the pandemic, takes a similar approach when making new sketches. In a way, Kubrick did this too. I read he made the cast of The Shining screen Eraserhead before they began filming. It’s a way to channel a mood.

10 - 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?

I’ve been returning to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World lately. A recommendation from Mike Young. I also like to listen to certain kinds of music. Music helps me get into a good headspace for writing, but typically it has to be instrumental or something that drones. The lyrics can’t be particularly distracting. I’ve been writing to this album lately: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlZyFLX7VdE

11 - 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?

Environmental geologist.

12 - What are you currently working on?

I just completed my first novel, Report of Land. I’m also working on my third full-length poetry collection, Ecodecadent.

12 or20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: Canada Day, 2018

Happy Canada Day! We’re sticking close to home these days, given my father in the hospital (he improves, but slowly; most likely in hospital another month or two), but moving a wee bit between McNair locations for the occasional gathering. We’re even attempting to have a couple of folk by tomorrow, which meant the girls assisted with some baking yesterday (they each stir their own, individual batch of what would become scones).

I’ve been going through a whole spate of chapbooks lately, for whatever reason (perhaps now that the children are home for the summer, I have only the attention for short/small things?). So here’s hoping chapbooks keep coming in, yes?

Southern California: Produced as part of “The Toad Press International Chapbook Series” is Buenos Aires poet Roberta Iannamico’s Wreckage (2017), translated by Providence, Rhode Island poet and translator Alexis Almeida. Moving through the backlist of the Toad Press catalogue, I’m impressed by the sheer amount of chapbook-length titles they’ve produced, especially for a press that focuses on works originally produced in a language other than English.

Queen

I am the Sweet Potato Queen

adorned with jewels

made in Taiwan

riding a horse

from a carousel

I breathe in more wind

than anyone

the colored lights

and the cumbia

create a luxurious climate

lustful

I turn with my horse

in a strange time

I rise and fall like the air

when it wants to be noticed.

I like the straightforwardness of these poems, composed with the occasional odd turn, such as in the poem “Zebras,” that includes: “we all know / that a zebra behind bars / is a redundancy / so they do as they please [.]”

Brooklyn NY: Another excavation of my writing desk uncovered saretta morgan’s room for a counter interior (portable press @ yo-yo labs, 2017), a very striking chapbook of short, accumulative bursts. It would be difficult to presume that room for a counter interior is entirely self-contained, or part of something larger (I suspect, or even hope for, the latter), but that is the beauty of this chapbook, composed of short fragments/sections, containing incredibly sharp and powerful lines. There is an awful lot going on here, possibly far more than there is space here to discuss.

what if you woke up mourning inside it. a pale yellow morning frayed and waiting to pass a minute a window the time it takes. you might crawl your way out of it again.

Discovering this chapbook immediately sent me to the internet to seek out information on morgan, a Brooklyn-based artist who works predominantly with text. I was gratified to see she has another title out this spring with Ugly Duckling Presse, and now all I can think about is when I might be able to get a copy.

principle two: the absence of supporting walls means the house is unrestrained in its internal use. principle three: by separating the exterior of the building from its structural function, the façade is free from structural constraints:

elbow crease. grecian jaw. how the eyes fell—you may take these objects as facts.