“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.

Demcak is a Renaissance man who works in unusual ways, cutting up blocks of text from a variety of sources and rearranging them, to create his poems. In “Cryptopedia” he mixes this method with the murky, monstrous and mysterious to create something unsettling yet genuinely moving and thought-provoking. Demcak’s success comes from his pitch-perfect subject choices and his ability to turn a seemingly random selection of lines and quotes into a twisting narrative, a short, emotive gut-punch. It takes talent to write poetry, but Demcak has proved he is not only a great talent, but a true craftsman.

Demcak’s poetry has appeared in a range of journals and we were lucky enough to have him share his craft, as well as some words of wisdom, with us at Newfound.

Josh King: Would you tell me a little about your writing life in general? Have you always considered yourself a poet? Did you study it, or just happen to fall into it?

Andrew Demcak: It’s funny now because I did consider myself to be primarily a poet until I wrote my first novel (“If There’s a Heaven Above,” JMS Books 2013) and I was already happy just writing poetry. Now I see myself as an author, a content creator in various forms. I have an MFA in English (Creative Writing/Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College of California. I studied with Brenda Hillman and her husband, Robert Hass. I’ve always been interested in language. I grew up in a house full of limericks, dreadful puns, and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. I love pushing words around on the page a making them do things they don’t want to do.

King: Does this collection signify a change of form or focus for you, or would you consider it part of the Demcak canon?

Demcak: It’s an extension of the canon. Many of my poetry books are collections of cut-up poems I created from various sources.

One of the things I love about history is: what we used to call magic, we now call science. – Andrew Demcak

King: It’s such a fun and unusual idea for a collection; people are undoubtedly going to focus on the idea behind it as much as the words themselves. Did this idea germinate while reading Wikipedia articles and discovering their innate potential for poetry? Or from a desire to find poetry in this unexpected place?

Demcak: I was thinking about classical myth and modern myth, the urban legend, when I stumbled upon all these entries in Wikipedia in my search for source material to cut up. I was more than thrilled to see so many of these subjects represented in Wikipedia. I’m glad that the Chupacabra has an article, for example. I’m intrigued by cryptozoology. No one in the West believed pandas were real when they heard stories about black and white bears in the 1920s.

King: Could you explain the process of creating this? What did a typical day’s work look like while researching and writing “Cryptopedia”?

Demcak: It’s a rudimentary process, I must say. I print out the Wikipedia article, cut it into pieces, place the pieces into a paper bag, shake them up, and then draw out a few scraps at a time and see if the random words inspire me to write a line.

I love using a finite set of language (the article itself) because the word choice is already limited by the subject matter. It helps when I edit the poem for meaning because the word choice keeps the poem within the subject (for example, I’m not going to find the word “subarctic” in an article about the Chupacabra. I’m going to find the words: blood, chickens, nightmare, goat, glowing red eyes, sucking, etc.)

King: During the writing process, were you tempted to release the poems without saying that they were cut ups from Wikipedia? Or is that too much of an innate, important part of this collection?

Demcak: I’ve published the poems both ways, but I think the process is interesting. I like to be honest about my work. Plus, it’s a fun way of creating content. Maybe I will inspire others to try cutting up their own work or the work of others.

King: At first I was tempted to think that you’d used Wikipedia’s “random article” button, but there are definite themes and connections running through “Cryptopedia.” There’s this triangular back and forth between scientific ideas, religious figures and mythological or folkloric creatures. Is this reflective of your own diverse beliefs, or simply a result of trawling though such a diverse website?

Demcak: My beliefs entirely. One of the things I love about history is: what we used to call magic, we now call science. I also love the line between myth and reality, especially in a spiritual sense. Belief makes the unreal real, because belief is real. It’s all a testament to the human mind, as with my poem, “Brain in a Vat.” What is reality to a brain in a vat?

King: There’s another unsettling theme that runs throughout, that of creatures which are famed for kidnapping or attacking children or instances of children going missing or being sold. To generalize more, “Cryptopedia” seems to run on themes of absence, both domestic and cosmological, hidden threats and unexplained conspiracies or myths. Reading your poems alongside the original articles themselves made my stomach turn more than once. What made you seek out these vicious characters and create a book dripping so heavily in the world’s mysteries?

Demcak: I think our mythologies are maps for the human psyche. These scary characters show up in stories whichever part of the world you are in and in every time-period. We’ve always known them. They are nearby, sly and illusive, waiting for us. I’ve always liked the darker side of things (I was a goth as a teen!), so I naturally gravitate to that. The dark side of the human psyche is fascinating to me.

King: You’ve included a sort of cheat-sheet at the end of the collection, with brief explanations of what each subject of the poem is. I think it offers a great palette cleanser and anchor point for the work. Was this always the plan? Why not just leave the reader to linger on the poetic summations, or explore at their own leisure?

Demcak: Part of the fun of this collection is discovery. But I worried that some of the lesser known subjects might confuse readers and put them off. The notes about the poems are like a guardrail so no one skids off the road and doesn’t come back.

King: What place do you think poetry has in today’s world? As an artist, do you feel any duty to confront the world’s problems, or do you feel, perhaps, that it’s your job to distract people from them?

Demcak: Poetry moved into popular music and then came back on its own to the stage in poetry slams. It’s in every culture and every language. It has always had a place, even if it’s just scrawled in a personal journal. As an artist, my response to the question “Do I confront or distract from the world’s problems?”—I do both. But I like poetry most for its language. For me, I write a novel to know what happened, what I felt, but I write a poem to hear the words rubbing up against one another.

King: What are you reading at the moment? As the year comes to an end, are there any books or works that have stood out in 2017?

Demcak: I thoroughly enjoyed “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” by Norman Ohler, and I’m reading “The Other” by Thomas Tyron right now (I can’t keep away from horror fiction!)

King: What is the best piece of advice you have ever received regarding the writing life? Do you have any words of wisdom for a writer embarking on their first collection?

Demcak: Best advice: Don’t compare your work to another’s work. You are on your own path, on your own journey, and it, like your work, is unique to you.

Words of wisdom: Be your favorite author.

If it’s criticism, it’s petty.

Believe in editing.

Always move forward with your writing, even if you are moving blindly forward.

Be brave with your work; do the thing you are the most afraid of doing.

Bonus mantra: Each time I touch my work, it gets better.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. His fiction has been published in BlazeVOX magazine and The Matador Review, and he divides his time between writing articles, plays and drawing comics.

Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

The post “Cryptopedia” – An Interview with Andrew Demcak appeared first on Newfound.

Ross occasionally reads poetry live, but says it is sometimes difficult for her to participate live poetry readings while living in a rural area. On the page, her work can be found in Newfound’s print issue No. 3. Her other poetry chapbooks include “A Tiny Hunger” from YellowJacket Press, and “My Mississippi” from Anchor & Plume Press.

The poetry in “The Graffiti of Pompeii” is inspired by the actual graffiti excavated from the site Pompeii is believed to have been located in Italy. The 26 poems in the collection are one part history lesson and many more parts creative imagining. The collection gives a voice to the ancient people of Pompeii, before the eruption of the volcano on Mount Vesuvius.

Ross got close to the supposed site of Pompeii several years ago, which is near Naples, Italy.  There, Ross spent time on the Amalfi Coast but did not get to see the ruins of Pompeii–she chose her vacation spot before she had the idea for this chapbook.

Ross is a joy to talk to, especially when the topic is “The Graffiti of Pompeii.” She enjoys writing narrative poetry and prefers telling stories and sharing experiences that are actualized into meaning through images and emotion. “The Graffiti of Pompeii” does exactly this. Ross took actual found graffiti and brought it back to life by creatively and fictionally telling people’s stories through narrative poetry. She uses exceptional imagery and strong language to  bring these stories to life, captivating every reader.

I marveled at the words and I wondered about the people who wrote them. -Laura Sobbott Ross

Megan Andreuzzi: You use very strong language and imagery like “she’d held the first fruits of the sons of Rome in her teeth more than once” and “they were sewn from the backs of their mothers’ eyelids.” These jump out at readers and make our imaginations run wild. I wanted to point to these two examples because they are quite haunting. What were you hoping to provoke from the readers? What do you feel from it? What are some of your favorite lines out of all the pieces?

Laura Sobbott Ross: That particular poem, about the prostitute named Attice, begins the series. The graffiti was meant to be a recommendation by a patron and was written on a bench at the Maritime gate, which was a main entrance into the city. What I felt was despair, layered beneath face paint, hunger, and her own power and powerlessness. The prostitutes were known as the “ninth hour girls,” meaning their business started nine hours after sunrise, so there was kind of a visual darkness and an internal one. “The stars brought anguish, a mirror of this dark city’s small burnings.” That poem was hard to shake. I wrote it first and put me in the mindset to write the others.

I like “Figulus loves Idaia” with its images of the fisherman in longing, the sweet and dizzy “Bees are like Lovers in That They Live a Honeyed Life,” and the pub poems: “Come and Drink with Us, Oceanus” – who was a famous gladiator of that era, and the feisty barmaid’s: “Whoever Wants to Serve Themselves Can Go on and Drink from the Sea.”

Andreuzzi: What inspired you to write “The Graffiti of Pompeii”?

Ross: I teach English to ESOL adults, and we were covering natural disasters. When it came to the word volcano, I mentioned Pompeii, and many had never heard of it. I found a video, without language, that showed what might have happened that day. It sparked an interest in me, and later through my own research, I found out about the graffiti of Pompeii. I was fascinated by it.

The graffiti that was unearthed was such a relatable sampling of humanity. Some of it was just everyday kind of stuff: Antiochus hung out here with his girlfriend Cithera, some of it was mischievous and funny, some sad and philosophical, and some of it was astoundingly poetic. I marveled at the words and I wondered about the people who wrote them. The volcano erupted in the first century A.D., and those unwitting historians told us so much in such aching plain speak, sometimes with a wink. I decided to try and flesh out the stories behind the writing, using both my imagination and information I’d gleaned through extensive research.

Andreuzzi: Where did you find the information for The Graffiti of Pompeii? In your author’s note, you mention it is from the excavated discoveries from Pompeii. Is this true? Tell me, was this actual found graffiti?

Ross: Indeed. There is so much graffiti which has been unearthed, and archeologists are continuing to find more. I did extensive research not only on the graffiti, but on Roman culture in the first century A.D. so that the poems would feel real and relevant. The citizens of Rome liked their wine watered down, but their fermented mullet sauce strong and on everything! Imagine the smell, especially since they used urine on their laundry.

Andreuzzi: Are the parenthesis in the title the location and the italicized text excerpts from graffiti?

Ross: Yes, and you can see from the variety of locations how the graffiti was written all over the city. Often, there were responses to what others had written, kind of like an ancient version of social media. There is even graffiti about graffiti: Oh walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed you have not already collapsed in ruin.

Andreuzzi: Do you feel connected to any of the characters? Do any of them remind you of yourself? If so, which one(s)?

Ross: That’s an interesting question. I’d have to say none of them, or all – the village in my head! It was more important to me to get a good read on the characters behind the graffiti, and to have them fleshed out authentically, rather than leave any of myself behind. That being said, the one sounds most like me is the voice of the one standing at the window at night (x. House of Caecilius Iucundus), but I wouldn’t have thought about that until you asked me.

Andreuzzi: I can relate to the ‘village in my head’ sentiment. How long did The Graffiti of Pompeii take you to complete?

Ross: It took only about a month and a half. Once I got started, I just kept writing, before work, on work breaks, after work, on the weekends. I wanted to “lay down all the tracks” while I was in the same head space. I wrote twenty poems initially, and then added another six.

Andreuzzi: How did it feel when you were notified to be one of the finalists for the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize?

Ross: It was so exciting! The judges noted the quirky humor of the book, which was gratifying.

Don’t worry about what anyone else says or thinks about your words. Do what you love; do what inspires you. -Laura Sobbott Ross

Andreuzzi: You have other chapbooks published. Could you share a little from them?

Ross: (“My Mississippi” from Anchor & Plume Press is) collection of poems is a personal homage to a family history set in the Deep South. As with any family, there are stories, myths, and lullabies. The ones in these poems weave a complex backdrop to the flat and unforgiving dominion of the Delta. The land is both harsh and magical, a rural setting of bayous and blackberry thickets, and a vast horizon scored with distant latitudes and longitudes of pasture fences. Here, life is steeped slowly and spooned from a map of truths passed on like treasured recipe cards. There is hardship, triumph, and longing. Threading it is all like a collective vein, is the river. It’s what we know. It’s where we will return.

from the title poem “My Mississippi”:

“For every city, a river, blood
pact between land and water,
sharing what brothers would:
homestead, livestock, harvest, dreams.”

And from the poem “Full Moon” of A Tiny Hunger from YellowJacket Press:

“None of us could sleep.
Roofs and lawns opaline
between razored shadows.
Bald light unfolding pastures.
Ponds rife with surfacing fish.”

“Pale light striking–
a calibrated shaft.
Midwives swear by it,
when more babies are thrust
blue-white from the womb.
We all felt it and stirred,
cobwebbed beneath
our thread-counted sheets.”

Andreuzzi: Who are some of your favorite poets?

Ross: There are so many! It would be easier for me to say which journals I prefer: Disquieted Muses, Ruminate, Cold Mountain, Glass, and Earthshine is one in which I almost always discover a poem I want to keep forever. That being said, a couple of my favorite poets are Susan Elbe, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Andreuzzi: What style of poetry do you enjoy reading?

Ross: I love poetry that is accessible, image-shimmered, but gritty, and full of light and shadow – meaning strong emotion; I’m drawn to that.

Andreuzzi: Do you have any advice for other poets?

Ross: Don’t worry about what anyone else says or thinks about your words. Do what you love; do what inspires you. Your voice is unique and necessary.

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theater.

The post “The Graffiti of Pompeii” – An Interview with Laura Sobbott Ross appeared first on Newfound.

To read “Flower Wars” is to see all of these labels both interwoven and dismissed. Amador’s collection, though it so delicately touches the nerves of modern life and confronts the shadows that we see growing in society’s corners, is able to provide for multiple types of reader. It is light, beautiful and fully capable of staking its claim as part of the contemporary poetic renaissance.

Nico Amador’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod International Journal, MiPOesias, HOLD, Big Bell, Plenitude, Bedfellows, and APIARY Magazine, and he is an alumni of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writer’s Retreat. “Flower Wars” will be published by Newfound in 2017.

Writing in a way that risks exposure, that connects in an honest way, is a matter of integrity for me – Nico Amador

Josh King: I’d love to hear a little more about your writing history and your personal view of the writing life. Has your poetry, in your view, always been the shape that it is now, or do you see it reincarnating continuously as you mature?

Nico Amador: There’s a few different stories I could tell about my writing history but I think it’s fair to say that I probably wouldn’t have become a writer if I hadn’t first become an activist. I became politicized as student in the wake of 9/11, from seeing the ways the government was manipulating the fear of terrorism to wage a war on Iraq, to profile Muslims and immigrants, to fuel the systems that funnel young people of color into the military and into prison.

At the same time, the spoken word and underground hip hop scene was thriving and these art forms were real tools for drawing people into these issues. Open mics became a recruitment strategy for our campaigns on campus – but that meant all of us had to be ready with our own work in order to ensure enough readers for a successful event. Everyone was expected to put their name on the list. So really, I first started writing poems as a function of my political work.

But the effect of having that space within our organizing work was transformative beyond whatever initial motivations we had for it. It allowed us to build an organizing culture that wasn’t based on dogmatism – participation required a measure of personal courage, vulnerability and witness. I felt that it deepened our commitment to each other across issue and identity, as well as to our own voices. It kept me returning to the page despite how difficult and clumsy it felt at times.

Certainly, my poems have evolved since then. My curiosity has led me to other influences and I’ve moved away from a performative style to one that’s quieter, more authentic to who I am. But I still write with those earlier rooms in mind. Writing in a way that risks exposure, that connects in an honest way, is a matter of integrity for me. I hope to never embarrass myself by becoming so pretentious a writer that I couldn’t find an audience with the person I was when I was twenty.

King: So, with that in mind, do you consider yours a writing life? Do you have a schedule for your writing, or does it come out when you are politically motivated?

Amador: My work as a writer and my political work inform one another but each requires its own kind of attention. I don’t have the privilege or desire to abandon all other commitments in order to devote myself completely to the writing life, so making room for both is a constant negotiation but one that has a symbiosis to it. My political work gives me a location from which to write from – it takes me places, literally and figuratively, and those places become sites of tension and wonder and longing and relationship that is worth writing about.

At the same time, the vision and the imagination that is necessary to the success of social movements can be easily consumed by the daily work it requires. It’s a grind – conference calls and meetings and hammering out the same kinds of emails over and over again and facing down the feeling that nothing you’re doing is meeting the urgency of the crisis at hand. Writing is a way to root in a practice of creation. I try to write most mornings for at least a couple hours, and there’s a discipline to protecting that time that I think is important for anyone in the long haul of social change work. It’s more than self-care, it’s staying conditioned to an attitude of possibility, of thinking elastically.

King: For those who know a little about you and work, both in writing and in activism, your poetry seems to do great justice, and act as great contextual pieces, to the causes you have stood for. Do you find that you are under any obligation, or any innate compulsion, to write from the perspective of a queer person, or about race, especially in the political climate in which we currently live?

Amador: One impact of oppression is that our sense of choice is narrowed. It imposes circumstances in which we can only be one thing or another, it robs us of our complexity. The poem is a space in which we are permitted to be whole. I find relief in getting to approach the page, not from a sense of mandate but from whatever questions are alive inside me. In getting to ask, what is true for me today? What am I drawn to that is delightful or troubling or strange? And each day the answer is allowed to change if it wants to.

Ultimately, that kind of process does those causes or perspectives more justice, as you say, because they’re allowed to exist within a kind of internal democracy, one that has many interests and many points of intersection. That to me is queerness or racial justice at its most liberatory. It’s not just the assertion of a single issue or identity, but about lifting the restrictions that have been placed upon us so that we can live in the full range of who we are. In this current climate, which is so restrictive and so polarized, I want to keep insisting on the right to have places where we get to experience freedom, wherever we can find it.

King: Tell me a little about the creation of “Flower Wars.” How long did it take? Do you remember the moment that it first sparked into life?

Amador: The oldest poem in “Flower Wars” is at least eight years old and the newest is only a few months old. In that span of time I wrote about sixty or seventy poems in order to be able to curate the slim collection that appears in this chapbook, because I was still teaching myself how to write during that time. Many of the poems in “Flower Wars” started as writing exercises, I didn’t have a plan for them. But at a certain point, I could see which poems had lasted, and how they spoke to each other.

One day I printed everything out and sat with pages and pages of poems spread out on the floor of my office and shuffled them around until I understood the story they were trying to tell. After that, it only took about a year to fill in the gaps and finish shaping them into the final manuscript.

To be trans or gender non-conforming is, in many ways, to live at the perimeter of what is considered real. – Nico Amador

King: When reading through “Flower Wars,” I was drawn in by the rises and falls from reality into a kind of surreality that you achieved by changing the time frame, the form the poem comes in or the vantage point we have as a reader, for all of which there are numerous great examples. How much do you find the vivid and personal themes affect the way you present your work?

Amador: So much of this chapbook is shaped by how I came to an understanding of myself as trans and what that meant in relationship to the rest of my environment and the histories I’m connected to. To be trans or gender non-conforming is, in many ways, to live at the perimeter of what is considered real. So much of who we are is not given validity in culture or language or law or ways of thinking about the body.

The surreality of the poems are an expression of what it feels like to interact with the world when our place in it has to be either imagined or explained in approximation to what is more readily known and understood. Invention and metaphor become a necessity, a way of building a bridge between ourselves and what others define as reality. There is pain that comes from the isolation of that position, but also a tremendous access to magic and beauty. I wanted my words to reflect both.

King: As a mixed-race writer, and a Latino, how important is a sense of place in your work? Is it important for a poet to anchor themselves to a certain place?

Amador: Most of the poems in “Flower Wars” are sourced in some way from encounters with place, real or imagined. But the way place shows up is episodic, it’s in these acute moments that happen as part of a larger journey, there’s not a single anchor. There’s descriptions of places like Denver, Minneapolis, Nicaragua, which I’ve only passed through as a visitor, but there’s very little of Philadelphia, where I lived when I was writing those poems, or San Diego, where I’m from.

I do think that’s partly about being mixed race – I think that’s what Anzaldúa means when she describes what it is to live in the borderlands or when Rebecca Walker writes that she feels more comfortable in airports than anywhere else. That our sense of belonging isn’t attached to one place but in what’s liminal. When I’m in one place too long I get restless, I feel depressed. It’s when I’m in motion between places that feel most alive, when I’m able to see and think most clearly about what’s around me.

King: How do you think poetry fits into today’s society? Obviously, in recent months, even days, the poetry that has erupted has been loud and powerful and creative, but how, if at all, do you see the poet speaking out against society’s evils in a way that can make a difference?

Amador: In any highly repressive system, I don’t doubt that the role of the poet is necessary, though it is difficult to know exactly how or what that means. It’s something I think a lot of writers are struggling with right now, myself included.

I was just listening to a discussion about Adrianne Rich and how even in the role of the poet she saw herself as a worker. I took that to mean not only that she saw her poetry as a form of labor, but also that she didn’t view herself or her labor as superior to anyone else’s. There’s something in that attitude that I find helpful for this moment. That the role of the poet isn’t to deliver truth to the masses from on high, but to be a worker that is allied with other workers that will have to fight the battles ahead on multiple fronts.

The poem is only useful as much as it’s a tool used in relationship to other tools and strategies – the word alone will not save us. I can’t say what each of us should do or how we should act at this moment, but I think we all should be asking ourselves, Where can I push back on or withdraw my participation in institutions that are causing harm? Where do I have the ability to influence power? What am I willing to risk? What actions can I take to be in solidarity with those around me?

King: I saw elements of e.e.cummings, of Alberto Rios, and a mix of the surreal and the natural, colliding head on to express something banal and human. There are also mentions of poetry and poets, such as Pablo Neruda, peppered throughout, creating a sort of timeless world where poets share the modern world. Where do you see your fitting into the poetic tradition? Who would you list, if there is anyone, as your main inspirations?

Amador: June Jordan was the first poet that I really latched onto as an influence, first because of her politics but later because of her lyricism and her effortlessness with sound in a poem. She gave me my ear and my attention to the arrangement of words within a line. And yes, of course, Neruda, the lushness of his poems, the emotional force of his imagery. The first time I heard Eduardo Corral read it was as though he’d conjured a door and handed me the key. And I also spent several years learning from the poet Michael Loughran, who has been a wonderful teacher and whose personal influences span a very different territory – The New York School, Gerald Stern, Mary Rufle, Dean Young – to which I was somewhat resistant at first. But I’ve come to love those poets also, they’re helpful counter-weights, they keep me from becoming too lofty or too pretty.

King: Speaking of inspirations, what are the best pieces of advice you’ve received from other poets? And what advice would you pass on to someone wanting to write their first collection?

Amador: Don’t be boring. Not just in what you write but in how you observe your surroundings in between the times you sit down to write. To try to notice what others aren’t noticing or to notice them differently. That, and I also had a mentor tell me to treat the poem as a made object, a thing that can be taken apart and reconstructed and made better if it isn’t working. Taking on that attitude helped me become a more fearless editor of my own work. That’s the advice I’d pass along, to put in the time in on revision and insist on pushing the poems as far as they can go.

Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, non-fiction and drawing comics.>Josh King received his MFA from Adelphi University in New York, and now lives in the UK. He divides his time between writing fiction, non-fiction and drawing comics.

The post “Flower Wars” – An Interview with Nico Amador 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.

A thoughtful and articulate poet with a deep sense of purpose, Gomez’s interview is inspiring to all of us who believe artists can and must effect change in the world. Among many things, Gomez discusses inspiration and process, the value of an MFA, and literary heroes.

His winning chapbook, “Spine,” will be published by us this spring.

Join our mailing list and/or connect with us via social media for the announcement of the release.

The post Rodney Gomez: 2014 Anzaldúa Poetry Prize Winner appeared first on Newfound.