Lauren Camp: An Interview and Review of THE DAILINESS

The Dailiness,  How do you measure your days?

                                  Review and Interview by Caroline LeBlanc

The Dailiness

            by Lauren Camp

          Edwin E Smith Publishing,
                2013
 
                    67 pages

          ISBN: 978-1-6192755-6-0

          Available on Amazon



About Lauren Camp & How I Know Her

Since moving to Albuquerque in 2012, I’ve noticed that one name, Lauren Camp, keeps coming up in email notices about poetry events—readings and workshops—in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe area.  Her readings are captivating.  Finally, I took one of her workshops and experienced what all the excitement is about.  Lauren is down to earth, energetic, and generous in manner and well versed in literature, art and music.  Since that workshop two of Lauren’s poetry books have won awards. The Dailiness, reviewed here won the National Federation of Press Women 2014 Poetry Book Prize and a World Literature Today “Editor’s Pick.”  A third manuscript, entitled One Hundred Hungers, was selected by David Wojahn for the Dorset Prize. The book will be published by Tupelo Press in 2016.  Lauren is also an award winning artist whose work has been exhibited in solo and group shows as well as other venues around the world.  She also hosts Audio Saucepan, a weekly music & literature Public Radio program (http://ksfr.org/programs/audio-saucepan-ksfr).  Much more information about Lauren, including voice samples, is available on her web page, http://laurencamp.com/index.shtml. The web page itself is an enjoyable experience full of Lauren’s poems, sounds and images.  It is safe to say that Lauren is both a Renaissance woman and a Southwest poetry treasure.

The Review 

The Dailiness contains fifty poems in three sections.  The poems are lyrical journeys through days with the familiar and unfamiliar.  Themes include nature, sound & music, improvisation, time, direction (especially sideways and back looking), place, medical conditions (insomnia and cancer), and family.  In several poems, Camp’s lines give a nod to other poets and writers, including Tillie Olson and Sharon Olds (“Drama Class, 1989”) and Mary Oliver (“To Be Still”).  The list of acknowledgements for journals that previously published the poems in The Dailiness fills 1 ½ pages.

The language and music of Camp’s poems makes them so enjoyable to read that it takes a moment to realize the tragedy of some of the topics, or the riddle created by some of the imagery.  While most of the poems are free verse, there are also a number of form and prose poems.   Before looking at some individual poems, I’d like to share some lines/phrases that grabbed me as I read.

 “I grew/moldy and without promise” (“Unpacked”). 

“And you will not understand the language/but are willing to be carried backward/into the space before sense//where sound rolls sideways in your mouth”(“And Now You Would”).

“Do not get out your knife./My skin knows its angles already” (“Let Me Live in Your Tolerance”).

“The way his hyphen flattened the beveled air” (“The uh-huh of Desire”).

“In the absolute, every moment can go wrong.”(“Clarity”).

“This ground is voracious, but clogged.  We do what we can./We are a people of anticipated guilt”(A Colloquy on Water”). 

“The man who bore/this cross lugged the weight of pardon, mounting it here,/where the shoulder of heat is heaviest”(“Atonement”).

“The merciful comfort of data…. Maybe she had no taste for the soup of her children….[S]he gently read me each drop of the rain” (“How I’d Explain What Kind of Mother She Was”). 

“We walk…into the waltz and step of the ocean, into waves that become blue apostrophes…. Everyone is angled, held in the ever-shrinking linen and spandex of self”(“A Week in L.A.”).  

“[S]top the suffering and ask for exactly what you want…./Crouch into the smear of a tulip, the tragic palette of time”(“When”).  

Next, let’s look at three very different poems.

“My Grandfather and His Eggs” is written in irregularly rhymed couplets and lines of irregular length.  It is about the speaker’s mother’s father who spent his life candling and sorting eggs before he “headed home to boiled eggs.” “He carried his lungs in a shirt pocket, his humor/in a highball glass…./fried his fears.”  This image of a life full of eggs becomes a conceit that crosses generations as the poem moves into first her mother’s reaction to his death, and then the effects of the her mother’s death.

                My mom was fragile when he died.
                We watched her eyes go runny,

                how she slid into the pan
                of what was missing.

                I tell  you grief can lay eggs anywhere.
                Pale and delicate, Mom dreamt her daddy

                in the bowl of heaven.
                She saw Papa in her photos, heard Papa

                in her whispers.  Papa drinking gin,
                Papa over easy.  Now Mom has moved

                through that same membrane, and without her,
                life in our house keeps breaking open.
          

“What You Might Hear” begins with a quote by Ornette Coleman, an innovative jazz musician in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornette_Coleman). In 2007 his album Sound Grammar won a Pulitzer Prize.  The quote reads, “…when I realized I could make mistakes…I  decided I was really on to something.”  The poem is written in irregularly broken and spaces stanzas, the white space between lines and stanzas like the “silence [that] travels sideways, that …is careless and quirky.”  The second stanza warns that “[i]f you/ want answers, you must haul the questions behind you/for a long time until the music starts up, faulty/and brooding.” After several lines describing Coleman’s playing and “[h]is horn, that pliable prophet of conduct,” the poet declares: “If you cannot respond,/he has proven his point, the rate of the measure, his sounds wrenched in error./Where he got them won’t matter.”  The first two lines of this last quote are right justified. 

On the page, and in the auditory pacing, the poem is as innovative as any jazz improvisation.  It ends,    

                                                                                                 He may offer a cure

                                                          contradiction                           

                                                                        paradox    

                                                           a possible

                                                                       furious anthem.

                                                                                              

                                                                                If he offers you meaning, accept.

 

The theme of mistakes, naiveté, recovery and redemption in the face of mistakes, appears in other poems in this collection, but, by far, this poem is the major celebration of the potential hidden in mistakes.

The last poem I’d like to look at is, “The Coming Day,” the penultimate poem in the book.  Its fifteen line pattern is 2/1/2/2/1/2/2/1/2.  Again, line lengths vary, and the rhymes are imperfect, their pattern irregular.  Again, it is the music—the lyrical rhythm and imagery—of the poem that captivates.  It begins with the speaker’s dream—as she puts it “My eyes are inside.”—of song and playgrounds. The focus shifts to the “small seed in the (speaker’s) back yard,”/just a murmur now, but in seven years we will be locked in/with something that really happened, a world that germinated/while we loved.”  These lines are a great example of the poet’s ability to time travel and take the reader with her.  From sleep to a barren but seeded back yard to a world germinated by love. 

The poem’s line breaks are also skillful.  The above break transposes from “a world that germinated/while we loved” into “while we love. The birds will merge with the invisible.”
The enjambment and multiple layers of meaning continue: 

           God will move to the outside, forget us and

           our five-minute increments of sanity.  We are asleep,
           touching particles, sowing atoms of air.  In the morning,"

The poem is pregnant with the liminal fecundity of time, place, the natural world, and dimensions of reality. Passions grow everywhere. 

             ....  Flickers impregnate the eaves.

             The grasses grow.  I hear your heart beat across the down,
             feel your eyes burn along my face.

The last three lines cross the threshold into waking reality, anchored in the ordinary task of eating, but full of promise on the extraordinary table of the bedspread.

                When I am more awake, I sit up, split clementines

                  into sections, line them up along the bedspread
                  count the ripe parcels of the coming day.

We are grounded in the ordinariness of the day even as we “embedded” (forgive me) in the sensual depths of the images.

In summary, The Dailiness, is a stunning collection of evenly intriguing poems that vary as much in content as they do in form and style.  Their music and imagery makes them at once easily accessible and endlessly minable.  

Lauren Camp

 

 

 

The Interview 

Thank you, Lauren for agreeing to this interview in conjunction with my review of The Dailiness on our Poetry Matters blog.  Since you are accomplished in visual and musical venues, as well as poetry and essays, some questions extend beyond this book.  That leads me to my first question. 

 

 

Caroline:  Would you describe your journey to and as a multi-media artist—visual, musical and writer—and how the different media inform your work, overall and each in the others?

Lauren: I came to poetry from art, and to art from magazine writing. I came to music in between, and music informs both the art and poetry. Then, I set art aside because poetry asked me to trust in it, to find it more moments. Poetry writing is filled with what I like about art making: the composition and texture, the negative space, the line.

I had very little exposure to art growing up. I created — sure. I always did. But I had no formal direction, and almost no awareness of any of these forms of expression.

After graduate school and a few jobs, I spent 12 years as a professional working artist. My medium was fabric and thread. I knew nothing of how to manipulate either when I started. This was, perhaps, the joy of it — and the angst. I learned that I like to experiment, and that I won’t do something that has been done. That way of creating has carried over to my work with music and my poetry. (To be clear, I am not a musician; I am a radio host and producer, sliding sounds together to create new associations.)

Poetry lets me color every line and stanza in ways I never dreamed words were meant to be used. I found poetry well into adulthood, and love using it to careen through the visual and sonic possibilities of everything I write.

Caroline:  As the book’s epigraph signals, Dailiness is a travelogue through time and places: inner and outer, public and private, wave and particle.  In fact, the borders we take for granted between these realms become porous in your poems.  For instance, in “What You Might Hear,” you write, “If you/want answers, you must haul the questions behind you/for a long time until the music starts up again, faulty/and brooding.”  What do you understand about how your mind navigates and often erases conventional borders of association?

Lauren:  I don’t understand any part of how my mind works. I know that if something feels too easily “captured,” I must start again — randomizing what I am after. I want both rhythm and curiosity in my work. The material of my own curiosity, I mean. I want to let the why and how of what I’m looking at surprise me.

I know enough to remember to put in the when and where as grounding. After that, I figure I’m free to fly around.

I also want to disrupt rhythm, to throw in some friction. I learned this while making art, and it carries over. Always allow the unexpected, the unplanned, the strange. This is often where the power lies.

Caroline:  Would you speak about how you arrive at such a nuanced balance of narrative, philosophical reflections, and lyricism in your poems?  

Lauren:  Every one of these elements is critical. Narrative provides the detail, but can be flat by itself. Too much reflection becomes some attempt at capturing the conscious self. I like a dark side, but I want to extend that darkness into an understanding, and maybe, hope. Lyricism — oh, thank god for it. It is what makes the process of crafting a poem such a trial and a treasure. The music isn’t there until I’ve almost completed it. I eye every word with suspicion, and go through a lot of revising, playing with spaces and order, the pitch of sound, the pictures I’m drawing with language. I need the words to be much more than words, to be precise and intense and unusual. I need them to stack together, but be sort of slippery.

Caroline:  The book includes both titled and untitled poems, in which the first line serves as the entire or partial title.  What is your decision making process regarding titles?

Lauren:  I have titled hundreds, maybe thousands of poems and artworks. I even give each episode of my radio show a new title. I believe fully in the value of a perfect title. It could be soaked in what is coming, could lay out the echo of the poem, or misdirect the reader.

For example, the poem “When You Leave, Reiterate the Alarm” had several drafts with another title. At some point in the revising, this phrase showed up as the last line of the poem. In the next draft, I pulled it up to the title, and left it there, knowing that was the strongest opening I could give the poem.

Some titles place the reader, as in the poem “At Echo Canyon,” which investigates a phenomenal stone amphitheater in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

Perhaps the quickest to title was “Let Me Live in Your Tolerance.” I wrote the poem shortly after hearing the awful news report, and couldn’t find even the ghost of a title in me. That first draft got by with “Title” as its stand-in. I did one revision (unusually paltry for me), and gave it that title. It came to me whole—almost as a sort of wisdom.

Caroline:  Your poems are full of creative combinations of imagery such as “the enzymes-fixed juice of conclusion (32),” “silence travels sideways (17),” “a furrow of calories (1),” and “The man…lugged the weight of pardon, mounting it here,/where the shoulder of heat is heaviest (34).”  Would you describe how you arrive at such unique combinations of imagery?

Lauren:  I ask my students to look for new ways of describing, to hug unexpected words together to make new concepts. I do this all the time. It requires that I first untether from the normal way to say something, and then “shop” for new ways to approach the subject. I keep a messy desk that drives me nuts, but gives me a whole surface of wild possibilities. I just have to look around, blurring the actual into chance happenings.

Caroline:  What poets most inform your writing?

Lauren:  Many, many, many. Because of my work with Santa Fe Public Radio, I am exposed to a tremendous amount of what is currently being published. My goal every week for my radio show, “Audio Saucepan,” is to find magical or powerful poems that will itch at a listener’s ear. The show interweaves global music and contemporary poetry. I want to select poems each week that offer a way of looking, a truth that is also surprising.

I have stacks of books, and read a lot, often just dipping in. Other times, I find a delicious hour to sit with one or two books, and form a friendship. In this way, I discover a lot of poets, styles, even words. Reading so many books for all these years, I appreciate all the different prisms that writers use to build a sensuous presence.

Certain poems, poets and styles fill me with jealousy (why didn’t I write that?). I know what I like, and I learn easily from these poems. Those that are odder or discomfiting to me, well… I trust them to tell me what I can’t get away with in my writing, or to pull me into their lair so that someday I might claim that approach.

More than anything, after holding all these books and turning their beautiful pages, I am filled with a sense of community. The writers… how extraordinary we are, caring to point to certain places and times, to a certain emotion!

Caroline:  Would you talk about your teaching and how you attempt to impart some of what you know about writing to your students?

Lauren:  I approach teaching with a sense that it is important to share magnanimously whatever I have learned. I work mainly with older adults who wish to write about their life experiences. They don’t care too much about technique at first; they simply love their stories. They need a gentle guide to help them craft their simpler forms into something more fulfilling.

As a child and growing student, I didn’t have any real support for either my artistic or literary impulses. Every week in my classes, I give what I wish I had been given— direction, encouragement, approval. I think of my role as cheerleading for humans who have something to say, and introducing them to the possible techniques and approaches to say it better. I prod them to shape their stories, and encourage them to let the language ripple in front of them. That’s good, fun work.

Caroline:  Anything else you’d like to say about your work as artist, writer, musicologist?

Lauren:  I love all three of these disciplines, and adore even more when they cooperate to make something new.

Thank you, Caroline, for shining a light on my work.

Caroline:  Thank you, Lauren, for your time, poetry, art and love of music.

 

 

 

       

Imperial, a Royally Good Read
                                               by Barbara Sabol       

By the Numbers:

Imperial, by George Bilgere

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pitt Poetry Series

Copyright 2014

60 pages

ISBN: 13: 978-0-8229-6268-7

In Sept of 2013 I was fortunate to attend a weekend poetry retreat sponsored by the Ohio Poetry Association at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, which included a two-day workshop facilitated by George Bilgere. In the course of the weekend, George read several poems from his soon-to-be-released Imperial. His delivery was that of a raconteur whose signature wry observations are tempered by good-natured wit.  Or perhaps the other way around―an impish wit tempered by philosophical musings on the nature of being human. Either way, the audible music of good poetry was reinforced  by the poet's reading, and inspired me to give Imperial, Bilgere's sixth collection of poems, a closer read for review in Poetry Matters.

As in each collection before it, the poems in Imperial are eminently accessible, in the best way possible: Bilgere is a shrewd observer of human behavior (his own included), a lyric storyteller whose narratives dip below the concrete surface to hint at the beating heart of a day-to-day life. An evening walk through a suburban neighborhood takes a "mystical and obscure" turn in "Scorcher;" an obsolete set of Encyclopedia Britannica becomes the ghost of an era when people watched ". . .Gunsmoke/through a haze of Winstons," and which now sit ". . .on a card table in a light rain" in the poem, "Yard Sale." A Duncan Imperial Yo-Yo, with its power to "Split the Atom./Shoot/theMoon," becomes a talisman for  "the lost ten-year-olds of America" in the title poem. In this centerpiece poem, a-brim with a boy's and a nation's sense of wonder and fear and possibility, the nostalgia for America's Camelot is perfectly captured.

As with the Yo-Yo in "Imperial," objects serve as a conduit for memory and for the nostalgic tone that washes, like longing, over the poems in this book. "I love the hoses of summer" begins the wonderful poem "Hoses." In this poem, a common object conjures a childhood memory infused with equal parts sadness and happiness:

     . . .

     I think of my father, armed

     with his scotch and garden hose

     probing the dusk

     with water, the world

     in flames around him,

     booze running the show.

Yet the same memory contains delight, via the garden hose:

     . . .

     my sisters and I would run

     in our swimsuits through the grass

     while he followed us

     with a cold beam of water.

Likewise, in "Coupons," a photograph of the speaker's grandfather conjures the story  of his grandmother as "a pretty sixteen-year-old" who catches the grandfather's eye, while, in present tense, the grandson cuts coupons for his arthritic grandmother. The grandmother recounts that first encounter, when he smiles at his lovely bride-to-be,

     "And that," said Grandma,

     "was that." I snipped out

     another coupon for Campbell's Soup,

     or Borax. Milk of Magnesia.

     Chicken pot pies. Denture cream.

 In the space of five lines, the romantic girl becomes a pragmatic grandmother, via the tell-tale world

of objects that inhabits the grandmother's "stuffy apartment." The fragmentation of syntax into punched out noun fragments at the end of this list of objects further reinforces the implied limits of a once vital life.

Bilgere takes on the poet's task of witness: signaling not only object and action, but delving into dimensions beyond the tangible, directly observable realm. In "Lint," the great topics of love and death are conjured via a wad of lint:

     . . .the lint itself

     is the palpable bond of our union,

     our clothes whirling together and mingling,

     our selves, our very lives,

     becoming lint.

The notion that in every good poem at least two subjects reside is borne out by the work in this collection. The surface wit of the poems shimmers above deeper layers of reflection, so that while the reader may chuckle at a line, the truer and sometimes sad, always poignant meaning bubbles to the surface. However, the reader is not drawn into sadness, as the poet maintains a light touch on the tableaux his poems create. The true subject of  "Musial," for example, is a father's alcoholism and a downward  financial and marital spiral. Stan Musial (the ace Cardinals pitcher from the 50's), is the shining foil against which the failings of the speaker's father are revealed. The poet balances such darkness against wit's lightness when, in the final stanza, he compares Musial's legendary visit to his father's dealership thus:

     . . .

     as when,

     in the old myths, a bored god

     dresses up like one of us, and falls

     through a summer thunderhead

     to shock us from our daydream drabness

     with heaven's dazzle and razzmatazz.

Here, not only the vision of baseball player as mythic god but the music of the those last three lines, in particular, lift us out of the ". . .dark mouths of garages on our street" into a sonically delicious and spirited energy. 

Among the four temperaments, Imperial  is strongest in story and imagination. The poems are context-rich―the reader never has to work out the place, time or figures of a poem. Context is fleshed out by tangible elements that lend a highly imagistic backdrop to the narrative of each poem. Character and setting are forgrounded in these poems, so that we are transported to "summer twilight" in ". . .one of  the green, old,/more or less identical/streets of our neighborhood" in "Scorcher;" in "Desire," we are standing in the grocery store line behind a beautiful young woman, and the reverie angles into the speaker's fantasized future: "The way her dark hair/falls to her narrow waist/makes me ache/to pay for a washer-dryer combo," and the fantasy continues in a split-screen erotic/drolly domestic progression, while the tension of sexual longing is strung against the speaker's ". . .beer and toilet paper and frozen pizzas" on the check-out conveyer.

In most of the poems, however, the context of the past prevails, manifested through a present-day experience or observation. In "Traverse City," for example, we are driving past  ". . .the toy lake where my family came from. . .//The tiny cottages on the shore. . ." and the speaker detours into a reminiscence of summer boyhoods by that lake, made visible by apt and specific description, such that the smell of wind over the water of that lake lifts off the page. In "Arcadia" we are at "the old/Cleveland public golf course" as it's bulldozed into a Walmart, and, again, the speaker drifts back to the vision of  ". . .those men and women/on the distant clearances/and the twinkle of their silver wands/in the morning light. . ." The magic of those "silver wands" carries us to a halcyon era that has to do with so much more than bygone golf courses.

What binds the poems in Imperialinto a reflective and cohesive collection is the silver thread of time. The theme of temporality, and its accompanying tone of nostalgia―a looking back with tenderness, with sadness, w/understanding that comes from time and age―runs through the book. The collection is bookended by elegies that highlight cycles of life, opening with the spreading of Aunt Betty's ashes in the Thames in "As Requested," and closing with "Weather," a tribute to the speaker's father and to familial love that endures every failing:

     My father would lift me

     to the ceiling in his big hands

     and ask, How's the weather up there?

     And it was good, the weather

     of being in his hands, his breath

     of scotch and cigarettes, his face

     smiling from the world below.

The single-stanza poem fast-forwards then to the speaker as a father, lifting his own son, continuing the cycle:

     . . .

     . . .my little boy

     looking down from his flight

     below the ceiling, cradled in my hands,

     his eyes wide and already staring

     into the distance beyond the man

     asking him again and again,

     How's the weather up there?

    

While the structure follows a solid narrative line, this poet's approach to narrative hinges more on a stylistic than structural approach. Signature to Bilgere's style are the concrete language, imagistic rendering of context/scene, informal diction, use of dialogue, and a rhythm created by short lines delivered in a direct style, in a voice that is genuine.

George Bilgere is a poet whose proverbial pen presses firmly on the pulse of human nature, its charming quirks, common drives, universal sadnesses and joys. He is willing to risk the personal to reveal the universal, through this collection of plain-spoken, powerhouse poems, stripped of artifice, pretense, airs. These narratives are delivered via the natural speech line, in colloquial language textured with voices, in a personal, almost confiding manner, so that the reader is drawn in, invested in the tangible details and the insights. We lean into these poems as one would lean across a cafe table to catch the nuance and detail of a friend's story. The poems are populated by evocative objects that haunt the text and induce an atmosphere, a past, a narrative truth that resonates after each poem is read, and re-read. The dynamic of these poems resides in the juxtaposition of the ordinary exterior landscape chafing against the interior emotional life of the poem's speaker, and the power of objects to haunt, to suggest another time and place, memories that shape our perceptions and  take us back to another age, an era when ". . .we entered the Space Age, dogs and men/in orbit,/. . .Cuban missiles pointing/their little heads at us, and voila!" Voila!, indeed.

An Interview with George

Engaging in a close read of Imperial made this collection all the more satisfying. It's the best way to read, I believe, to get down through the strata of a poem, to experience its meaning at the narrative and the symbolic level. Your poetry, at first glance, might appear like straightforward narrative; the mind's eye scans and appreciates the textures and surfaces of your wonderfully tangible and accessible language. However, these poems are deliciously nuanced and layered. There's so much more than meets the mind's eye to each one; an emotional and at times philosophical depth beneath the tangible surface.

One element of the poems in this book is the seemingly very personal "I," the narrator who shares his history, his day-to-day musings, his quandaries and fears. I'd like to begin the interview with a question about the personal nature of the poems. And I would like to thank you, in advance, for this dialogue and for your rich and memorable poetry; book-to-book, I have admired and been inspired by your writing.

The poems in Imperial(and in your previous books, as well) have a very personal feel; a reader can imagine a very fine line between poet and "speaker" of the poem. How much personal risk is involved in writing poems about a dysfunctional family, for example, and about other personal relationships and experiences?

GB: You're right, the two are very close. And I suspect they will keep getting closer. My sense is that the older you get, the farther along you are to being whoever it is you become, the more important it is that you get that person, that self, into the poems. Like most poets, when I was much younger I had much less to say about myself. If I wrote a poem about, say, a turtle, it was pretty much entirely  about that turtle. Nowadays I'd focus more on my reaction to that turtle, to what that turtle speaks to in me. It's important to me, when I'm reading someone's poems, that I get a sense of that person speaking to me. T.S. Eliot's whole "cult of the impersonal" isn't something I find very appealing. So my poems in my recent books tend to be centered around a person very much like me―perhaps an exaggerated version in some respects―moving through the world.

As for the risks of writing about a dysfunctional family―well, do you know of a family that isn't dysfunctional? I mean, if you had a perfectly happy family you'd probably never turn to poetry. In an odd way, we writers have to be grateful for the flaws and foibles of the people who produced us. Without them we wouldn't have anything to write about. To me, the real "risk" in a poem is avoiding the sentimental, the maudlin. And that can be tricky. My own way around this is to try to find the comic edge in the midst of tragedy. I tend to like poems that somehow manage that difficult trick of being both funny and sad.

The figure of the troubled father was prevalent in this collection. You present a rounded perspective of the father, though: there is the drinking, the bravado, the financial failure, yet the speaker expresses tenderness toward the man with "the big hayseed smile." The last poem, "Climate," describes an especially tender memory that says all that needs to be said about love between a parent and child. Have you found poetry to provide a sense of emotional release, a means of reconciling past and present?

GB: I don't know if I've managed a reconciliation between the two. I think the uneasy and always changing relationship between us and our pasts is what fuels so much of our writing. At thirty you think you finally understand your parents. Then at forty you realize you got them all wrong. And at fifty you have to revise the whole thing, usually because you realize that life is much more complicated than you could understand when you were young, and it must have been just as tough for them. I recently became a father myself, and I can only imagine all the bother my son will have to go through figuring me out. I'm already feeling guilty about it. But back to the question: that tension, that slippage between past and present isn't something I think I'll ever resolve. If I do I'll probably stop writing altogether. The dynamic tension between the now and the then is where I locate my poems.

What do you think is the role of poetry in our or in any culture? Do you believe it serves a societal or political function? I was particularly struck by the bald irony in poems like "Mexican Town" and "Far from Afghanistan," which stood out in this collection as statements about the devolution of society via technology-as-interaction and via international conflict.

GB: If you're asking if I think that poetry can serve as an instrument of political change, I guess I'd have to say no, to be realistic. The fact is that most people who read poetry are poets themselves, and are already on our side. It's a strange thing, isn't it, how artists tend almost universally to be liberals, to be on the anti-war, anti-American global domination side of things? I doubt if a supporter of the policies of George Bush or Dick Cheney has ever read one of my poems, and even if they had I don't think there'd be much chance of changing their views. In today's world I think it's the essay, the blog, the viral video, that effects change. The culture has changed a lot since I was young in the '60's. Back then it was actually people mobilizing, marching in the street, demanding that power be taken away from the corrupt and doddering political machine defined by Nixon and McNamara, that got things done, as was the case with the Selma marchers. We tend not to gather publicly and march nowadays. We sit inside and twiddle on our keyboards. I'm sensing a much bigger problem here. . .

Your poems are so wonderfully tangible and textured with specific objects, like lint, hoses, a set of encyclopedias, the Duncan Yo-Yo―the list goes go on and on. (I'm also a child of the 50's and 60's, so many of the tangible references strike a resonant chord.) Please talk about the power or magic of objects, in terms of their evocative power in poetry and also in our lives.

GB: I have a poem somewhere about the rotary phone. I've written about typewriters, bowling alleys. I guess my interest in all that obsolete old stuff comes from my sense that most poetry at its core is elegy. It is the nature of being human to miss the past, to mourn the constant process of change that is always taking everything away from us. We grab onto those old objects of our youth like drowning men. We stuff our attics and basements with the useless junk of the past, perhaps simply to remind ourselves that we really did exist, that we were once at the vibrant center of things. People my age, sixty-ish, watch the kids walk by tapping at their screens and wonder if we're even still here. So those old objects take on an almost talismanic power for us.

Nostalgia seems to be the dominant tone in many of these poems. It's quite the complicated attitude―equal parts longing, sadness, bittersweetness, comfort. I would think it would be difficult to directly translate this full-bodied emotion into one word in another language. Do you aim for the nostalgic touch in your poems or is it something your subjects naturally render?

GB: This is closely related to your previous question. I don't want to seem like some old-timer constantly boring young people with stories of a lost, golden age. But I certainly am prone to severe fits of yearning for the vanished past. Give me my little tea biscuit and I turn into Proust. Again, though, in order to prevent this from becoming incredibly dull I try to find a way to inject some sort of wry humor into my reminiscences. I think you can see that in the encyclopedia poem, "Yard Sale."

Your style of writing is very distinct and  effective in its plain-spoken, direct approach. How has this stripped-down, vernacular style evolved over your years of writing?

GB: My writing is simple, direct, and plain. This is the plainspeak, the common language of my Midwestern forefathers. When I was younger I affected a much high, more vatic language. My influences were people like Yeats and Eliot, Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. But I was just putting on airs, trying, as my grandmother would say, to be better than I was. When I was around fifty―quite old!―I relaxed into speaking the way I really wanted to speak, rather than how I thought a poet should speak. For me, writing in this plain and unadorned diction gives the poems a modest, understated quality, a dry Midwestern sense of humor that isn't possible in the register of a higher diction.

You've been compared to Billy Collins, and that comparison seems apt in the most complimentary way possible. What poets and writers have been your models?

GB: Yes, I can't turn around without someone telling me I sound like Billy Collins. And the similarities are certainly there, especially in terms of the plain diction. But I think many poets are sounding like that nowadays. Just as the High Modernists like Yeats and Pound and Eliot all sound somewhat alike at the turn of the last century, there's something in the air now, or maybe it's in the water, that makes poets like Collins, Tony Hoagland, Steven Dunn, Denise DuHamel, Steven Dobyns, Thomas Lux, all sound a bit similar. We are of our age, and the age is dressed in this rather casual set of clothes. And part of the age, of course, is a kind of highly inflected irony not exactly available to the Modernists, since they hadn't seen Groucho Marx yet, or Woody Allen or Saturday Night Live.

Who are your touchstone poets, the ones you come back to for inspiration and comfort?

GB: I go back to John Donne―always. Thomas Hardy. The great Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wislawa Szymborska, whose voice (though I know it only through translation) seems somehow like the perfect voice for our times.

As an English professor, do you find young students excited about poetry and about literature, in general? Do you feel hopeful that a generation of strong writers and lovers of strong writing is preparing to follow the current generation of established writers?

GB: As for the interest my students, and the students I meet in my travels, have in poetry,  I think they're passionate about it. There are more writing programs in the country now than there ever have been. There are more young poets excited about the possibilities of language and literature than there were, certainly, when I was coming up. I think the future of poetry is in good hands.

I'd be interested in your take on the current dichotomy between "street" and "academic" poetry. Do you feel there are two distinct brands of writing, or that this may be a false dichotomy?

GB: The dichotomy between "street" and "academic" poetry: Yes, I think there's a huge difference, if by "street" you mean rap poetry and performance poetry. In those cases, the emphasis tends to be on the performance itself, whereas in the typical "academic" poetry reading you've got some nice university professor standing at a podium intoning his or her verse. I don't think there's much similarity between the two―which is great. Both worlds have something to offer to the larger conversation.

What project(s) are you working on now? Are there any new themes or subjects you're itching to incorporate into your work?

I was on sabbatical for the past term from John Carroll University here in Cleveland. My wife and little son and I spent the whole time in East Berlin, where I was working on a new collection of poems. My subject, broadly speaking, tends to be America, and I find I write best about it when I'm far away. It was a fantastic trip, and I recommend East Berlin to anyone likes beer and wiener schnitzel!

George Bilgere’s sixth book of poems is Imperial, from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has won the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Midland Authors Award, and the May Swenson Poetry Award. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has called Bilgere’s work “a welcome breath of fresh, American air in the house of contemporary poetry.” He has given readings at the Library of Congress, the 92^ndStreet Y in New York, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Cleveland Partnership for Arts and Culture. His poems are often featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and he was recently a guest on A Prairie Home Companion. Bilgere teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Books That Call Us Back

Happy Valentine's Day, poetry lovers! This month three of our blogging team present the poets they consider touchstones―books and writers whose words touch deeper chords, serve as a hallmark of poetic achievement, continually surprise with original beauty. They inspire us with poems that cause us to breathe in, true to the origin of the word; in essence, to breathe more fully into our own perceptions and truths.

Karen George touches on several poets whose work most moves her, with special emphasis on Li-Young Lee's collections. Joel W. Nelson focuses his reader's light on the haiku of Kobayashi Issa in Spring of My Life. Barbara Sabol explores the work of Jane Hirshfield, highlighting in particular the book The Lives of the Heart.

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***KAREN GEORGE: My list of touchstone poetry books that I return to again and again would include all four of Li-Young Lee’s poetry collections (The City in Which I Love You, Rose, Book of My Nights, and Behind My Eyes), because of how his poems are layered with meaning, haunting in their tenderness and longing, deeply spiritual, yet grounded in the world of the senses. I’d also include New and Selected Poems, Volume I and II by Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems, because of how they teach me to pay attention, and immerse me in their reverence for the beauty and vulnerability of the natural world. Pablo Neruda’s One Hundred Love Sonnets would hold a place on my list of vital poetry books because of his sensuous imagery, and the intimacy, passion and mystery at the core of his poems. Jane Hirshfield’s After, Come, Thief, and Given Sugar, Given Salt earn a place on my list because of their contemplative nature, and how her spare yet multi-layered poems suggest as much by what she does not say as what she does. I’d include Naomi Shihab Nye’s Words Under the Words: Selected Poems for her direct, simple language, and her sense of urgency and compassion in writing about moral concerns and injustices. Lastly, Marie Howe’s The Good Thief and What the Living Do would hold a place on my list of touchstone books for the powerful, nuanced ways she handles complex emotional issues involving relationships and loss.

***JOEL W. NELSON: “Touchstone” isn't exactly the first word to roll off my tongue in the morning. What does it mean anyway? At one point, a touchstone was a literal stone used to measure the quality of gold and silver. Applied to our topic of discussion, a “touchstone” book of poetry can be understood as a book that one uses to judge the quality of other works, possibly even ones own. Kobayashi Issa's The Spring of My Life, translated by Sam Hamill, is such a book for me.

 Language is an essential compromise. Words can give life to a poem, but they can also kill a poem. The secret is in finding the right balance, and Issa is a master. His poems explore the whole range of emotion from light humor to deep suffering. When confronting suffering, the temptation is always to say too much instead of handling it with restraint, something Issa does beautifully. Even when his daughter dies of small pox, Issa manages to hold back:

 This world of dew
 is only a world of dew--
 and yet...oh and yet... 

This poem kicks off a series of poems by various haiku poets who also lost children. The haiku are brilliant mini-explosions of raw emotion. If there is one trait I admire most in a poet is his or her ability to transcend the page, to bring the reader into a world bigger than what they expected. If the poet can use the poem to manipulate not just the words on the page but the space outside the poem, is there anything more awesome than that?

 The old masters are old masters for good reason. I constantly fail to write the poems I want to write, whether it's because of a craft related failure or a lack of taste. For some reason, the poets of China and Japan reinvigorate me when I feel defeated and humble me when I become too proud. The Spring of My Life is a book that I constantly revisit. The feeling I get when reading these poems is a feeling I seek in other books of poetry and a feeling I aspire to share to my readers. Maybe one day, I will succeed, but until then, always the struggle.

***BARBARA SABOL: Joy, Sorrow and Every Moment In Between: Jane Hirshfield's The Lives of the Heart 

There is a good handful of poetry books I return to―for comfort (Kunitz, Merwin), for inspiration (Millay, Yeats), for wisdom (Hopkins, Rumi), for sonic brilliance in the nearly-edible vocabulary, the sheer rhythmic flow of a line (Dickinson, Heaney), for a well-wrought narrative (Bishop, Haas), for the exalted pleasure of discovering one's own perceptions exquisitely expressed (Glϋck, Doty). Any one of these poets could serve as exemplar "touchstone" poets. The one poet I keep closest, however, read again and again, the poet whose work embodies all of the above qualities, whose poems resonate into my day, is Jane Hirshfield. I own most of her books, including her collections of fine, illuminating essays. Of her books of poetry, The Lives of the Heart, published in 1997, has long represented a standard of poetry making to me, and stands out in high-relief on my bookshelf. Its pages are yellowed and the sumptuous cover holds a permanent curl at the bottom right-hand edge. What defines this collection, in particular, as my touchstone book of poems, is only secondarily its clear cohesion around the conceit of heart-as-symbol, its accessible diction, its beautifully rendered images, its philosophical and spiritual depth. Each time I re-read certain of the poems, I am struck anew by the quiet yet authoritative voice that layers meaning and image, image and meaning, such that I discover yet another strata of connotation, of connection to the poems' sensibility and sense enacted by its original and beautiful language. The poems ring true, the clapper chimes in fresh tones, even if I've read that same line five or fifty times.

 The collection is organized in four sections, each a full complement of one heart-theme: I) Heart Starting and Stopping in the Late Dark; II)Not-Yet; III) The Sweetness of Apples, of Figs; IV) Each Happiness Ringed by Lions. The four sections together present the full scope of emotional and spiritual responses to the world, to loneliness, loss, longing, joy, via a heart metaphor.

 A parallel theme of mortality and the inevitable tension that death/loss imposes on our waking lives, our joys, runs through the book. In the poem, "Not-Yet," the speaker turns her "blessings like photographs into the light," while "over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:/Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken." The speaker accepts the temporary nature of her blessings: "I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,/I ask him only to stay." The undertone of mortality completes the full circle of life, as enacted in these poems; eventually both "salt heart" and "abundant heart," in their ardent beating, says the god of Not-Yet, will someday cease.

 The book opens with the title poem as prelude to the collection; it presages the themes of each of the four sections in startlingly beautiful, textured images:

The Lives of the Heart 

Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear birch-colored feathers,
green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are clay; blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,
can be skinned for garnets, for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt, are bitter,
tear sweet grass with their teeth.
Step silently into blue needle-fall at dawn.
Thrash in the net until hit.
Rise up as cities, as serpentined magma, as maples,
hiss lava-red into the sea.
Leave the strange kiss of their bodies
in Burgess Shale. Can be found, can be lost,
can be carried, broken, sung.
Lie dormant until they are opened by ice,
by drought. Go blind in the service of lace.
Are starving, are sated, indifferent, curious, mad.
Are stamped out in plastic, in tin.
Are stubborn, are careful, are slipshod,
are strung on the blue backs of flies
on the black backs of cows.
Wander the vacant whale-roads, the white thickets
heavy with slaughter.
Wander the fragrant carpets of alpine flowers.
Not one is not held in the arms of the rest, to blossom.
Not one is not given to ecstasy's lions.
Not one does not grieve.
Each of them opens and closes, closes and opens
the heavy gate―violent, serene, consenting, suffering it all.

One poem that catches my breath with each reading, and that I'd like to share here, is "Not Moving Even One Step," in which longing and emotional fulfillment are enacted by the figure of a solitary horse in light rain:

Not Moving Even One Step

The rain falling too lightly to shape
an audible house, an audible tree,
blind, soaking, the old horse waits in his pasture.

          He knows the field for exactly what it is:
          his limitless mare, his beloved.
          Even the mallards sleep in her red body maned
          in thistles, hooved in the new green shallows of spring.

Slow rain streams from fetlocks, hips, the lowered head,
while she stands in the place beside him that no one sees. 

The muzzles almost touch.
How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.

How strange and yet natural that the "she" horse appears in the second stanza. It is the old horse's open-heartedness to love's possibilities and mysteries that allows the female horse to inhabit the empty space that only he, in his blindness, can see. And how quietly and surely that last stanza completes the poem, with the impossible observation (unless it is the heart that perceives the muzzles almost touching) in the simple sentence in the penultimate line, followed by the philosophical musing of the closing line. Jane's poems seem to turn on insights such as "How silently the heart pivots on its hinge," which carry a contemplative quality through the collection, adding a multi-hued resonance.

A new book of poems by Jane Hirshfield, titled The Beauty, will be published this March by Knopf. If it's possible for another book to rival the full emotional and spiritual range found in The Lives of the Heart, it may be this newest. I relish the idea of another book of Jane's; another collection that promises to express the unarticulated and private self―poems that, as in "Three Foxes by the Edge of the Field at Twilight: ". . .look back from the trees,/and know me for who I am."

An Interview with Poet Greg Santos

      That feeling the executioner has

      when he hangs his mask at the end of the work day,

      I have that right now.

      Like a rabbit punch out of the blue.

      But I’m not complaining.

      I'm just singing a requiem for all decent centaurs everywhere.

       - from "The Prodigal Son" by Greg Santos

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Greg Santos’ newest book is Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014). He is also the author of The Emperor’s Sofa (DC Books, 2010) and two poetry chapbooks. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana, 2014), Daddy Cool (Artistically Declined Press, 2013), A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry(Akron, 2012), Mcsweeney’s, The Best American Poetry Blog, and The Feathertale Review. Greg is a graphic designer, teaches creative writing to at-risk youth, and is the poetry editor for carte blanche. He lives in Montreal with his wife and two children.

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I first encountered Greg Santos’s poetry as part of The Found Poetry Review’s (FPR) Pulitzer Remix project and then again as part of FPR’s Ouilpo project. I admired Greg's keen interest in exploring and interrogating popular culture, which plays a prominent role in his poetry. I found myself especially drawn to the cleverness and humor in his poems. When he invited me to review his second book Rabbit Punch!, I suspected it would be a book filled with fast-paced and witty poems, some with a dose of irreverence, poems that were funny and sad, serious and playful, at the same time. And indeed, that it is. [You can find a review of the book here.] 

For those who are not familiar with Greg's poetry, to give you a better idea of his work before proceeding to the interview, here’s a poem titled "Zombies," which is an example of his work with popular culture, containing references to the Irish rock band The Cranberries and American musician Rob Zombie.  

—Nancy Chen Long

Zombies by Greg Santos

Zombies like listening to The Cranberries

Particularly their hit song, “Zombie.”

Zombies like the song because they can relate to it.

They nod their heads, mouths agape.

“Ughhhhhhhhhh,” they grunt affirmatively.

Zombies, however, do not like Rob Zombie.

He is not an authentic zombie.

He is a live human who has appropriated the zombie name.

There is no greater zombie taboo.

Look out, Rob Zombie! Behind you!

Just kidding.

Or am I?

first published in New Wave Vomit
© Greg Santos, Rabbit Punch! (DC Books , 2014)

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[This interview was conducted via email in January 2015.]

Congratulations on publishing your second book! While getting a first book of poetry published is difficult, getting a second published is even more so. Please share with us how Rabbit Punch! came to be and how you got it published.

GS: Getting my first book, The Emperor's Sofa, published was really a dream come true. It was edited by poet and scholar, Jason Camlot, and published by the Punchy Poetry series, an imprint of Montreal-based DC Books. I'm very proud of my first book and if that had been all I had ever published, I would have been more than content to leave it at that. So I still have a hard time wrapping my head around having a second full-length collection of poetry out there in the world.

I approached Jason with a second manuscript comprised of confessional poems written while I was living in Paris, where my wife was pursuing a research fellowship for her PhD. My first book had just come out and I was a new father living in the City of Lights. It was an exciting time, everything was new and terrifying. I tend not to write confessional poetry, so these poems were also new and terrifying for me to share with the world.

After some discussion with Jason, we decided that the manuscript I sent him in its original incarnation did not quite fit with Punchy Poetry's mandate. That manuscript is still a work in progress that I'm hoping to publish elsewhere in the future. At the same time, he pointed out some poems that he felt we could work on together, in particular, "Reading Ou Yang Hsiu in a Café". He asked me if I had more similar pieces that we could compile into a separate project. Thankfully, I had been putting together a completely separate manuscript that I was planning on sending out to some poetry contests and that manuscript turned out to be Rabbit Punch!


Rabbit Punch! has a good dose of pop-culture references. In a post for the Poetry Society of America, Adrian Matejka writes “Every important idea that poetry interrogates has a corollary in popular culture, and when poetry and pop culture team up like those Marvel comics, good poems can happen.” Please share some of your thoughts on the union of popular culture and poetry, how you find pop culture impacts your writing or your relationship to poetry, etc. 

GS: When I include pop culture references in my writing, I do so knowing full well that I am potentially opening up poetry to people who might not normally be inclined to read poetry. At the same time, I am also interested in exploring the idea that everything and anything is fair game to be poetic fodder. Paris Hilton, Bugs Bunny, John McCain, Hooters, and Batman might on the surface seem like odd poetic bedfellows, but TV shows, celebrities, comics, movies, music, spending our time on Facebook, for example, these things are all part of our vocabulary and daily lives, so why not attempt to incorporate them into our poetry? I’m not really doing anything new, though. Poets like Frank O'Hara, David Trinidad, John Ashbery, David McGimpsey, Denise Duhamel, to name a few, have all made great use of pop culture in their writing. I'd like to think of myself as following in their footsteps and playing with poetry's potential to both entertain and enlighten.


Thinking back to your first full-length manuscript that was published, were there things you thought would happen, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?

GS: I was expecting, perhaps naively, to get more reviews for The Emperor's Sofa, but as a relatively new writer at the time, I'm quite happy with the reviews that the book did receive. I was particularly tickled when I heard from one of my wife's relatives that they had read a review of it in the Telegraph-Journal newspaper from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, which is near where they live. It was a really detailed and thorough review and I couldn't have asked for a better analysis. Reviews aren't everything, but for a new author like me, it was exciting to know that someone had actually taken the time to read and study my work.

I would have liked to have done more readings for the book in Montreal, which is my hometown, and where my publisher is based, but like I had mentioned earlier, I was living in Paris the year the book came out. That allowed for some unexpected and very cool opportunities to promote the book. In particular, doing readings in Paris, Berlin, and London. My good friend, Joshua Levy, who's a wonderful poet and short story writer, was living in London at the time and he organized a lovely event at Goodenough College where I read alongside Todd Swift, a poet I've long admired. That was a real thrill and an honor.


When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?

GS: "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service was one of the first poems I remember reading when I was a child. I used to pore over my elementary school library’s edition of the poem that was paired with the colorful and haunting paintings by Ted Harrison. I recently found the book for my father-in-law after I found out it was his favorite poem. It wasn't until I was a teenager trying to write songs and lyrics to play on the guitar that I seriously started wanting to read and learn more about poetry. My songs were my first poems. It was around that time that I started reading e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, and my aunt's copy of Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen.

At a young age I knew I wanted a career in the arts but I was all over the place. I wanted to be a cartoonist, an animator, an actor, and the list goes on. I took my first poetry workshop as an undergrad at Concordia University in Montreal with poet, David McGimpsey, and it was an eye-opening experience. Until then, I had been trying my hand at both prose and poetry but there was something about that class that really clicked and made a tremendous impression on me. McGimpsey was a passionate teacher and he took poetry extremely seriously, despite his writing being some of the funniest stuff I had ever read. I really admired that. It was after McGimpsey’s class and because of him that I made the decision to buckle down and focus on learning as much as I could about poetry and I've never looked back.


When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

GS: There’s a quote from Gertrude Stein that I love: "I write for myself and strangers." I don’t normally imagine a reader. I’m usually too busy writing to exorcise an idea from my head or to make myself laugh. That said, if I were to imagine my ideal reader, I guess I would picture someone like me, only smarter.


We met online when we were both participants of a Found Poetry Review project. When did you first become interested in found poetry? What attracted you to it? What sort of response have you gotten from your readers regarding your found poems?

GS: I first became interested in found poetry when I started teaching poetry workshops. I was looking for more prompts that would force myself and students to think outside of the box and I discovered Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout. The book is made up of poems that Kleon created by taking a black sharpie and blacking out pages from The New York Times to create new texts. It's exciting and liberating to create something new out of existing works of art. In effect it’s a type of collaboration. Around that time I was also really interested in collage and remix culture. I started constructing poems using lyrics from pop stars like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus and rearranging the words into poems that I would call “poetry remixes.” This led me to seek out other found poetry forms and writing exercises.

My chapbook, Tweet Tweet Tweet (Corrupt Press, 2011) contains more of my remixes and found poems, but I didn’t really include many of them in Rabbit Punch! except for “We Were Startled by the Sound of Fog”, which was an erasure poem using Out of the Fog by C.K. Ober (Associated Press, 1911) as a source text. I used the great Erasures website at Wave Books to create it and I was thrilled to find out that the poem was chosen to be the November 2014 Poem of the Month at The Montreal Review of Books. I was happy that an example of found poetry was being showcased, when it might not normally be seen by a mainstream audience.


Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices?

GS: Revision is always an ongoing process for me. I have poems that I’ve been tinkering with for years. I don’t have a checklist but here are a few practices that I turn to regularly:

I - After writing out the first draft of a poem, I often eliminate the first line or two. I have a tendency to over explain myself and this helps cut out any superfluous words.

II - Reading the poem out loud is always a good idea. If I find myself regularly tripping over any words, then that’s a surefire sign that something’s gotta go.

III - Putting a fresh poem away and not looking at it for a while also helps when I return to it after giving myself a little distance.

IV - I took a great workshop with poet Matthew Zapruder when I was doing my MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. One of the exercises he had us do was taking our completed poems and rewriting them backwards, meaning writing the last stanza first and so on. It doesn't always work but sometimes an odd juxtaposition surprises you and makes the poem sound more interesting.

As an editor at carte blanche, what would you tell hopeful poets looking to find homes for their work?

GS: I share poetry editing duties with Patrick McDonagh at carte blanche. We both have pretty eclectic tastes. I’m not actively searching for poems that resemble my own writing style. I simply choose poems that move and surprise me. It’s hard to say what that might look like, but whatever makes me say, “Wow! I really need to help share this with the world.”


Who are you reading now? Do you have a favorite poet or poets? What poets influence you?

GS: I have way too many books on my to-read pile, and I am often reading more than one thing at the same time. I just finished two great novels, actually. Blind Spot  by Laurence Miall, who is carte blanche's fiction editor. The protagonist, Luke, is a great anti-hero. I found myself disliking him, but wanting to keep reading to see what he was going to do next. The book reminded me of Camus' The Stranger. It's a remarkable debut novel. The second is 10:04 by novelist and poet, Ben Lerner. The book really brought me back to my time spent in New York as a graduate student and aspiring writer.

The poets and writers that I often turn to for inspiration include James Tate, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Dean Young, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Mary Ruefle, Russell Edson, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Violi, Lydia Davis, Robert Hass, Linda Pastan, David Lehman, David McGimpsey, Stuart Ross, Gillian Sze, and Ben Mirov.


If you were a place, where or what type of a place would you be?:)

GS: Gee, I've never been asked that before! I would be a traveling carnival or a place like Coney Island. Complete with cotton candy, Cracker Jacks, haunted house, sticky floors, Ferris wheel, fun house mirrors, a sideshow, and clowns.

Thanks again for the opportunity to be interviewed! This was fun.

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Greg’s website:http://about.me/greg.santos
Greg’s blog: http://moondoggy.blogspot.ca/

Rabbit Punch! Tumblr: http://rabbitpunchbygregsantos.tumblr.com/

A sampling of Greg’s poems on-line:

• “Hulk Smash!," Best American Poetry Blog
• “Siem Reap, Cambodia,” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 
• “Out of the blue,” ditch 
• “Shell/Cave” and “Dear Dark”, Poets for Living Waters 

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Lemonstone Reading Series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Mason's Road, Sycamore Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, RHINO, and other journals.