http://www.openlooppress.org Literature lives - Audio Loop with Open Loop Press Fri, 06 May 2011 03:26:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Want to go behind-the-scenes with rising writers? This monthly podcast from Open Loop Press draws aside the curtain, revealing writers’ influences and techniques, ideas and inspirations through in-depth interviews, readings and reviews. Literature lives - Audio Loop with Open Loop Press Open Loop Press http://www.openlooppress.org/images/logos/olplogo300.pnghttp://www.openlooppress.org literature, literary, writers, art, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, books no Carlin M. Wragg carlin.wragg@openlooppress.org http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jericho-brown/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jericho-brown/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:05:38 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=219 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jericho-brown/feed/ 0   Jericho Brown promises no revelations. His poems are tight, trimmed of excess, lyrical and lonely.   I want to answer their questions Tell them the dead man’s name But I cannot identify the broken body. Even I don’t know who he is.   His poems are home to the hardest questions: Can a boy love the father who whips him? What’s the best way to injure, after departure, the person one loves?   How best to hurt you.              Fling a pitcher of sweet tea. Leave              All the lights on. Phone your mother              And threaten cremation. Set fire to your cassettes   Brown says, “Write what you can’t stop thinking about. Write what’s on your mind.” For him, this is love and the complication of loving. It is the fact of violence, and the conflict in forgiveness. It is, especially, the strange tension between nostalgia and suffering — the way the poet transforms that tension into art.   We learn to listen to music Over hollers, through Smoke. Her soprano comes across A photograph in giggles, But ends up crying, Save me. We think we’d like that Kind of love, sad and steeped In trumpets, though a block up The entire decade shoots For words to put in the dictionary: Crackhead, drive-by. Loss   Jericho Brown converts life’s tragedies to rhythmic stories about family, about love and home, about Southern culture’s ragged edge. These poems wake the reader from reverie. They place him at the moment of rupture. If poetry is a literature of the heartbeat, then Brown’s poems are the blood that infuses its song. They fuel the poet, in the middle of the stage, holding the final note, proving by raw emotion the universality of human kinship.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Jericho Brown: Reads “Prayer of the Backhanded” from Please (New Issues, 2008).   Carlin M. Wragg: What I love about hearing you read that poem is that the punctuation on the page stands for the places that you pause as the writer reading. It makes me wonder what punctuation means to you in poems.   JB: Well, I think I’m a poet because I took way too much too seriously. I was always excited about sentences. Even when I was really young I was really excited about sentences. I remember being a kid in elementary school and knowing the difference between a comma and a semicolon and my teacher being proud of me because of that. I guess I liked that feeling of having my teacher be proud of me because I was the one in class who knew what a semicolon was really supposed to do and where it was supposed to be and how you make use of a semicolon. Because of that I was just like — I think I’m still the same way — I’m like, “This semicolon is real life.”   So commas and dashes and colons and exclamation points and question marks are really very important to me when it comes to how the poem is going to be read aloud, and what’s going to happen for the reader when they’re reading the poem.   I have to add though that maybe that’s just part of being a poet. I’ve always said that you know you’re a poet when you type an emdash and you hit the delete button, and you type a colon and you hit the delete button, and you type an emdash and you hit the delete button, and you type a colon and you hit the delete button [laughter]. If you can do that for about three hours straight trying to figure out which one is the best one, if you can do that for three hours and call that a good time then you’re probably a poet.   CMW: I want to ask you about physical abuse. The book opens — at least to me as a reader — with this as a dominant theme but it changes and dissipates as we move through the poems. I was curious about why you wanted to start on those terms.   JB: It’s interesting, the first poem in a book ends up being what the book is about whether you like it or not. It’s so funny, I read so [...] "I think we've been telling our students so long, 'Write what you know. Write your lived experience,' and I think our students have this idea that that means write about the time A, B, and C happened to me, but that's not [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/lisa-olstein/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/lisa-olstein/#comments Sun, 09 May 2010 03:51:50 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=218 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/lisa-olstein/feed/ 0 Culture asks much of the writer: filter the cacophony, exceed vernacular, deliver art. The writer may use familiar language to build an extraordinary world, to make an unusual character an analog for the self, to transform that self into a friend. She may excel at documentation, recording observations in exquisite lines that juxtapose agricultural ritual with scientific discovery, interior reflection with external reproach. Poet Lisa Olstein is this writer. In “Lost Alphabet” (Copper Canyon, 2009) she gives readers a collection of moths, a mysterious companion, a dark hut in an unusual country, and the eyes of a lepidoptrist asking perennial questions: What does it mean to know? Are there limits to understanding? Even in company are we anything but alone?   Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like snow falling. It was on a day like this when, visiting, Ilya decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.   Each poem is an illustrated plate colored by detail — the work of writer as collector. We learn that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” brushes against the atmosphere of Marco Polo’s travel diaries, that Olstein was captivated by a landscape of moth wings. Holding a hand to the eye and rounding the fingers, the speaker of “Lost Alphabet” acts as the writer acts: narrowing focus, targeting detail.   I want nothing to end, not a single observation, despite longing for what remains unknown. For one thing: weight. Another: ratio. Flight’s beat, beat, glide. And constantly, the interruption: sometimes circling for days, a wary insistent stray.   In her new poems, myriad voices extend Olstein’s investigation. Mentions of medical experiments appear beside anecdotes of space travel. Reflection is compelled by fact, doubt undergirds perception.   Either the mute child spoke in full sentences alone in the dark or the monitors picked up ghosts of deliverymen and pelicans streaming over the bridge.   Thus Olstein asks us to consider knowledge as ephemeral, relational. She critiques certainty, exposes fact. These are important poems. They walk us to the borderline of what we take for granted and stand unflinching at the chasm, compelling us to wonder what it’s possible to know.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Lisa Olstein: Reads “[white spring]” from Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).   Carlin M. Wragg: I wanted to start by asking you a question about color, or really the lack of color. I felt in reading the poems that the setting was colorless, but colorless in a good way, in a way that made it dream-like and ephemeral. Some images I’m thinking about are “a shadow made by starlight,” and “a white sheet illuminated by moonlight.” I’m wondering if you were thinking about creating a certain kind of space with this technique, or why you chose those images as a way of describing the setting.   LO: It’s interesting because you’re coming at it from an angle that wasn’t the angle from which I approached it but it’s very interesting to hear and I think you’re right. To me it’s almost like a world seen and experienced through a scrim. There is this sense of quiet, of mutedness — not a lack of immediacy, or of connection, or passion even, but it is a very meditative, incremental world. I think the place I imagined myself into is one of great measure and a lack of what we would ordinarily think of as active, whether it’s through color or activity itself.   I think so much of this project comes from spending a lot of time staring at these incredibly enlarged images — they’re scans actually — of moths. There’s this book called Night Visions by a scientist named Joseph Scheer. There was some new technology that allowed them to scan the specimens without crushing them — I think before they could enlarge them but [...] "We all love to receive something either really beautiful or really intelligent, but what’s most exciting or engaging is when a work of art stimulates in you a new kind of thinking, or a new set of questions, or a new set of ideas that are [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/salvatore-scibona/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/salvatore-scibona/#comments Sun, 21 Feb 2010 04:44:08 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=217 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/salvatore-scibona/feed/ 0 If the act of creation is the epitome of elegance, a waltz between the writer’s conscious and unconscious mind, then Salvatore Scibona has performed the dance perfectly. A telephone call to his grandmother on her birthday, a patch of conversation overheard and written down, the view from his writing desk of a clothesline drying laundry — these are this language artist’s broadest strokes, transformed by his conscious mind into crucial, telling details. In “The End,” Scibona’s award-winning first novel, the elaborate weave and turn of story through language whirls the reader through the overlapping lives of five unique characters: an elderly abortionist, an abandoned husband, a teenage boy, an absent mother, a dedicated baker, and a lonely jeweler. In rendering these characters’ lives, Scibona transitions from anecdote to anecdote with implicitly elaborate footwork, the dance of free indirect style, so the gesture comes bearing all the import of direct action, and the absence of events is as telling as their presence.   “The man on the bridge watches her ascending the hill. She is stooped by the weight of an enormous sack on her back, so touchingly like a mule, like an enduring animal that slowly carries on its back a burden as large as itself. It would be impossibly sweet and satisfying to follow her. The sweetness of saying ‘she’ is the intimation of somebody else, of something else that’s really out there being real, that isn’t an idea or a ghost but a person, definite, completed. But he’s watching her now. He can’t not. And while he watches her, he is turning her back into an idea, so he must act fast. She has already begun to disappear.” (Pg. 112.)   In “The End,” Scibona challenges his characters’ tangibility. He implicitly asks what it means to be perceived. ‘What are the consequences of community?’ The reader wonders, watching these ordinary, extraordinary lives. Is the reflection in the mirror one of comfort? Or does it manifest deep-seated regrets; repetition, routine, anonymity — by what are these broken? We discover, in “The End,” that tragedy is one disruptive mode.   “How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants-only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest spec of mental lint from that day for years.” (Pgs. 20 – 21.)   Readers of “The End” will find this story about a community lost to time an opportunity for total reading immersion. By the last line, they will know this place and these people in the way they know their own, and they will find in it the satisfaction of particulars, an antidote to the mysterious void.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Salvatore Scibona: [Reads from The End, pages 38 - 40 (Graywolf Press, 2008).]   Carlin M. Wragg: I want to start out by framing our context: where is this happening and what is the occasion of this procession?   SS: It’s in Ohio, in an Italian-immigrant neighborhood called Elephant Park, which is fictional but based on a neighborhood that exists in Cleveland to the present. The occasion is the Feast of the Assumption on August 15, 1953, which is the central day of the novel. It’s probably accurate to call it the central day because things circle around it and come back to it; it isn’t the point to which everything goes merely, it’s a point to which things head, then pass away, then head back again. The Feast of the Assumption is the Catholic holiday [...] "I think for a writer you don’t see a thing until you use the word for it and the more precise the word you can use the more precisely you see it. On the other hand, the word is an instrument in order to lead you to the thing and you can [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/paul-harding/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/paul-harding/#comments Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:09:52 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=214 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/paul-harding/feed/ 0 Paul Harding’s prose is like the interior of an antique clock; the copper wires of rhythm bound to sentences like brass gears that control the movement of loss. These marvelous mechanics propel readers through the provinces of memory—the angle of winter light on ankle-deep snow, the clink of metal spoons in wooden drawers, the missing father and his mule-drawn wagon making their way away from the embracing warmth of home.   “God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets, and slip hooch into coat pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters. God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family — my wife, my children — because my wife’s silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving.” (Pg. 122)   The movements of departure — of a husband from his family, of time from its timepieces, of a wife from the alliance of marriage — are rendered in language grounded in the precision of words.   “The house was gone. Kathleen stopped walking and looked around. The clouds that had colored the dawn copper had advanced and were now fastened overhead like a lid of stone. Flurries of snow spun in the wind. Kathleen surely stood in the right place and the doctor’s house surely was vanished.” (Pg. 91)   Paul Harding creates an immersive experience in which the present recedes naturally into the past on a journey through the frozen backwoods of New England, where an act of kindness elicits the gift of an American treasure, and the silences that deepen over dinner are the residue of love lost to the void of poverty, to illness, to unanswered prayers. Paul Harding’s steady hand pulls us in and leads us on, turning back the layers of legend to brighten its shadows with the reviving light of beautiful prose.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Paul Harding: [Reads from Tinkers, pages 7 – 8.]   Carlin M. Wragg: The story begins inside the mind of George Washington Crosby, who’s the son of Howard Aaron Crosby, in his final days of life. Could you talk about the choice to begin the book inside the mind of a character in his final moments? What did that make possible for you as a writer?   PH: I don’t know… It’s funny because my mode of composition is so scattershot, I just collage things together, so the beginning of the book wasn’t one of the last things I wrote, it was probably something I wrote in the middle of the process. The book actually radiated out from when George’s father originally left the family in northern Maine years and years ago, that becomes the event which George is remembering as he dies. I just had this idea of “stock taking” when you’re dying—you’re at the end of your life and so what you do when you’re facing the end is you turn back and the main thing that he turned back toward was this catastrophic event in his own personal history and his family’s history which was being abandoned by his father. I just had this idea of George having a scrambled mind and slipping away from the world and trying to imagine his way back to his father in order to affect some kind of reunion.   CMW: Is that then how the structure came to be? Because the structure isn’t linear; there are circles within circles within circles of voices.   PH: Yes. I guess that’s a function of the way the canals of my own brain work; I think that way so the fiction comes to me in that way, and that worked organically with the fact that the story is so interior, that it’s in George’s brain. I had this idea that the present is what he’s running out of, he’s running out of time in the present, and so the whole narrative just keeps [...] "… I don't write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and wonder about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I have a question about something: 'What does she think at that point?' Or, 'What [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/leslie-t-chang/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/leslie-t-chang/#comments Sat, 24 Oct 2009 04:02:05 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=207 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/leslie-t-chang/feed/ 0 In the early aughts Leslie T. Chang was a foreign correspondent reporting for the “Wall Street Journal” on the transformative effects of socioeconomic change in China. Her exploration of the lives of the people she met led her, in 2004, to publish an article whose subject would eventually fill 432 pages of prose and become Chang’s first book, “Factory Girls” (Speigel & Grau, 2008), an impeccably-written survey of the lives female migrant workers-the young women who “go out” from China’s rural villages to find work in its urban factory cities. Over three years of reporting in Dongguan, one of a number of urban centers in China’s Pearl River Delta, Chang met women compelled by the promise of opportunity to leave home to find work, to jump from factory to factory in pursuit of higher wages, better working conditions, to be with a friend, a sister, a boyfriend. She encountered women who were in the shadows, women who worked in karaoke bars, women who taught themselves English at night school, women buffeted by the pleasures and pitfalls of new friendship.        ”When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work — this time, the fine one hundred yuan — to spend the day with you. You might stay at a factory you didn’t like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to. Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish. They sent messages by mobile phone instead.” -Pg. 3-5   Unconvinced that decade-old reports about inhuman working conditions examined factory life from all sides, Chang began her investigation with a question: What do migrant workers make of their own experience? Along the way she discovered previously unrevealed facets of the factory story, where individual ambition, hard work, lying, and personal pluck lead to advancement, where life is fast-paced but monotonous, anonymous, in which work and workers are depersonalized, except to each other, where women came in from the provinces and return to them, their connections severed, if they can find their way back.        ”The girls talked constantly of leaving. Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker’s pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn’t know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.” -Pg. 4   Told in part through the close observation of two women, Wu Chunming and Lu Qingmin, she meets while reporting, in part through an account of Chang’s own family’s history, and in part through descriptions of the city of Dongguan, Leslie T. Chang presents a picture of a culture beset with change, whose rapidly evolving economic landscape offers pressures and perils in quick step with opportunity, where millions of ambitious, hard-working individuals live lives on the brink of explosive transformation. Chang challenges her readers to discard received notions of China and discover it anew — as a place full of energy, bursting with the promise of advancement, of individual success, where lives beset by setback, ravaged by history, always have the potential to be renewed.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Leslie T. Chang: [Reads Factory Girls, pages 27 - 28.]   Carlin M. Wragg: So this is Dongguan, this is the place where you spent quite a lot of time doing the research for this book, Factory Girls. I wanted to start by asking you who are Wu [...] "…what I wanted to do was start out inside the mind of a factory girl and describe the world: What it was like when you met a woman from another factory, what it was like when your friend helped you because you lost your job, what it felt [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/rob-riemen/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/rob-riemen/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:49:45 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=196 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/rob-riemen/feed/ 0 If Rob Riemen were a writer with a different voice, who punctuated his ideas with footnotes and framed his anecdotes with jargon, his elegant volume, “Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal,” might be on heavy rotation in philosophy courses worldwide. But Riemen is a humanist with a literary impulse who takes great pleasure in the creative act. Writing, as he says, in “the small hours of the night” when he can put his work at the Nexus Institute, the independent organization he runs in The Netherlands, to one side and explore the terrain of his own mind, Riemen has produced a text that eschews the traditional definition of critical analysis; it is neither an extended philosophical essay, nor a work of academic criticism. For this reason it is hard to decide whether to shelve it in one’s personal library beside Anthony Kenny’s “A Brief History of Western Philosophy,” or if it instead belongs next to Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Yet it is this protean nature that makes “Nobility of Spirit” as much a pleasure to read as Herman Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” or Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.” Riemen understands that in enjoyable reading there is opportunity for learning.   A passionate student of the German writer Thomas Mann, Riemen expresses his ideas in stories, animating conversations between great thinkers of the past. He breathes life into the meditative walks of Friedrich Nietzsche, and recounts Socrates’ trial in Athens, giving us a ringside seat for one of Western philosophy’s most crucial speeches. By doing so, he encourages contemporary readers to reconnect with some of history’s most elegant concepts: Beauty, Truth, Goodness, the importance of language. These concepts were once impartial moral guideposts, but today they are subjective measures whose definitions often rely upon individual opinion for their import. Riemen suggests that there is still room for certainty, that there are unassailable truths, and that morality and human decency have a crucial role to play in contemporary culture:   “No, for the sake of human dignity the free individual is not allowed to ignore universal, timeless values. Intellectuals in particular should resist this kind of nihilism. Not everything is allowed. Human freedom is in essence relative; it is subordinate to the immortal and never completely attainable ideal of human dignity. Furthermore, absolute freedom obliterates justice. There are transcendental absolute values that have priority and are obligatory for everyone.” -”Nobility of Spirit,” page 70   Rob Riemen sees his life “as a kind of mission to restore the meaning of certain words.” When one closes the covers of “Nobility of Spirit” for the last time, one does so with the sense that communication itself is at the very heart of being human, and that in the face of incredible challenge one has the resources to persevere.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Rob Riemen: [Reads Nobility of Spirit, Part One, pages 20 - 21.]   Carlin M. Wragg: To begin, I wanted to start with this question: Why did you want to write a book? You have the Nexus Institute — this is something that you do. Why was the next step for you writing, not a novel, but something that read like literature?   Rob Riemen: The book is a little reflection on the stages of my life. The first chapter is on Thomas Mann and I wrote it on the occasion of the fact when his daughter, his youngest beloved child, Elizabeth Mann-Borgese, at my request, came to The Netherlands, came to my institute, to give a public lecture with the same title that her father gave when he became seventy-five; she was eighty.   When she came to The Netherlands I realized that this famous lecture of Thomas Mann’s, “The Years of My Life,” which is a very interesting kind of autobiographical reflection on his life — he starts with “I [...] "When words no longer tell the truth, when words turn into lies, language dies, and we with the language. It is the first and foremost task of every poet, of every novelist, to write meaningful words, to write truthful words. You don't [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/steven-price/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/steven-price/#comments Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:52:44 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=186 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/steven-price/feed/ 0 At 135 pages, Steven Price’s “Anatomy of Keys” is no slim volume of verse; how could it be? Tracing the track of a famous life full of remarkable acts, Price transforms a historical figure into a fictional character, rendering his story in verse. Harry Houdini, whose incredible escapes made him one of the most well-known men of his day, is revealed in Price’s work to have been a playful child, a vulnerable performer, a loyal husband, a grief-besieged son, as well as the escape artist we know, that man of the modern age. So Price explores the architecture of persona, challenging our assumptions about headline makers and revealing the human interior of fame:             Offstage, he looked too ordinary in his strength to be so; short and stumpish like a pugilist, he lived by his fists, all ox-neck and thick root, all barrel-chest, battered like a kitchen chair.   We find ourselves immersed in a work of imagination, a fictionalized biography that proceeds from Houdini’s childhood, through adolescence and into adulthood, exploring the years Houdini’s escapes were known around the world.   Through closed forms — the sonnet, the ghazal — and intricate interior rhythms, regulated rhyme schemes, free verse, prose poems, sections in series, Price crafts a collection of astute observations:   So that, trembling, fingering my skin, I began to doubt: had I accomplished this, who was not remarkable, no more than others?   This, which sang in me for a time, then fell silent.   Months of dust and rain, abandoned, in flickering railcars. It is true: to live without illusion is to live without hope.   Thus the fragility of the self is alive in even the most incredible acts. Price gives us a three-dimensional Harry Houdini with an interior life as rich as his performing one.   Though “Anatomy of Keys” is not a biography, not in the technical sense, Steven Price’s capacity for empathy offers something equally compelling: a life’s story rich in detail, which challenges our expectations and lingers long after we finish the final line.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Carlin M. Wragg: Before we read one of your poems, perhaps you could speak a little about how you came to write a book about Houdini’s life?   Steven Price: Well, I stumbled on the man through happy accident. As I started looking deeper into his life it became clear to me that a number of the things I wanted to do as a young poet I could do more effectively using Houdini as a foil. I don’t pretend in any way that the book I’ve written is a true biography of Houdini. It charts a number of his actual circumstances but a number of the things in the book are fictional — it pretends to speak in his voice — it does a number of things that of course no accurate or respected biography would be doing.   My own family and my own circumstances were also an influence. On my father’s side, we come from a long line of locksmiths. We own Victoria’s oldest — in fact Canada’s oldest — privately owned security company. So I grew up surrounded by keys and locks. As a young poet I wanted to explore some of the mythology of “On my father’s side, we come from a long line of locksmiths…so I grew up surrounded by keys and locks.”where I came from, but when I tried to write about it it seemed to keep diminishing in scope and size. I started becoming very frustrated with it. It seemed as if, too often, the poems were becoming devoured by the “I” or the “me” that takes over the poem. I started trying to step back from some of that, and by using Houdini as a foil to explore some of these things I managed to just get that arms-length distance that I think young poets want, or long for.   CMW: You mentioned before that biography in verse is a feature of Canadian literature. Who were the people you were looking to as models when you were working [...] "I didn't want to just hit the peaks of his life, I wanted to hit a number of the troughs too, small moments that aren't necessarily talked about or discussed or described in the biographies but that he, of course, experienced. They [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/karla-kelsey/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/karla-kelsey/#comments Sun, 07 Jun 2009 05:41:23 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=164 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/karla-kelsey/feed/ 0 Karla Kelsey’s well-polished poetic objects remind one of sculpture, of solid materials worked and reworked until they acquire, by the sculptor’s hands, freedom of movement in the face of restraint, bounded energy, artful repose.   daily begun from. The blue paper crane hangs in the tree, arc of thrust and drag. You left plumed. You arrived telling of golden sands and a golden sea, sidereal navigation bringing the bird home over bright blooms of fire, explosion   Her poems are literally shaped by punctuation. Stanzas are broken by asterisks; a cacophony of backslashes populates a single line; images reach toward other images from the far edge of a page. In this way Kelsey bestows on her readers one of poetry’s greatest gifts: the space for contemplation.   Gone to the window, light there wood-glossy and in non-repose * As in pick up the seeds and throw them into the street * As in 1 color, gone gold and so seeing, all blurred around the edges and walking   A reader’s journey through her first book, “Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary,” is like a twilit walk through a walled garden rich with juxtaposition; everyday objects keep company with blooming botanicals, birds alight on the branches of trees. Inspired by Plato’s image of the mind at work, an aviary populated by diverse and divergent species of birds, his symbols of knowledge, Kelsey invites her readers to examine contemporary experience through the optics of the past. An eighteenth-century gardener’s dictionary becomes a touchstone for descriptions of flora; an epic Romantic poem teaches the value of scientific language. These elements and others work together to make poetry that is smooth, seamless, whose beautiful moments are path through today’s crashing babel.   Patterns on the siding,               amber waves of decibels to perform the particles   a waking         as if we slept, here, the street going on before      as the street               goes on                                  in moments of reverberation   Now, in her new work, “Iteration Nets,” a contemporary take on the sonnet form, forthcoming from Ahsahta Press, Kelsey curates an exhibit of sound sculptures, their strict, formal framework a structure for musical language buttressed by rhyme scheme and rhythm. The first section, comprised strictly of sonnets, is “exploded out” in the second into related prose poems that are, in the third, erased to lyrical fragments. In this way Karla Kelsey illustrates the transitory nature of meaning, reminding us that understanding is mutable, and art full of possibility.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Karla Kelsey: [Reads "I Was Working the Free Radicals"]   Carlin M. Wragg: I wanted to start with this poem because we have the image of the bird, which you mentioned as being a really important figure throughout the volume, as well as the idea of parts and component parts — I was curious about that. It’s hard to give language to this question because I find, for me, reading your work is more of a sensory experience. I find that when I back away and try to understand “what it means” it’s reductive, so let me just say some of the things I was thinking about as you were reading: Again, component parts, red and orange-red, that one can be part of another, this taking apart and putting back together again. I’m wondering what you were thinking about as you were composing this, who you were reading, what came into this particular piece?   KK: I think I’m very infatuated with perception, where language and perception meet, and how language creates our perceptions while perception creates our language. So, thinking about the way that we intake the world — that we take in only parts of it, that we can’t intake the entire world — is always fascinating to me, [...] "I think I'm very infatuated with perception, where language and perception meet, and how language creates our perception while perception creates our language." http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jamie-oneill/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jamie-oneill/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 06:04:50 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=158 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/jamie-oneill/feed/ 0 In 2001 Jamie O’Neill’s novel, “At Swim, Two Boys,” was published to international acclaim. O’Neill was compared favorably with James Joyce and called the “next big thing” by critics around the globe. The story of Jim and Doyler, “At Swim, Two Boys” explores the complexity of two boys’ emerging love for each other against the backdrop of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising.   “The Lancers had charged here too, it was told. There was a dead horse down the way. All about the steps, flowers were strewn and trampled, where the flower-sellers’ stalls had been toppled. Barricades blocked the side streets, erected of particular things: bicycles jumbled and piled in one, hunks of marble for another, bales of newsprint — the work of disparate guilds whimsically chosen. Trams had been overturned. There were no trams running. No juice, the tram-man told him. Even trains: the Sinn Feiners had dug up the lines. And no polis. No polis anywhere. Withdrawn to barracks. Every last pigeon-hearted lily-livered chicken-gutted sneak of them. It was pandemonium. It was Donnybrook Fair. It was all ballyhooly let loose.” (U.K. Edition, pages 563 – 564)   Thus begins the move toward Irish independence, a long and bloody war of subversion, disagreeable compromise, and betrayal. But “At Swim, Two Boys” is as much a book about love as it is a book about revolution. In fact, descriptions of the uprising come only in the novel’s last chapters. It is the heady confusion of the boys’ affection for each other and the complex portrait of emerging Irish nationhood that spur the reader on.   Pegged at 200,000 words, “At Swim, Two Boys” is also a book made rich by the possibilities of the English language: animated spoken speech, diverging, diverse accents, lyrical writing interrupted by abrupt pivots from one point of view to another. These add a magnificent texture to O’Neill’s deftly rendered history, animating his questions about Irish culture through characters that embody the myriad walks of early twentieth century Irish life:   “There goes Mr. Mack, cock of the town. One foot up, the other foot down. The hell of a gent. With a tip of his hat here and a top of the morn there, tip-top, everything’s dandy. He’d bare his head to a lamppost.   A Christian customer too. Designate the charity, any bazaar you choose, up sticks the bill in his shop. ‘One Shilling per Guinea Spent Here Will Aid the Belgian Refugees.’ ‘Comforts for the Troops in France.’ ‘Presentation Missions up the Limpopo.’ Choose me the cause, he’s a motto to milk it. See him of a Sunday. Ladies’ Mass by the sixpenny-door, stays on for the Stations for his tanner’s worth. Oh, on the up, that’s Mr. Mack, a Christian genteelery grocerly man.” (U.K. Edition, page 3)   In the years since its publication the critics’ compliments for “At Swim” have rippled through the culture. They inform book club picks, course syllabi, the recommendations of one friend to another. This, it seems, is true evidence of the novel’s success: these concentric circles; these expanding rings.   Now we have a glimpse at the sequel.   Our interview begins with a discussion of “At Swim, Two Boys” and ends with a preview of the story still-to-come.   — Carlin M. Wragg, Editor   Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.   Jamie O’Neill: [Reads At Swim, Two Boys, U.K. Edition, pages 67 - 68.]   Carlin M. Wragg: I want to start by asking you where your idea for the book came from; did it start with the two boys we just met, Jim and Doyler?   JO: It started as a film script, actually. I thought it would make a good film, just about the Easter Rising, and then, when I had these two boys, I said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go the whole hog with a buddy movie?” Instead of everybody thinking, “Oh, aren’t they wonderful friends,” to actually have them loving each other. So I thought I’d [...] "When you're writing you're that bird on the wing, you're soaring and you're plummeting but you're not telling the wings to do anything. When you're describing afterwards what's happened you're applying [...] http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/dedra-johnson/ http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/dedra-johnson/#comments Sat, 07 Mar 2009 06:32:25 +0000 editor http://www.openlooppress.org/?p=121 http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/dedra-johnson/feed/ 0 A nine-year-old girl wakes up on the morning she is to leave her mother’s New Orleans home. Sandrine Miller will spend the summer with her father, and she will visit her grandmother, who she adores most of all — who lets her bring the collard greens in from the garden, teaches her to make jam, takes her to the library for more of the books she loves. Sandrine can already feel the strength in her grandmother’s fingers as she works cornrows into her hair. Even so, anxiety dilutes Sandrine’s excitement. Will her mother discover her? She is standing on a stool, wiping down the tops of the kitchen cabinets, early, before her mother (Sandrine hopes) is awake, righting an oversight, that, if caught, would be considered a grave one. Will her mother keep Sandrine in New Orleans as punishment?   “I stopped in the doorway, my clothes for the drive still on the floor where they had fallen off when Mama picked up the suitcases; I tucked the clothes under my arm. ‘You keep your mouth shut. He asks you about me or this house you just say ‘fine,’ hear me?’ When I left, she was muttering, ‘He don’t want to live with me, he don’t get to know what goes on in my goddamn house…’” (Pg. 3)   So begins “Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow,” Dedra Johnson’s impeccable first novel; hopeful and hurtful by turns, where reader and narrator walk together along a path of prose that wends its way through Sandrine’s troubling childhood.   Through Sandrine we encounter the quandaries of adult authority, explore the specter of loneliness, and observe unusual resilience in the face of trouble, all of which compels us to examine questions of responsibility: of adults to children, of children to themselves, of readers to the characters they learn to love.   “Mama cooked breakfast every morning before work and I ate just enough to stop the pains in my stomach. Soon I’d be eating biscuits and grits and hard-rind bacon and homemade jelly every morning for the rest of my life. In church on Sunday I stood, kneeled, said words without thinking about them until it was time to go home and even though I usually couldn’t wait for Lent each year because once a week our class did the Stations of the Cross and I could look at the stained-glass windows showing the Mysteries up close, the paper-white Jesus, the drops of blood, Mary’s face turned up to heaven, begging God to save her son just for her, no other reason, just because she loved Him and wanted Him, I didn’t even glance at the windows and didn’t care about any of it. (Pgs. 67 – 68)”   We come to know Sandrine as we know the interior angles of our own assumptions. Yet we also know her as we know the child who sits beside our son at school, the girl we see, day in and day out, at the library — the one we caught once out on the sidewalk admonishing her sister. Dedra Johnson has affected a difficult, disconcerting, yet delicious writerly effect: the unreliable narrator. Sandrine tells us what’s happening, accurately renders her encounters, but does so in a voice that reflects a child’s vision of the world. It is us, Dedra Johnson’s readers, who recognize another layer of meaning: we know Sandrine’s challenges should not be hers to face alone. Thus we are bound to her, and to each other, by our concern. Will anyone step in? Are we the ones who must do our best to help?   It is in this way we recognize the power of fiction — that it compels us to care for those who are, in fact, imagined, that it shows us the most difficult things and makes it possible to look. Fiction is a window through which we view the experience of others, those whose lives may be different from our own, but who we are drawn to through the fact of our mutual humanity. It is this gift that Dedra Johnson gives her readers: a character that elicits our compassion, who reminds us that that the power for change lies in what draws us beyond the borders of the [...] "I've always liked the idea of the unreliable narrator, or the multi-layered narrator, where you understand more than the narrator is telling you, and so I very intentionally did that with her. Sandrine being a child made it possible to [...]