GL: The first poem in Who’s Who Vivid, “Completely by Accident,” begins with a kind of problematic ecstasy, “I was in a fix / I was sloshing with joy,” and thereafter catalogs a series of privations/aggravations, non sequiturs, and scattered pronouncements: “I have always understood ‘nothing’ as a series of zeroes…No one delivers the ice that I ordered. / No one controls my remote from the forest.”  The poem, it seems, devolves from the “fix” of “joy” into a more complex amalgam of emotional states, ending, ultimately, on a dark, parabolic note—a kind of cross between Mary Shelley and Gerard de Nerval:

From the myths of beginnings to possible worlds,

I have often been wrong about philosophy in public.

When I boiled this evening’s lobster this morning

I screamed and invented a monster.

“Completely by Accident,” as seen above, concludes with a parodic exclamation of artistic ambivalence.  The speaker “screams” before his own invention, like Victor Frankenstein recoiling in horror at the first glimpse his pet monster.  I love how fun this poem is, but I love it also because it features a kind of signature polarity in your work.  On the one hand, your poems often pursue and, in turn, deliver the pleasures of surrealist simultaneity, the shock of the irrational, the joy of novel linguistic constructions; but on the other hand, your poems are just as frequently filled with impossible longings (as seen in these lines from your newest book, “I wish I had a bike / made of leaves”), which imply a deeper absence, and pain.  So, how do you negotiate both the joy and the sense of loss/impossibility precipitated by creating the playful and fabular worlds of your poems?  And why did you choose “Completely by Accident,” a poem of such emotional oscillation and exuberant crisis, as the figurative welcome mat to your beautiful book?

MH: I’m so glad you referenced Frankenstein right off the bat, here, and I’ll get back to it in a minute, but first I’d say that that polarity you describe in the work—between joy and pain, sense and nonsense, presence and absence, denotation and connotation—is super real for me.  It’s something I think about all the time.  Experience is full of shadows and reflections, and these are often the very things I’m trying to activate in my poems, the life that life points to, the depth-charged layers beneath the surface.

Of course, in the actual process of writing I almost never know what I’m doing—I try to not know what I am doing.  I find the poems in the same way I’m finding the answer to this question: by writing it/them.  Ultimately, I’m looking for a way to see the shadows and reflections of experience (the mysteries, doubts and contradictions) with the same intensity—with the same sense of realness—as the things themselves.  This gets weird.  Even writing about it is weird.  But this is one of the things poetry’s really good at doing: presenting the world as it is and as we imagine it (which can be contradictory) at the very same time.

Now, Frankenstein is one of my favorite books, because of the narrative inside a narrative inside a narrative structure.  There’s always another layer.  And that scene where Victor recoils in horror at the sight of his creation is to me one of the best and most instructive in all of literature.  What does one do in the face of the things one makes?  Does one behave responsibly or irresponsibly—and what do those two things mean?  There’s definitely a mad scientist streak in my work—and certainly in “Completely by Accident,” yet all I invent there is a lobster—a creature to be sure, but not a monster.  I scream in the face of my own failure to compute.  But how that happens in the course of the poem isn’t altogether clear.  It’s a recipe, but one that can’t ever be followed the same way twice, which is lucky, but also frustrating as hell.  Every time I sit down to write I have to learn to write a poem.  Sometimes “It’s alive!”  Sometimes it’s body parts.  Sometimes it’s those zeroes.   “Completely by Accident” had to be the first poem in Vivid, because it provides the blueprint for everything that follows.  Make a mess.  Lose control.  Go off the rails.  Scream if necessary.  But keep one eye open to the possibilities that arise as a result, whether it’s lobster or monster or a long night in the margins.  What is it the poem wants to do?  How can I help?  

GL: The final poem in Who’s Who Vivid, “To the People Know Better, Let Me Say in My Defense,” features a complex inventory of self-identifications.  The speaker claims to be “of,” among other things: “the mind,” “the gut,” “the testicles,” “the nostrils,” “the bedsheets,” “the toy chest,” “the sincerest / apologies / and best wishes” and others.  Obviously attempting to account for the self in this way doesn’t clarify the speaker’s notion of self, but radically complicates it instead.  Could you tell me how your poetry both works for and against attempts at self-identification? How, in other words, does (your) poetry both help and hinder the quest for self?

MH: I often tell people that my poems aren’t about anything; rather they are demonstrations of a particular way of paying attention.  This isn’t entirely true (I hope), but it does point to, and make possible, a kind of shifty instability of the self, among other things.  What I’m paying attention to in my poems is the collision of experience and language and the marvelous ability of both to evade one another even as they constantly crack each other’s skulls, even as they kiss and make up.  But it’s these collisions and evasions that I’m also trying to house/contain in the poems as well , so oddly I’m building the poems as they’re falling apart, or I’m tearing them apart as they’re being constructed.  This doesn’t only help and hinder the quest for the self, but for anything the poems address or attend to—which is a-okay with me.  I like when life is simple, but I like when art complicates our emotional and intellectual experience of it.  Poems make it possible not only to think about who we are, but who we aren’t, who we could be, who we might’ve been, who we seem to be in spite of our best efforts to be/or not to be “that person.”

Human life is manifold and various, and as a result language, which is an invention of that life, is a reflection of its uncontainable variety.  Poetry, in its mis-use and mis-management of language, is a compact burst of what’s possible.

GL:                “The world is wicked by definition; my job is to stay aware of it.”—Philip Whalen

“Aside from the wolf, things go well.”—Richard Hugo

The two epigraphs (quoted above) for your newest book Wolf Face, which is due out in the coming months from H_NGM_N BKS, are wary, tragic and ironic.  Your poems frequently revel in, well, a lot of things.  I often get the sense that you’re pleased with the world for the sensory novelty it always provides and the ideational chaos it incites: “I thank everyday for the blessing / of nonsense,” since such novelty and chaos fuel your poems.   Yet these quotations from Whalen and Hugo cast a hunted feeling over the collection.  They suggest that to enjoy the world and its wildness one must account for and be aware of evil, danger, etc.  Why did you feel these epigraphs appropriately introduced or colored your poems?  Did you mean to suggest to the reader that there’s a deeper awareness of the sinister, the malevolent, the dangerous in this new book than in your earlier work?

MH: I meant to suggest to the reader that things aren’t always what they at first appear to be, so it’s a good idea to keep a lookout.  Putting this book together, the thing that struck me is how much joy there is in these poems—and actually in my real life as well.  Since the last book came out my personal life has become increasingly more stable—more “lovely in lovely in lovely in love”—and I’m constantly in awe of the fact that, as my four year old daughter says, “life is great.”   This is not something I take lightly, given that I know full well how life is NOT great for a huge portion of the people on this planet.  I am also well aware that one’s luck can change in an instant—knock on wood, I’m not tempting fate.  I turned forty last year.  I think about dying all the time.  I don’t want to die, and yet even amidst all this life, it’s out there somewhere doing its work.  I’m truly thankful that I get to be a poet, a father, a husband, a friend and that life is stable even as the poems spin more and more wildly out of control into the ether.  And yet there’s this little nagging part of me that’s always worried that it’s all a mirage or a dream or some other ephemeral thing.  Those epigraphs are on guard duty.  I hope they ward off the evil spirits.

GL: There are a couple of poems in Wolf Face, “Flamingo Effusion” and “Blackbox Cockpit Voice Recorder” in particular, that reference friends, fellow artists and spiritual peers.  The former lists well over thirty people by first name in a vast dedication for “the people [you] love / and [who] love [you] back,” and the latter names several poets whose work you’re enjoying while reading submissions for Forklift, Ohio.  According to one of my professors from grad school, poets use coteries, groups of friends, etc, as a way to build new or enhance existing aesthetics; such socially-conscious poets invoke and/or mobilize their ideas of what art or poetry can be by inscribing a new ethos through collaboration and community.  Does this notion or sense of imaginative community allow you to, as you put it in one of your poems, “walk[] / into a legendary sympathy”? Or something else? How would you characterize the community you’ve mentioned/constructed in these poems, and how does it affect your work as both an editor and writer?

MH: Hey, this is great, and I’d like to answer by way of saying first that there’s nothing imaginative in my poems.  There’s no speaker.  No made up anything.  I’m speaking.  The poems are primarily descriptive—though often the descriptions are mismanaged (rearranged, blown apart, mixed and matched) or mis-used (de/re-contextualized) to try and give them their own new life on the page.  My point is that there’s not much of a filter when it comes to the details.  The details are the details.  It’s their arrangement, their shape that’s reconfigured.

With that in mind, the community is, as you alluded to in your question, a referenced thing rather than constructed or imagined.  I know it’s a subtle distinction, and some people might think I’m splitting hairs here, but it helps me when I’m writing the poems to know that I’m connected to real people and a real world through the writing, that there is an audience, however small, of people that I’m writing for and to and with and through.  It’s a huge relief to know that the material for the poems is whatever’s actually around me, not something I have to make up.  As Mary Shelley put it, “Nobody creates out of a Void.  The materials must first be afforded.”

But I couldn’t create in a Void either.  I have to be an audience member.  Community is the artist’s greatest asset.  I operate with it and against it.  It is the form of my poetic life.  It informs my poetic life.  All those people who get mentioned in “Flamingo Effusion” and “Blackbox Cockpit Voice Recorder” (and elsewhere in the book) are in the poems, because they’re in my life.  The poems and the life aren’t separate things, they’re the same thing.  Poetry is how I make the world make sense, and for better or worse most of the people who understand that way of proceeding are either people who I love and who love me and/or they’re other artists, so it seems crucial to build a community out of those folks first (then one can branch out from that place of resonance and relative security).  The community provides critical and material support and tension.

I want to be intimately connected to other people, genuinely interested in them and their interests, and my way of trying to plug into that is through poetry I have things to say, even though I don’t ever know what they are when I sit down to write, and I want a community around me that’ll talk back once I figure it out.  Call and response.  I feel lucky that Forklift’s been around for as long as it has, because the community around the journal is super alive.  I love reading and getting to know new poets, and I love too the constant reminder that there are lots of other people out there doing the same thing I’m doing with both similar and wildly different interests from my own.

Additionally, if I might digress a second, I think one of the big differences between the poems in Who’s Who Vivid and Wolf Face occurs on a material level (I’m thinking about this, because of the Mary Shelley quote above).  In Vivid there’s a lot of deliberate messing around and messing up and radical manipulation of language via process/parameters to see what will happen if…  Whereas in Wolf Face, I started in most cases with descriptions of actual experience, e.g. reading Forklift submissions, feeding the baby her peas, or whatever happened to be most pressing right then and there.  Often I was writing the poems in the midst of whatever experience I was attending to that moment.

This became sort of a necessity after my daughter, Agnes, was born.  I was home with her a lot when she was a baby (when a lot of the poems in Wolf Face were written), so to take care of her and take care of the poems I was making constant notes, changing diapers, making bottles, etc. then putting things together in the afternoon/evening after my wife got home from work.  There’s a full-throttle domesticity (however strange) throughout the work in Wolf Face that was only in its infancy in Who’s Who Vivid.  Ironically, it actually took having a real infant in the house to allow me to attend to that fully. 

GL: One of the things I really enjoyed doing for this interview was going through your work and making a sort of greatest hits file of lines that caught my attention.  I noticed that many of my favorite lines from Wolf Face made direct personal statements to the reader; they frequently departed from the associative mode to strike a more intimate (though sometimes ironic) tone.   For example: “I do what is done / to me. It seems important to hurt” (38). Or, “the pain is the thing that sticks with me” (69). Or, “you feel like a fraud deep-frying / In wonderland” (30). And, “I am joyful / in my blue plaid mind, even as I think / terrible thoughts against my wife, /my daughter, the leaders of my country” (26).  These lines seem to burst on the page with cathartic force.  But many of these apparent revelations seem to result from digression as opposed to meditation.  These perspicuous moments, in other words, are often preceded by more associative, opaque or absurdist language.  Could you tell me a little about how these two modes of utterance work together in your poems?

MH: Yeah, this is exactly it.  I have to find those moments of clarity through the mess and marvel of infinite possibilities.  Every once in a while things come into focus.  Hopefully that’s an experience that a lot of people have (and that a lot of people are troubled by and/or enjoy).  As you’ve noted there’s a lot of play in the poems.  I’m a dork who loves language, and I love all the places it leads—wind farms, Vicodin, dead ends, love.  I’m not afraid of meaninglessness.  Things can be meaningless on purpose—for a reason.  What I am afraid of is pointlessness, so I’m always looking to come to a point, a place of resonance that radiates through the poem(s) backwards and forwards and upside down.

And yeah, sometimes this is ironic—it employs irony—because in the process we come to know something we already know, or we realize that everyone else has known it and we’ve been in the dark.  I do want the poems to provide the reader with a sense of going through something to get somewhere.  “Beauty is difficult,” wrote Pound in The Cantos, and increasingly, in our time, so is clarity, so is rationality, so is feeling and knowing even a tiny piece of the world (the self) with any certainty.  That’s why nonsense is, and must be, serious business.  I keep looking for a clear true thing in all the accumulation.  It’s like trying to find a particular needle in a warehouse full of them. (There are no more haystacks.  Haystacks are easy.  They exist in meadows, pastures, impressionistic paintings.  There is no need to find a needle in a haystack; one merely enjoys the haystack…)

In a recent essay Tony Hoagland talks about vertigo as a characteristic of a lot of contemporary poetry, and certainly that sort of full-speed disorientation is something I delight in, but it also makes me nauseous.  I spin in order to find a place to stop spinning.  The problem is how to stop (and go again) significantly.   

GL: As an editor, you get a different look at contemporary American poetry than the rest of us.  From this vantage point, what pleases you about our moment in poetry, and what troubles you about it too?

MH: To answer the second part of your question first: I don’t think I’m troubled about it.  I used to be troubled.  But I don’t want to be troubled anymore.  History works out the trouble.

What pleases me is that poetry seems as alive and vibrant and anxious as ever.  I don’t know if I can really characterize it beyond that.  There’s a great small press community, but I think it’s really always sort of been that way—if one only knew where to look—lots of outlets, lots of ways to proceed, more ways than are imaginable to do it yourself.  Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Certainly the internet’s changed things, given more people access.  Now one can actually be a poet in Ohio who is connected to the larger community of poets residing on the coasts and everywhere else.  But that’s been the case for a while—it isn’t a characteristic of this moment.  Poets have always been resourceful about using whatever technology was available to them to get the work out to readers: mimeograph, copy machine, internet, pdf, etc.  I’ve been publishing a journal now for most of my adult life, and it’s always seemed like there have been hundreds of other small presses going strong right along with us.  It’s exciting.  I’m really happy to be a part of it.

GL:  So what’s new with Matt Hart these days?  What direction is your poetry headed in now?  What are you reading, thinking?

MH: Currently I’m working on two manuscripts—one called Debacle Debacle, which sort of picks up where Wolf Face leaves off, except that every poem in it could either be described as a fuck-up or a flood.  The other manuscript is called Sermons and Lectures, Both Blank and Relentless.  It’s a largely unpunctuated long poem in about 55 sections that weaves together references to early punk rock with various philosophers and philosophical positions as a way to talk about things like felt need and desire, responsibility and faith, hatred and love.  I’ve been reading some of the sections from this manuscript out lately, and it’s been a ball because they’re super musical.  Some of them even rhyme.  So I’ve been trying to read them in a way that’s part hellfire and brimstone preacher, part anarchic punk rock.  I used to play in punk bands, and reading these poems I get the same thrill that I got playing rock shows.  I want to give the poems a different life in the air than they have on the page.  Actually this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but I didn’t have the right work.  Now I feel like I have the right work.

As for reading, I’m always reading lots of books.  The current stack consists of Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan, Rilke’s Duino Elegies trans. by Gary Miranda (recommended to me by my pal Malachi Black, who’s both a terrific poet and a lightning bolt), The Typewriter Is Holy by Bill Morgan (not my favorite book about the Beats, but it might make a good introduction…) and Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems—MARY RUEFLE!  Also, finally just read Revell’s translation of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.  It’s not my favorite work of Rimbaud’s, though as always Revell breathes new life into whatever he translates.  As for Rimbaud in general, I’d much rather read the Illuminations, which ARE absolutely modern (and everything before and after whatever’s modern).  Anyway, there’s something about A Season in Hell that just seems so Emo to me…  Did I just say that?  Yes I did.  I’m also reading Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare as well as the lyrics on The Monitor, the new album by the band Titus Andronicus.  Everything’s connected.  Everything repeats.  Whitman.  Lincoln.  Jefferson Davis.  Finally, I’m totally digging Michael Schiavo’s pdf only journal The Equalizer—and not just because (in the interest of full disclosure) I have poems in it—but because I think it’s such a great idea for getting poems to readers quickly, efficiently, democratically, virally.  Clearly, it’s a labor of love.  What more could you want?

Thanks for these questions, Greg.  Really great to have this conversation with you.

I am watching you move in the temple made of sand. It’s a song.

I can hardly read the map through yr hair. I trust that you can do this. There will be time later to take it all apart. The sand is a song neither of us know how to speak. A question & rooms with rugs. Here & there the sounds broken up. I want to see the sand map & the trees outside the stone steps. I am going to do the only thing I can do: trust you. It isn’t a connection. Really. I want to see the leather tight around our feet. I want to see the temple you enter: go back. Here & there the rattle forgotten. The song to speak to. I’m trying to draw out the city &:

What I would like to do is to rely on someone else.

*

Under the town, a map

You see the temple & you enter.

There is the amber or jade light of the candles & the path you choose into what stone                                  room. The box there. Gold or jade or wood.

Is there a lock. Is there a key.

Above the hearth is a plate & bird. A pear & mirror & bird with its ghost made of rice.                                     The rice smells like a song under all that hunger.

There is a fire or start a fire.

The temple is a palace. You understand. Stones worn soft to shine. There is a wood                                       table in every room. The rugs are wool or the rugs are fur. Fur pulled straight off the                                     animal

& the animal unharmed. The animal to lay under. The field nearby. You’ll learn to tell.

You are in your room & it is unfamiliar to you. The house is dark but there is a hearth.                                    The water is dark but the lamps are lit.

Go back. There is a map on the wood table of the temple which

flames & flames everywhere.

A man roasts the bird in the temple & lights the candles in the candle pattern. All the                                    lights of letters in the right order. You could build the temple if you could build a ladder.

The temple steps are wool-wove & laid right down on the rock. You forget about the                                      bird & parsnip & pear. What was rice was sand.  

On the map the paths are brown. On the ground the paths are brown. You draw the                                      trees in the sand of the map. The grass where the grass has grown unspoken & where it                                      is field.

You walk in sand. The motion up & down. This is the hungry that is not thirsty.

You forget about the fruits when you pass them & berries & the hard shells of almonds                                      & even the wooden temple table. The rice goes uneaten, the offering.

To break apart. Draw a line & go back.

*

There isn’t going to be sleep.

Not the long sleep, the ship sleep, the dirt bed, there isn’t going to be a place in the                                       palace for you, a place in the temple on the wool rug or stone, there isn’t going to be a                                feather bed or a hammock or a simple sheet.

Only the cold wrists of the morning & the afternoon sun that keeps beating down hours                                 later. Yes it is still afternoon. It doesn’t matter what you have done.

If you could keep stepping forward it would change the hour, if you could accomplish                                     enough night would fall.

Complete the task & it will finally be the night where you could lay down.

Or you must do what the night asks of you. Under each moon is a saying you can read                                   with a telescope. Under each mast is a boat you must guard with your back to the fire &                                   the fire in your hands.

On each island is a temple in the shape of a forest. Who lights the candles in the temple                                knows that inside it is always day or night. The light means nothing.

Take the candle from the wall & you learn the song of the man who made it.

In the room where the moon shines in, or the sun, the temple keeps no candles. In the                                  stone rooms, he calls it morning & lights the candles. It will be day until the candles                                           burn out. Then he says night & the temple sleeps & he does not check the room where                                   the moon shines in or the sun. 

Take the candle from the wall & the song candles in your hand. Small moon to smaller                                    ghosts.

The light forms a line on the floor & you follow it. The light is a grid & a maze through                                     the temple.

The moon makes a series of squares on the floor & you choose one as your bed. You                                      want to sleep where it is light when you blow the candle out because this is the room                                  where you know it is night.

*

The hint is break it apart: cup & jar, barrel & lantern, box & larger, the bridge, the gate,                                      the vine, the stem of the enemy, the shield. Too the lock on the chest, the supports of                                     the shelf; the rock is a weapon but also to be split; the stick is a weapon

& to be burned.

What is the matter now.

Here is a jade vase—break it; here is a vase of earthenware—break it; here is an                                          animal—here is a stick; here is an animal—everything is hungry.

Make this animal to lay down. Make this statue to lay down. Make this door to lay down.                                 Make this map to burn the path out of the ground.

To make the map you must steal the paper; you must steal the feather & ink, you must                                 steal the light even to map this light by.

Here is the bag—steal it.

*

Something missing getting in the way. There is the ghost that speaks & the trees that                                    form a maze, the ghost that stands in the way, the trees that form the path, trees as                                   cover, a ghost that tumbles down to find you, guide-ghost in the tree blockade.

The song hunger makes. The fruit of the tree. The bird to eat as well.

There is one kind of tree on the map & the tops are cotton, but you must lay in the                                        sand.

The sand forms an oath. The sand forms a maze, removing your prints as you cross                                       them. The sand takes you down into it & you lose. Or you enter a kind of cave. The                                        sand is a door.

The sand is a bed & a door & sometimes a cave where a man waits with a box.

The box has a complicated lock. The lock needs an iron key. The box is gold or jade.                                      The man needs you to pick one of three.

The box is only a card. It will spring open at your touch.

Something is inside. Nothing is inside. Something is inside & waits for you to choose.

The treasures change inside the boxes as they pretend they are facing you. They pass                                  them under the table.

They wanted you to have this from the moment they first saw you.

The man only has one thing for you, no matter which box you pick.  The boxes move                                    around above the table & the treasure moves around below & the man asks you to pick                                  one of them.

You will have the right key. Touch the lid or the complicated lock. The box opens where                                   the key in your hand becomes your hand.

*

Where is winter.  The breath from the mouth. Where is the trees not green any more.                                    Where is the grass dies & the birds move somewhere else.

This time is not going to come.

The birds are hungry & the trees are full of pears. Why should the birds go anywhere                                      but to the fruit.

The circling sun. The unnecessary rain.

Fruit falls in the sand & the sand becomes bread. Fruit falls on the path & the birds take                                       the path away.

You hunger under these trees full of birds. You want to pull the birds down with your                                      hands like pears. To break the crust of them like bread.

Fruit does not appear on the map. All the trees are one tree. What map is this.

You break the box on the stone floor. The temple smells of pear & bird, but the boxes of                                     the temple are empty. You break the barrel but the birds are inside. You go to break the                                   vase but the vase is already broken.

Everyone is hungry & the fruit of it is everywhere.

The salad was mostly purple detritus.  He threw it out.  He got on the bus. Someone in back barfed into a paper cup. Once they’d planned to drive to the ocean. He wanted to put his hand on her back under an awful amber lamp. Out the window the city kept eating itself.  My mother, he thought, is a sad person.  He felt so sorry.  He might not ever see the ocean.

*

She was an angel of invincibility.  This has to do with her mouth. In public sometimes it was hard not to stare. Her mouth, moving its jewels around. He tried to show her art but art is everywhere, she said.  That’s a cop out, he said, and they argued for a while.  Got on and off the subway. Skidded on pennies. He was about to shave his mustache off.  He had a lot of worries, and she could see them, little airy napkins falling from his pockets.

*

She didn’t know how long to wait.  It kept raining. It wasn’t a familiar rain, but it wasn’t new, either. “Talk to me,” she’d say to the gutter-bound trash— the needles and the red plastic bits.  She called her mother on the phone and didn’t leave a message.  She put her hands deep into the spot between her legs in their jeans.


from Sorrow Arrow

Did you think there was room for “real” love?

If you dug a hole in me you could get in?

Wheel-y green trash container

I might grow large and contain your inability to contain me

You don’t believe me

I am not believable because you don’t believe me

In geometry we were given a protractor and a compass

It’s like art the teacher said

I wore crayons to nubs filling space in

Rainbows taught me everything

This is a mean fucking world

-

Don’t fuck with me, Christian PTA moms

My sandwich is overly mayonnaised

The cheapest thing to do in winter is get a disease

No one can figure out where the sky comes from

Trees lifting into the mist

The horrible light of morning

Shuffle in and out of sleep

Thighs aching like a giant

Pain is not interesting

Moms twisting their fingers on Caesar salad napkins

Moms with empathic bangs

Pin a badge on the dirty river

With my god hand I put us inside my father’s new heart

-

I had to leave the cafe because of sexual tension

It was so loud

Yellow bee legs

There are a few styles of public readings

Woman poets in flowy dresses

Taut verbage

Slim males with deliberate facial hair exploiting homoerotic energy 

Whiskey

White people who think their feelings are interesting

Breathing and breathy

Often a day ends upon waking

Why must you fiddle with time

What’s this time bullshit

I want dilemmas involving god and coastal highways

 -

Our rainbows faded

We’ll grow old

Trends that back off

A light blue sweatshirt says WASHINGTON in white puffy letters

Plastic headbands pinch at the spot behind your ears

A woman with a beautiful fishtail braid is pumping cream into her coffee

All night I dreamt of the possibility of dreaming

I woke to drink water, look out the window

Some sweatshirts are lined with a fake collar

You can still buy them at airports

People eating and eating and eating

I guess there’s a point to it

Taking off their clothes, arm by arm

Leg by leg, getting into bed

The moon hurting itself on the sky

Waiting one day longer to die

-

Our whole lives we’re going to be metal towers rising out of the wasteland

How long must we wait to be abandoned

Who reads books about gardening? 

You just put your hands in the dirt
 
It’s not that I’m better but that my love is thicker
 
I disavow what I say when leaving the cavern
 
Remember my love letter? 

Burning like a planet in a drawer

Is anyone “ready” for anything? 

Readying, I stare at the ceiling from my crib

Blue velvet curtains

My father, singing

My mother in the garden, hopeful as a Marxist

Science is facts without value

Spectrometer of joy
 
In the park I gnaw grass
 
Man with spiked leather jacket, taking iPhone self-portraits

It’s arbitrary

If I let go, a burnished rainbow

Apparently I never finished my essay called The Value of Love

Three ferns outside your house, symmetrical and reaching

I loved you instantly

A tremulous snow

In my mouth

I turn my head

& cough

back your shape

into the damp

unspoken

lack of place

purple as a

splinter up-

on your lip

to tongue

the empty

longitude

underneath

the belly

singing to fit 

At seven A.M., we face opposite walls

Our feet hook together at the ankles.

I stare toward the front and eat my fingernails

which do not satisfy me.

            A line, a day.

In line, I order bagels—

you know, how all-over blue

blueberry bagels are? You like them.

They are bought, and until I am done eating, I wait.

Just chewing, waiting,

waiting to leave.

Me and my bike tires, we are not full.

We are soft.

We are slow.

The coda is geese—V. Sound it out.

            A line—a radius, center to edge, a horizon,

            what comes before a corner is enough.



At the shore, it’s hard
to imagine anyone mulching or leaves
already falling from the trees in your yard.
One minute there are so many tomatoes
the peppers find it hard to keep
up. It’s the asparagus
that doesn’t bother with the end
of summer. If all else fails
belly dancing will keep us
looking like we’re forty. Is this
the doorway to self-deception
or a doorway to new possibilities?

While we wait for death, heavy petting
on the Pentacrest between the rainbow
splashes of the fountain and the happy
stars on the grass will do. Some day
I think I’d like to own horses just like
I’d like to own an alcohol problem. Glamorous,
but without the acumen of a business
man expanding his temporal boundaries
to alleviate stress. That’s one option.
This year the cicadas came
out four years early but your plane
was late. Winter is never
late, and the shore goes on without you.



And nobody’s here, unless you count as a somebody

an analog recording of a honey-smooth baritone voice

accompanying footage from the 1960 Olympiad

playing on a loop on a TV you get to like a lab mouse

following symbols and signs through a test maze

of haunted hallways after a gondola ride

to the top in an empty car

that reminds you of a womb

in a lab, which makes it feel like

an experiment, this going to see

the hermit seer sage in his cave above the tree line

on the day O Wise One goes to the village

for provisions but leaves behind a note

in the form of a film

in which athletes are stretching

like a meadow of gentians

following the contradictory orders

of their acclaimed coaches the breeze, the sun,

over which the honey smooth voice pours out:

They’re in a race, and in the race

most of them will get exercise only—

only three will win a medal

which makes you want to protect

the ones who’ll lose, like the mother

of a very large family, like, say,

a red snapper laying millions of eggs, and

suddenly you want to know the population of Las Vegas

ten years ago versus now. You think of ten years from

one second ago, when you will feel, if

you’re more than a disembodied voice,

responsible for not issuing a warning

sooner. On the way down the mountain

you understand what the seer sage

is saying: that honey-smooth will always taste

good to the tongues in your ears, and balancing

expertly on the miniature avalanches

beneath each of your downward-angled

steps will go unheralded unless

you herald it, which isn’t in your make-up,

you who now believe that your best

teachers are the ones with straight faces

telling you lies. 

Becca Klaver interviews Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin is a writer and performance artist. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books, 2009), Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot (Dancing Girl Press, 2009), FASHIONWHORE (Legacy Pictures, 2010), and Kept Women (Insert Press, forthcoming). She is founding editor of the journal Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga.

Becca Klaver: So much of The Ravenous Audience is about how women’s and girls’ bodies are not only over-sexualized by our culture, but violently consumed: “The nude female body / is a strip of paper / at the bottom of the serving dish” (54).  The Big Bad Wolf, the shark—all these flesh-eating creatures want to eat little girls up.  In connecting sexual appetite to an appetite for food, are you trying to make some of the fairy tales’ allegories more explicit?  Are you updating them for the 21st century?  Some mix of these?  Something else?

Kate Durbin: I must first tip my (feathered and tulle-d) hat to Angela Carter, whose feminist revisionist fairy tales continue to inspire me, even though I take issue with some of her idealism. Her notion that Perrault’s & the Grimm’s fairy tales contain an underscript of sexual violence that becomes blatant when they are re-written for adults, is an idea I stole for my own fairy tales, although I wanted to complicate the narratives further by making the girls in the stories less than heroic. I wanted to make them more like girls I knew growing up. Girls who’d ignore you in front of some guy they liked, for example, or talk shit about you behind your back to other girls because they were jealous. Girls who were incredibly smart and yet would make fun of you for something stupid, like your period stained underwear. Certain feminists have talked about how the effects of the patriarchy are what have turned women against each other, and okay, that’s true. Except that when you leave your friend in a compromising position at a party, or when your friend leaves you, you know that you made a choice. It may have been two lousy options you were choosing between, but you still chose. And so to blame the patriarchy entirely is to give it too much power, I think. In my fairy tales I let the bitches be bitches. I wanted to reveal the complexity of these issues that I think are, at times, too simplified in Carter’s tales.  In many ways my tales are a response to hers. They are also an homage to Sylvia Plath. Plath always let the bitches be bitches. 

I want to add too that Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel are bizarre and bawdy in their early folk versions. Little Red, for example, cannibalizes her grandma and drinks her blood in the earliest known version of tale. She also does a striptease for the wolf and escapes the situation by claiming she has to take a piss. In some ways you could see my renderings of these tales an act of collage—combining elements from various versions of the tale, including feminist revisionist versions, to create a postmodern, non-sensical, re-mix version. Or, as Johannes Goransson called them in his Rain Taxi review of my book, “B-movie” versions.

Now, to expand this notion of consumption—I am glad you culled that quotation from “Doll Disrobed” because in that piece as in many of my cinema pieces I wanted to draw attention to how (mis)reading women, whether in a text or on a screen, is cannibalizing them. This is why the nude woman’s body is a sheet of paper, just another text/tree/treat. I love this quote from philosopher Simone Weil (herself an anorexic): “We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest). A mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people.” Or, I would argue, a blind viewing. To view someone blindly is to render her flat (flat screen, flat page). It is therefore far easier to consume the flatness. To really see, to really read, is to allow someone to expand, to gain more and more dimensions, some of which we won’t like or understand. I wanted to permit my women to expand in this book, by drawing attention to the fact that the reader’s mechanical process was getting in the way of that, and that my own position, as permission-giver, was also problematic.

Your blog is called “Ornament and Excrement,” and for all your interest in ornament (as feminine artifice, usually), your book is indeed interested in excrement as well:  “Now woman/poet, I shit words; vomit them like someone else’s bile out my mouth. Crap them from my pen. Rub them into my hide. Paint them across my lips” (34).  I’m thinking here, too, of your essay about teenage girls on Delirious Hem: “My writing, then, is a swollen corpse full of babbling she-demons, slobbering and vomiting on one another, emitting a chorus of unholy grunts.” What’s the power of shitting and purging?  Does it have something to do with your rendering of patriarchal forces as ravenous?

Teenage girls puke in private, they puke because they have been presented with an impossible image of femininity that is puke-worthy. But what if bulimics didn’t purge in private but instead purged in public, much like 28 Days Later or some other zombie film? I love this notion of teenage girls vomiting all over their math papers, all over their teachers, standing in a line like that film Suicide Club or as a row of crazed Care Bears, puking all over the world.

I want to say, though, that this kind of writing—which is really a political stance—has a danger to it. If you puke and puke and puke and never stop, you will die. I fervently laud and protect those writers who are compelled to vomit endlessly, as a way to hold this world accountable. For myself, however, I find that this shitting and purging aesthetic is one that is fraught. I became physically ill while writing that Delirious Hem essay. I was listening to these terrifying recordings of Anneliese Michel, the possessed girl, and I started to feel like I was going crazy, and that someone was touching the back of my head while I wrote. I couldn’t sleep. This experience made me realize two things: 1) writing, creating, is powerful beyond any understanding I have of it now and 2) there are ways of creating that are dangerous, and should be treated as such. That doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable, in fact the opposite is often true—that some may find their own lives worth sacrificing for the wake-up their work will be for this world.

I think that this stance is inherently rebellious, inherently teenage. We should not move past it because we are now “grown up,” should not take on some modernist, progressive approach. But to learn to wield the vomit, perhaps, in sharper shapes, and to become stronger, to become a monster so that you can withstand the purging, and to eventually purge flowers, sequins, rhinestones, yards and yards of tulle. And maybe one day you will realize you’ve become a fountain, that the rose waters of the world are flowing through you, that you’re being fed even as you’re spilling out.

Even though I’m interested in confession (and withholding), I can feel a little nutso reading such writing, even as I admire its risks—its “TMI,” its lack of filter.  I don’t care much whether or not poems do “healing” work, but I want them to do some alchemical work.  I want to witness raw material transformed.  And sometimes vomit is just the raw material. So even as I’m interested in this type of writing, I’ll admit that my gut reaction is often to look away.  This feels a little conservative and cowardly, but it’s true.  For anyone who might be curious to do some further reading, do you have particular authors in mind when you mention a “purging aesthetic”?  What do they have in common? How is puke-writing different from confessional poetry?

I don’t know that confessional writing lacks a filter. All writing is a process of filtering. Whatever ends up on the page is processed through the writer’s body and memory and confessional writing is an amplification of the writer’s experiences, whichever ones she chooses to, well, puke on the page. It is filtered through her needs, too. Maybe that’s what can be so squeam-inducing about confessional writing—it seems so needy,  instead of casting the illusion of existing apart from the writer’s emotional life. It is also interesting from a feminist perspective, since many of these confessional writers are women, purging their emotions, wallowing in them, when women are traditionally seen as too “emotional” as is. This is what makes their work powerful and important and rebellious, I think. And, yes, dangerous and potentially even unethical at times.

As for who does this sort of purging-writing—one of my favorite writers, who is also a dear friend, is Kate Zambreno. Her blog, Frances Farmer is My Sister, is like this. Also, Dodie Bellamy, who wrote the original puke-manifesto, Barf Manifesto. Ariana Reines. With the work of these writers, there is no difference between the confessing and the puking, except that they are clearly wielding their puke into artful shapes.

I also think there can be different types of vomit-writing that aren’t confessional in an I’m-revealing-my -personal-life-for-you kind of way. Puking or regurgitating something you’ve ingested culturally that is poisonous. The Ravenous Audience is like that. I think Lara Glenum’s Maximum Gaga could be read that way too. Some of Danielle Pafunda’s work, like her new series “The Dead Girls Speak in Unison.” The poems of Juliet Cook.

You’re the founding editor of Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga, and you identify as a fashion and performance artist. (Actually, I’ve noticed that your self-descriptive phrases in the “About Me” section of your blog change about as often as Gaga’s outfits!)  Plus, your own costumes are to-die-for: you approach Gagaesque elaborate excess without an entire Haus to help you out.  Do you make the costumes yourself?  Can you guide us through the making of one of your favorites, from inspiration to completion?   

I come up with the overall concept for every costume, but I don’t actually make the clothing. I generally find most of the outfits on ebay and at vintage stores, or I purchase some amazing concoction from Carissa Ackerman of Mandate of Heaven and then work with that as a base. Carissa and I share a lot of similar inspirations, such as fairy tales and Courtney Love. She has such a sense of clever playfulness and over-the-top, yet still functional, femininity to her clothing [I am all for dysfunctional couture as well, but have yet to be able to afford pieces by, say, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, or Viktor and Rolf].

I also collect from Kelly Eident of I’m Your Present, whose fashion is also over-the-top feminine but in a very hyper-90’s girly, Saved By The Bell, way. My favorite costume from Kelly is my bunny tits outfit, which goes with my forthcoming chapbook about the reality show The Girls Next Door, Kept Women.

I do my makeup myself, and my hair, and have made hats and altered many a costume. For example, I took this lavender thrift store gown from the early 80’s with a netted neckline and attached faux butterflies to it and paired it with a 1950’s tulle and flowered turban. Another of my favorite examples is my Rockinghorsefly dress, designed by Carissa for her Through the Looking Glass collection, which I wore for the Los Angeles book launch of The Ravenous Audience. I affixed felt letters to the shorts so that they read POEM, and orchestrated an unveiling/performance around it.

The yin to the POEM costume’s yang is my golden POETRY outfit, which Carissa designed and named after Joan Crawford’s glam, saucy character in “The Women.”  I planned for months to wear this piece for AWP. I thought it would be awesome to walk around the convention center in Denver at this serious academic conference decked out in full gold regalia, with black feathered lashes, and the word POETRY tattooed across my ass [it was a tough toss up between POETRY and AWP for the ass stamp]. When I finally got to do it, I got a lot of stares, and one outright guffaw as I was heading up the escalator to the book fair. Once I got upstairs, a confused, older gentleman asked if I was lost, because shouldn’t I be at the car show next door [as a showgirl]?

Nooo!  That’s so great!  I mean, so presumptuous, but so great as an illustration of gatekeeping.  It’s like a Gurlesque poem trying to strut through the pages of some stodgy old lit mag.  Any costume or performance plans for AWP DC or other conferences?

I was secretly thrilled when the old man thought I could be a car show girl, really. As for performance plans, I am in the early stages of mapping out a couple of performances, one for the Mommy, Mommy reading series in L.A. I also want to incorporate fashion models into some of my future events, a la Vanessa Beecroft, and plan to propose some performances to art galleries in Los Angeles and New York.

While I had a blast meeting poets I admire at AWP, the idea of infiltrating academic conferences is becoming less interesting to me. Instead, I am trying to actively participate in popular culture, by doing things like writing about celebrity fashion for hollywood.com and creating Gaga Stigmata.

What did you wear in high school?

It was in high school that I began to really incorporate fashion as a part of my identity, and as a weapon/shield—at least as much as my meager earnings from babysitting and cashiering at Krispy Kreme Donuts would allow. Also, I went to a conservative, tiny Christian high school in the middle of the Phoenix desert—it was a cement block with no windows and frigid A.C. They were strict about clothes. No flip flops, no short skirts, no tank tops. I dyed my hair lavender in the 9th grade and they called me to the office and told me that it was a sin to draw so much attention to my hair instead of God. Because of me, a new rule was indoctrinated into the rulebook—“no clothing or hair coloring that draws too much attention to one’s self.”

Oh man, I got called into the principal’s office for similar reasons in high school.  Mostly it was because I was wearing slip dresses, which were trendy at the time and being sold as dresses (the second “slip dress” I got in trouble for was actually a “real dress” from the Delia’s catalogue).  I insisted that they show me the place in the student handbook that said I could not wear such a thing (so did my mom — she’s a lawyer).  They ended up copying a page and highlighting the phrase “or otherwise distracting.”  The other phrase that echoes in my head from the incident is “underwear as outerwear.”  Ha!  So, basically, same as you — original style was officially banned!  And this was a public school.  (Though I got yelled at for wearing lipstick in 7th grade at a Catholic school, too. )

Where were you when I was in high school, Becca?! We could have started a gang. The Slip Dress Sluts! I worked with what I could in terms of what I wore—I shopped at Buffalo Exchange, Urban Outfitters (on sale—it seemed so expensive then!), mall shops like Wet Seal and Hot Topic. I was obsessed with Clueless, and worshipped my Delia’s catalogue although I couldn’t buy anything from it because I didn’t have a checkbook or credit card. I read Sassy and Seventeen, but secretly, as my parents didn’t want me to read magazines that talked about sex. I was inspired by Gwen Stefani & Theo Kogan of the Lunachicks & Courtney Love & Debbie Harry—I’ve always loved iconic blondes. I wore dark lipstick and bright colors. My nickname was Rainbow Brite. During that phase I wore a lot of plastic. I also went through a grunge girl phase where I wore huge pants (remember Jncos?) [yes!] and tight-fitted pizza delivery shirts. I carried around those giant roll-on tubes of glitter from Claire’s and would glitter my arms during Bible class. I was obsessed with nail polish, and had about 50 different kinds, mostly from Wet & Wild, or the rare, treasured bottle of Hard Candy. In speech class, I gave a speech about caring for your nail polish collection, when were supposed to share a how-to instruction. Other people talked about witnessing for Christ or taking care of their expensive cars their dads bought them.

It strikes me that an outré costume is one very effective way of twisting the patriarchal gaze.  The average girl is leered at, commodified, and consumed like many of the girls in The Ravenous Audience; her femininity seems natural or transparent, ready to be seized upon.  The costumed lady throws a wrench in this cycle, unravels the loop of the gaze.  By distorting and exaggerating, she seems to say, “You thought you knew what femininity looked like, but look again!”  Or maybe, like Medusa, she turns you to stone.  Where do you think the costumed woman’s power comes from?

This question makes me think of a recent discussion at Gaga Stigmata, curated by my brilliant co-editor Meghan Vicks, about Lady Gaga’s (in)famous, most fabulous, meat dress! I think Gaga turned the paps to stone with that choice piece, as well as millions of Americans. In the meatiest way.

As you and I have discussed before,  everything we wear is a costume. And there is no difference between a fashion statement and a political statement. I am tired of the attitude many poet-liberals ascribe to, this pooh-poohing of fashion, this nervousness around  it, because it is associated with frivolity and the marketplace. Nothing can be extracted from the marketplace, not even a poem. And we are putting on a costume every morning when we get dressed.  In fact, out of all the categories of art that exist, fashion is the most ubiquitous. Perhaps its mass availability is part of what makes it so denigrated by elitists, which many poets are but won’t admit to being. [Aside: taking issue with fashion is different from having a problem with the fashion industry, though of course one cannot separate them out, just as one cannot separate one’s art from the marketplace.] I think if these poets were really so troubled with fashion, they would dress like goths or punks or homeless people or nudists, instead of donning the uniform of the academy.

And so if we are to costume ourselves daily, we need to be aware of the Gaze. You described it perfectly, Becca, when you said that the costumed lady “unravels the loop.” Via exaggeration, distortion, ornamentation, fashion distracts and distorts like a funhouse mirror that kind of simple (mis)reading that women and girls fall victim to. What the costumed woman stands for is being conscious of that power, owning it, and wielding it like a sick pair of Gaga-style, razor-blade sunglasses.

You’re one of the only contemporary poets I can think of whose project takes place both on and off the page.  I think your persona completes the project of your book, and vice versa.  Do you think poems are like costumes?

Thanks, Becca! I actually like to think of the costumes as spin-offs of the book, or evolutionary outgrowths or mutations, more than completion, I think. As for the poems being like costumes—yes, absolutely. I wear my poems all the time!

Although it’s clear elsewhere that you can use pretty words, you seem to steer clear of ornamented language in The Ravenous Audience.  Was this a conscious decision?  What do you think about the relationship between ornament and diction?

In “The Ravenous Audience” I was going for cinema, for that sense of relentless surging danger one feels when watching a Lars Von Trier film like Antichrist. This was because of the intense subject matter of the book, and also because I was violently regurgitating all these mythos from my childhood and needed to get them out-out-out.

After the book came out, I started to feel that, with the exception of the Viktor & Rolf pieces, and “Marilyn: Leftovers” (a list poem, which details all of Marilyn Monroe’s affects including her vast wardrobe), my investment in over-the-top femininity, in ornamentation, was something I wished was in the book but wasn’t. I wouldn’t go back and change it now, but I did start to wear the costumes to readings as a way to “ornament” the text.

For my next project, the poetry and visual art book Excess Exhibit (forthcoming from  ZG Press), co-written with the stunning poet Amaranth Borsuk and illustrated by Zach Kleyn, Amaranth and I wanted to dress up our poems, to laud the excessive potential in language that is usually “toned down” in order to not have ones work considered “over the top.” Couture poetry! I see this as a rebelliously feminine gesture. To wallow in glorious adjectives, outrageous and gorgeous descriptions, saucy Caroline Bergvall-esque babble, and also to write/merge with someone else, another woman, as a way to do away with the patriarchal concept of sole authorship. We looked at all kinds of visual art pieces—from the hair sculptures of  Shoplifter to the decadent candy landscapes of Will Cotton—while working on these conjoined poems, but then in terms of our language constraints (which eventually fell away, like a useless corset), we chose to amplify and joyfully celebrate language that already felt “too much,” additional, pretty. Ornamental. And we then turned the language back into visual ornamentation, by making costumes in which to present the work, and a series of photographs, which you can see here and here.

Unlike other poets who retell fairy tales (I’m thinking, for example, of Anne Sexton’s Transformations), you don’t necessarily rewrite the story itself.  Instead, the women seem useful to you as emblems or icons.  The real women you write about—Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe—are often given altered lives in your hands.  What’s your hope in revisiting these stories and recasting these icons?

To quote Simone Weil again: “Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” Monroe & Earhart in particular are two icons who seemed to me to be crying out to be read differently. Their cultural narratives are completely tragic and simple. And for those of us who are in their imposing shadows, who are stalked by their images at the grocery store and on TV, we want, not a different ending, but a different way of understanding the ending, and of expanding the middle, which ultimately is what really matters.

I talked earlier about how (mis)reading someone is to render her flat. Like a cardboard cut-out, of which we’ve seen countless of Marilyn with her white halter dress flirting up as she poses over the subway grate, forever flashing those creamy legs. And Amelia, standing next to her Electra plane in aviator gear, only we see only The End. We read straight tragedy in her smile.

These women were complex beings, brave ones, and I wanted to allow them to expand beyond these flat, tragic narratives we’ve inscribed upon their cardboard corpses. Not for them, but for the girls who have them pasted in their lockers and as their desktop backgrounds.  Girls like you and me.



SECRET MUSEUM

And the subplot fizzled like two white bulbs

in a safe house.  You were there,

I thought, or was it a trick of chipmunks?

Meddling neighbor?  Compound fracture?

Somebody picking the teeth out of a bite mark?

I said, Everyday in every way, I want to be weirder.

When Coleridge attacked the grizzly in the kitchen

it was only a movie—though clearly the fire

was actually in him.  The bear and the midnight,

the teeth where I kissed the little children

on the wall.  Two white bulbs

could mean nothing or a tulip.  My dreams

are pretty obvious, I told you on a dare,

and yours are the fear of a loneliness

forever, one that’s in your muscles

you can never put a brake on…

Back in the picture, you sounded

like an astronaut sleeping through winter,

an icicle dropping on the museum’s sternum.

Fire/no fire.  Meddling member.  Kids these days

are drastic/terrific.  Suddenly the clearing

so shiny and druggy. The end breaking off like a finger.

SWEETNESS

Day after day it’s a revolution, or it’s a wonder

that anything exists at all.  What can I do?

Dinosaur glass of giant, red wine.  Brand new

poems in my inbox from Brett.  I read them forthwith

to remember his high-horse, then speaketh romantical

the rest of the week.  But before that I turn on the newspaper.

Time goes by and clearly awry.  I’m not being funny;

I’m literally speechless.  I futz around or read my head off.

A jet flies over the house, and close.  I think at first it’s the return

of the living- dead TV, but it turns out a dumb-bunny licking

a head wound—which makes me feel truly sorry, both

because I called him a “dumb bunny” and also because

he’s obviously hurt.  I lay down on the couch

with an ice pack.  The birds in my throat for the moment

won’t sing.  I’ve been trying for years to get them to argue

in music. For awhile it works pretty well: more life to live

and wholly with feeling, then suddenly silence of nothing at all,

the conclusion, as ever, non-sequitur, small.  The point is this:

one of Brett’s poems ends, “I want to be sweet,” and man,

more than anything, I want to, too.  I get up off the couch

with a fluttering headache, take a couple Vicodin and go

to the mall.  When I get there I’m numbing and lumber

through the people.  I dig the dance beats, how

nobody knows me.  At the candy store, I buy a bag

of gummy worms and eat the whole thing.  And while

afterward, clearly, I’m still not sweet, I know someone

who is.  How’s that for sick?  How close to a sickness?



Special thanks to Radiohead, Superchunk & Wolf Parade for their help in assembling this issue.

Kristin Abraham is the author of two chapbooks:  Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus (Subito Press, 2008), and Orange Reminds You of Listening (Elixir Press, 2006); her poetry, lyric essays, and critical writing have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines, including Best New Poets 2005, Court Green, Columbia Poetry Review, The Journal, LIT, H_NGM_N, and Rattle.  She teaches at Laramie County Community College in Wyoming.

Emily Anderson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals including DIAGRAM, Caketrain. McSweeney’s, and Requited.  She lives in a tiny town in Pennsylvania.

Melissa Barrett is the author of False Soup, a veg-friendly recipe book from Forklift, Ink. Her poems have received honors from Tin House, Indiana Review, and Gulf Coast, and can be found in current or forthcoming issues of No Tell Motel, Sotto Voce, and Grasslimb.

Jeremy Benson writes stories, poems, criticism and letters. He edits the literary magazine reviews for NewPages.com, and is experimenting with a mail-order poetry blog, the Aloha Project.

Tamiko Beyer is the author of bough breaks (Meritage Press, forthcoming). Her poems have appeared in diode, Sonora Review, OCHO and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of Drunken Boat and leads writing workshops through the NY Writers Coalition. She is a founding member of the queer, multi-racial writing collective Agent 409, and is a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellow.

Matt Bialer is a literary agent for book authors at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in Manhattan.  Before that, he was a book agent at the William Morris Agency in New York.   He also does black and white street photography with work in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of the City of New York and The New York Public Library.   He is also an accomplished watercolor landscape painter.  A book entitled The Best of America Watermedia II (Kennedy Publishing, Fall, 2010) will feature his work. His poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Green Mountains Review, Retort Magazine, Le Zaparogue, Forklift, Ohio  and Postscripts Magazine. . A poetry chapbook is forthcoming in 2011 from Stanza Press (PS Publishing, UK).   Matt lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.   www.MattBialer.com

Timothy Bradford’s poetry has most recently appeared in Upstairs at Duroc, ecopoetics and Drunken Boat, and it is forthcoming in No Tell Motel. Nomads with Samsonite, his first book, will be published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2011. From 2007 to 2009, he was an associate foreign researcher with the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent in Paris while working on a novel. Currently, he is teaching English composition at the University of Central Oklahoma. He lives with his wife and two sons and an ever-changing menagerie just outside of Oklahoma City.

Melissa Broder is the author of the poetry collection WHEN YOU SAY ONE THING BUT MEAN YOUR MOTHER (Ampersand Books; 2010). She is the chief editor of La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at CakeShop. Her poems appear in many journals, including: Opium, Five Dials, Swink and The Del Sol Review. Find her online at www.melissabroder.com.

Erika Jo Brown is from New York, where she founded the Chinatown reading series Floetry at 169.  She is editor of Stretching Panties magazine, an annual print collection of experimental poetry, architecture and drawing.  She’s currently a MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Oni Buchanan is the author of Spring, a Poetry Honors winner of the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards and selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her first poetry book, What Animal, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston, where she maintains a private piano teaching studio.

Stephanie Burns received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New School University.  She has been published in the tiny, LUNGFULL, The Sink Review and has five poems forthcoming on the Verse website.  She lives in Greensboro, NC.

Caroline Cabrera grew up in South Florida.  She currently lives in Amherst, Massachusetts where she attends the MFA program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst.  She is managing editor of Slope Editions.  Her poems have appeared in Jellyfish Magazine.

Jack Christian is the author of the chapbook /Let’s Collaborate/ from Magic Helicopter Press. His poems have appeared recently in Web Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Sixth Finch, Cimarron Review, and notnostrums.

Lisa Ciccarello is the author of two chapbooks: At night (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) & At night, the dead (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Glitterpony, elimae, Otoliths, Anti-, Poor Claudia, & Saltgrass, among others. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona & currently lives in Portland, OR.

Jackie Clark is the editor of LIT magazine.  She is also the series editor for Poets off Poetry on coldfrontmag.com, a monthly series where poets write about music.  Her chapbook Office Work is out now from Greying Ghost Press.  She lives in Jersey City and blogs occasionally at nohelpforthat.wordpress.com.

Francisco Q. Delgado earned his M.A. in English at Brooklyn College.  In 2005, he graduated from SUNY New Paltz, where he also won the Vincent Tomaselli Short Story Award.  His fiction has appeared in Skive Magazine, Plain Spoke, Boston Literary Magazine, Ghoti Magazine and Underground Voices.  He is the 2009 winner of the Many Mountains Moving Flash Fiction Contest. 

Adam Deutsch was born on Long Island, New York and has his M.A. from Hofstra University (2005) and M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008). He’s been in journals like juked, Anti-, No Tell Motel, Barn Owl Review, and Pank. He’s the publisher at Cooper Dillon Books, and lives in San Diego.

DJ Dolack’s most recent work can be found in Handsome, Lonesome Fowl and Diode magazines, and his collaborations with Allison Titus can be found in The Denver Quarterly, Fou and The Journal. His video reviews and Tourist Trap, NYC video series can be found at Coldfront magazine, and his chapbook, 12 Poems, is available at djdolack.tumblr.com. He teaches writing at Baruch College and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Winner of DIAGRAM’s 2010 Innovative Fiction Contest, Sutherland Douglass’ work has also appeared in, or is forthcoming from, PANK, Fiction International, trnsfr, and Sidebrow among others. In 2009, Douglass was a finalist for both the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency and Black Warrior Review’s Fifth-Ever Fiction Contest.

Matthew Falk is a small part of the pantomime in Baltimore, where he is an MFA candidate in fiction writing. His stories, poems, and reviews appear here and there from time to time. He works for Mayapple Press.

Adam Fell’s first book I AM NOT A PIONEER will be published in February 2011 by H_NGM_N BKS. His chapbook Ten Keys to Being a Champion On and Off the Field (H_NGM_N 2010) is available as a free pdf here: <http://www.h-ngm-n.com/storage/SH76_NewChap.pdf>. Adam’s poems have appeared in Tin House; Forklift, Ohio; Diagram; Crazyhorse; notnostrums; Sixth Finch; & Fou; among others. He lives in Madison, WI, where he teaches at Edgewood College & co-curates the Monsters of Poetry Reading Series.

Jessica Fjeld is the author of two chapbooks: The Tide, available from Pilot Books; and On animate life, for which she was awarded a Poetry Society of America fellowship. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts and is a contributing editor at jubilat. She lives in New York City.

Brian Foley is the author of the chapbooks The Constitution (Horseless Press, 2011), The Black Eye (Brave Men Press, 2010), & The Tornado is Not A Surrealist (Greying Ghost, 2008) His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Saltgrass, Fou, Poor Claudia, Glitterpony, Caketrain, LIT, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He edits SIR! Magazine, curates The Deep Moat Reading Series, and with EB Goodale runs Brave Men Press. He lives in Northampton and attends UMass Amherst program for Poets & Writers

Jennifer H. Fortin loves & lives in Brooklyn. Any day now, Dancing Girl Press will release her chapbook If Made Into a Law; another chapbook is forthcoming in early 2011 (Dusie Kollektiv). With three other poets, she edits LEVELER (www.levelerpoetry.com).

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour 2009), FRANCES (Poor Claudia 2010), and THE NEW PLANET (Mindmade Books 2010) as well as three chapbook collaborations.  Her first full-length collection, THE GRIEF PERFORMANCE, will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Kristin Gilchrist has a daughter and a husband who rock her world.  She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with some poems recently published in the Prism Review.

Liz Green grew up in New Jersey and received her MFA from Warren Wilson College. Recent work appears in Forklift, Ohio and on anderbo.com.  She is currently pursuing her MS in Counseling at Loyola in New Orleans.

Sarah Green lives in Athens, OH, where she is a Ph.D candidate in Creative Writing at Ohio University. When she’s not grading papers, she’s writing songs and drinking paw-paw beer. Her poetry has won a Pushcart Prize.

Evelyn Hampton lives in Providence. A chapbook of stories and poems, WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC, was published by Magic Helicopter Press in April 2010. Her website is Lisp Service.

Carrie Hohmann was born and raised in Oil City, Pennsylvania and has an MFA from New York University. Her has appeared or is forthcoming in The Allegheny Review, The Connecticut River Review, and Forklift, Ohio. She likes strange postcards, bakes pies, and currently lives in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, but those are always subject to change.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009). She’s a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books and a PhD student at Rutgers University. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Carla Lake is an undergraduate at University of Maryland, College Park, where she is a member of the Honors program and the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House. She works as a writing tutor and as a student blogger for performances at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, but in her spare time she likes to dance and train draft horses.

Gregory Lawless is the author of I Thought I Was New Here.  His poems have either appeared in or are forthcoming from InDigest Magazine, Sonora Review, The Cortland Review, Cider Press Review, Zoland Poetry, Third Coast, Thermos, Drunken Boat, and others.  He teaches writing and literature at Suffolk University and the New England Institute of Art.  

Dani Leventhal’s videos are distributed through the Video Data Bank. She has screened her work at Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Gene Siskel Film Center, CineCycle and Anthology Film Archives.  In 2007 she got an Astraea Visual Arts Award and a Women’s Studio Workshop Book Arts Grant. In 2003 she received an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and in 2009 an MFA in film/video from Bard College.

Kelin Loe is the author of the chapbook The Motorist (minutes BOOKS, 2010). She attends the UMass-Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers and lives in Northampton with Michael.

Samantha Mabry lives in Dallas, Texas. She writes mostly about ghosts, families, and families of ghosts. “Bad Spirits” is her first published short story.

Matt Mauch grew up in small Midwestern towns between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, in the snow and wind-chill belt. He is the author of Prayer Book (Lowbrow Press 2011) and the chapbook The Book of Modern Prayer (Palimpsest Press 2010). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Salt Hill, NOÖ Journal, DIAGRAM, The Journal, Willow Springs, The Squaw Valley Review, The Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. The editor of Poetry City, USA, Vol. 1 (Lowbrow Press 2011), Mauch teaches writing and literature in the AFA program at Normandale Community College, and also coordinates the reading series there. He lives in Minneapolis.

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Father of Noise, Moongarden and I ♥ Your Fate (forthcoming in March, 2011). He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and works with Machine Project. 

Amy McDaniel contributes to HTMLGiant, and her work has been or will be in Tin House, The Agriculture Reader, and PANK. She is the author of a new chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox Press).

Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, where he teaches gifted & talented middle school students. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Mid-American Review, National Poetry Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, Pleiades, Tar River Poetry and elsewhere.

C.J. Opperthauser is a student of English at Central Michigan University. He has had poems published in numerous magazines, including Temenos and Eclectic Flash, and is editor-in-chief and poetry editor for greatest lakes review. He has a deep passion for good poems and good fish dinners. He can be reached at
cj.opperthauser@gmail.com.

Alexis Orgera is the author of How Like Foreign Objects (forthcoming, H_NGM_N BKS) and two chapbooks, Illuminatrix (Forklift, Ink) and Dear Friends, the Birds were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press). Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Eleven Eleven, Folio, Forklift Ohio, Fou, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, The Journal, jubilat, Luna, No Tell Motel, The Rialto, Sixth Finch, storySouth, and The Tusculum Review, among others.

Curtis Perdue is finishing his MFA in poetry at Emerson College where he also teaches in the First Year Writing Program and is the Assistant Poetry Editor for Redivider. He has work forthcoming in Cloudbank and The Common Ground Review.

Derek Pollard is co–author with Derek Henderson of the book Inconsequentia (BlazeVOX 2010). His poems, creative non–fiction, and reviews appear in American Book Review, Colorado Review, Court Green, Diagram III, Pleiades, and Six–Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, among numerous other anthologies and journals. He is currently Managing Editor of Barrow Street Press and is on faculty at Pratt Institute and at the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse, New York.

Brett Price lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY.  He is an editor of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety, and the author of Trouble With Mapping, a chapbook (Flying Guillotine, 2008).  He curates the Friday Night Series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.  

Dan Rosenberg’s chapbook, A Thread of Hands, is available from Tilt Press, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several magazines, including Forklift, Ohio; Subtropics; Verse Daily; and Sixth Finch. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia.

Zach Savich is the author of Full Catastrophe Living, Annulments, and The Man Who Lost His Head, a chapbook from Omnidawn. The poems from this issue will appear in The Firestorm, forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

Jason Schwartz is the author of A German Picturesque (Knopf).  He lives in Florida.

Mary Austin Speaker is the author of two chapbooks—In the End There Were Thousands of Cowboys, and Abandoning the Firmament, (Menagerie Editions 2008 & 2009). She is co-curator and founder of Triptych Readings (www.triptychreadings.com) in NYC, poet laureate of F.E.A.S.T. (http://feastinbklyn.org/), and works as an art director, designing books for Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Her work can be found in recent or upcoming issues of Iowa Review, Boston Review, Gray Tape, Konundrum Literary Engine Review, and elsewhere. In previous iterations, she was poetry editor of Indiana Review, co-curator of Readings Between A&B, and taught creative writing at Indiana University. She loves westerns and astronaut paraphernalia.

Chad Sweeney’s recent collections are Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010) and The Lost Notebooks of Juan Sweeney (bilingual chapbook, Forklift)  The selection published in H_ngm_n is from Wolf Milk, the full-length version of the Juan Sweeney poems. Chad is cotranslator, from the Farsi, of The Selected Poems of H.E. Sayeh (White Pine, 2011), coeditor of Parthenon West Review and editor of the City Lights anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds. He teaches poetry and is a PhD candidate at Western Michigan University.  www.chadsweeney.com

Gale Thompson is originally from South Carolina but currently lives in Sunderland, MA, where she attends the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. She teaches composition and creative writing at the University and is the editor of Jellyfish Magazine. Gale has works either published or forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Bateau, Glitterpony, Juked, and elimae.

Elizabeth Twiddy’s first collection of poems is Love-Noise (Standing Stone Books, 2010), and her chapbook, Zoo Animals in the Rain (Turtle Ink Press, 2009), includes several poems that have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.  Most recently, her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, POOL, The Alembic, Two Rivers Review, Stone Canoe, Slush Pile, the Australian journal Skive, and elsewhere.  She teaches workshops at the Downtown Writer’s Center through the Syracuse YMCA and serves as an editor for Comstock Review. For more, visit elizabethtwiddy.com.

William Walsh is the author of Without Wax: A Documentary Novel, Questionstruck, and Pathologies. His fiction and texts have appeared in Annalemma, Quick Fiction, Artifice, Caketrain, New York Tyrant, Juked, and other journals. A collection of short stories called Ampersand, Mass. and a collection of Joycean derived texts and poems called Unknown Arts are forthcoming from Keyhole Press in February 2011. He blogs weekly at The Kenyon Review. (http://questionstruck.blogspot.com)

Angela Veronica Wong is the author of two chapbooks, All the Little Red Girls on Flying Guillotine Press and to know this on Cy Gist Press.  Poems are published or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, and Columbia Poetry Review.  Visit her at www.angelaveronicawong.com.