This week in Vintage Fringe: “rest : stop” and two more poems by Arlene Ang, of Issue 6 fame. Fringe poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips interviewed Ang by email to find out what she’s been up to of late. Her responses to our lightning round indicate that cake is the winner.

It’s been over three years since your work appeared in Fringe. Looking back on the poems, what do you notice?

Reading them again, the Czech patient and Czech scientist jumped out to me. I didn’t even notice they were there separately in two different poems. It’s like the Cold War all over again. Makes me want to check on their whereabouts now in my other poems. There could be a story there.

“That time my upper lip swelled up” made me smile. It was one of those desperate moments where I had to write something quick at the ITWS [Inside the Writer's Studio] forum. There’s a challenge there where you have to produce a poem every day for thirty days . . . and that morning I woke up with a very itchy, swollen lip. The undercurrent of urgency here just brings me back to that day. I never realized it would end up like a diary in code.

You’ve worked with this form in other poems as well. How did you arrive at both the shape on the page and the use of the colons as punctuation?

“rest : stop” uses the 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 sequence in terms of syllable count. Valerie Fox, always with the innovative spirit, brought that to the 30:30 group. It was fun to see people experimenting with the form. I find it very useful in writing surreal, non-linear poems that focus on imagery and are open to different interpretations depending on the reader’s own experiences.

Visually, the colon allows enough room for pause and yet remains unobtrusive. I also like the fact that it is often used to introduce an explanation or example as well as give the relationship between two things. When I use them, I always keep that in mind, too.

Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon, a collection of poems you wrote with Valerie Fox, came out in 2008. How did you begin writing together, and what was your process like?

We began through e-mails and writing every day at 30:30. I’ve always found Valerie’s views stimulating and delightfully quirky. We’d quote each other or use each other’s poems as a diving board to write our own. To get through the 30:30 marathon, we also gave each other daily assignments, like using a given set of words in one poem. The whole process was a series of correspondences, hence the title.

Some of my poems in Bundles were published in Moria, and Valerie’s appeared in Adroitly Placed Word.

Do you know any poems by heart? If so, describe how you came to know one of these, and tell us whether it’s a favorite or a least-favorite.

Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It was one of the poems that we had to memorize in high school and, unlike the rest, it just refuses to go away. For some strange reason, it usually haunts me while I’m brushing my teeth before going to bed. While not one of my favorites, I still repeat it over and over in my head when I want to get into an iambic mode: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. It’s so perfectly crafted that it feels like voodoo.

What’s one of your favorite poems that has appeared in any online journal in the last year, and why?

The first thing that comes to mind is “A Limitation of Birds” by Sampson Starkweather in Typo 12. There’s something brilliant about how it’s both simplistic and yet complex, direct yet mysterious, focused yet wide-angled at the same time.

What prose work have you enjoyed most in the last year?

Matthew Salesses’s “Fraser Island“—I love how he handles the interaction between the strangers in this bus ride. His use of unspoken/body language is particularly evocative without being cliché. It’s like looking at a shard of life: incisive and evokes reflection.

Is there any form or mode of writing that you haven’t tried recently, but would like to try in the next year? What is it, and why?

Sonnets and sonnenizios. It’s been a while since I’ve written any formal poetry. They’re infinitely good exercise for the brain . . . but like going to the gym, you tend to put it off until it’s too late. And I’m still hoping to finish that Petrarchan sonnet series that I started two years ago based on Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28. I call it my private torture chamber.

Your book Seeing Birds in Church Is a Kind of Adieu will be out this March. How long have you been working on it, and how would you describe the collection?

It started out as Lean Season way back in 2005—focusing on modern illnesses (like cancer, AIDS, etc). Very depressing. The good thing about rejections was that they gave me a lot of chances to edit afterwards and, hopefully, improve the manuscript. Cinnamon Press accepted the current version in 2008. The final draft is still depressing (yay!) but explores the living aspect more, at times how people cope with loss—with a good mix of narrative, experimental poems as well as some formal poetry. My parents passed away a few years ago and I’ve been obsessed with death ever since—how it affects those who are left behind, the process of grieving, etc.

Some poems from the book were previously published in Boxcar Poetry Review, Eclectica, Pebble Lake Review, and The Potomac.

And now for our lightning Q&A round:

Pen or pencil?
Pencil

Pegasus or unicorn?
Pegasus

Skirt or trousers?
Skirt

V-neck or ringneck?
V-neck

Sweethearts or strangers?
Strangers

Dictionary or phone book?
Dictionary

Hallelujah or alleluia?
Hallelujah

Cake or cookies?
Cake

Cat or dog?
Dog

Veg or nonveg?
Veg

Early or late?
Late

Truth or fiction?
Fiction

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