Michelle Detorie, After-Cave

In motion is how we live, sleeping inside skin. I want wheels turning only in, around. My clothes, they get thin as I get worn. We were looking out for tracing clouds, fin slid under wing. We were without beds. I nurtured sounds. We came to land on land like rest. We fluttered full to nest only sticks built into temporary chambers. (“Fur Birds”)

Following the publication of a series of chapbooks through Insert Press, eohippus labs and dusie, Santa Barbara, California poet Michelle Detorie’s lively first trade poetry collection is After-Cave (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2014). Composed in three sections, each of which are constructed via a collage of untitled poem fragments, prose-pieces and short lyrics, she opens the first section, “Fur Birds,” with “I am 15. Female. Human (I think).” The poems then move into an exploration of what the book describes as “feral life,” disappearing into the wilderness and abandoning numerous comforts of human culture, writing:

Digging underground, I disrupted homes that did not belong to me

but wound deep and tethered together.

          I thought of coupling tunnels and the downward wind of tubed

                    figure-eights.

                              Like swans

                                        leaning in, their necks so long:

         the forged reflection

            the rubbed-out lake

Remember: her narrator may or may not be human, openly admitting at the offset to a rather considerable uncertainty, allowing the reader to find nearly anything else the narrator describes as possibly suspect, however open and sincere ‘her’ descriptions, admissions and considerations might be. Exactly what might our narrator be describing, one might wonder, or do we simply take her at her word? The way the accumulation of short pieces stitch into each other to create a larger construction is quite impressive, and her section-fragments shift and shimmy between abstract considerations, pure description, articulations of shelter, displays of animalistic tendencies, and talk of social interactions, shifting between a narrator who claims to have left the world long behind (in the ‘mad hermit in the woods’ sense), to someone who has merely stepped away for a moment. Towards the end of the collection, Detorie admits to the possibility of the abstract and even contradictory qualities of what this unnamed narrator presents: “To insist that something—someone or some being—cannot be / imagined is, in fact, its own form of oppression.” As poet and critic Bhanu Kapil suggests in her back-cover blurb, this is very much a collection exploring a space between “feral life and the ecology of shelter.”

We measured the mountains.

This small sadness:

I can hold in my swale, taste

it only tongue. Salt

showers and the glow

inside bones—lit up,

electric signs. The desert

is the pain of home, the home

away. This withholding—

it makes me pine all the more.

Sympathy is a craving. The stone

around us turns to ice.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Detorie

Michelle Detorie lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she edits Hex Presse and coordinates the Writing Center at Santa Barbara City College. She is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. In 2007, Michelle was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and in 2010 she won a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, appeared from Ahsahta Press in September. Her current project, The Sin in Wilderness, is a book-length erasure project about love, animals, and affective geography.

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’m really excited and happy about After-Cave. & I love this book. It isn’t the first book I’ve written -- it’s probably the third or fourth, but it is the first that is being put out into the world as a published book-object, so in that way it is a “first book.”

That said, I am glad that this book is the first book. It came out of my bones. I pulled out what was already there. This is of course a type of making, but much of my earlier work was more consciously crafted to look or sound a certain way and do a certain thing. With After-Cave, my work was to have the language and the shapes they made on the page honor the way the words had already grown inside my body. This required crafting and intention, but some of that was to make room for a type of risk-taking where my relationship to the language and page space was open and messy, because the way the language coalesced and sytancitically constellated and unfurled in my body-swamp was open and messy. And plastic. How do you put things that are alive and moving on that page? For the past several years I have been very preoccupied with the notion of ferality, and how feral creatures and organisms trouble and adapt . In this way, I feel like After-Cave is a feral type of writing. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t know that I came to it first, and I’m less and less attached to describing my work as being a specific genre (but of course I feel that language can self-identify as a specific genre!), BUT the thing people call poetry is the thing that I have spent the most time learning about and making. That said, I do make things that could be called fiction and nonfiction. I also make visual poems and poetry objects and time-based poetry.

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?
My process tends to be eclectic: rhizomatic, trance-based, palmipsest-y. I write a lot. Obsessions and inquiries emerge and reach and converge. I make chunks of language and arrange and re-arrange, juxtapose and shuffle, erase and repeat. Some chunks or lines come out a way and stay that way. This mostly has to do with my state of consciousness while writing. Sometimes I come back with things more intact. Other times I bring back pieces and work to discover or intuit or create ways for them to go together. 

4 - Where does a poem 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 begins in the murk. Some things are short, but lately every single thing is part of a bigger thing. I seem to have a preference for the space of 20-40 pages.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings. I read around in my work, sometimes reading one or two lines from a section and skipping ahead and coming back. I like reading for 15 to 20 minutes. If it’s longer than that, it feels less like a reading and more like a cultivation of a ambient, verbal atmosphere. A way of filling up the air with language and space where I’m not expecting people to listen or hear every word but rather to just experience it as a sort of affective or sensory mist. This is perhaps because I myself have ADD and have experienced this at longer readings and have found it very pleasurable.
    
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?
How can we live without cruelty? Who has power? Who benefits?

I have for several years been conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of feminism, human/animal studies, and radical poetics. This research centers on the question of ferality and the feral, and searches out links between human writing practices and animal aesthetics -- what I call a “feral poetics,” a continuing project that meditates upon the politics of interspecies affiliations, affinities, and alliances. As a feminist, I am often concerned by the tacit acceptance of a pastoral frame in writing about nature. In my work as a poet, I have experimented with a feral poetics as way to trouble pastoralism’s duplicitous and highly gendered fantasies of nature as "wild," “pure,” “unpopulated,” and outside of historical and political time.  A feral poetics destabilizes these fantasies, and feral texts articulate and recover the subjects otherwise contained or made invisible by pastoralism’s narratives of nature, nation, state, and species. Ferality is a process, not a state of being: one cannot be born feral. A creature or poetics becomes feral because it has to or because it wants to. Also, feral is not another word for “wild.”

Most of this work also somehow connects or intersects with an interest in emancipatory social projects, creating new resources in literary interventions against state violence and war, critical pedagogy, and public art.

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?
The roles other writers play for me varies, so I don’t think there is any one answer. The writers for whom I have the deepest attachment are those who help me learn and feel, whose work documents or questions how we live in a way that helps me understand it or see it differently.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The editors with whom I’ve have the opportunity to collaborate have all been very light touch. I always appreciate it when someone shares their experience of reading my work with me, and editors can ask really good questions that help you re-think or re-see what the language is doing. With After-Cave, there is a narrator, so in some instances when there were questions it helped me wonder about whether or not the speaker would say it that way. I found that useful.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I would like to write more fiction and essays, but when I sit down to write I always just feel like writing poetry. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I prefer thinking about putting words together outside the concept of genre. I’ve begun thinking of my erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness, as an experimental novel. & my diary/reading notes can be very essay-ish.

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 routine is that I make notes when I can. I work full-time, so I take off one or two weeks to work on my writing in a concentrated way in January and August.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The outdoors, conversations, art, books, daydreams, dreams, my dog, trance, meditation, divination. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine, magnolias, wood smoke

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?
Definitely. Artists who’ve inspired me include Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martin, Lorna Simpson, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, John Cage, M.I.A., Kathleen Hanna, Chris Marker, David Lynch. 

I spend a lot of time at the beach. Before I injured my back in 2010, I volunteered for three years rescuing starved, injured, and oiled seabirds through the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. A lot of what I experienced and learned in that work comes into my writing. It is also the subject of one my pamphlets with eohippus labs, How Hate Got Hand.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Notley, Claudia Rankine, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Boyer, Fanny Howe, Donna Haraway, Paolo Friere, bell hooks, Jessica Smith, Julia Drescher, CJ Martin, Kurt Newman

This isn’t a complete list (all lists are inherently incomplete).

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
experience the auroras and the midnight sun

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?
Probably something with wildlife rescue or habitat restoration.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It made sense to me. I enjoyed it.  I received encouragement at key moments.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog

20 - What are you currently working on?
Scanning and photo editing pages from my book length erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness. Writing bitchy ghost and dragon poems. The feral poetics project. and my public art project, The Poetry Booth.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz on eohippus labs

eohippus labs is a literary micropress located in Los Angeles, California.


Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz are co-publishers and co-editors of the press eohippus labs. In addition to their individual works, they also write collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and U.N.F.O. (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization). Their collaborative work has appeared in a variety of publications including Area Sneaks, String of Small Machines, A Sing Economy, Source Material: A Journal of Appropriated Texts, Abraham Lincoln, and as an Arrow as Arrow chapbook, Sin is to Celebration. In 2011, Harold and Amanda, as part of U.N.F.O., co-organized Explanation as Composition, a collaborative audio text project, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

1 – When did eohippus labs 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?

 eohippus labs started in 2006. The original goal was to give writers we knew a venue for work outside of their normal practice. Our goal has not shifted since then. We’ve learned that asking people to access or articulate another part of their thinking can be a difficult task.


2 – What first brought you to publishing?

 The desire to publish work that we love and felt would have no other home.


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

 We can only speak for ourselves, but see the above answer. We also try to work with different economies to make our work more accessible.


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

 We’ve been doing a a pamphlet series, a greeting card series, and most recently an innovative narrative series.


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

 In our experience, chapbooks get out into the world in grassroots way: at readings, through word of mouth, the internet.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?
 We can be very involved as editors, depending on what the work calls for.


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

 A usual print run is about 120 books. We also feel it’s important to keep books in print, so we do reprints.

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 editing involves just the two of us. We’re lucky because we get along and work well together. We could imagine it being a very difficult process if we didn’t.


9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?
 Being editors/publishers has made us more sensitive to understanding the need for communication throughout the publishing process. Nobody likes to have long periods of silence when waiting for work to be published.


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?
 This issue depends on the goals of each individual press. The idea for eohippus labs actually got started because Harold wanted to publish a piece of Amanda’s writing that he thought was great.

11– How do you see eohippus labs evolving?

 The bottom line is that eohippus labs will evolve along the lines of what we can afford to produce.


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?

 We are proud of everything we have published and love that these pieces of writing exist in the world. Our biggest frustration has been learning how to design and make the books. Also, we’d love to devote more time to the press, but the day jobs do get in the way.

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


We were inspired by our friends’ presses in Los Angeles – Insert Press, Les Figues Press, and Make Now Press.


14– How does eohippus labs work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see eohippus labs in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?
 Engagement with our immediate literary community and the community at large is integral to everything we do. We think those dialogues are crucial and ongoing. There would be no reason to engage in this project otherwise.

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

 

Yes, we do. Readings are very important.

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

 

We don’t what life is like without the internet.

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

 Right now, we solicit work and do not take submissions. However, we are planning to change this process in the future. The one thing we are not looking for is pieces or excerpts from larger projects. We want the press to be part of a generative process for writers: either by publishing small, self-contained pieces that they would not have been written otherwise, or by seeding what might become bigger projects.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
 Recently we have published a pamphlet by Cara Benson titled The Secret of Milk, and an innovate narrative piece by Allison Carter titled Sum Total. They are both great writers and their work speaks for itself. We think you should read them.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Cara Benson, The Secret of Milk

I want to distract you from my primary purpose in penning this pamphlet. To do that I will create a space for an abject lyric, not in the sense that the lyric is abject, per se. Its core/content. Perhaps lyricism is the distraction.

The story goes like this: I made a poem. Which according to Robert Duncan was more than singing; but according to Johannes Goebel music is beyond and came after language. Either way, I made a piece of writing that slides along a continuum of music and language in its lyricism. Language here being signs attempting to indicate referents (which can be misunderstood), and music viewed as patterns of sound without intended referents.

There are a few versions of the poem of which I write. All of them include pre-text curated from an article on agri-business as well as lyric stanzas written in response to an advertising slogan. Here is the first, condensed, for space (think originally more floating or white):

“Does A Body Good”

As the product, myself, of generations of Eastern Ontario dairy farmers (and where I also worked and grew), I find I'm reacting even before opening poet Cara Benson's chapbook, The Secret of Milk (Tract Series #5, eohippus labs, 2011), referred to by the poet Kate Greenstreet, in her interview with Benson, as “a treatise on the possibilities of lyric advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness” in Bookslut. What does it mean to produce for one body, by putting another in danger? There is an element of Benson's writing that deals very much with the consequences of the things we make, as writers or as humans, whether in our literary production, or here, specifically, the dairy industry, asking the difficult questions that are usually, deliberately, overlooked. And in certain sections, is she talking about writing or milk production? Possibly, and beautifully, applying a single morphing strain of argument to both. I've always liked the approach, forwarded over the years by writers such as Erin Mouré and Lisa Robertson, of blending literary writing with the formal essay, genres bleeding and folding in and over each other, and, when done properly, each element adding significantly to the other.

We want the reader to enter to produce her poem from the poem so that we don't replicate anti-democratic syntactical strategizing. But what do you put on your cereal? How do you open the carton? At some point the door of the refrigerator is closed and one will hurt her hand thinking otherwise. Abstracting the physicality of shut.

Produced out of Los Angeles, California, eohippus labs is self-described as “a short form literary project and press, co-edited and co-published by Amanda Ackerman and Harold Abramowitz.” The author of the trade collections (made) (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010) and the forthcoming Protean Parade (Black Radish Books, 2012), New York poet Cara Benson has also produced a number of chapbooks over the past few years, including Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2008), which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Sources:

Milk: It Does A Body Good: Advertising slogan

[Lori Lipinski. Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2003, https://www.westonaprice.org/news/259.html]

That is the first version, sans picture. I submitted it for market consumption to a few literary journals, and though other work from that batch was published, this poem wasn't. Maybe it's not a good [sophisticated, ambiguous, artful, musical, image-filled, allegorical, metaphorical, speechy infused/refused] poem. Too sentimental. Littteral. Processually neoliberal? The picture was cheating. Or the whole composition was too difficult to format online. I tried a second version; actually, once I submitted two versions together so there could be a choice. I operated on the [pre-text] more. I'll give just the changes, for space:

[The majority of commercial dairy cows are kept …, forced to … months out of the year, in an overcrowded ….]

The Secret of Milk reads as a poem/essay/treatise on the mistreatment of animals-as-product, on forcible containment, even including information I didn't previously know, such as the fact that “It is illegal to expose animal manufacturing / practices through photographic images or reporting in thirteen / states in the US.” In their Bookslut interview, Greenstreet addresses the issue of art and advocacy directly, asking:

Where do art and advocacy meet? I hear this question in all of your work and you address it directly in The Secret Of Milk...

This is such a huge consideration in my life, and for so many poets/artists I know. I spiral around it. Some days I feel so strongly that poetry, with all its ineffability and particularity, is perfectly suited to effect something like a paradigm shift. Other days it seems like we’re spilling out of a thimble into a sea of disinterested scrawl and sprawl and commerce. Then of course I don’t want to demand of the writing or making that it has to tackle, well, anything.

What is the balance between individual and society? I want to consider larger concerns, and yet I am not in a position to speak for others. I can only speak to things/ideas/issues and for/from myself, such as I am -- even if I’m working with all source material and thinking the author is dead. That’s not the whole story even when the work I’m sporting says it is. Besides, I need to value myself. Should I not do any of that publicly? Should I not make the poem of the slender stem in my hand because it doesn’t tackle oppression? Just a silly example, but I think resisting an economic or systemic or political or post-structuralist -- an ideological -- read/requirement of the poem can be a radical, er, ideology. I’m definitely not after solipsism. Then -- and here is more of the spiraling in action -- I’m all too easily of a mind where playing with syntax or fabric seems like the proverbial rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Or, to switch vehicles, an ignorant neutrality on the moving train, which of course isn’t neutral at all, is it. If you’re “against theory” it’s really just because you haven’t looked at what’s underpinning your own work/status. More than that, though, doing nothing “beyond” the art to address the incredible inequities piling up on the planet also isn’t neutral. There are days when I get really mad at artists with their complicit and precious galleries and personas or theorists or writers who think because they’ve read Lacan or whoever that they are somehow avant or radical anything. What’s at stake? Even the installation artist. Or blog posts that say “but is it art?” -- they’re such bullshit.

And they’re not, right? Or at least not categorically. Critique is needed on all fronts, I know. Holding the space for conscious cultural/artistic creation is crucial, I know. Without theoretical considerations we’re sunk, I know. So this is some of what I’m tackling in The Secret of Milk. More specifically, can lyric language take on factory dairy farming? Should it?