Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited. – Kaveh Bassiri

This year’s winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry prize is Kaveh Bassiri, for the chapbook “99 Names of Exile,” to be published by Newfound in Summer 2019. It was a pleasure to talk to Bassiri about the sound of language, issues of translation, culture, and more:

Laura Eppinger: The opening dedication of this chapbook is lines from “La Cantatrice Chauve” by Eugène Ionesco:
“He’s not English. He’s only been naturalized.
And naturalized citizens have the right to have houses,
but not the right to have them put out if they’re burning.”
This absurdist play is all about slips of the tongue, mistaken identity, miscommunications, and the limits of language in expressing ourselves. Are these themes you explore in your work?

Kaveh Bassiri: Yes, all those issues—such as “miscommunication” and “the limits of language”—are found in the chapbook. I am interested in the power and limitation of words. We try to harness the vitality of language, as it slips away and writes us. I am interested in how we find ourselves in language, how language defines us and determines our opportunities.

When you live in different languages, when you cross languages and cultures, these issues become even more obvious. Language is where I was born, the home I lost, the apartment where I live now, the room I returned to when I translate, the city I visited when I studied German, the neighbor’s house I see from my window but have never visited.

Ionesco wrote “The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice Chauve)” while trying to learn English. As I understand it, he used an English primer for French speakers, L’anglais sans peine (“English without pain or toil”) put out by the French company Assimil (as in “assimilation”). He first considered L’anglais sans peine as the title for the piece. English primers inform my work—the role learning English plays in becoming an American, with all its implications.

The quote from “The Bald Soprano” is both funny and dark. The play isn’t about assimilation or immigrants, but as a French playwright writing English characters, those themes found their way into the work. In our current climate, the quote seems especially apt for what many immigrants are experiencing.

Eppinger: The poems are evocative and no doubt sound beautiful when read aloud. Still, the shape of each poem on the page is striking—“Mihrab,” “Peeling the Seed (Part 2)” and the title poem come to mind right away. When drafting a poem, do you have a vision of how it will look on paper? Or is the sound of the words more important at first?

Bassiri: The form of the poem is very important to me. It is like the meter. You can’t avoid it, so why not consider it seriously? I am always searching for the proper container. Like many poets, I cast the poem in different forms to see what happens. For example, the prose poems in the chapbook were once lines of verse. “Majnun” was once a sonnet in fourteen lines.

For me, traditional forms like sonnets and more experimental forms like concrete poems have a lot in common. They are both containers that limit and shape the words. The container can be visual or aural. For example, with “Peeling the Seed” I wanted to have the visual sense of two different peelings, as if you are peeling the orange first (part 1), and then the seed (with the erasure in part 2). At one point, the original shape of the poem resembled an orange.

Sound also provides a container. I love soundscapes like anaphora. The poem “How to Build a Bomb,” for example, used the anaphora “Say …” In the end, I took most of them out. But the original directive formed the container that made the poem possible.

Eppinger:  I have this hunch that the alignment of the text in “Mihrab” is meant to evoke a prone posture of prayer. Am I right about that? Are the words of this poem praying?

Bassiri: Actually, with “Mihrab,” I was thinking more literally of the niche in the mosque wall that indicates the direction of Mecca. The wall is the page, and the direction is East. Persian is also written from right to left.

But, yes, it is supposed to evoke a prayer, with every two syllables being like the prayer beads of a Muslim tasbih—itself a form of zikr, a repetition of short utterances. Words are the mihrab.

Eppinger: That titular poem, “99 Names of Exile,” strikes me every time I read it. Racial epithets and concepts like “Dirty” and “Forsaken” are listed as three columns of text, ostensibly defining “Exile.” Both “Villain” and “Victim” appear on the list, one of many contradictions. Also listed: “Unspeakable, Unthinkable, Untouchable.” Back to the Ionesco—can exile be named?

Bassiri: It is impossible to limit the scope of what exile means or who a person in exile is. Exile encompasses many things.

We can do the same thing with the word “immigrant.” What do these words conjure in our mind? How have they been manipulated to limit or define immigrants and their experiences? I am hoping the use of alliterations like “dis” and “un” reinforces the absence, the undoing of the names, the exile that happens inside the words by pinning a label like “un.”

The inspiration for the poem comes from the 99 names of God in Islam. The names work as labels and attributes, encompassing a much broader range of words than one may imagine. We have “most merciful” and “most kind,” “the first” and “the last,” as well as “the avenger” and “the destroyer.” God is, of course, beyond any specific attribute. The best we can do is to produce a field of words for our idea of god.

Eppinger: I’ve read and reread “Invention of I” several times, drawn to both its power and its playfulness. The poem is broken into two sections, seemingly comparing one language to another.
Part 1 is set up like:
“In Farsi, if you take bread from a verb, you make history.

In English, for a perfect past, it isn’t enough to exist, you must have things.”

Part 2 takes this form:

“In English, we capture with an army of nouns.

In Persian, we guard them with the veil of adjectives.”

Clearly there is a lot more going on here than the feel of a language—culture, history, religion, geopolitical power and more are wrapped up into speaking a language in a specific time and place. Is it difficult to capture all these other forces that bubble up when learning or speaking different languages?

Bassiri: I do hope the poem conjures different possibilities in the minds of the readers. I don’t expect them to come up with the exact references, though usually I have specific things in mind.

A number of sentences start with a play on grammar. For instance, the Part 2 example you mentioned has to do with the use of adjectives in Persian and the emphasis on nouns in English. I remember one of my issues when I first started to write papers in English was the overuse of adjectives, as if I didn’t trust the nouns. I am always amazed by how many nouns there are in the English language. But the reference goes beyond just nouns and adjectives. In Iran there are many veils in our customs, not just the women’s hijab. For example, Iranians also use a complex web of civility, called taarof, that produces another layer in conversations.

One more thing I should mention is that the poem begins with “in Farsi” because it evokes the time I grew up in Iran and was learning English. The Iranian language is called “Farsi” in Iran.

The second part is a reflection of my life in America, where English is my main language and the Iranian language is called Persian. The debate over whether we should call my native tongue Persian or Farsi has been going on for a while. Many of my friends insist that we should use “Persian” because that is the name in English, the way we use German and not Deutsch.

But I’m not making any specific point about this politicized topic. My use is more a reflection of my personal experience of this change and the role the languages played in my life.

Eppinger: The speaker in your poem “Alarm” describes living in California while many of his family members are in Tehran, including a sister who has gone missing. It contains the line, “We contain no message, are no messenger.” What a devastating sentiment—to be exiled from the ability to decipher language, or from sense of purpose. Are grief and exile necessarily the same thing, or are they different?

Bassiri: Being an immigrant means different things to different people. Immigrants cope with the experience of exile in their own ways. For Iranian-Americans, the experience is determined by such socio-political events as the Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War (one of modern history’s longest conventional wars), September 11, the sanctions against Iran, the Muslim ban. My own experience has been shaped by all of these events, whether I’m talking about my sister going to jail as a political prisoner when I was young or about my wife not being able to join me because of the travel ban now.

Eppinger: I am wondering if you could talk about the influences you drew from while creating the poems of this chapbook.

Bassiri: For a long time, I didn’t want to write anything about my heritage as an Iranian or about being an Iranian-American. Maybe because I didn’t want to be reminded of or to engage with the negative media coverage. I also didn’t want to be an immigrant poet or to be labeled as one. I wanted to write like the great American poets I admired, such as Stevens, Eliot, Bishop, Plath, Ashbery, etc. I remember (to my embarrassment now) during a workshop with Merwin, he was trying to encourage me to study and learn from the great classical Persian poets like Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. I told him that I wanted to write like him and that I left Persian culture behind a long time ago and had no interest to go back.

It was during my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College that I decided to write about my experience as an Iranian-American, though I was uncomfortable. I am still uncomfortable. I don’t want to write what is expected. I don’t want to repeat the same clichés, be a spokesman for Iran or Iranians, or try to gain empathy or publication because of political circumstances. However, I also don’t want to deny my heritage or to avoid writing about something that matters to me. I need to write responsibly.

To write these poems, I experimented and found inspiration in many immigrant writers: Charles Simic, Li-Young Lee, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Agha Shahid Ali, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Etel Adnan. Gloria Anzaldúa is also a hero. African-American poets are among my greatest models—how so many expand the language while addressing important issues of identity and the socio-political condition in America. They are a great foundation for American poetry. I read widely and am influenced by many different styles, but reading poets of color gave me the courage to write the poems in this chapbook.

I have to say that, in the past few years, we have a lot of amazing young poets who are doing great work. I think they are redefining the shape of American poetry. I am in awe of all the talent. It is a very exciting time.

Eppinger: I agree! Finally, what are you working on now and how can we see more of your work?

Bassiri: First, I want to thank you for the interview and the thoughtful questions, Laura.

After working on the chapbook, I started to put together a manuscript built on the same themes. I am also working on another chapbook. My most recent poems are based on my visits to Iran in the past few years. I am not sure where they are taking me. For this year, I am focusing more on translation, however, including translating the poetry of a contemporary Iranian woman writer, Roya Zarrin, for which I got a 2019 fellowship from the NEA.

Laura Eppinger is the Managing Editor at Newfound Journal.

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The post Naming Exile: an interview with Kaveh Bassiri appeared first on Newfound.

I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.” – Shilpa Kamat, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”

Poet, visual artist, and educator Shilpa Kamat contends with the violent legacies of imperialism, her lived experience, language, and threats of erasure in her chapbook, “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet,” finalist for the 2018 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize. In “eleven,” mid-way through the chapbook, Kamat writes, “the demons were never/ evil just regular/ people who prayed.”  

The content of Kamat’s life—the experience of thinking across multiple languages, and being rooted in a particular lineage, Konkani, while having grown up elsewhere—is woven into the chapbook. She is concerned with nuance and layers, integrating her fascinations with magic and the sociopolitical without oversimplifying the past. Kamat is committed to exploring where magic still resides despite every violent attempt to erase it.

In the chapbook’s title poem, Kamat writes: “when she is done/ everyone/ uses plural in the singular/ stuffs their heartbeat/ into the first pocket”

Patrycja Humienik: When did you begin writing “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet?” Is there an image, idea, feeling that initiated the project?

Shilpa Kamat: Many, perhaps all, of these poems were written in an effort to transmute pain while at the same time, creating space for the experiences that often slip through the cracks of (personal, global) history. I was driven by the forces that create and break language: sound, migration, immigration, alienation, speech, accent, imperialism, place, longing, myth, consciousness, archetype, universality, magic.  

The “speech migration” poems emerged while I was writing in an old growth redwood forest a few years ago. My experience of my voice, of how I lost access to it in my childhood, emerged as I wrote. I should note that I am a highly emergent writer. The content of my life springs up.

The poems that span some of the history of my lineage (as well as my interactions with other histories) began in response to a painful discussion. I found myself exploring cultural pain, ranging from misunderstandings or micro-aggressions to outright oppression and cultural/linguistic erasure. I am rooted in a specific lineage, but I grew up in multiple places, and the histories of those places also inform my experience.  

Many of the Konkani and “Konglish” poems that I included in this manuscript are some combination of surreal and lyrical. I wasn’t sure what to do with them when I wrote them since the market for experimental Konkani poetry seems nonexistent. When I was pulling together this chapbook, I saw that there was finally a place for them to “fit.”

Humienik: Your manuscript generously provides snippets of Konkani history. Is poetry a way you stay connected to that history and lineage? Is poetry a part of your family history?

Kamat: I love the connective potential of poetry for many reasons, including the potential for exploring my linguistic and historical roots while remaining present.

As a toddler, I spoke fluent Konkani in each of my parents’ dialects. My experiences in school led to the silencing of my Konkani for many years. Although my parents never stopped speaking Konkani at home, I didn’t speak back to them in Konkani again until adulthood.

Now, my accent is somewhat Americanized, and I generally only feel comfortable conversing with my family members or with children—but I still think in multiple languages, and the connotations of Konkani words and phrases inform my daily existence. Even during the long period of silence that I mentioned, I explored writing and performing contemporary poetry in Konkani.

I want to keep my language alive in my world as well as to claim my own expression of it, which may differ from expressions in other regions. I resent the ways in which the beasts of monolingualism erase diversity and stifle creative potential. I want something better for the planet than the cultural/linguistic extinctions that we are facing (along with plant/species extinction). Poems and songs help.

Humienik: You contend with a large swatch of justice issues in the chapbook. You also named, as one of those many “forces that create and break language,” universality, myth, consciousness, and magic, indicating this as a place you naturally go. Can you say more about this fascination, and how you see these forces—magic and the sociopolitical—as connected?

Kamat: The sociopolitical intersects with magic only in the places where it doesn’t seek to constrain, to rigidly define, to contain within linear boundaries. Whenever people’s interpretations of language, of the world, grow too literal, the potential for magic fizzles. Fundamentalist attitudes neutralize this potential. Even radical/intersectional theories, for all their scope and idealism, can lose magic when their interpretations are overly rigid/polarizing. When trying to access the parts of the consciousness in which the potential for magic resides, nuance is essential.

There is magic in the social, in the natural—and when I say “natural,” I include the bodies and psyches of human beings. There is magic in the wisdom and worldviews of indigenous communities that forces seeking to dominate or colonize often strip away.

In navigating my work, I am aware of the play between Western philosophies that elevate diversity and Eastern philosophies that elevate oneness/union. There are stories of shapeshifters, of rebirth, in which superficial aspects of identity are revealed as ephemeral rather than essential. There are stories in which ancestry, profession, migration histories, etc. are vital. Frequently, those mired in a single orientation will condemn the other as “wrong”; I prefer to wrestle my way to the best of both.

Earlier, I described how the majority of poems in “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet” explore and transmute pain. I would say that there is a magic in moving through and beyond the pain of history, in inviting unheard or silenced narratives to express themselves, in creating new narratives or assembling bridges between narratives—however we can lead ourselves to wholeness, balance, renewal.

I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience.” – Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: I was drawn to the play with organic form in your chapbook—the way you use space between and within lines and also between letters. Do you remember when you began to play more with form in your work? Has form always been a fascination for you as a poet?

Kamat: I am a visual artist as well as a poet, so yes, I am as fascinated by the form of my words (and the ways in which their placement may inform readers) as I am by their sounds. Both image and sound can inform meaning, and I strive to understand and stretch these elements within the constraints of typed language.

When working with pulling sounds apart in “anoutofcontrolsilence” (from which I pulled the “speech migration” poems), I wanted to break language so that fluent readers of English would experience the dissonance that those struggling to break into the language might experience. I wanted readers to slow down, to pull together sounds in the way we all had to when we were first beginning to read. Speech precedes sound; by decomposing speech, I wanted to parallel the breaking of the world as old growth languages and forests alike are threatened. The form of each poem reflects my experience: its density, or its meandering, the way it breaks off. The content extends to contain collective experience as well.

My more “historical” poems explore form in other ways, such as the “glitter” poems (“It Became Theirs!” and its Konkani equivalent). I wanted the scope of these experiences or histories to sprawl across the page while also being contained by the page.  

Humienik: Do you find your visual art converging with poetry, or are those creative practices distinct for you?

Kamat: I often engage in interdisciplinary art, whether I am incorporating dance and/or visual art into a literary performance, illustrating my writing, or incorporating the written word into visual art pieces. There are specific questions that emerge when considering illustration as an art form. For instance, as I approach the illustration of my speculative poetry manuscript, I want to intrude minimally upon the reader’s imagination. But when my writing is entering my art rather than the other way around, the pieces are generally more abstract than representational—the writing, in a manner, becomes the “illustration.”

Humienik: How is this project in conversation with your current work? What are your current fascinations?

Kamat: While reading my works in progress, such as my verse novel or my speculative fiction YA novel, people have often commented that they are “global” or “international” in scope. I recognize that my upbringing in multiple countries and states, with multiple languages and dialects around me, informs all of my writing. Not all of my writing works with explicitly diverse content—for instance, I recently found myself working on a series of existential poems about old school arcade games. Yet, my background informs my worldview, which I believe must be present in everything that I write.

It has also been noted that I tend to infuse my work with mythical themes that are grounded in reality—in the title poem of the chapbook, for instance. I have written a children’s book centralizing the experience of a child whose parents are in the middle of a separation. While I was driven to write this story after years of working with separating families, seeing/hearing the emotional experiences and needs of children, the character’s turning to imagination/mythology to make sense of her experience is something generally unseen in books exploring “serious” content— but this is a place where I naturally go.

Humienik: What helps keep your writing practice alive? Do you have any rituals that help ground you in poetry? Do you have writing mentors, collaborators and/or a writing community?

Kamat: I always have several projects going on at once, and generating content is never an issue. This doesn’t mean that I can always manage to be consistent. I may be distracted by lesson planning, by the needs of family and friends, by the demands of my respiratory health when fires in the region are out of control.

There are times when my writing practice goes through periods of dormancy. The leaves fall off my projects; they are naked, subsumed by snow. Even then, there are ways to engage—touching the roots, working from the core, allowing the surprise of flower buds emerging on trees in the middle of winter.  

I find spiritual/connective practices vital. I do best when I am walking daily in nature. I may practice yoga or meditate or work with mantras. Ideally, I am engaging in some kind of centering practice and working on one of my writing projects (or a stand-alone piece) every day, even if only for five minutes.

There have been periods of time when I was writing a certain amount of words or pages per day, tracking the quantity. There are times when a poem or a project emerges spontaneously and times when I have to make myself sit down and get to work. I can enjoy writing in forests, but I frequently write indoors. Sometimes, I listen to music while writing, and sometimes I don’t. I find it important to be adaptable and to meet the needs of each piece.   

I appreciate being around other artists, engaging in artistic dialogue, and occasionally practicing with others. I find at a point that readership—any type of readership, even if it isn’t terribly critical—is vital to completing books and novels. I have a few MFA cohort members who are local as well as close friends who are visual artists and dancers, and I particularly appreciate their community. I appreciate the diversity of my networks; too much insularity of any kind can begin to feel debilitating to me as an artist and as a human.

I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries …” — Shilpa Kamat

Humienik: Who are some of the poets that make up your poetic lineage?

Kamat: At one point during my MFA program, I worked on a short project presenting poet/freedom fighter/educator Rabindranath Tagore, recognizing that most poets around me had never heard of him. Most translations of Tagore’s work, including his own, do not adequately transmit the poetics of his original Bengali creations. I do not know Bengali, and I find that the English translations often have an archaic/formal tone that I need to read beyond to appreciate the content, which ranges from love poetry to critiques of imperialism. As a poet and educator who is concerned with social and ecological justice issues, I deeply resonate with Tagore’s transmission of spirit, even if I cannot understand what is reputedly the best of his poetry. I love his writing on education, that he never wrote a formal treatise, that he used his Nobel Prize money to fund his student-centered school in which young people learned outside beneath trees. I love that his art supported his teaching. And some of his poems do speak to me—but that is not the point.

I will also name Gloria Anzaldúa. I loved “Borderlands/La Frontera” when I read it in college. I was refreshed by the fusion of the “academic” and the spiritual, by the normalization of Spanglish (anyone who grew up with multiple languages in the home may relate), by the casual inclusion of poetics, by her reclamation of the indigenous and her unabashedly claiming her lived experience. I resonated with the centrality that Anzaldúa’s work ascribed to people who were previously considered peripheral/marginal: those of us who walk between multiple worlds, borders, boundaries; whose lived experiences are largely unrecognized; whose ways of knowing are not respected or understood by academia; who are on the “wrong” side of imperial power dynamics. I particularly appreciate her poetry that is channeled from the soul rather than the spirit. I would say that Tagore’s work is more rooted in spirit; in general, his poetics seek to rise and elevate while Anzaldúa’s descend and embody.

Shilpa Kamat is a writer, educator, and healing arts practitioner based in Northern California. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, where she was awarded the Marion Hood Boess Haworth Prize. She was a finalist for Tu Books’ New Visions award. Her work is informed by her intersectional identities, her spiritual journey, her diverse communities, and the natural world.

Patrycja Humienik is a trilingual Polish-American writer and performance artist. She works in service of underrepresented grad students and faculty at the University of Washington. Patrycja collaborates on performance projects with people in solitary confinement through letters via Dances for Solidarity. She was a finalist for the 2018 Kay Murphy Prize for Poetry. 

The post “Saraswati Takes Back the Alphabet”: An Interview with Shilpa Kamat appeared first on Newfound.

Rennie Ament’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, Sixth Finch, Redivider, Yalobusha Review, minnesota review, The Journal, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2018 Yellowwood Prize in Poetry from Yalobusha Review and a nominee for both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s also received fellowships from the Millay Colony, the Saltonstall Foundation, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

Jamie Wagman: I would love to hear a bit about your writing life and your process. What’s influenced your writing? When did you first know you were a writer, and what has your journey as a writer been like? What delights and what scares you most as a writer?

Rennie Ament: Poem-wise, I don’t pay attention to semantics at first. I’ll give myself some kind of formal constraint (a sonnet, “e” the only vowel allowed, words can only come from a specific source text), but mostly I want to play in language and surprise myself. It’s fun to scribble gibberish until something sounds both strange and true.

Nonfiction is great for flipping through if your thoughts rut. Hildegard von Bingen’s “Physica” has been near me for a year now. Mostly a 12th Century catalog of herbal remedies, she also gives advice like: A mouse is hot and has insidious habits and devilish skills. Since it always flees, its flesh is harmful to humans and not much use as medicine. But, if someone having epilepsy falls on the ground, after he gets up, place a mouse in a vessel of water. Give that water to the person to drink, and wash his forehead and feet in that water. This should be done each time he falls and he will be cured.

—I love that book.

I’m always researching alongside the scribbling, but no one will ever know how long I spent reading about mouse water or whatever when I’m done. Most of “the facts” I collect invisibly buttress poems.

Growing up, my mom was singing unless in conversation or asleep. I knew dozens of folk songs before I could read. I liked the songs with nonsense choruses best. Maybe because of those songs and when they happened to me developmentally, my syntax leans musical?

Sort of related—since I can remember, when falling asleep sometimes I see a word floating above the bed in neon. DILATE or BUNKER or CORAL. The word changes, but the sensation is always the same: eventually, the word compresses, comes down into my mouth, and weighs my jaw down. I feel blissed out and pass out.

I started writing around when I learned to read. I liked the typewriter clacking and got steady attention for my stories in school. I wrote mostly fiction and nonfiction until college. Got lucky with my first poetry teacher. She was a human rights activist who could convince you a higher level of consciousness was attainable only through the reading and writing of poems (poetry is a cult).

In one class, I remember being asked to describe, plot-wise, what was happening in an Emily Dickinson poem. Had no clue. And that was embarrassing—to admit I didn’t explicitly get it. But I could taste how dense the poem was. CF bedtime word snacks.

What scares me? Describing beauty. I don’t run from flowers in life so why in poems? It must be connected to gender performance anxiety and not wanting to be a woman who writes about gardens. Wild—to be afraid of saying hyacinth. I have one garden in my book and that garden is a succulent patch.

What else? Inauthenticity, though I don’t know what it means to write an “authentic” poem.

What do I love: Cognitive dissonance. Oxymorons. Absurdity. Research. Learning through writing poems. Discovery in general. Trying to create my own shorthand.

I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—Horses are forward motion.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: Some of your work here has appeared in Hysterical, Bone Bouquet, cream city review, and Yalobusha Review. Can you speak to the creation of this chapbook? The title is “French Braid.” Why did you choose this title? Can you speak to the repetition of home and references to horses throughout your work?

Ament: Initially I thought, “You need to do your book’s hair.” Then I culled the chapbook from the full-length first collection I’ve been working on. There were ten sections in that manuscript at the time. “French Braid” is three of those sections braided together: short, skinny little poems about home interwoven with prose poems that respond to lines taken André Breton’s “Ode to Charles Fourier” plus a group of poems I think of as cascading poems—quatrains and tercets that break down across the page.

I wanted to see if the poems did better together. They did. I have my obsessions and they pop up in all the poems like a gopher infestation. So. Gophers hold things together. Or horses—

The horses! Horses are forward motion. My thoughts are, at their best, horses. The underlying word driving most of my poems is Go. My thoughts are, at their worst, also horses. Dumb and snuffling. I don’t know. Sometimes you gotta climb into a horse.

I write about home because I don’t understand what or who home is and I’m always trying to root while galloping.

Wagman: So many lines from “French Braid,” stay with me–from the line about sitting shiva for Pangea in “My People The Horse Thieves” to “I stopped reading men” in “Under the Never Failing Anesthesia of Banners.” How does gender function in your work?

Ament: I hate this question. It’s an important question. I wish this question on all male-identified writers.

A few women-identifying poets I admire say their consciousness is genderless on the page. Being a floating eyeball sounds freeing. But there’s something in me that also wants to slam the door on that option. I’m not a confessional poet (or a writer of apparently personal poetry—a better descriptor from Sharon Olds); I use vaguely conceptual, Language-oriented techniques to generate writing. But I still feel entitled to pillage my own life at will. Without access to subjectivity, I would feel rootless, ahistorical.

I’m not on a mission to write polemical poems about misogyny. But it’s useful to write with an enemy in mind. Who am I quoting?

Anyway, if you write about women you write about men you write about desire for men (if you lean that way) you write about power you write about powerlessness you write about systems of power you write about abuse of power and all the -isms enter the picture, hopefully.

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.
— Rennie Ament

Wagman: What advice do you have for aspiring poets?

Ament: Read interviews with living poets you like and they’ll lead you to books and writers you’ll like.

Read as many poems in translation as possible!

Read Jehovah’s Witness religious pamphlets. Read piano tuning guides. Read an outdated copy of the DSM. Buy random, cheap used books. Stock up your language pantry.

People can’t help but rub their own taste all over your work. Don’t let one person’s hot take crush you. I’m floating in an Olympic-sized pool of accumulated rejections as I write this.

Wagman: What is the function of poetry today, do you think?

Ament: Poems should complexify, add nuance to, interrogate the status quo re?

Jamie Wagman is an Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and History at Saint Mary’s College in Indiana.

The post “French Braid”: An Interview with Rennie Ament appeared first on Newfound.

“Anemochore” keeps no borders between visual art, poetry and even music. Stricker’s work here demonstrates a melding of ideas that flow naturally from page to page, evoking all of a reader’s senses.

Meredith Stricker fuses her work with her own experiences, including performances with musicians, her own work as an architect in Big Sur, California and her deep perspective into the value of poetry and imagery. The second part of the chapbook, The Be/s of the Invisible, was a collaboration with several other musicians that link the life of bees to the freedom in poetry.

Her chapbook “Anemochore” will be published by Newfound in spring of 2018.

Steve Mulero: When did you begin writing poetry and what were some of your influences on your early journey into poetry and art?

Meredith Stricker: Because my mother was a war refugee for whom English was a second language and my father’s family from Russia spoke in an archaic form of German, I grew up
in a household where several languages mingled in ways that were basically incomprehensible to me, except as a kind of music or rhythm that was deeply familiar, but also untranslatable.

Whatever one could call “normal” English was not a given since even the language my mother taught me had an accent. And so much remained unspoken. So, it always seemed natural to swim in the space between words. You could say poetry and imagery were a first language for me or a kind of mother tongue.

Also, there’s really no “normal” language for any of us. Which is why poetry matters so much in its rejection of “normalizing” in favor of the particular and odd and nearly inexpressible which we all hold in common in entirely different ways that poems, our senses and imagination can access.

I remember going out on the hillside where I lived in Oakland and talking to the trees and birds in this kind of in-between language. I have always been drawn to forms of poetry and image that are multi-lingual in this way and can be read inside and outside of English in ways even birds could understand.

How do birds understand us or we understand them in a poem? I don’t know, but somehow the poem knows.

“Anemochore” simply extends this process.

Mulero: The title of this chapbook is “Anemochore,” defined as a “plant that spreads seeds or fruit by wind.” Why did you choose this for your title? What tone and feelings did you want to elicit from the reader of your work?

Stricker: It’s a beautiful and odd sort of word. The Anemo– or wind part carries the sense of Anima also related to wind, soul, breath, spirit, so this felt important. And then it seemed to take the shape of a bee swarm or bee language forms that are core to the second part of the book, The Be/s of the Invisible.

Mulero: Is there a musical element throughout “Anemochore” as well? You include “adj. anemochorous / wind chorus dithyrambic polyspecies lyric” and in a later line, “are you a wind instrument are you breath / gone wild.” These lines emit a type of wild musicality. Is there a play-on-words to be found with the term Anemochorous?

Stricker: Those are really interesting questions. Yes! Music is very much part of this book.

All of The Be/s of the Invisible was created as a collaboration with musicians, bee-keeper and another artist for a performance in Oakland. I worked with musician Kumi Uyeda, and two other composer musicians using several kinds of instruments: piano, accordion, tonkori, cello, toy piano, melodica live with recorded voice, electronic music and video. I added visual projections and then half-sang, half-read the poems as a kind of chant.

The audience also was part of sound with a participatory score based on lines of the poems. In terms of these specific lines you mention, you’re asking questions that tune into sounds, which speak to how we hear as much as see a poem.

How reading a poem is multi-sensory: seeing-hearing-sensing.

I am particularly interested in the communal and performed sense of poetry. And here, the -chore of Anemochore sounded to me like the chorus of classical Greek where lines where spoken/sung and danced (choreography/chorus). Poetry was always mixed-media, multi-genre across many cultures. Performance brings this sense of chorus into current practice.

So, “polyspecies lyric” pretty much sums up the intent of book itself and probably the hopes of all of my current writing.

Mulero: Do you feel there is a comparison to be made between an anemochorous plant and how its seeds disperse by wind and how individuals spread ideas through language and their own voice?

Stricker: Yes, absolutely. Writing and visual art for me are more of a kind of open-ended research than self-expression and what I keep discovering is how the page is itself a field or habitat where the word-seeds move and that our lives, spoken and unspoken, are intrinsically interwoven with the lives of seeds, plants, rivers, clouds, weathers.

Mulero: How did you come to the photos and artwork in “Anemochore?” What is your artistic process when merging both poetry and artistic imagery?

Stricker: I always work with visual work in relation to writing. I don’t separate them. Even the shape writing a poem is more like a gestural drawing than a statement, say in filling in forms or information. Also, the written images in poems are continuous with images made of India ink, paint, collage, video and three-dimensional objects. There are the materials of the page and book then also installations in gallery space and performance.

There’s always this slippage between the verbal and non-verbal, gesture and sound, world and word.

The photo at the start of “Anemochore” comes from a performance at night in a field I did with dancer and collaborators. The movement of the light suggests writing or a kind of hive, which fits my sense of the book.

The Be/s of the Invisible came together when my friend Kumi said let’s do an hour-long performance in a few months and I noticed I was working on poems and images related
to bees and colony collapse disorder and that I could use these as projections throughout the performance. I made drawings and paintings of patterns of bee-flight used in communicating flower location to the hive. And these were projected and used as a graphical score in the performance. There was a lot of color; bees see colors — some of which are out of human range. Poems and images help us to see outside our normal range, closer to the vision of bees.

Mulero: The way you utilize space on certain pages offers a unique imagery of its own. Sometimes the words drip off the stanza and onto the next page. What inspired you to utilize such distinct formatting and design?

Stricker: I work as an architectural designer as a partner in a studio mostly on coastal sites in Big Sur. You make drawings or shapes that start on a two-dimensional page related to a living site with grasses and earth then translate the ink into built forms. We work with not only Euclidian geometries but also fractal forms leaves, shorelines and more, breaking the pre-set forms of a rectangle to curve or jag with the coastline.

This is very exciting! As we talk, I’m realizing how similar the page is to a landscape.

I mean, there’s actually a lot of space on a page. The white space is not just a backdrop for written lines any more that a landscape is the background to drop in a pre-set house design that doesn’t pay attention to the shape of the land, the existing biotics, the weather or light.

In the same ways that the words and phrase structure can move in relation to the voicing and shape of intuited thoughts in a poem’s physical surface.

In “Anemochore,” I began to discover what felt like fractal or dendritic forms the way tree roots and branches are patterned. And the Be/s of the invisible are meant to move like hive swarms or individual bees foraging.

Also, there’s the animism or livingness of the poems themselves the desire of the lines themselves as though these words want to bend or break off. Others need more space. They seem to want to exist as their own beings. And when you can feel and relate to that being, the poem or page feels complete.

Mulero: Do you feel that there is something lost in translation when words like “wall” (which you mention in the catalog of synonyms on page 11) are spoken only in reference to it’s the physical sense?

Stricker: Working with the habitat of the page as with other environmental work is political and communal. “Anemochore” addresses the brutality of the kind of Border Wall the current administration is attempting to force on us, or the Separation Wall imposed on Palestinian communities by Israel or gated communities or the Iron Curtain which separated my mother and countless others from their homeland and free movement. Also, the futility of any Authoritarian Wall. Or the utterly mistaken idea that we can wall ourselves off from the fate of honeybees as we use harmful pesticides or dump toxic materials into the biosphere and not poison ourselves:

“I’m breathing your oxygen you’re breathing my carbon dioxide

green world blue world red world my darling permeable membrane

there is no greater love than this

folded in involutes” – Meredith Stricker

I would not draw a line between human and other speech, say of trees or owls or at least I would hope to bridge that divide through poems, art and living with senses open.

Mulero: Do you have any advice for aspiring artists and poets?

Stricker: First to notice is everyone is aspiring, which kind of relaxes the pressure. No poet says to herself “Yeah, I’ve totally made it and know exactly what to do next….”

Also, just to write and make images on-goingly without expectation. Even for small amounts of time to keep the thread of your work alive in the midst of everything (self-doubt, drive for productivity, demands of paying jobs) that tries to pull you away from trusting what shows up on your page.

And be willing to work unstintingly, without measure. Poems may appear instantly outside our conscious effort but they are not efficient.

Bring everything in: sounds, scribbles, words, wordless. Bring in notes, spaces, noise. Then sieve out. It’s quite physical like sorting beads, feeling resonances.

Track the energy of your work: read aloud to self or others: keep the parts that feel alive, take out parts that feel wordy and grey (no matter how much you loved the ideas of them)
Hearing the poems outside the loop of your own mind helps clarify immediately.

Step out of your habits: work in collaboration with others. Find a band of poets, artists you can exchange work and perform with. Not as a big deal, just playing poetry, the way musicians play music.

Trust. Allow. Make things. Connect with others.

Stevie Ray Mulero graduated from Georgian Court University in May 2017 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Creative Writing. An avid reader of poetry, plays, novels and short stories, Steve intends to transcend the way we consider ourselves and others, life, loss and reality.

The post Anemochore: An Interview with Meredith Stricker appeared first on Newfound.

Anna King is a PhD student at Georgia State University, a mother of two, and a small-business owner (she runs a soy candle business with her husband Chad). Her other passions include fitness, preferably Cross-fit at her local gym in McDonough, Georgia. King’s works have been published in literary magazines as well as academically in the “Ellen Glasgow Journal of Southern Women Writers.” King was offered a fellowship by the Summer Literary Seminars and she has been nominated for a Pushcart. 

Taeler Kallmerten: What thing did you see today that most stayed with you?

Anna King: I work as a teacher with struggling students, many of whom have learning differences, many of whom do not fit in socially. Today is the ribbon cutting ceremony of our newly renovated Estes Learning Lab—a badly needed update to a program that has been underfunded for years. Seeing my community rally together to set up an environment to help non-traditional learners has been both humbling and inspiring.

Kallmerten: When did you realize your passion for poetry?

King: Like many writers, I was a young child when I realized how much I loved to write about things I saw that moved me. Someone once said that only two things pierce the human heart: beauty and affliction. My clearest early memories about writing are of admiring natural scenery and feeling a near obsessive burning to communicate on paper what I experienced.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process and any advice you have been given?

King: Writing has become increasingly challenging since I had my second child, and I already work a full time job as a teacher and attend graduate school. I often don’t get much writing done until I am on significant breaks like summer vacation or spring break. When I do, I put on music—Third Eye Blind is my favorite—and often start with an image or a combination of words. From there, I weave that concept into a poem. I often can write a poem fairly quickly, but then I may continue to revise for even years afterwards. The best advice I received was to write first and then worry about where to put the poem in your manuscript later!

Kallmerten: What are you trying to communicate throughout your chapbook?

King: I started the chapbook a couple of years ago believing that I was going to tell the stories of people around me who had experienced pain. Some of my family members and friends had seen personal tragedy such as the death of children and the brutal shooting of a family pet by a police officer.

But then the chapbook became a chronicle of my own growth when I met the man who is now my husband and fell in love with him. Later on, a friend of mine was horrifically murdered in a hit and run—and her fiancé was driving. She was five months pregnant. The chapbook evolved again as an outlet for dealing with that grief. I worked through that grief and eventually was able to find peace. The work concludes that I finally understand how to be willing and able to love the people who already love me, regardless of how terrifying it is to be that open again.

What we do with pain becomes a second skin. I make tourniquets and remedies for an emptiness that runs universe deep. My ten years of my dishonesty is Meghann–who used nakedness to answer all of us. And all of this we never wanted. Last week I filled the car with shrieking–thick and succulent–while I was on the interstate. Her birthday is on a Wednesday and I am undone.

– Anna King

Kallmerten: In Part IV you mention something called a “second skin.” Can you explain what a second skin is and why you believe it coincides with pain?

King: I believe the “second skin” is a mask we wear to cope with pain, any pain. No one gets an instruction manual to deal with grief until after they realize they’ve done it all wrong and they attend counseling or read self-help books. So many of us wear a variety of these “second skins”– drug addiction, infidelity, abuse, anxiety, depression, or obsession with achievement. Unfortunately, the mechanisms we use to try to deal with our pain often result in destruction. I saw that about myself as I wrote the chapbook. 

Kallmerten: In the second to last poem of Part III  you write “The heresy of silence fills me again when Chad begs say what you feel.” Can you explain this line, specifically the “heresy of silence”?

King: My husband, Chad, and I are very different, and during my grieving process for my friend Meghann I would often shut him out and would not say how I was feeling. Sometimes that was because I felt so many conflicted things I had no idea how to name what I was feeling exactly. Sometimes I just didn’t realize how long I had been bottling it up. I started to see that when I stopped talking that I was reverting back to bad habits. It became increasingly important in that grieving process to voice to him things like, “Today in the car I thought I saw her,” or “I had a dream about her,” or “I came across an old picture and I felt so angry.”

Deconstructing water is for the birds. The heresy of silence fills me again when Chad begs say what you feel. Soundlessness thickens my gums as I think of what is next–creating friezes monuments obelisks with gerunds and such. But I see the ocean as a gazillion salt shakers instead of the largest cemetery. The days balloon. The nights breathe. I have become a project of cartographers.

– Anna King

Kallmerten: Have Old English elegies had any influence on the style of your Chapbook?

King: I do love elegies, and I have studied them considerably over the years. Some of the most beautiful poetry is written in elegiac form. I feel like my work is an elegy for more than one person, but that the losses happen at different times. Some of the “loss” in my writing is about death, other times it is about something else. Since experiencing several losses was an ongoing grieving process interspersed with happiness like finding love, it doesn’t quite fit the traditional model. Life felt too big to make it all about what I did not have. However, it was important to me end it on what I do have, which is the consolation.

Kallmerten: Lastly, is there a question you would like to be asked or if given the opportunity would ask another poet?

King: I would love to know how other poets genuinely make the time to write. I often need days to relax before I can decompress enough to write. With the demands of a family and home, what is a woman to do when she needs to write but also has to eat, sleep, and work?

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘Simbelmynë’ – An Interview with Anna King appeared first on Newfound.

Lorsung’s chapbook “West Illegitimately“  exemplifies the ways in which the present is created from many pasts. Within the chapbook repetition is manipulated as a constraint that allows Lorsung to create an acrostic style poetry. “West Illegitimately“  is a part of a larger piece of upcoming work and was a finalist for the 2015 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize.

Our neighbors are students, maybe 20 years old. Today I slept until ten and lay on the couch looking at the snow falling in immense slow flakes and their red curtains stayed closed and I put a record on our record player which we have not to be ironic but because it slows down our listening and makes us go in order, which we have so little of these days

– Éireann Lorsung

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you realize your passion for poetry?

Éireann Lorsung: I don’t think I have ever conceived of my relationship to poetry—or to language, writing, texts, books—as passion. Passion seems like something that is relatively short-lived, and also extreme. I see its definition includes the words “a compelling enthusiasm,” and certainly I feel both enthusiastic about poetry (in particular when I am in a classroom where poetry is central) and compelled by it. But I also feel compelled to eat and breathe and move and I don’t think of these as passions. Writing things down or making marks on paper—some of these eventually take on the title of “poem,” often by habit (that’s the category easily supplied for this kind of thing)—has been part of my way of being in and relating to the world for as long as I can remember.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process?

Lorsung: Mostly writing means reading things, making notes about things, drawing things, watching out windows, knowing and learning the names of things, studying things, listening to things and animals and humans, paying attention to things including internal things, sewing and making things with my hands, memorizing things, taking pictures of things, singing things, and sometimes using a pen, pencil, computer, or phone to record things at length.

Kallmerten: What compelled you to start Dickinson House? How has Emily Dickinson inspired you as a poet?

Lorsung: Dickinson “inspires” me insofar as I feel her as an ancestor—I am grateful for her departure from older ways of writing and for the ways in which her private and often minuscule practice provides, over time, a chasm that begins to represent writing from the US. And I admire her like I admire very religious people who are drawn to live out their faith in private, who have mysterious experiences of what they believe is there and whose lives demand solitude and priority for those experiences. That is what links Dickinson the poet to the space I made and named for her: a desire to consecrate a space and to consecrate it in particular to unseen women doing their internally demanded work.

As far as how the space came to be, I suppose it stems from my education, which mostly took place at the kitchen table, surrounded by my brothers studying and my parents helping or cooking: I like to be in rooms with others who are learning and making.

Kallmerten: How do you manage your many endeavors and also find time to focus on your writing?

Lorsung: I have always been this way. Something that helps me come to terms with how I work (when I hear the mighty should that arise from observing many other people’s different lives) is to remember that even in stretches of time where all I “have” to do is write, I can only ever manage a few hours before I need to do something else—walk, read, cook, move… When I keep this in focus I remember that a few minutes or an hour regularly will keep the ideas moving and will suffice to make the work. I am selfish when I can be about my time. I have a very supportive partner, who makes it his business to encourage me to write. And I accept that the work I’ve taken on requires a tiny sacrifice of my own time/energy in order to put the values it represents into motion. I’m okay with that.

Kallmerten: You recently gave a lecture about failure where you talked about the concept of productivity. Can you talk about that a little?

Lorsung: Productivity is a concept I had never encountered before my second year in university. It was alien to me to count the worth of a day based on tangible output. When I count my work through this lens it rarely measures up: I am often “unproductive,” meaning I spend a lot of time doing invisible writing and even more time doing work that is “not writing”—cleaning, cooking, teaching.

But in fact I think that when I work hard to be very alive to and awakened by the ordinary work that takes up most of my time, I am able to be more alert and discerning on the page, too. For me the pressure to “produce” is untenable and tied to a logic that I try to reduce as much as I can in my own life—the logic that what is valuable is what is visible, or that writing-as-process is subsumed in value to writing-as-product.

And I know in my own life that focusing on ‘being productive’ requires a willing amnesia about the fact that making meaning takes time. So I am being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I say that, because I would prefer to reject the idea of productivity all together and encourage writers to spend their time attending closely to whatever the work of living puts at hand, from dirty dishes to the blank page, and to see what comes of that (rather than being self-critical for “failing” to live up to an imagined standard of factory-quick production).

Kallmerten: In “Americium” you write “…I put a record on our record player which we have not to be ironic but because it slows down our listening and makes us go in order, which we have so little of these days.” Can you explain why you believe our lives today lack order?

Lorsung: That’s actually in the poem with the very long title that begins “When I say fathers…” And the “we” in that section and several others is a very particular “we”: the we of my partner and me, stuck in the difficult and disorienting disorder of immigration/migration. It’s also a sort of wry comment on the fact that most of the music I listen to (and probably many people listen this way) ends up being a jumble of all kinds of things, more like radio than like a record. The record goes in an order I can’t change (without getting up to physically move the needle). When I listen to music on my computer or phone it’s rarely in the order in which it was made (i.e. the order of an album); it’s a different and more diffuse order.

Kallmerten: In section entitled “An archaeology” it is clear you are talking about people migrating. Can you tell me more about this section?

Lorsung: Moving freely is a human right that transcends national boundaries. The “Archaeology” poems are my imagining of the migrational movements of people in the southwestern parts of Flanders in the 1940s, during the occupation here—the second occupation in thirty years, in a landscape that was still recovering from the absolute desolation of the First World War.

So, in these poems I am trying to experience the landscape here (which is, as many are, pretty banal now that I’ve lived here a while) as the site of an older and other dailiness—the dailiness under occupation, the movement of people (including members of my partner’s family) across borders, through checkpoints, in military prisons, or hiding in byres.

I’m also thinking in these poems about a long history of people here belonging to the land their descendants still live on, and what it means to e.g. be peasants (as much of my partner’s family was even until the middle of the 20th century), what it means to be land-tenants, what it means to do physical labor on and to care for land that isn’t yours by law. I took inspiration from Michel Foucault’s idea of archaeological method as a mode of inquiry into ideas, and relied on actual ‘archaeological’ findings, both textual and material (shards of blue tile found in a field, for example), to generate images for the poems.

Kallmerten: Is there a question you would want to ask other writers?

Lorsung: I would like to ask them what thing they saw today that most stayed with them and what they love.

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘West Illegitimately’ – An Interview with Éireann Lorsung appeared first on Newfound.

Readers encounter the medical terminology Huynh once studied in poems like ‘The Translation. Further reading of Huynh’s work reveals another layer: poems like ‘Tết’ ruminate on the loss of loved ones, extending to loss of language or cultural ties.

The interplay between these themes–the medical world, the author’s cultural background–make Huynh’s chapbook ‘The First Language’ feel alive and fresh.

Fake hearts if mechanically activated
ba-dum on a machine-measured beat
Beating to stay alive Beating to stay alive
Surgery requires an incision
below the collarbone
A small metal tentacle fed into a superior vena cava
A flat egg shaped pacemaker to push against
skin like a subtle speed bump in the road
The one that catches you off guard during a night drive
The one that catches your first lover off guard
when he rubs his hand across your chest
pulls away finds the light
and avoids your childhood scar
– Amanda Huynh

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Amanda Huynh: I did not start off pursuing poetry. Writing was something I did on the side, and I was pushed to go into science. My first bachelor’s degree was in biology, and I minored in creative writing. The writing impulse was present the entire time. I still remember someone telling me, “You’ve majored in rationality, and minored in your passion.” After graduation, I got a full-time job in the medical field, and I could have stopped at an eight-to-five job. However, that lifestyle did not fit me well. It was not long before I went back to school to get my second degree in English. This time, I was serious about pursuing a writing life.

The time I spent completing my English degree was one of the most pivotal points for me. I had two wonderful professors, Laura Kopchick and Tim Richardson, who really opened everything up for me. This was also the time when I had committed to a genre. It all happened during an advanced poetry workshop. I had just finished writing a poem, “My Nervous System,” about a narrator seeing a crush and how her nervous system is reacting. My poem was being critiqued, and I realized all the possibilities in poetry. I knew that this was what I was going to pursue. This was also the first time I was actually really proud of something I created. It is such a nerdy poem, but I still find it one of my favorites to read.

Kallmerten: You said you were born in Texas. How has Texas inspired and shaped your writing?

Huynh: Yes, I am a native Texan—the old born and raised. I never lived outside of Texas until I moved to Virginia in 2014. I mention this because it changed my perspective about home. When you live somewhere, you don’t really notice the distinct characteristics around you.

When I moved, I was able to see Texas through a new lens. There’s a large Latino population in Texas alone, and an even greater diversity. It’s not as common in Virginia. The absence of this has found its way into my work. Before I moved, I rarely wrote about family: our Latino perspective, work struggles, identity, working as migrants, what it means to be Latina, what it means to be Latino, and more. It is more prominent in my work than it’s ever been, and I believe it has a lot to do with being fourteen hundred miles away from home.

Kallmerten: Can you describe your writing process, and share any advice you’ve been given by other poets?

Huynh: The writing process varies from one poet to the next. For a while I thought my writing process was terrible until I heard a craft talk on revision by Cornelius Eady. He described how there is no one correct way to write, and that for many people it can be vastly different. The biggest point I took away was that revision will always be a part of the writing process, and as he put it, “You better make your peace with it.”

In my writing, I tend to sit with an idea and meditate on it. It might take a few minutes or a few months, and it all depends on what the topic is. If the topic has something to do with current events, I will do some research. I do not start writing until I have a firm grip on the first couple of lines. When I do, I write it out by hand, edit, rewrite, and repeat. It doesn’t become a draft until I type it into a Word Document. At that phase, it becomes a revision game and I begin to save all the versions.

“to pray in a language
I don’t understand,
a language my throat
cannot wrap around
– Amanda Huynh

Kallmerten: Your poetry illuminates a struggle to preserve your culture. You write “It occurs to you/ that only in America will you lose/ abuelo.” Can you describe why you think this happens? And how it has impacted you?

Huynh: The dilution of language, yes. The loss of a family member, yes. When someone passes away, you are not just losing a loved one—you are losing a connection to your culture, a mind, an experience of the world during a specific time, and a speaker of your own language.

My mother lost her mother at the age of sixteen. Since then, she didn’t feel compelled to speak Spanish. I’ve never asked my mother why, but I’ve concluded that it’s because it brings painful memories of a time that’s now gone. The only time Spanish is spoken tends to be around family, and we live far from family.

My parents moved away because of work—the working culture in America pushes people to be workaholics. When we moved from Abilene to Houston, I was five. In those first five years I remember my aunts and uncles coming over all the time, there were always cousins to play with, trips to Floydada (where my grandparents lived) were frequent, Spanish was thrown around more, the meals were homemade, and for some reason we were always having a party for something. When we left, all of that went away.

Kallmerten: Houston was recently named the Most Diverse City in the United States. Does the diversity of Houston contradict the seemingly inevitable phenomenon of American assimilation? Do you believe multiple cultures can coexist without any one being completely erased? Why or why not?

Huynh: I believe assimilation creates a type of cultural evolution. When I say this, I mean that certain aspects of a culture, when brought to America, will be lost while other aspects will be carried forward. My in-laws came over from Vietnam in the 1970s—my husband’s parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents still have a firm grasp on their culture. As for my husband, he’s split between two cultures: Vietnamese and American.

There are parts of his culture that he hangs onto, but he is also losing some of it too. When my husband was ready to propose to me, what came to his mind was not the traditional Vietnamese proposal, a Dam Hoi. Instead, he proposed the American way—on one knee. Of course, after the proposal it was a “Why didn’t you do this?” and a Dam Hoi was eventually done. I share this because there are things parents will forget to tell their children about their culture or something will not be brought up in conversation.

Will my husband be able to pass on everything to his children? No. The culture our children will inherit will be a mixture of Vietnamese and Hispanic. That’s not including the American culture they’ll be raised in. We will still try to pass on our individual cultures, but it is not a guarantee that they will pass it along.

Do I believe multiple cultures can coexist without some being completely erased? In my case, I hope so. I will find out within the next decade with my own kids, but from a larger vantage point I do believe multiple cultures can coexist. Will they coexist equally? I’m not sure. Again, I hope they can, but it might not be possibility. It all depends on people.

Kallmerten: You sometimes write about the struggle women face in society. My favorite poem in your chapbook is “Returning to the Moment I Learned to Count,” about expectations of women: expectations of society on women, expectations of nature on women, and expectations we have of ourselves. I’d love to hear more about what went into this piece.

Huynh: Cross-culturally, I believe all women are impacted by society’s unrealistic standards. I know I am impacted. If you were to ask me about what I thought was great about myself, I would probably answer with all the things that are not so great. All my life, I have been conditioned to think this way.

The messages we take in subconsciously do damage to ourselves, but it also perpetuates how we treat each other. This poem wrestles with that idea. It is very easy for a woman to blame her mother for instilling an inner critic, making her self-conscious, and insecure—to see the situation from this one point of view. However, to see it from the mother’s point of view, from the mother’s mother’s (grandmother’s) point of view, and so on is the real challenge.

Someone must have made similar comments to the preceding woman to justify her passing them on. The criticism falls from one mother to the next daughter who becomes the next mother, and the cycle continues. The question that then arises is “When will it stop?”

I believe the only way for the cycle to change is by the people who become aware of the behavior, and choose to act differently. It’s a daily battle, not only when interacting with other people, but within ourselves.

Kallmerten: What did writing this chapbook teach you?

Huynh: I have a long way to go. I feel like I am still starting out, and I still have a lot of things I need to work on. It’s a continuous growth, and an ongoing process.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘The First Language’ – An Interview with Amanda Huynh appeared first on Newfound.

“What Cement is Made of” chronicles the inner city racial violence and poverty-stricken neighborhoods Donaghy grew up around. Donaghy has received awards such as the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence for his most recent book “Start with the Trouble.” He was also awarded the Board of Regents Teaching Award from Eastern Connecticut State University where he currently teaches poetry and creative writing.

Donaghy was encouraged by his poetry professor at Kuztown University to share his work and believe in his voice, and now he encourages his students to do the same.

Taeler Kallmerten: When did you start writing poetry? Why did you choose to write poetry?

Daniel Donaghy: I didn’t start to write poetry seriously until I took Harry Humes’s poetry writing course at Kutztown.

The first poem I wrote for that class was about the tension in my father’s life, which often manifested itself as violence toward my mom. I was a struggling physics major at the time, not sure what was going to happen to me. I honestly cannot tell you why I signed up for the class. It didn’t fill any requirements or electives. I just wanted to take it, I guess.

The class after I’d turned the poem in, Harry asked me to stay after class. I thought, “Oh great. I can’t do physics. Now I can’t do poetry. Where am I headed?” After class, though, he said that he liked what was at the heart of the poem and named four or five poets (including Len Roberts, whom I think should be far more widely known) to check out if I wanted to learn how to write poems about family. I hogged Harry’s office hours for the rest of my time at Kutztown. I cannot overstate his influence on my professional and writing life.

“Why poetry?” is a good question. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that I’m addicted to the compression of a poem. I love the potency of poetry, the energy that the best poems capture and transfer in such a short space.

The poems I like most come alive when you read them aloud. You can feel the force of life behind the poet’s words. They believe what they’re saying is important and they’ve organized their words in such a way so that I feel that way, too. And when I connect with their ideas, emotions, and energy on that level, I feel less alone in the world. I feel more alive. Just like when I hear a great song. The artist taps into a vein he/she shares with me and gives me something I didn’t know I needed. I always go back to Rainer Maria Rilke, who says in his “Letters to a Young Poet” that if you don’t have to write, don’t.

I am rarely if ever compelled to remember poems that feel as though they were composed entirely in the poet’s head, that have no emotional urgency driving them. I’ve always been someone who has a lot of energy, so writing, for me, is a physical exercise. So is reading. And that physical engagement is often most intense for me when I’m reading and writing poetry.

Kallmerten: You are a professor and your past students describe you as being knowledgeable, patient, engaging, and even “awesome” in one of your reviews on Rate My Professor. One review left on the site claims to be someone who never wrote poetry before your class but now they describes themselves as a true poet. You inspire your students to create. Can you say the same for your students?

Donaghy: I can certainly say the same for my students, many of whom are far more articulate, poised, and mature than I was at their age.

Teaching poetry writing at a state school is a job that I always wanted to have. There is not one day, not half of one day, when I am not fully aware of how fortunate I am to have a position that allows me to help students, many of whom have overcome great odds to become the first person in their family to go to college, to believe in the value of their own stories and their own voices.

When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to be, what was going to happen to me. I was this kid with a lot of energy, looking for someplace to put it. I tell my students on the first day that they may have signed up for a poetry writing or a creative writing class, but they really signed up for a voice class. We spend a lot of time talking about what that means, about understanding the difference between the language that the world imposes on us and that language each of us owns, which only we own, which no other person who ever lives will have access to. I don’t want my students to sound like me or any other writer when they write. I try to help them to sound like themselves.

Throughout the course, I keep reinforcing the mantra that that I may be their professor, but books (the books we talk about, the books they find on their own) are their teachers. We read writers with widely varying styles, and we talk all the time about reading like mechanics, like thieves, so that we can learn from great writers how to move people with our own work, how to use language and images and memories they’ve mined from their own minds and hearts.

Next, hear silence falling flat
as awning shadows

over Osage, where in every
boarded window a nail gun

still rings rifle-loud
-Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: Your poems reference life in Philadelphia while you were growing up, the racial conflicts, the bombing of Osage Avenue, and the eleven people who lost their lives that day. Do you feel like you are a voice for those whose city turned their backs on them?

Donaghy: I wouldn’t ever claim to be a voice for anyone but myself. I think we can get into trouble pretty quickly if we ever try to speak for anyone else.

That said, I think that I have a responsibility in my writing to bear witness to what I’ve seen and to argue in whatever way I can for social justice. Without, I hope, going on too much of a tangent (or a rant), what the city of Philadelphia did on Osage Avenue on May 13, 1985, and what it has done to the residents of that block and the surrounding neighborhood over the subsequent decades is unconscionable.

I recap the story in the poem about the day the city tried to “mobilize,” if not kill, members of an African American liberation group named MOVE (it’s not an acronym; the name is in all caps to emphasize the organization’s sense of urgency), with whom police had had many conflicts over the years, by dropping explosives on a row home that was linked to blocks of other row homes owned by residents who were completely uninvolved with MOVE. All of the houses burned down. The city, as the evidence has revealed, rebuilt those houses cheaply and shabbily then denied for years that it did so.

I was living on the other side of the city when that happened, in a mostly white, Irish-Catholic neighborhood. The fathers in my neighborhood were pretty unsympathetic to the plight of the mostly African American neighborhood that had been bombed. There was no outrage that I recall. In fact, I don’t remember much talk about it. It was around that time that I began to realize that I was being taught to be a racist by men I otherwise admired in many other respects. For a lot of reasons, I turned from their examples.

As an adult, now, I feel a strong sense of purpose to write about those experiences, to bear witness to that racism, that anger, the scary smallness of that life view, and to speak my truth about some very complicated and frightening times I have lived through.

“T-shirts, ball caps. They wait for each other
to pull on clean socks, lace their boots, then rise
together, laughing, toward their evenings.

– Daniel Donaghy

Kallmerten: What inspired you to write “What Cement is made of”?

Donaghy: I wrote that poem shortly after visiting the workplace of brother-in-law, Shawn. At the time, he was a truck dispatcher for a cement company. While I was visiting one time, he’d forgotten something at work and asked me if I wanted to come along. We had to walk through the locker room and shower area to get to where he worked. All of the details in the poem come directly from that experience.

The heart of the poem comes from what I saw growing up as men in my neighborhood, including my father, worked long, hard hours of physical labor. With Shawn’s workplace in my head, I finally had a place to situate these men collectively and individually. They came home from work five, six days a week exhausted, smelly, spent. They’d fall into the couch or out onto the front stoop or onto a stool at a corner bar for a while before did it all again the next day.

It’s an incredibly hard way to make a living. It’s no way to make a life, really, but it’s the life I was headed toward, like most of the people I grew up around. I remember my father sitting me down at the kitchen when I was 8 or 9, telling me about what it was like to be an electrician at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, how he’d wire boats for ten, twelve hours a day in any weather.

I remember that he told me, “Work with your mind. Your hands will fail you someday.” It’s like he had seen his own future; that’s what happened to him ten years later. I think about that talk with my dad a lot. It’s another moment, maybe the first moment, that put me on a path to be a teacher.

Kallmerten: Readers of ‘What Cement is Made of’ encounter racial injustices in Philadelphia, the poverty you grew up around, and about life in the Kensington neighborhood. What about these places inspired you to write about them?

Donaghy: It’s the story I have to tell. Simple as that. Each of us carries inside the story of where we come from and how we got where we are.

As we get to know new friends, we spend so much time talking what it was like where we grew up. And we’re always reminded in our present lives of someone or something from that earlier place. You grew up around some colorful people, I bet, Taeler––people who gave you, through their actions and their words, great examples of the kind of person you should grow up to be and the kind of person you should work your whole life trying not to become.

You could drive a friend up and down the streets of your hometown, I bet, and talk about what’s happened there over the years, how things have changed, what the local secrets are that no one likes to talk about. The longer we think about the houses we grew up in, about our hometowns, questions about “what was it like?” gets more and more complicated. At least they have for me. I love to be in the middle of writing a new piece in which I’m speaking to something that I thought I’d forgotten, that raises some part of my past from the dead so that I can wrestle with it again, maybe make some sense of it, some art out of it, maybe bring people back to life and let them have their say.

Kallmerten: What are you working on next?

Donaghy: I’m finishing up the third of a trilogy of book-length poetry collections about life in the inner city. Many of the poems from the chapbook manuscript I entered in to the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize is from that collection. This project has led me to do more research that I’d done previously. It includes poems triggered by memories as well by current events, which, where I’m from, have been pretty harrowing. This project also has led me to work in a variety of forms that I hadn’t tried before. I also have a short story manuscript that I keep coming back to––sometimes I start writing a poem and it turns into a story. When that happens, I just go with it. And I’d really like to publish a novel.
 

Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post ‘What Cement is Made of’- An Interview with Daniel Donaghy appeared first on Newfound.

objects stay grounded easily
but not me – come on
two parts for thunder owe two parts
at once – soon to keep our need

Taeler Kallmerten: The way you organized your chapbook is interesting, can you explain your intentions of breaking your chapbook up into two parts? Can you explain the title to your chapbook “empathy for cars / force of july”?

Davy Knittle: I was interested in ways of riffing on a crown of sonnets, a sequence of sonnets that link the final line of one poem in the sequence to the first line of the next. While these poems don’t link in that way, I liked the idea of having a set of sonnets that connected to one another thematically and structurally. Each of these poems is made up of five stanzas that are 28 syllables each, with twelve poems in each of the two sets. Each set feels a little different from the other, at least to me. I wanted to use the same form to engage a couple of different kinds of moving through the poem, and of the space that each poem might make.

Kallmerten: What are you trying to communicate throughout your chapbook?

Knittle: I’m interested in exploring a kind of attention that’s not by any means singular to me or my work. I’m interested in the way people privately narrate experiences of public space–in what happens to a train station or a school or a public park if while you’re there you can’t stop thinking about something that happened four years ago or what you read in the newspaper or someone you miss or what you’re going to eat for lunch. I want to know more about how a neighborhood or a street or a single spot in a city is a unit of feeling. For me, these poems speak to some of those explorations, which I hope I get to continue for a long time.

Kallmerten: Describe some routines you have adopted during your creative process.

Knittle: I think my main routine is trying to change my routine to adapt to what makes the most sense for me on a given day or week or month. I do try to write every day, and usually I do, but that means a lot of different things, especially for this project, which was composed of fragments of a larger free form document that I wrote with the hope that I’d be able to build poems out of it.

Kallmerten: Can you explain what you learned about yourself after writing this chapbook?

Knittle: I’m not sure. I learned that I like writing poems as part of a larger project, which is something the poet Brandon Brown talks about as necessary to his practice–to start with a project that frames the writing. I hadn’t done that before, and so I learned that having a frame on the scale of the project was generative for me.

Kallmerten: What advice would you give to other creative-minded people who want to write?

Knittle: Try to do it more often than feels absolutely necessary. For me, there are a million reasons not to write, and so finding a way to return to my work out of some of the same general familiar obligation by which teeth are brushed and dogs are walked (I don’t have a dog, but if I did) is helpful for me. I find that if I’ve been writing at least semi-regularly, it’s easier to keep writing. I know that’s true of so many repeated things, of practice in general, but it’s felt different for me to know that than it has for me to build it into my life.

Kallmerten: What are you looking forward to working on next?

Knittle: I’m in the process of expanding this project to include two additional sections: a set of twelve fourteen-line sonnets (again syllabic, but not metrical) and a set of twelve sevenlings, where each line is twenty syllables. I’m looking forward to situating the poems in “empathy for cars / force of july” in a bigger family of poems with some of the same questions and curiosities.

Kallmerten: Finally is there a question you would like to be asked, or one you would ask another poet?

Knittle: There are so many questions I’d like to ask other poets. My academic work has been thinking, recently, about how city planning, poetry and criticism can interact–about what it would look like to read poems as a kind of planning theory. The poet who is the locus of that work for me is Leslie Scalapino, a spectacular poet, publisher and essayist who died in 2010, and who I never met, but have heard so many stories about from people who were close to her.

Scalapino wrote and talked often about the way poetry might participate in the public sphere, where she really believed it could work alongside other kinds of discourse, like criticism and journalism. Where, for instance, a poem might appear in a newspaper as an opinion piece. Today (and many days) if I got to ask a poet one question, I’d ask her what she thought a city that took her poetry as the framework of its plan and systems would look like, and if there were urban spaces that came close to doing some of the things she wanted a city to do.

 Taeler Kallmerten, Staff Writer

The post “empathy for cars / force of July” – An Interview with Poet Davy Knittle appeared first on Newfound.

The winner of the $500 honorarium and 25 printed copies goes to M.J. Gette. Her chapbook, “The Walls They Left Us,” will be available this spring through our web store, as well as at our booth at this year’s AWP conference in L.A. (Table #832!).

And our finalists? We received so many outstanding chapbooks that we had difficulty choosing five. So we chose six:

• Dan Donaghy, “What Cement Is Made of”
• Amanda Huynh, “The First Language”
• Anna King Ivey, “Simbelmynë”
• Davy Knittle, “empathy for cars / force of july”
• Éireann Lorsung, “west, illegitimately”
• Natalie Scenters-Zapico, “Lessons In Machismo”

A poem by each writer will appear in our annual print edition of the journal this December.

Curious about our winner and finalists? Interviews with all seven will appear on our blog this winter, so stay in touch with us via social media or mailing list.

To all submitters: Newfound’s managing editor will respond personally to all entries. You should receive communication before January 1st.

And THANK YOU to everyone who helped spread the word. We couldn’t do this without any of you, and we are very grateful.

Newfound is committed to making as many great things happen as possible for our winner and finalists every year and we hope to do even more next year. Keep an eye on the contest page as we prepare for our next launch on April 15th, 2016. We hope to be celebrating your work here next year.

The post Anzaldúa Poetry Prize: 2015 Winner & Finalists appeared first on Newfound.