Deema Shehabi’s first book, Thirteen Departures from the Moon

How does your identity as a Palestinian woman, and your international background, inform or shape your poetry?

Certainly, the first impetus for writing poetry began with experiencing the foundational loss of Palestine, the way of life there told by the stories of my mother and grandmother (who were both gifted storytellers), and the loss (by geography and migration) of an extended beautiful family of aunts, uncles, and cousins, many of them courageous, vibrant, and utterly human. That sorrow—and an accumulating desire to immortalize that loss—spurred my poetry. I began searching for a language to give to that sentiment. The language that initially emerged carried a foreign sentiment with it, so it took a while to make it less strange to the American reader.

The voice that rises in poems from Thirteen Departures from the Moon took a couple of decades to develop fully. In looking back at the trajectory of my writing, I discovered that I often oscillated between strangeness and familiarity and between acceptance and rejection (and perhaps I still do). When I arrived in the US in 1988 and walked around an American college campus, I couldn’t help but feel alienated despite my tremendous excitement. Because of that alienation or exile, I turned to writing as an anchor. It provided me with respite from that gnawing feeling.

You write in poems like “At the Dome of the Rock” and “Blue” with lavish longing for your homeland and sorrow for its age-old losses and conflicts. Does your poetry continue to spring from this source, or have you turned to different sources in recent writing?

The source is constantly changing. In recent writing, I’ve turned more toward listening (I mean really listening) to people’s vernacular in speaking. This has given rise to new writing, which is more prosaic than my early work. I am currently collaborating with the poet Marilyn Hacker on a renga collection that started in January of 2009 during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. We each take a word from each other’s renga and braid it into our own renga, resulting in a kind of call and response effect that has taken place over several years now. The personae and geography may change but the renga are anchored by a kind of fragmentary narrative.

Another source that I’ve turned to in recent years is the love for the beauty of the land where I live now. Mt. Diablo and the surrounding valleys, creeks, and rolling hills are a perennial source of inspiration.

The first two books in the series, on Dunstan Thompson, an American poet writing primarily during and after World War II, and Tamura Ryuichi, a poet revered in his native Japan but underacknowledged in the Western hemisphere, showcase fresh, distinct voices, each responding to WWII in their own ways. While Tamura (the surname comes first in Japanese) attempts to speak on behalf of a distinctly Japanese post-WWII mentality as well as on behalf of poetry itself, Thompson writes taut lines intimating psychological turmoil in his early poetry and Catholic-tinged meditative verse in his later poetry.

Thompson’s wartime poems often derive their resonance from their sense of interpersonal relationships. In this excerpt from “Songs of the Soldier,” as in other early Thompson poems, the violence of war (“Death blows the boys to ribbons”) is punctuated by glimpses of a wartime homoeroticism (“That sharp, unshadowed, surgeon’s light / By which heroes are turned inside / Out, their flamboyant guts put straight / Or lopped off.”). What’s striking is how seamlessly these elements complement each other.

You waited, excited, watched the door;

They wait for you forever, not

Caring how long. No new friends wear

Away your image, nor can plot

You damage. They keep true faith, their

Loyalty is endless. If a kiss

Woke you sometime, still living, swear

Love to the dead. A war means this (24-25).

In this excerpt the individual lover collapses into the insurmountable centrality of wartime. The reversal from the interpersonal (“their / loyalty is endless”) toward the larger social context of war (“swear / love to the dead”) is what undoes the desired fulfillment of eros.

While Thompson’s relationship to WWII centers primarily on interpersonal relationships, Tamura Ryuichi’s voice is more postapocalyptic, more concerned with articulating the ontology of poetic utterance in a postwar Japan. Though Tamura’s poetry frequently utilizes the first person, his is a much more universalized “I,” one that invites the reader to inhabit the poem (“I am vertical / I cannot stay horizontal,” he writes). As such, he is, as Wayne Miller points out in the introduction to the book, closely aligned with European postwar poetry. His attempts to carve out a place for language in the face of wartime devastation are perhaps best evidenced by his poem “Four Thousand Days and Four Thousand Nights,” published roughly four thousand days and nights after Hirohito’s surrender shocked Japan. The poem, which appeared in his first book and is here translated by Takako Lento, opens:

In order for a poem to be born

we must kill

we must kill many

we shoot down, assassinate, poison many we love

Look,

from the skies of four thousand days and nights

we shot down

the silence of four thousand nights and the backlight of four thousand days

simply because we wanted the trembling tongue of a small bird (14).

These plainspoken declarative lines recall Polish poet Tadeuz Rozewicz’s assertion, speaking of an old woman leading a goat, that “whoever thinks and feels / that she is not necessary / he is guilty of genocide.” But Christopher Drake’s essay, which the editors of this volume borrowed from the introduction to his translation of Tamura’s Dead Languages, informs these lines, explaining that Tamura, who initially avoided the draft by enrolling in Meiji University, was later declared unfit for naval service (“He was too tall to fit easily into the tiny cockpit of a zero fighter”). In July 1945, he was relegated “to artillery duty on the shore of Wakasa Bay[…] where a U.S. or Russian invasion was expected (74-75).” Drake continues,

The invasion never came. Tamura, unlike many of his friends in Kagoshima who were ordered to kill themselves as kamikaze pilots, survived; but he has never gotten over the experience of being certain he would die, and he has never stepped out of earshot of the voices of those who did die (2).

Since I first learned about them in college, I have loved broadsides. I heard about them first in their early context—single printed sheets distributed around 16th-century London, say, with gossip or news or a ballad. People still did this for poems, I read, except now they were more fine-art than news rag. The idea of making such a visible place for a poem, a beautiful, portable one, appealed to me. Not that I had seen one in person, or knew where one might find such things. Far away, letterpresses in Alabama and New York were rolling out text objects, but I dreamed in North Carolina, and the Internet was young.

Is a book like a room and a page like a meadow, a spot of ground? Fifteen years later, I still want a place for poetry that’s out in the open like that. My bookshelves burst with volumes of poetry. But when I think of how I’d like to be given a poem, I think of a page, a card, a sheet: something that reveals itself immediately, and is all of one piece, and that therefore demands all my attention.

As do the poems in Tuesday; An Art Project, which I’ve described above. I asked Jennifer S. Flescher, its originator and editor, what she thinks are the differences between poetry between covers and poetry on a flat sheet. “I feel like one of the things art publishing can and should do is offer a resting place for a work—a book or a poem or an image,” she wrote. “Poems are complex and need time and space. I hope that a card gives them a little more of that.” And: “My idea, too, was that they would be more easily shared. The poem is the same, of course. But isolated. Held up. Held.”

I hold a card that holds a poem. It is cradled and it is entirely visible. Holding a book, I don’t know what its contents are. It is a repository of secrets, a structure whose rooms can be viewed only one at a time. And holding a computer or other such device? The secrets multiply, and not always according to a good algorithm. But a single page reveals the poem’s single self.




Because poems are stored in two-dimensional space, they can quickly become invisible—especially on a desk that is also home to other, nonpoetical sheets of paper, especially when one has another desk at a day job that occupies most of one’s waking hours, which I do. Maybe this is why the biggest challenge I encounter as a writer is actually sitting down to do it. It is about paying attention. If I could think of the poems as objects, I said to a friend, a visual artist, this past spring, they would take up as much room as objects do in my mind, and then I would need fewer things in my life. Fewer artifacts waiting to become art.

For finished poems, my own or otherwise, this imagined objectivity can be made physical: The medium in which the poem is presented can escort it into the world of things. Over my writing life I have tried this repeatedly. Because I am not first a visual thinker, and yet have a discerning and particular sense of what I like, rendering poems visually is always time-consuming for me. Which medium, what colors, which image, which font? The results are like poems themselves—some better than others, all linked to a particular time. If they are not perfect, they nonetheless exist.

Fringe’s Rachel Dacus caught up with Adam by Skype for a chat about poetry and publishing.

Why do you think poetry is on the outskirts of our culture?

It might be because the poets seem to write for themselves, or their tight workshop circles, rather than writing for some sort of process of discovery that can be shared with another person. It’s rare that a poet gives of himself the way I’ve seen some musicians give to their audience. I’m talking about presenting something, and letting it go in the process. It involves a humility, and the intent of the poet to share something, rather than be recognized or applauded for it. One friend suggested that poets—particular at a reading—are taking more from their audience than they’re giving, and it drains us.

What would you see changing that?

There’s an absence of community; maybe we can get back if we could also get beyond being so proud of ourselves. It’s part of human nature: if someone says to you, “this is awesome and you need to hear it,” the reaction from most people is “No, I don’t,” and maybe “Get out of my face.” But if someone approaches us with sincerity and says, “Hi. It’s so good to see you. Can I share this with you?” we’ll be far more inclined to listen—and we have to be okay if the answer is “no.” We can do this, if we can understand that the writing comes from some place outside of us, and that’s where there’s a sense of unity that is natural. Maybe our community is currently dominated by people resisting that unity, and wanting to be told that everything they do is great. It’s selfish, and can be mean and ugly. I think the community would do well to be more humble and thoughtful. It might make the community more sincere, and maybe a little more patient.

We need to think about each other. Attend events you believe in, teach books you believe in. Buy books directly from the press rather than from a distributor or Amazon. Read journals and if you like a poem, track that poet down and buy the book. Find the small presses and journals that are publishing what you want to read and support them. So many journals don’t have a readership to support them. Maybe I want to buy a journal but when it’s $15, I won’t. But I’ll always buy an issue of Poetry magazine because the price is right: $3.18 an issue (on subscription) and they also have critical articles and letters. They’re community-minded.

When did you begin writing poetry? What were your early poetic influences and how have they informed your work as a poet and a publisher/editor?

I didn’t write, or really read, poems until I had just turned 20. I came across On The Road like many kids, when I was around 16, but didn’t read it until I was 19, and moved out to Nantucket for a summer. The following semester was my last at Nassau Community College, and I signed up for a workshop. We read The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry that semester, and a little Bukowski, C.K. Williams, and Li-Young Lee. And I was digging it all, and decided to be an English major, so I took the British Romantics, some comparative lit, etc. etc.

Whitman, Emerson’s essays, William Carlos Williams, Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Byron, Milton, William Matthews, Szymborska, James Wright, Brigit Kelly and Neruda all stick with me. Each one moved me outside of myself, and that became the sensation I was looking for when I read. Transcendence became a priority of studying poetry, and it’s what I look for as a publisher.

Why did you start a poetry press?

I’d been working for a number of years with journals like Ninth Letter and Barn Owl Review. I sort of missed that process of discovering wonderful work that came with that, and I missed the poetry community. Colleen Ryor approached me from Black Lawrence Press, wanting to get into an all-poetry press. So, Cooper Dillon Books was established.

Part of our mission is to nurture the writer, which means working with writers with respect and establishing trust. Some authors seem disenchanted with a press after their book has been out for a while—whether it be in the form of long waits for responses to emails, or a lack of transparency about sales numbers and contract details—and we never want our poets to feel like we’ve ceased to care about their work.

In order to serve our community (which includes our poets, readers, as well as those submitting) it’s important that we be trustworthy, attentive, and excited about what we’re doing. That means responding to emails and submissions quickly and kindly, working with stores to get the books in people’s hands (especially when those people are students), packing up orders the day they’re made, and doing something as simple as staying behind the table at Associated Writing Programs Conference (AWP), and standing up while we’re there. I don’t even want to think about how many great books I’ve missed because the person representing the press at a bookfair didn’t look like they cared about where they were; how can I expect someone to be interested in the work we’re doing if I’m sitting down with my hands in my face, and nodding when someone says hello?

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s book

How did you come to the idea of using fantasy, mythology, and comic book characters in your poetry? Do you find one of these to be the richest source of ideas?

I started writing comic book and mythology poems back as an undergrad, I think on one hand being enamored with the old stories of my childhood (I loved all kinds of mythology and folk tale collections) and on the other wanting to write something that would be relevant to my little brother’s generation. I find the connection between classical mythology and pop culture fascinating—enough to write two books now about those connections!

For me, reading widely is really important for my writing. If I’m not reading anything interesting, I’m probably not writing anything interesting. Reading Ovid, folk tales, Grimm’s, the Bible—all that stuff is still pretty exciting for me. I also try to read a lot of fiction along with my poetry—fiction writers have often inspired my poetry—like the recent The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—I owe a lot to them indirectly for making it okay to write literary works about comic books and geek culture. I would never have written my second book, She Returns to the Floating World, if I hadn’t read Hayao Kawai’s books on Jung and Japanese fairy tales or the short story collections of Osamu Dazai and Haruki Murakami. (Everyone should read Haruki Murakami and Osamu Dazai—they are classics!) Lately I picked up some fun non-fiction books on The Manhattan Project and an annotated Hans Christian Andersen. So we’ll see where those things lead me.

I’m also surprisingly dependent on the visual arts. If I don’t visit galleries or art museums often enough, I lose some of the sparkle of visual imagery in my work. I especially like pop art, as you might imagine, and also art that combines some gothic or pop elements with mythological elements. I think the Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle is a great visual representation of the kind of thing I’d like to do with my poetry, for instance. I’ve written some poems for Jeffrey Koons and for Lichtenstein and for Rene Lynch, the artist who graciously consented to let us use her art work for the cover of She Returns to the Floating World. I’m collaborating right now with Seattle Installation Artist Amy Johnson for a project that involves images from the Snow Queen and Snow White.

When did you begin writing poetry? What were your early poetic influences?

I started writing poetry at about ten years old, when my fifth grade teacher encouraged me to start a daily writing practice (!!). As a kid, I liked T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Louis Simpson and Carl Sandburg; as a college student, I discovered Louise Glück, Margaret Atwood, H.D., Dorianne Laux, and Denise Duhamel. I feel lucky to have been a book reviewer for the past several years, because I get a chance to read a lot of books outside my comfort zone, which I think is essential to me as a writer. I want to constantly expand my ideas of what poetry can do.

What makes you want to read more poetry?

The possibility of being blown away by something new! This year, for instance, I loved Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl for its innovative approach to a classic narrative; a few years ago, I was in love with Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life for its combination of apocalyptic tone and language play.

Poetry is an interesting way to connect to other people, to other cultures, to other ways of thinking about the world. A combination of intellect and music, some halfway house between the cerebral and the celebratory. People have been writing poetry for thousands of years. You can find an ancient trash bag and it will have scraps of poetry in it.

Why do you think poetry is on the outskirts of our culture? What would you see changing that?

I think people see poetry as hard work, which is a shame, because a) it’s not always hard work, and b) any work you do is rewarded. A lot of people see poetry as “not for them,” as if it’s not being written for people of their gender, age, class—but these days there really is a kind of poetry for every kind of person, you just have to look for it. I tell my students—it’s not all dead white men, I promise!

I think a culture that doesn’t pay attention to art is a culture that is dying. I just watched the children’s animated movie The Secret of Kells, in which there is a battle over whether to preserve a book or build a wall to protect the village from the Viking invaders. Well, the village wall is knocked down, but the book survives the attack, and the person carrying the book took it to different villages all over Ireland. It’s a good reminder that books often outlast people and villages.  (And probably a good argument for physical books over e-books.) I for one lament the end of illuminated texts. I’m pro-technology, but also there is a kind of stubborn practical (possibly apocalyptic) mindset that says: books based in paper and ink still work when the power goes out, when the computer or gadget becomes outdated, insert apocalyptic scenario here.

What kinds of things can only be said, or subjects treated, in poetry, and not in prose?

I don’t think any subject is off limits for poets.  Poetry, more than prose, allows the writer to engage in a little magic, a little alchemy: an image becomes a rumination, a joke becomes a comment on mortality.

Are you working on a new book?

Yes, currently I’m working on The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, about growing up in the seventies in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while my father worked as a consultant at the government facility at Oak Ridge National Labs. There were actually men-in-black lurking around our house, asking our neighbors questions about my father, and a secret safe in the house that houses—presumably—government secrets. There’s a lot about the beauty of Tennessee, a little about class—the weirdness of Oak Ridge would be that a family full of barefoot children in a falling-down shack and several members in jail living next door to a family composed of nuclear physicists from Denmark—and as a child you’re only dimly aware of what separates these neighbors, the ones full of stories of stabbings and shootings and holding up liquor stores, the others with stories about developing the bomb.

How long did you work on your new book? What was your process of getting feedback?

I actually started this manuscript back in 2006, when I was still in my MFA program at Pacific—so Pattiann Rogers got to take a look at it during my thesis quarter (she actually researched Japanese anime movies so she could make better comments—talk about dedication in your mentors!) It was inspired by Miyazaki’s movies—which I’ve been in love with since I was ten—and by Japanese religious scholar Hayao Kawai, The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan, who clued me in to the recurring characters I’d been seeing in Japanese literature and anime. The idea of the transforming/disappearing woman, the sister/savior, the floating world—I’ve had the manuscript mostly finished since two years ago, when I started working on a new book.

How does the concept of this book enlarge on, or depart from, your previous book?

There are some similar themes—empowered female characters in pop culture, in this case anime and manga—and some different themes. Marriage plays a bigger role in this book, as well as the difficulties of women and the body, the line between the subconscious and conscious worlds. Where Becoming the Villainess looked at the journey from victim to villainess, the characters in She Returns to the Floating World are on a different trajectory—there are transformations, disappearances, a more spiritual focus, dare I say, more romance, more regret.

Do you think inspiration plays the major role in writing or revising a poem?

Absolutely. For me, there is no poem without that moment of inspiration, though the revision process is definitely work, careful, painstaking work (with occasional moments of revision—when I decide to change the form of a poem, or add a section, or take out a huge chunk of it). If I try to write a poem without that spark, it just comes out flat. But sometimes I’ll have the inspiration and just write down a sentence or an image or idea for a poem—and come back to it months later to do the real work. I’ll have false starts, too.

Do you regularly share your work with someone, or with a workshop or group?

I do have a group I’ve been working with on and off for about eight years. They are a wonderful group of writers, excellent readers, and I am very grateful for them. Often I learn more from reading their poems than I do from the actual workshopping of my own poem. Sometimes I’ll read a poem to my husband, or send something to my parents or my little brother. They’re all pretty good readers as well.

Thank you, Jeannine, for insights into your fascinating process of creating some magical work. I, too, aspire to become a villainess!

Projection

As a young child I learned the shape of our world from a map pulled down out of its cocoon above the chalkboard. It was a rainbow burst of color, each country with its own. This map also outlined each US state. As a six year old, this did not strike me as unbalanced, as if worldwide my little state of Ohio was viewed on par with China. They were both purple. I did not wonder why our states were delineated and China’s provinces were not. Should I have? I didn’t know China had provinces until college. Do Hunanese children learn about Ohio?

For years I trusted this map as though early in our stint on Earth the universe handed it down to all humans. Just, you know, so we wouldn’t get too lost. At some point – a point in which I felt it fit to question everything – I questioned this map and others like it. Why is Australia always at the bottom? Why is the Atlantic Ocean always in the middle? Is Greenland really that big? Earlier, if shopping for a map, I might have reached for what I knew: the “right” map – with the US in the West, Antarctica stretched lean across the bottom, and the corners neat and square.

There were more “wrong” maps than I would have believed. Many have tried to give the Earth – and its people – due representation on paper. The Peters Projection, with its slender, area-accurate continents. The Buckminster Fuller, with its angular oceans and reunited lands. The Pacific-centered map, with the intimidating ocean dominating the page, reminding us of our size and weakness. The minute islands and atolls, sprayed across the Pacific as if in some great tectonic sneeze, pop with new importance to the eye. There are people out there.

Legend

Everybody needs a map. Each map is drawn with a specific audience in mind, be it the entire Western Hemisphere or the hikers of Wayne National Forest. Each map then has its own priorities; all legends are unique. As mapmakers, we determine how a place will be read. We write the bike lanes or the lines of elevation. We decide if the map will show the public restrooms, or if it will keep that a secret.

But what if you’re not on anybody’s map? Where are you? To be awarded “city-status” in Ohio, a town must have 5,000 people or more. Most everything else is a village. But no one is guaranteed a dot on the map. If you’re really small, you may just get shaken off to clean up the clutter. Drive down an old state route at 55+ mph and you’ll find yourself speeding through a collection of buildings – one with holiday decorations in the windows, one with a shed in need of a paint job, one with a daisy sign advertising the price of cigarettes. Your passenger says, “Blink and you’d miss that one.” But it’s not even there.

If you drew a map that includes you, right now, what would be on it? Roads and rivers, forests and mountains, your church and Dairy Queen? Do you label intersections or landmarks? Think bigger. Do you live in Israel or Palestine? India or Pakistan? Tomorrow you will be in Kosovo; yesterday you were in Zaire. Nobody’s map is everybody’s map.

Scale

The ever-tired and never-funny line goes, “That far? But they’re so close together on the map!” Every map lies just a little bit…and they’re all great liars. They are particularly slippery when it comes to time and distance. My tiny heart-shaped Ohio is puny on a map of the entire United States. Friends from Texas and Florida laugh at its size and estimate that they could drive up through it in an hour. Then I laugh and tell them that from the Ohio River to Lake Erie is four hours at least. You’re on a lake? they answer.

This spread shows two pages from Ce N’est Pas Le Monde, a comic produced by Denis Wood and John Krygier to advance their argument that maps can be understood semiotically as collections of propositions of the form "This is there." The answer to the question, on the next page, is obvious—"They're maps!" Image courtesy of Denis Wood.

Let’s start with a something that’s been nagging me lately. What is a map, anyway? What would you say a map is?

I usually answer that question by pointing to the nearest obvious map! I don’t define maps. A map points to the world. It points outside of itself to the world, and then it points to something else—the subject of the map, and it says that that subject is linked to that place in the world that it’s pointing to. That linkage carries juridical, economic, and other kinds of authority. The map links things to places, so that [through maps] you become linked to a school, to a tax code, to a set of laws that prohibit this or permit that at different ages, you become linked to a system of conscripting for the army, et cetera.

You could record all this information in tabular form, obviously. Prior to the 15th century, in fact, much of this information was kept that way. It’s kept that way as we move into the 16th and 17th centuries as well, but increasingly it takes map form.

I’ve argued that it takes map form because what we know as the modern state is taking shape, and the modern state has uses to make of the map that it doesn’t have to make of other forms of tabulation. Primarily, that is that the map gets wrapped up in the geo-body of the state.

That’s something you discuss in Rethinking the Power of Maps, the way the fact that the modern nation-state has specific borders makes it particularly suited to being mapped, and how the mapped outlines of states become icons for state power. In addition to the iconic nature of national maps, what is it about the map as a medium that makes it so compelling? Why this shift from tabular data records to maps?

Well, the other side of it is you’ve moved to another medium. You’ve moved to a medium that is coterminous with painting. [Maps are] a flat surface, you move lines around. Painting and drawing, mapmaking, other forms of graphics, printmaking—these constitute a whole slither of technologies that inevitably drift from one onto the other. So painting drips onto mapmaking, and drawing drips onto mapmaking, and mapmaking drips onto painting. . . . Needless to say, all the things that you bring from painting are going to find themselves in some way on a map.

So the map becomes really complicated. On the one hand, it’s got this ability to fall into a set of tabulations of latitudes and longitudes, and on the other hand it’s got this ability to fall into the world of fine art painting. It slips and slides between them like somebody skating with his shoes on a piece of black ice.

So much of your work over the past twenty years has been as a theorist and critic of maps, not a mapmaker. It’s interesting to me that, with the release of Everything Sings, you are coming to be known, primarily, as a cartographer!

Which is totally bizarre! Since I don’t even think about myself, or haven’t thought about myself until very recently, as someone who really made maps. I talked about maps, I looked at maps, I caressed maps. But I never thought about myself as much of a mapmaker. It’s been a startling change . . .

I woke up—in fact, it was just five or six weeks ago. I woke up and I went to the bathroom. And I’m coming back from the bathroom and about ready to get into bed, and I had this thought. I said: “You’re a cartographer! You’re a mapmaker!” And I just laughed and laughed as I got into bed. I mean, it was the funniest thing in the world. That me, who has spent all of this time lambasting cartographers and mapmakers, is now being accepted and understood in some bizarre way as a mapmaker.

But, in fact, I’ve made maps since I was ten. Reading The Hobbit, and reading The Lord of the Rings. And maybe even more important, not Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, but . . . it’s not Katy the snowplow, but somebody the snowplow. In that book the map element is that there’s a snowstorm in the town. The snow comes, and it’s white. And this snowplow now has to dig out all the streets so that the fire engine can go, and the postman can go, and so forth and so on. As the day goes by, the snowplow draws on these pages a map of the city. That really excited me as a child.

This map shows the underground infrastructure of Boylan Heights, a neighborhood in Raleigh, N.C., including water, sewer, and gas lines. The map appears in the original neighborhood atlas and in the newly released Everything Sings by Denis Wood, from Siglio Press.

But there’s a big difference between the kind of imaginative sketch maps you talk about making as a kid and professional cartography. How did you get started making the maps in Everything Sings?

So when my students start making maps in 1975, at the school of design, I’m certainly not thinking of them making maps in, let’s say, a very professional kind of way. My first interest was: what the hell am I going to do with these students for three hours a day? Four hours a day in the beginning, for three days a week. . . .

The typical studio instructor sets them a project—design a building or something—and then disappears. I had never heard of a studio. I had no idea what kind of a classroom situation it was. I didn’t know anything about projects when I started this thing. I was a geographer and I knew something about thinking about the land. I knew landscape architects wanted to shape the land, so I thought: wouldn’t it be useful if they knew the land, and could attend to the land in some rich kind of a way? So I thought, why don’t we just go out and map neighborhoods? Like, my neighborhood?

So we started mapping with two motivations: I wanted the students to see, and I wanted some way of interacting with them usefully in the studio context. As I write in the introduction to Everything Sings, one of the key problems was to get the streets off the map. Landscape architects relate to subdivision design as a street-drawing exercise. They look at the environment in terms of streets. It’s a depressing reality, but I think it’s undeniably true. And consequently, it gets hard for them to see what’s going on free of the framework of the streets. So for me, an underlying goal became getting them to think about the land in a way that didn’t depend on the streets as a form-giver and as a meaning-maker.

Of course, one of the things I wanted to do was to drive them into other senses than the visual. I wanted them to think about what it felt like to walk the land. I wanted them to think about the smell, how they reacted and dealt with the smell. The sounds. The taste was always hard—I never really knew how to deal with the taste. But we did have people licking the environment . . . and of course, that turns out to be very complicated.

So your students were out making maps of neighborhoods all over Raleigh. When and how did you come to the idea to focus in on Boylan Heights and make an atlas?

When we came to the 1981 studio class, I was determined to make an atlas this time, not just to do a bunch of maps. We wanted to compile the maps into an artifact that we could hand out to the residents of Boylan Heights. Because the atlas was going to be reproduced on the cheap, and that meant Xeroxing it, it was going to have to be black and white (this was 1981), and that was a limitation that I found extremely powerful.

Out of that, we began the experiment that led to the streetlight map. That was the first map where we really managed to get the streets off the map entirely, and to evoke in some kind of graphic way the phenomenon that we were dealing with, and to make a really cool map, and to make a good page spread. It was a big double-page spread originally, it’s all black. You have a copy of the original atlas, don’t you?

Yeah, it’s gorgeous!

[pointing] It’s got the one streetlight over here, and we’ve got other streetlights running across. That was a great page, and that was really exciting to make, and we were really excited. And then we realized that we could actually make some pages. That’s what set the whole thing in motion.

After several years of work back in the 1980s y’all had a half-finished set of page layouts, but Everything Sings is a whole different book—it’s got some new maps, different layouts, and new text. You were telling me how the Boylan Heights atlas project slowly died out. Your appearance on This American Life in 1998 was what really brought it back to life.

The maps were sitting in a box in my closet, and then Ira Glass calls. Actually, this producer calls from WBEZ. I’d never heard of Ira Glass, I’d never heard of This American Life, I’d never heard of WBEZ. They wanted to talk to me, just on background, about maps.

I went to the [WUNC-FM] studio in Chapel Hill. We walked in and they were like “Yeah, okay. Sure. Who do you want to talk with . . . . Ira Glass?! Oh! Well come with me, we’re going to set you up in our best studio!” It was a big deal. Ira Glass was a name already. This was in 1998, and he was already a name. We do the interview, and I do my usual talk about maps. At the end of the hour he says, “So, do you make maps yourself?” I say no, not really, I’m a map critic . . . but I have been working on this atlas of my neighborhood for the past twenty years. And he says, “Wait—what? Okay, we need to book another hour here in the studio.”

And since then it’s been this careening road to publication. The book was just nominated for the essay prize that the University of Iowa grants, and I’ll be reading at the LA Times Festival of Books in late April or early May. This has all of a sudden gotten some bizarre traction, which I don’t know what to make of.

Now that Everything Sings is starting to get traction, what’s next for you? What other projects of yours should we know about?

John Krygier and I have just finished the second edition of our intro textbook Making Maps. This time it really is almost entirely graphic. It even opens with a sort of graphic novel. And it jettisons even more of the old cartography text crap that was really in there solely to buttress cartography’s claim to being a “university subject” (rather than the craft it is). That comes out this spring. It’s going to be interesting to see how well it’s received.

Beyond that I’ve got a couple of things in hand. The first is a project with John Fels on map signs, sort of exploring the implications of the semiologist’s claim that the relationship between the signified and signifier is arbitrary. At this point it’s purely exploratory. We have no idea where it’s going. The second is a series of papers trying to keep the critical project focused on what it is that has made maps what they are in the world today, that is, their ability to define, underwrite, and project the authority of the state and state power.

I guess I’m seeing this dispersion of map criticism as yet another way of, as it were, protecting the map’s core mission. I could be wrong. All these new developments could signal an actual dispersion of map energy, one perhaps capable of defusing the map’s power. That would be spectacular. But so much of it barely rises to the level of frou-frou that I have my doubts.

Denis Wood online:
http://www.deniswood.net/home.htm

Everything Sings at Siglio Press:
http://www.sigliopress.com/books/atlas.htm

Ce N’est Pas Le Monde (PDF):
makingmaps.owu.edu/this_is_not_krygier_wood.pdf

Rethinking the Power of Maps:
http://www.guilford.com/cgi-bin/cartscript.cgi?page=pr/wood.htm&dir=geo/tech&cart_id=36799.5999

Katy and the Big Snow, by Virginia Lee Burton:
http://www.hmhbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=582582

Locations written by staff and former contributors are rose-colored, while reader contributions are marked in turquoise. Use the controls in the upper left corner to zoom in and out, and click on markers to read or see the Fringe armada’s art.

Feeling inspired to write a little something about a location meaningful to you? Send your responses to FringeEditors@gmail.com before May 31, 2011, and we’ll add them to the map.

View Fringe’s Places of Great Importance in a larger map

Peter Mountford contains multitudes: he’s a novelist who’s also worked in finance. For his debut book, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism

Fiction writer Reese Okyong Kwon and Mountford first got to know each other as fellow waiters at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2009; more recently, they talked about escapism, moral maps, overseas love, and literary heroes.

In A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, your American main character, Gabriel, travels to a place that’s foreign in a variety of ways: geographically, professionally, morally. Do you think that the fact that he’s abroad by himself makes it harder for him to hold onto his moral map?

I hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, but I think that yes, being abroad loosens Gabriel’s connection to his moral center. I’ve found that one of the experiences of traveling to a very foreign country on work is that your identity can get a bit blurry, because you become anonymous. To the staff at the hotel, you’re that guy in room 8774. That’s it. The things that define you at home, not just your friends and family, but your home, your objects, the patterns that you have arranged for your life, once you’re separated from all that, you can begin to feel a bit ghostly and reckless. Las Vegas is founded on that feeling.

So, I don’t think Gabriel would have done what he does if he were in the United States at the time. I think he’d be scared to do it, for one thing, scared of getting arrested, but I also think that, by being more in touch with his identity, he would have some insurmountable misgivings.

Gabriel’s an engagingly complicated character, one who extends the rich tradition of literary protagonists who cause more harm than they intend. How did he come to you—how did you come up with him?

I’m hesitant to admit that he’s drawn somewhat from my life considering some of the dubious decisions he makes. Really, he’s a bit of me, a bit of some friends, a bit invented; that was how he started: ingredients in a pot. But, you know, eventually the ingredients sort of meld into something else, something different from the sum of the parts.

In terms of the mayhem that he causes, I had initially, rather blandly, envisioned him having a moment of clarity in the middle of the book, after which he’d enact a scheme to stick it to the hedge fund that had hired him. But then I remembered that people only behave that way in Hollywood movies.

Or in our fantasies.

Right. So I tried to think about what I would do in his position, if I were in my mid-twenties, suddenly making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for job that involves traveling the globe in style, studying countries and writing about them. Moral misgivings aside, I can’t see how I’d have the courage to quit (at least not until I had amassed a nice pile of money), let alone sabotage the hedge fund that had hired me.

Yeah, sometimes I wonder if people ever really change. And yet Gabriel seems to be surrounded by strong, high-minded women who become increasingly frustrated by his choices. Do you think they’re justified in their disappointment, or are their expectations unrealistic?

Oh yes, they’re justified. That said, they’re hardly saints themselves. People seem inclined to think his girlfriend Lenka is this heroic character, because she’s not greedy, per se, but really they’re not nearly so different. His goal, ostensibly, is money, and hers is the success of this politician Evo Morales, but in the end they’re both the same animal, or at least they’re playing the same game in the same way. They’re each hardening and learning how to play at the top of their game.

Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Jordá works in site-specific installations, drawings, and performances, and has exhibited throughout the world. Some of her work’s common themes include obscure anatomy, the evolution of a second skin, and the body as an alternate artifact. Her most recent exhibition at the Modified Arts Gallery in Phoenix, Arizona was entitled Cartograms of Memory. As she describes it, Cartograms is “using the experience of ‘displacement’ as a point of departure, and the vocabulary of mapping as the mode of expression.” Recently, (de)Classified Editor Heather Falconer chatted with Jordá about her work, inspiration, and the function of maps in modern life.

How did the idea of cartography come to you as a basis from which to create? Is there a story behind the map that began your maps?

It’s been in and out of my work for the last few years. I used to work in 2-Dimension, then performances, and now I’m going back and forth between 2-D and installations. Maps have always been around me – my mother worked for an airline and she would come home with piles and piles of maps of places we were going to travel. Visually, aesthetically, they were really exciting: looking at the lines and composition. When I traveled with my parents, the first stop would always be a museum – an art museum, museum of natural history – and these places always had maps.

Also, I grew up watching my grandmother, who was a seamstress. I’d watch her make patterns on paper with abstract lines and see them turn into a dress or blouse. It made me think about mapping the body – how these pieces of paper fit together to make 3-D maps of the body, how the lines graphed the body onto a 2-D plane, how our bodies relate to space and travel, and how we in turn become the line makers in a larger geographical area. I like zooming in and out in a micro–macro way.

Maps are also another language – it’s a universal language, but very specific. You need to learn the language in order to interpret a map.

How would explain your approach? Why is cartography an important focus for you?

I use maps and mapping as I would another language and as a powerful tool for communication. Almost everyone can relate to maps. A map is more than just a two-dimensional representation of a space. It is an extension of personal space, a record of visible and invisible paths that shift and change according to our perceptions. Maps can be simply ordinary tracings of land or complex depictions of personal experience. I have been exploring both the more traditional maps and the more abstract ‘personal maps’ that graph a dynamic combination of physical, emotional, and imaginary space – a memory space.

My most recent exhibition, Cartograms of Memory, features a large-scale abstract installation as well as a collection of smaller embroidered maps that are fictional combinations, extractions, and fragments of land, water, and memory places. Together they create a story of remembrance.

How do the materials you use inform the finished work? What is the significance of felt?

I have been using industrial woolen felt as my medium for various reasons: its seductive and tactile qualities, the historical connection to migration (e.g. its use in making tents for the nomadic lifestyle), and the association with ‘comfort and safety’ offered by felt as a soft layer of protection.

As a literary journal, Fringe focuses on the written word and the ways those words can be manipulated to evoke certain thoughts and emotions in the reader. Sometimes this is accomplished through syntax, sometime arrangement on the page. It seems that many experimental writers are playing with words and form to tap their readers in new ways. What is the artist-viewer dialectic for you? Do you create with the end user in mind?

I can’t make work just for the user; there has to be a personal connection to the work for me. I often wonder when making work if the user will get what I say; sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. I try to make work that toys with an idea, but I’m also an object maker. I’m conscious of the audience – but there are various levels to the experience. My work starts with the personal, but also relates to an immediate, larger context, like migration and finding placement in the world. I live in Arizona, a state with a lot of mobility – the snowbirds come down in the winter and leave in the summer, so there is a large shift in population.

Also politically — with all the immigration changes in the last year and the economy – I’m conscious of how that relates to the larger picture in the US. People are moving back into their family homes, for example. It’s interesting to me how people in the US seem to move every five years, versus the people I know in Spain and Venezuela who stay in their homes for life. It’s rare to find people in the US who stay in one place for extended periods of time.

You mentioned politics and immigration. Has the Arizona legislation affected your work at all?

Not me personally because I’m a citizen, but I have watched how it has affected people around me. The level of fear has grown. I watched twenty houses go empty and up for sale quickly because people are afraid, and workers on the farms have been up and leaving.

Can someone viewing and experiencing your installations learn about you? And do you hope that they might learn something about themselves through the experience? Is there a lesson that you hope a viewer walks away having learned?

I think indifference is probably the worst reaction – if they walk in and learn something about me and my travels, if they see something that reminds them of something they have done or places they’ve been, that’s great. If they are indifferent then it’s sad.  It’s not 100% necessary for them to learn about where I’ve lived and where I’ve visited. I want them to walk away with a sense of their own journeys and how they travel and how they look at their own surroundings – even their daily route to the supermarket. I hope that they become more in touch with their own trajectory. People will see what they want to see…some of my maps are based on specific places, like Maricopa County. It is fun to see if people can identify them. Just that they can identify the maps is interesting, and that they tried.

So, then, what role do you feel maps play in modern life? What is their significance?

Perhaps we need these maps as a way to piece together our own story?

Maps are seductive to me; they evoke a sense of adventure, and provide a way of journaling my experiences – chronicling my movement and memory. These are fundamental responses for me, having very little to do with modernity, per se.

Like mapping food: my memory is so distinctly connected to the scents and tastes. I remember the place I had the best plum, the best coffee… I’ve compiled a crazy map of food in my memory. I’ve never tried to map this, but I have a friend that made a map of hand-painted food signs throughout the US: hotdogs, hamburgers, tacos… I sometimes wonder what my food map would look like. It would become an experiential map, rather than one that provides direction or information.

I wonder, also, if mapping has become a fashion word. I think people use the term more loosely now, because we are looking for ways to connect with places and memories, and other people’s memories, and it’s a way to weave together a story through these little vignettes. We are definitely getting more abstract, but then you look at early maps of, say, what America looked like. These were based on a wild guess. Science has almost perfected clarity and now we have satellites and Google Maps, all the technology to take away the guessing. Now we are starting to go back to making things not clear and making places and memories more abstract.

Have you noticed that people, especially in rural places, sometimes give directions based on what used to be there, but is no longer? Like “take a right where the old sign used to be.” Those kinds of experiences are very interesting to me.  People will happily draw a map for you, but there is a large level of distortion in personal maps that is interesting and curious – that’s where artists working with maps are tapping in. Rather than using exact measurements like kilometers, they are more focused on the experiences embedded in these lines that are sometimes silent and sometimes screaming.

You’re a collector of maps yourself. What sort of maps are these and how long have you kept them?

At a very early age – about 9 – I started keeping the maps from my travels, but when I moved from Venezuela to the US I had to throw many of them away. My stack of maps includes everything from road maps to contour maps – whatever my mom got at work, what was discarded, she would bring home – aeronautical maps, you name it. Friends save me their geological maps; I save urban planning maps in books. Subway maps fascinate me because besides having to be really efficient, they are very abstracted, and graphically exciting.

And sewing patterns, I consider those maps too. I worked in a fabric shop for a while and would take home discarded patterns. I often used them in my 2-D works and overlapped them to make fictional maps. They’re inspiring, and mysterious in some ways. When I work with them, I feel like an anthropologist, but rather than convey clear information I am trying to mix it up.

I wouldn’t say that I have a collection of rare maps; most of my collection is relatively common. But together they tell a ‘rare’ story.

What do you do with the maps that you collect? Are they mostly for inspiration, or do they serve as art in the same way your pieces serve people visiting your installations?

In my most recent exhibit, Cartograms of Memory, I use maps of places I have lived in or have traveled through to build abstract and distorted sculptural cartograms that speak of mobility, migration, displacement, and in the end, the finding of new ‘placement.’ The large forms are cut out of felt, then pieced together by sewing. A portion of this installation forms a suspended mesh of abstracted maps, representing the ‘displacement,’ while the opposite end rests grounded on the floor like a topographical map, referencing the sense of ‘placement.’ They are connected by a mid-section that acts as a transition between them, the space between chaos and order, emotional and rational, displacement and placement.

I’ve read that your “artwork serves as an exploratory map of the artist’s experience of migration and physical displacement.” Are your installations mostly about place, or are you interested in the mapping of the human body and its changes as a result of migration?

A combination of both. ‘Place’ and ‘space’ are closely linked for me.  In my work I often explore the relationship between space and body, (personal space, intimate space, mind space, language space) and how it is perceived culturally. My recent works have expanded this relationship by combining the different possibilities of space/place, and overlapping them into complex layered pieces. They have provided me with a framework in which to explore my own changes as a result of migration, and my own sense of placement.

I love that you have a reference to Italo Calvino in your work (Calvino’s Imaginary Islands). Has he had any influence on your mapping? I assume it’s not coincidental that he has “mapped” with words.

I love Calvino’s writings. I have been particularly inspired by his book Invisible Cities, where he describes a series of places that are fictional and often given the personalities of women. He has had some influence in how I think about the character of an imaginary place. For example, in my recent piece Calvino’s Imaginary Islands, an archipelago of little felt islands crawl up a wall, each with its own distinct personality – I leave the viewer to imagine the life of each island.

Not to put you TOO much on the spot, what are your thoughts on the work of Edward Tufte? Do you see a place for Tufte’s minimalist approach in the art world, or would you relegate it more to the world of information design?

Hmmm. I first came across Tufte’s work in his Envisioning Information book and as compelled as I am by his approach, my work tends to invert and distort information rather than clarify it, as he does.

I don’t know about his place in the art world. I think the lines are really blurred nowadays. The boundaries between art, product design, architecture, etc., are very blurry. You’ve got sculptors doing product design, architects doing installations – people are crossing borders. Because Tufte’s trying to clarify information, maybe he’d go in the latter group – into information design – since he’s more focused on increasing the function of visual materials. Though, having said that, some of the work he has done is really beautiful. I would hang it on the wall and enjoy it aesthetically. But does that make it art because we hang it on a wall? I keep my maps in a box!

I suppose we’re opposites – he tries to make maps really clean and concise, but I’m more interested in making them more abstract. He wants to make a map readable, but I’m not so interested in making it that way. I prefer to make it more abstract. Besides, how do you visually map memory? It’s going to look like a bunch of lines and textures, who knows? I struggle with a definition of what mapping memory means. We try to define it, but our definition only works for us – it could be totally irrelevant to someone else.

A good example was my Cartograms of Memory piece, where I made a giant web of lines that derived from cartograms of places I have lived in. The result was very abstract and its meaning was probably more relevant to me than to my audience. Something funny happened when people viewed this giant floating mass of maps – most could see something that resembled a collection of dinosaur bones, much like a specimen hanging in a museum of natural history. After hearing numerous comments similar to this, my assistant started calling it Mapasaurus. The name stuck, and now I endearingly refer to it as such.

When Austin Kleon grabbed a newspaper and a Sharpie one dull day in Cleveland, he had no idea that his blackout poetry would soon become an Internet phenomenon. Three years later, his Newspaper Blackout became the sixth best-selling poetry book of 2010. Now it’s [almost] all fun and games for this “writer who draws.”

Recently, Fiction Editor David Duhr met Kleon and his wife Meghan at an Austin watering hole, where they chatted about cutups, mashups, the avant-garde, and how some art—like the Ramones—is deceptively simple.

So, the #6 best-selling poetry book of 2010.

(Laughs) I think that it doesn’t take a lot to get on the poetry bestseller list.

Good point.

I have friends in publishing that are like, “If you’re on any list, be thrilled.” And I am. But it’s a relative thing. Poetry sales are so relatively low.

How did you get started with blackout poetry?

I was about 22, right out of undergrad, and I was trying to be a short story writer. Short stories are what they teach you to write in college—

Sometimes the only thing they teach you to write.

Right. But when I got out of school I didn’t have an audience anymore.

In the meantime I was kind of rediscovering my love of drawing and we happened to have this surplus of newspapers lying around the apartment. So one day I just picked up one of the markers I draw with and started playing.

At the same time I was discovering blogging.

And basically they were a lark and I only did like a dozen of them and I quit for a year, and what happened was a few people on the internet found them and reblogged them and all the sudden I thought, “Oh shit, I should probably do some more of these.”

So it didn’t wow you at first.

At first I thought it was just a total side thing, just a writing exercise. It wasn’t until we moved down here [Austin] at the end of 2007 when everything blew up.

How did that happen?

Jason Kottke is probably who I owe my whole career to. He picked them up, and he just has such an insane fan base that he gets so many eyeballs on you. An NPR Morning Edition producer saw the poems, and she called me and said “We want to do a 20-second segment—how do you pronounce your name?” (Laughs) Then the next morning, we’re driving to work and we hear it on NPR, which was crazy. After that I heard from my editor at HarperCollins.

I thought we’d have an intro about the history of the technique, and then the meat of the book will be the poems, and the end will be an invitation for people to try their own.

That’s one of the things I really like here, your “Anybody can do this” mentality.

My favorite artists, that’s just the way they operate. They’re not like magicians, they’re not afraid to show their tricks. The bottom line is everyone can do it, but not everyone can do it well. I’ve been asked before, “Are you worried about someone being better than you?” Well, you know, if someone’s done like 1,000 blackout poems, if someone wants to put that much time into it to get that good at it, please be my guest.

Earlier this year [2010] Tumblr released this feature where you can submit posts. So suddenly people could upload their own poem, and I could go through and say “This one’s good, let’s publish this one.” So right before the book release we started this Tumblr that’s just taken off like crazy.

What makes a good one?

They have to be readable. You still have to operate on the rules of how people read. So for instance it’s really important that people can read them left to right, top to bottom, and that there’s a flow. If you want to use a word that’s out of place, one of the tricks I use is to create these little rivers between words, and that’s something I stole from Tom Phillips, the guy who did Humument.

What Tom Phillips does is fine art. It’s really beautiful and colorful, and there’s obviously a painter’s hand in it, so I always think of Humument as like Sergeant Pepper’s—people listen to Sergeant Pepper’s and they’re like “Oh my god this is amazing, how can anyone do this?” I always think of newspaper blackouts as the Ramones. You hear the Ramones and want to start a band. But the Ramones are deceptively simple. They still wrote brilliant songs, and not everyone can be them.

It’s tricky though because you have these notions of what makes a poem “good.” It’s really dependent on media, because on the Internet what’s good is something that’s very immediate and very visual. The poems that go over well on the Internet are probably only 10-20 words long.

You only use the New York Times, right?

That’s the paper we’ve always subscribed to. But on a practical level, the typography on the Times is really good, it’s got that classic look and there’s a lot of fucking words in it. Everyone kinda laughs when I say that, but it’s hard nowadays to find a newspaper that has a ton of words.

And the Times might be one of the last to go away.

That’s the other thing. If you’re thinking about future-proofing it, that’s the one that’ll probably be the last to go.

Otherwise I think all the rules of poetry apply. Images. I always think of that line in “A Supermarket in California” when Ginsberg says, “Shopping for images.” You’re looking for that image that puts something in someone’s mind. That appeals to me because I’m a visual artist.

But despite the form, there’s not really any abstract poetry here.

I always respond to the more narrative kind. What’s fun for me is taking this avant-garde technique and trying to make something fairly traditional out of it. Something you can send your grandma. Or your mom, maybe. Maybe not your grandma.

Meghan, we learn in the afterword that you found a narrative in here where Austin hadn’t seen one before.

(Meghan) Once he was done with the bulk of the poems he printed them out, four to a standard sheet of paper. They were almost like playing cards, but he was so intensely involved in the creation of the poems that he couldn’t really come up with an order to put them in.

(Austin) Because it wasn’t a collection. I wanted everything in the book to be new.

(Meghan) And I think that was hard for you, because you were so used to having immediate feedback.

Right, “This one’s good, this one …”

Yeah, you can kinda tell what’s really resonating with people. It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier to just do a collection.

I like that you said they were playing cards, Meg, because I really did think of that as card-sorting. We have these really funny pictures of us with all of these poems spread out all over the office.

When we were finishing up the book we’d just moved into our new house, so we finally had a space where we could—

(Meghan) And we didn’t have any furniture yet—

(Austin) The room was just blackout poems everywhere. It was wild. That was a wild end of the year.

But there are definitely themes. You start with childhood and memory, then love and sex, a bit of politics and religion.

I wanted it to—

Some UFOs.

(Laughs) Once Meghan picked up on that, I saw it too. It’s really like making an album and trying to come up with the words. I’ve heard it said that it’s really hard to escape doing a coming-of-age book, just because you’ve got all this stuff up until that point. I think it’s a coming-of-age book.

It was weird to go from being someone who published everything online and got instant gratification from readers to all of a sudden you’ve got this book, this object, and it’s just out there and you have no idea what’s going on with it.

How do the poems translate to the e format?

There was an article in the Times today about how the displays are getting better for the e-readers, and they’re finally at a point where I think they can handle this.

So you read the article, you didn’t black it out?

(Laughs) Yeah, I don’t always black them out. But I don’t own the rights to the book, HarperCollins does, so they have to decide whether they’re going to publish it or not as an ebook. But I’d love to see it as an ebook.

If presented with the original articles, do you think you could discern which poem each one led to?

Probably not, because some of them aren’t even an actual article. The Times is really great because two columns is the width of a paperback, and the width of a blog column, so it worked really well. So sometimes I would use one column from one article and one column from another.

Do you make copies of the articles first?

No. I probably should.

(M) There would be less cursing.

(A) Definitely less cursing.

That’s what I was wondering, what happens if there’s an error? The poem’s just out the window?

It just sucks.

There are no drafts?

There aren’t any drafts. But I don’t black everything out right away. I make boxes around words, I’ll put little dots next to words. I won’t do the full blacking out until I’m ready to go.

So you don’t just start blacking out and then stop when a word interests you. You map it out beforehand.

I basically figure out the canvas first. This is where the poem is going to happen and then I just start going around looking for combinations.

Do you hang onto the originals? As souvenirs?

There’s been interest in the originals. I’ve been really loath to sell them, because they’re going to deteriorate, and I haven’t really figured out a good way to preserve them. We sell fine art prints of them, but I don’t want to sell someone something that’s not going to last. You’d be surprised at how many people want an original. I’m like, “Really?”

Yeah. Buy an original and then watch it yellow and curl up at the edges.

(M) Sharpie on newsprint is like the least archival safe material.

(A) I should start using archival markers.

Would it be fair to say that this is akin to an art book that’s made up of photocopies of paintings?

I think it’s just as much of an art book as a poetry book.

So are you a writer or an artist?

Usually I steal Sol Steinberg’s term for himself. He said, “I’m a writer who draws.” I’m just a writer and an artist. It’s a simple thing. Just a writer and an artist.

Art with words in it, that’s pretty much what I do.

How much time does it take to make a blackout poem?

Anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour. Sometimes I put them away and then bring them back out, and then they take even longer. I hate to say it, but the best ones come in like five minutes, where it’s just like “boom.”

Do you have an obligation to put out a few a week for your followers?

That’s a good question. I would feel weird if I was just, “I’m not doing it anymore. Retirement.” One of the things that kind of alleviates that pressure for me on the blog is the fact that I can post something every day from someone else. If I don’t post something in a week I feel really guilty. Even though it doesn’t matter.

How do readings work?

I usually do a slideshow, and then we just make poems. I bring newspaper and markers.

You turn it into a how-to?

And it works really well. It’s very rare that adults are in a situation where someone hands you materials and says, “Make something!” We’ll do that for kids all the time, but no adults ever get that. So if you’re in a roomful of adults and say, “Hey, I brought these school supplies”—

“It’s playtime.”

Yeah, it’s playtime. It’s amazing to see who gets into it.

I don’t think it’s completely altruistic behavior. If you inspire people to make things, it just makes them love you all the more. I think more good artists would benefit by being more open and encouraging people to make things. I just think that there’s so much untapped creativity in people’s lives—so few of us make anything with our hands, or do things remotely creative these days.

Page 151: “Any idiot can do what I do.”

I made that poem and thought, “It’d be really funny if we stuck that towards the end, because that’s where it’s [the book] headed.”

Pablo Picasso: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

I have a whole collection of quotes on stealing like an artist. Everything from Picasso to someone like Chuck Palahniuk, who said “I’m just a mashup of everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve bumped into.”

So who are you a mashup of?

I love Vonnegut, probably because of the Midwest thing. I really like Charles Schultz and Lynda Berry. George Saunders is great. Probably music, too. Someone like Bill Callahan here in town, he’s one of my favorite songwriters.

I think on the whole I conceived of this book as cutups meet the Midwest. It’s poems about being a kid from the Midwest, with this weird cutup method. That’s the mashup.

Were you a nerd in high school?

A nerd in high school?

You’re the narrator of these poems.

Yeah.

I mean, you have lots of pieces about bullying, taking frustrations out on the tetherball, the humiliating shit that happens in locker rooms.

I grew up in a really small town where if you were remotely artistic or different you were kind of an outcast, which I think is fairly universal in a small town.

Yeah, I was a nerd in high school. I was valedictorian.

I feel like I’m best when I’m writing about … honestly I consider myself more of a love poet, if you can be that. I mean, human relationships are what fascinate me on a basic level. Family, your wife.

So what’s next for you? Will you continue to experiment with different forms?

I’d really like to attempt more visual books, something that’s really wacky. But I’m not sure it’s going to be a book, actually. I have a project right now that’s about art and marriage, but I’m not really ready to talk about it yet.

This is a fun time for me because I’ve got the poems and they’re not going away. I make a few poems every week, and then the rest of the time I can work on what I want to. It’s a good time. It’s like playtime for me.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky will become available in paperback on January 11.

Fiction Editor David Duhr chatted with Durrow about the trajectories of her career, character, and life.

This novel is a fictionalized narrative of your own life, but the idea came from a newspaper article you read about ten years ago. Which came first—the idea to write about your life, or the idea to write a story based on that article?

When I read the newspaper story about the family that died in an accident and the girl survived (this was about 15 years ago or so), I really became obsessed with the story—obviously by what happened (how could we live in a world in which that would happen?), but I was also obsessed because even though I couldn’t explain it, I felt like the story had something to do with my own life. FYI though: I have never survived a traumatic accident like that. I say that to audiences so they don’t feel concerned for me. Really, I am okay! Anyway, I started writing really trying to figure out how much of the real girl was the real me. So, I’m not quite sure how to answer. I already knew that I wanted to write about some of the issues of my own life—the idea of being “raced” and being American; the relationship between mothers and daughters—but my life is not so interesting and I wasn’t about to try memoir. The newspaper story—the real girl—gave me an opening and a purpose. I had a reason to write a story about those issues because suddenly I needed to give the real girl a future and a voice.

Do you often find yourself looking to the news for story ideas?

I am big on reading the real news for stories. I think it’s because I’m very interested in how the questions we ask shape the story we tell. I see blank spaces in lots of news stories because the most interesting question hasn’t been asked.

Do audiences at readings assume that this accident happened to you? I can see that being awkward.

There are definitely times when I sense that the audience thinks I am a grown-up Rachel when they see me. I did give her my same racial and cultural background and blue eyes like me. Here’s a secret: What the audience can’t tell is that Rachel is actually taller than me. (Proof: if you were to make the silhouette on the book’s cover to scale—definitely, she’s about 5’7’’.) In those moments, I want to make sure that people feel like they can ask me questions without me falling apart. So I explain—really, that’s not me. I swear. I’m good. So are my mom and siblings. Alive and happy.

Have you sought and/or had any contact with the girl?

I haven’t sought out the real girl. And I’ve tried not to share too much information about the newspaper story because I feel very protective of her. I don’t want anyone else to find her. In all honesty, what would the point of that be? It seems like it would be a burden on her. Does she want to be found? And really, does she even know what happened? I can imagine that her family may never have told her what happened. Perhaps she has no memory of it. Wouldn’t that be best? Now the real question will be: what if she finds the story and finds me? What do I say then? Well, I’m not sure.

The truth is I know just three things about the girl: her name, her age at the time, and I saw a fuzzy photo of her. The story that I wrote has nothing to do with her experience, but I hope it honors what happened to her. I hope she knows that the character she inspired is someone I think of as heroic and loveable and ultimately has the ability to love.

Back to your memoir comment, let’s not sell yourself short in the “interesting life” department: International upbringing with an African-American father and a white Danish mother. Leading voice in the biracial community. Stanford, Columbia, Yale. Journalist, lawyer, novelist. “Life skills trainer” for the NBA & NFL (what?!). I should think that you’ve got enough material for years to come—newspaper subscription or not. If you don’t keep writing about yourself, I’m going to.

Okay, so the list of careers—well, it just shows that I couldn’t pin down what I wanted to do early. I did have some really cool experiences in each of those jobs. (You didn’t list Hallmark greeting card writer—I have Easter cards that are still circulating I think.) And the schools, well, I really hope you will include the fact that I am the first person in my family on either side ever to graduate from a 4-year university. That’s important I think for people—young people to know. I am not from a long line of college-educated or professional folks. But I really really really wanted to go to good schools. And I worked hard to get there. I want young folks to know that really there is a chance—even if you grow up poor like I did—to go to these amazing schools and change the whole trajectory of your life.

Interesting that you use “trajectory” there.

Interesting! Yes, well, this is my greatest hope: that some dissertation written about the book—that pays attention to the book and my language about it—will make sense of all of this to me!

For Rachel, the events of that day on the roof will forever be a part of who she is. How can she avoid allowing that one moment to define her? Or allowing her biracial background to define her? Do you personally try to avoid labels like “biracial writer”?

How does Rachel avoid allowing that one moment to define her? Well, that’s the book. She doesn’t know how to at first. She has to become the “new girl” to not have that moment define her. She has to let people just fill her in.

I see Rachel as a character who is not trying to escape her biracial background. She’s trying to figure out how she can claim it in a world that doesn’t recognize it. She wants to be able to claim “biracial” so that she can also claim her mother—no matter what others think about her—her mother is her mother and she still misses her.

I didn’t know about the Hallmark gig. When I dish out greetings cards, I usually joke that I wrote the content myself—but you can really say that. Can you lay down the text of one of your Easter cards for us, or are there copyright issues?

My Hallmark cards are sweet! The artwork is different every other year if they are still in circulation—but the last time I saw my “sentiments” as they are called, this is what it looked like.

Well those are very cute. I especially like the fact that Hallmark would pay for you to go about town seeing shows and movies. How could you ever leave that kind of job?

The job was a summer internship—and if I hadn’t gotten into graduate school, I would have applied for a full-time gig after college.

We’ve talked a bit about the book’s inspiration, but what about the actual writing? If the article came out fifteen years ago, when did you sit down and start putting pen to paper, and why then? Do you remember at some point crossing a threshold between initial fumblings and “Wow, this is coming together well and I’m going to get it published”, or were you confident from the beginning?

I started the book in 1997 when I quit my job as a corporate litigator. I left the job to pursue writing so it was time to write. Only I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to put all the good sentences and all my good ideas into a story. And then I had a very bad bout of writer’s block. The only writing I could do was journal writing—I was super stuck and whatever confidence I had in my writing abilities before I left my job was suddenly gone. I was also traveling a lot for the life skills training job, and I was having a hard time balancing a very social job with the solitude I needed to write. After a few years, (yes years!) I worked through the block—and I realized that I was going to keep getting older with or without a book. I put myself on a schedule and finally by 2004 I had a complete draft of the manuscript that I started sending out to agents. It was terrible, and the agents told me so. But I had my old confidence back and I tried to find information in their rejections. I did finally get an agent after a few more major revisions of the manuscript and then received some four dozen rejections from publishers. By then I had just become stubborn. I was determined to see this book get into the world. I considered self-publishing but thought I would try to do one more revision. I submitted that revised manuscript to the Bellwether Prize. It was my last hope. And then lo and behold, I won! That was a thrilling thrilling day!

Now that the book is out there, is there anything about it that you would change if you could?

I’m really happy with the published book. Once I won the Bellwether and started working with the comments from my editor Kathy Pories, I did a massive re-write of the prize-winning manuscript. I slashed 150 pages from the manuscript and then built it back up. When I finished that grueling process, I remember reading the final draft I was submitting to Algonquin on a flight from LA to NYC—read it all the way through on the flight—and I thought, Wow, this is really a book and I like it and maybe someone else will too. I felt very finished with the book after the long journey to publication. As I’ve gone on the road sharing the book with others I keep getting a question I hadn’t considered before—is there a sequel? Well, I didn’t write the book that way—it never occurred to me as I was writing it. But recently I’ve been taking notes—I’d love to spend more time with some of the characters.

On the work itself—I would imagine that Rachel’s was the original voice here. How did the other three come about?

Rachel’s voice was definitely the first one I struck upon. And the other characters came about as I realized how unreliable Rachel was. I needed other characters to tell other pieces of the story. The character Brick came about because I knew that Rachel needed a witness. I think that’s true in real life too—when something bad happens to you, you need someone, a witness, to say yes, that was a bad thing. You need the validation of your hurt. Laronne became a stand-in for Nella in many ways—but then she didn’t know the whole story of Nella so there had to be Nella in the book also. The characters came about organically in this way—and of course, Roger, I needed Roger to try to tell a story that Nella couldn’t tell anymore and I wanted to give Brick an adult in his life—even for a short time—who would care for him, see him.

In what ways is Rachel unreliable? Did you originally intend for her to be so?

Maybe unreliable isn’t the right word—what I mean is that she has secrets—secrets even from herself.

You know, I kept expecting Roger to appear again. Perhaps in a way he does appear in the form of the adult Brick? Brick seems heavily influenced by Roger, and we get the sense that he will become the man in Rachel’s life, in a way replacing the absent Roger. He’s also Rachel’s only tangible remaining tie to the accident. Potential lover, father stand-in, the link to her past who will help her reclaim it—that’s a lot of pressure to put on a young lad. Think he’s up to it?

That’s a really interesting way to think of Brick. But I think Brick—rather than being a stand-in for Roger—is the one who is able to help Rachel let go of her hope to see Roger again. Brick is a bridge, and a reflection. Brick is solid; and I think he’s definitely up to the task.

You mentioned a sequel, which sounds great to me. Two questions: 1) can your coattails support a 200-lb human? And if yes, then 2) how about a co-writer?

That’s funny. I’m strong for my size, but 200 pounds—hmmmm . . . I guess I could try!

I use inspiration and revision; no “versus” here. Sometimes, it is the subject itself that inspires me to be a better poet than I believe myself to be. When I began my “Somali Voices” project, interviewing Somali citizens about their life in Somalia before the civil war and their subsequent journey to the United States, I worried whether my poetic skills were up to the task of documenting people’s real lives. Writing poems of another person’s life, a person who would see the finished poem, added a new kind of pressure to my work. The end result would not be a hopeful placement in a book, but a page out of someone’s life. I explained to the people I interviewed that I was not a journalist, not recording their life stories, but…taking one piece of what they’d told me during our three-hour interviews and imagining from there.

Do you often work from personal stories or biographies?

In my more recent work, published in The Alchemist’s Kitchen, there is a sequence of poems based on the life and artwork of Myra Albert Wiggins. This was my first entrée into ekphrastic poetry, poems inspired by other art forms. Again, I wondered if I was up to the task. Secretly, I had previously found poems inspired by visual art a snooze; why was I suddenly so enthralled?

I joke that poetry is my long-term relationship; we’ve been together, seriously, for twenty years. Sometimes, I worry that the romance will grow stale, and so I create new challenges for myself.

Your poems use both sound and imagery in vivid and compelling ways. Which techniques do you use most often?

Thank you for your kind words. Like many other poets, I read my poems aloud as I work on them. I print poems out, change lines, words, rearrange stanzas, and go back to the computer. A poem changes shape several times during the revision process. Recently, I wrote a ghazal that I actually quite like (usually it is hard for me to like my work for at least a few months, years, if ever).

What do you think makes a poem memorable?

Image, sound, voice—what else actually stays?

Who are the best poets now writing?

I think we will all be dead and gone before the answer to that becomes clear. This is an interesting time in poetry—many more books are being published than any other period in my lifetime. When I finished college in the mid 1970’s, I could count on two hands the presses publishing poetry. Copper Canyon, Greywolf, and White Pine were all brand new. I knew their names only. And since I didn’t think I had the (then) pedigree to be an FSG, Knopf, Norton, or New Directions poet, I assumed I better find something else to do. I joined the Peace Corps—which it turned out—returned me to writing.

Travel and history have both provided you topics and given you a perspective of yourself as a global citizen. Will travel continue to be an important source for you, or do you find yourself turning in other directions?

When I was in my 20’s and 30’s, I lived or worked in a slew of different places: Bosnia, Gaza, West Africa, and South Africa, to name a few locations. Thankfully, I’ve now settled into one geography. This doesn’t mean that I don’t travel, but it isn’t the same as spending months or years someplace new. In The Alchemist’s Kitchen, I’ve traveled back in time one hundred years to the life of northwest photographer, Myra Albert Wiggins. In investigating her photographs, I learned a good deal of life in Oregon Country. And as your question hints, there are similarities in traveling through space and traveling through time.

What is the use of poetry? What place does it serve in our culture, and how do you think it needs to be brought into a more central position?

Oh that’s a big question. I could answer that after September 11th, newspapers across the country were publishing poems, and that poems of Naomi Shihab Nye and W. H. Auden went viral, traveling from email box to email box and back again. I received both their poems upwards of a dozen times. So yes, in times of national crisis, poems can respond to an emotional tsunami.

But what about in our everyday lives?

Right now my Maine Coon, Otis, best pet ever of eleven years, is dying and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I am not turning to poetry; I am turning to a glass of prosecco. In a few weeks or months, or even tomorrow, I may find something in a poem to take me away momentarily from the horrors of death—but not tonight. It always hits me afresh that even as a poet, there are times when words seem paltry, pathetic, and fully unsatisfying. Yet, during the first year of my MFA degree, when my father was dying—and then by spring, had died—there was nothing I could do but write poems of struggling with his death—and my mother’s death the year before. One poem, “Muted Gold,” which I wrote because I was in a program and had to hand in something every week, now seems to me a gift of remembering. And yet, when I finished that poem, I knew it was nothing but the diapositive—the negative of the negative—of the event. In other words, words are sometimes not enough.

How did you become interested in poetry? Who are some of the poets who formed your early influences?

My older sister gave me The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse when I was six or seven. I loved the purple dust cover complete with wizard and cauldron. Walter de la Mare and Lewis Caroll and Emily Dickinson are a few poets I remember. I memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter” on my own, amazed that the story could take such a dark turn (the oysters end up murdered). But I believe a more developed interest in poetry began for me as a teenager when I began reading Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov. These poets, especially Rich (no relation), opened up a world for me that I had intuited but could not express. Their poems struck me as no less than magic.

How often, or over what period, do you typically revise a poem?

I’m not sure there is much that is “typical” about my revision process. What I can say, with certainty, is that I am a chronic reviser. It isn’t unusual for me to work on a poem for a year or more. I have some poems with over thirty versions on the computer—and that doesn’t count the drafts done off the computer.

In my essay “Reclamation: A Poem on Revision” in the recent anthology, Poem Revised, I traced the life cycle of one poem from inception to publication. Here is what I ended up saying:

The point is this: revision is the difference between the adequate poem and the excellent one. It is the magic of a word positioned just right in a harmonious line of sound, it is the title changed and re-changed again. It is believing in your own poem. Get to work.

Fiction Editor David Duhr talked with Almond about his latest book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.

You’ve always loved music, but when did you decide to sit down and write Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life? (RRWYSL)

Well, I was under contract with Random House to deliver a second non-fiction book. That’s not a situation I’m generally in (being under contract). Usually, I write what I’m gonna write then try to get someone to help put it into the world. But in this case, I was sort of pitching ideas to RH. My first idea, the one I really wanted to do, was an unauthorized biography of Anne Coulter, written by one of her ardent fans. I actually may make this book on my own. But RH was uninterested. Then I pitched them on the idea of writing about the 2008 Presidential campaign. Again: no. So I went with music, because basically I do best when I write about my obsessions. I realize that’s a bit convoluted, but I was also in the midst of having two kids in a pretty short time, which makes everything somewhat convoluted.

When writing about an obsession, how do you decide where to begin? Similar to Candyfreak, RRWSYL delves into the childhood roots of your love of music, and the roots of your philosophy of Drooling Fanaticism. Do you find this to be the easiest method? A chronological account, with the occasional digression?

Oh, it’s mostly about telling stories. The stories revolve around your obsessions, and the obsessions revolve around all the shit you want and are afraid of, and the stuff you’re afraid to want. Don’t mean to be glib, but that’s really how it works. At least for me. I do very little “planning.” I’m just trying to tell the right stories, the ones that lead to the most danger.

The political has always been an important part of your writing. This New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) piece —that subtly compares your book to Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue — got you so hot and bothered that you wrote a response on The Rumpus.

The original reviewer notes that you’re “simultaneously winking and righteous, historically incurious, throwing in a little anti-cultural elitism and underdog sentimentality to flavor the stew.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this basically a snide restatement of what you tell us yourself in the book?

You write a book that is in part a criticism of criticism, and then out comes a review that in essence backs up your argument. Shouldn’t you be more appreciative?

You betcha I should be more appreciative. But I’m just so winking and righteous that I sometimes forget to be appreciative. Also, the review was really hard to understand. I just couldn’t figure out what the guy meant a lot of the time. It’s a problem. But look: my disappointment with the NYTBR dates back many years. They have the resources, and presumably the brains, to produce inspiring criticism. Hardly anyone holds them to account, which is too bad. Anyway, I knew at a certain point some self-serious cultural critic would go off on RRWSYL, because the book essentially argues that ALL people can have deep thoughts and feelings about the music they love. And this idea, of course, makes critics crazy. Because they want to believe that only they can supply a meaningful reaction to art. But my interest isn’t with the critics, for the most part. They’re incapable, for the most part, of admitting to their deepest feelings. I’m interested in what it feels like to be a fan.

So you’ve been both a fan and a critic. What about the list of “Ten Things You Can Say to Piss Off a Music Critic” — are any/all of these from first-hand experience? Any interesting stories there, or was this mostly a comic time-out?

Mostly a comic time-out. The central point of the book is that nobody — not even some smarty-pants critic — has the license on reacting to art. Anybody, in other words, has deep and important things to say about the art they love. They may not have all the jargon and snark down, like a critic. But the reaction of a fan matters, more than anything else in the end. Boy, do the critics hate it when you remind them they’re just one voice.

Do you enjoy being known as a comic writer? Ever worry that a serious point you may be trying to make gets glossed over by readers looking for laughs?

Yeah, sure. I’m a member of the humor-writers’ ghetto. But honestly, most of the best writing out there has some comic element. And frankly, the thing that tends to get overlooked, or just flat missed, is that the comic impulse almost always arises from negative feeling states — from embarrassment, shame, grief — that it’s not the opposite of tragedy, but the flip side. If you think about our greatest works, from Don Quixote to The Divine Comedy to Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Martin Amis’ Money — those are all funny books. Because, as we all know, it’s the fool who gets to speak truth to power. There’s a direct line from Lear’s fool to Charlie Chaplin to John Stewart. So fine, if my using humor to survive the essential sadness of life means the “critics” dismiss me, that’s fine. I’m more interested in attracting a 23-year-old kid who thinks literature has nothing to do with her.

Prior to writing RRWSYL, how much of the book had already made it into your fiction?

Not much, honestly. I wrote about reviewing music in My Life in Heavy Metal and nicked lines from my favorite songs and such. But listening to music was more like what taught me to write, not what I wrote about.

Have there been any interesting reactions from the musicians you feature in the book? Have any of them thanked you for increased sales, or blamed you for harming them in some way?

The musicians have mostly been very kind and understanding. It’s not easy to get written about, and though I’ve heard some quibbles, mostly they seem to get that I love them and what they do — their honesty, their sick talents. I hope everyone goes and buys their records. They can listen to them on my website. That was part of the idea of the book — as with Candyfreak. I wanted to pimp what I love.

Seems like every time I pick up a literary journal these days, you’ve got a piece in it — story, review, essay. You write regularly for The Rumpus, among several others. You make regular appearances at Boston literary events, and sit on panels and do readings at writing conferences all over the country. You have two kids. You’re a self-labeled excessive masturbator. So on and so on. Do you sleep, ever? What sort of writing schedule, if any, do you keep?

Sorry. I missed the question. I was masturbating.

Did you really write an “eight-hundred-page novel about sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism” or is that a gag?

It survives in a special radioactive Suck-ass Receptacle. Let’s leave it there.

Who are your literary influences?

Keeps changing, as with music. I need new medicine all the time. But I get asked this a lot, so I put a list of 30 books in my freaky little DIY book, This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, which folks can check out here: http://www.harvard.com/onourshelves/paige.html

Is RRWSYL you write about “barbaric expression of the soul” and the “divine voice [that] lurks within.” Is this book your “barbaric expression” and has it led you to discover your “divine voice”? Did you pour more of yourself into this book than you have into others?

I’m just happy my editor got it, and didn’t try to make me make it one of those bogus “voyage of self-discovery” books. She let me keep it weird and idiosyncratic, which is how most people are, actually. Anyhoo, I’m happy to rank my books. The only one that gets an “A” is The Evil B.B. Chow, which is probably why nobody reads it.

My girlfriend complains that I have a mancrush on you. In fact, she says the only time she’s not jealous of you is when we’re listening to Bob Schneider and my eyes glaze over. Imagine then my glee when, in RRWSYL’s Table of Contents, I saw a section titled “Interlude: A Frank Discussion of My Mancrush on Bob Schneider.” Of course, that part didn’t turn out to be the rip-roaring fun I was hoping for. What is it like to discover that someone whose work you so adore and whose life you kind of want to emulate (someone who makes you “kiss jealousy on its smoky mouth”) turns out not to be living such a dream?

Yeah, I mean, it’s weird and disappointing. But that’s the nature of idol worship. It’s bound to get weird and disappointing. The thing that makes me love Bob even more is that he was honest with me. He didn’t have to be. He’s given the world some of the greatest songs of this era. That’s all we owe that guy. So yeah, if I wasn’t happily married, I’d still blow him.

You live in Boston, I lived in Boston. Bob Schneider lives in Austin, I live in Austin. All of that proximity and mancrush in cities with rhyming names … seems as if fate is afoot. Think it’s time you packed a U-Haul and made your way down here?

Hard to move with two little kiddos, but my wife and I love Austin. I’ve been trying to scrape up the money to get down there for a while. So if anyone at a school there wants to throw some cash toward that effort, I’m all ears. We can hang out in Bob’s driveway and drool.

Rachel Dacus had the opportunity to ask him about how he became interested in poetry, what it’s like writing as a Southerner and an Arab-American, and how MFA programs have improved poetry.

What is poetry and what is its purpose?

Wow. I’m glad we are starting with the easy questions. Poetry has many purposes—all of them moral. Poetry, after all, is a moral act. What poetry is is a harder question. Certainly it is a way of remembering. No doubt, too, that it is what Frost called it—“a momentary stay against confusion”, but it is more than that. It is more constitutive of sense—“a way of knowing” as Auden called it, and about poetry Auden was never wrong.

On a less figurative level, the only feature poetry has that it doesn’t share with prose is the line break, which is there to provide the energy of surprise and ultimately much of the power.

When and how did you become interested in poetry?

I’m an English professor’s son, so I grew up around books. I loved the Browning and Tennyson monologues, then the Frost poems—though I was mostly ignorant of their darkness. I had a copy of Chief Modern Poets of Britain and America, Vol. 2 and I made much use of it. In college I read Sexton and Plath, but I was not a poet. I was a reader, a student. I wrote my first poem, my first earnest and legitimate poem, when I was thirty. I have no degree in creative writing and I’ve never taken a creative writing course in an official capacity.

Is there one poet who has interested or inspired you more than any other?

No, I wouldn’t say so, though I am a part of a huge chorus of influences. If I write in blank verse, I hear Frost’s raspy voice reading it back to me. If I write a list poem, Whitman’s long shadow falls. If I write something raw and matter-of-fact, the smoke from Sexton’s cigarettes gets in my eyes. There is no end to the anxiety of my influences.

How does your background as a Southerner and an Arab-American enter or influence your poetry?

I love the South and I miss it—the pace of life, the friendliness, the characters. Subjects were easy to find because people still like to talk down there and it is easier to get to know people. My background as an Arab-American has only come out in my poetry in response to the American Empire’s program of vilification and colonalization.