Carta Marina by Ann Fisher-Wirth

When I read Carta Marina, I was stunned by the honesty of the speaker.

While the book itself is structured very much like a novel, even hooking the reader with a something of a mystery that sets the stage for the drama of the present time of the narrative, the poems are straightforward in the way they confront the truth.
In the poem "April 10, Växjö" we read:

My legs across Peter’s belly,
I said, “I love you both,” and he smiled,
held me. He said, “I love what is real.”

At this moment of the relationship, the speaker, while she is visiting a foreign country for an extended period of time with her husband Peter, has taken up an email correspondence with a former lover, who fathered her stillborn child. I want to point out that, for me, the honesty of the speaker is not in the confessions, but in the way the poet has touched on the complex, interconnected and contradictory nature of reality.

Today pop psychologists are telling us about the dangers of facebook and other virtual social networks that allow us to reconnect with romances from our youth. I can’t believe anyone could read Carta Marina and not be confronted by their own sense of the past, of past relationships and past selves and ask themselves how all of it relates to the present and to the “real”.

I have read the book several times now already and feel that each time I see new connections, new metaphors in regard to territories, languages, time and transience. I am thankful that the author took the time to answer a few of my questions...

Speaking with the poet, Ann Fisher-Wirth:

RP:

In the very first poem, October 14, section III there is a quote from a letter the former lover wrote to the speaker, which he says, “If you were not living in Europe/I probably would not have written you now…”
The man doesn’t say, “If you weren’t married”. On some instinctual level this makes sense to me. What do you think about how physical landscapes possess us?
How do you feel the experience of being un-tethered from your physical home affected your writing?
How do you feel that the time you spent being “the other” in Sweden affected your writing?

AFW:

I am so glad you asked about that aspect of Carta Marina, because it goes so deeply into what made the book possible. The Russian word "ostranenie" means defamiliarization, or estrangement, and it is what makes art possible; it causes us look at everything around us with new eyes. Living in Sweden with my husband for an academic year -- where everything was familiar enough for me to negotiate daily life, yet different enough to bear strongly in upon my senses -- made me start looking around more intensely in the first place, and that is what led me, for instance, to spend time in the small dark room in the Carolina library gazing at the Carta Marina. But also, being away from home, away from our house, our friends, my full-time teaching, gave me time that I never have in my usual existence, and in that freed-up time my identity unmoored itself a little, and began to wander. In that state, already somewhat liminal, I received this message from a vanished lover from my distant past. I responded as one does, friendly but distant, and then received a second message, in which he revealed a
secret about our past that he had carried for over thirty years. This second message brought the enormous flood of unresolved grief that fills Carta Marina crashing down into my present -- and that released flood of grief brought, in its wake, all the other conflicts and emotions that the book struggles to express.

The other aspect of this process of defamiliarization was the weather. Carta Marina, which was written in real time, completes part of the circle of a year; it begins in October with brief flashbacks to September, and ends near the end of April. The darkness of a Swedish winter really pulled on me; it allowed me to move further and further into a liminal state in which my "monsters," as I called them, roved abroad, and the beloved dead could hover closer and closer to the living. Then the spring, with its nearly constant light, electrified me as love electrifies us. I don't remember who has said of poetry, "It was like being alive twice." But that is what that year -- for all its anguish -- was.

RP:

While this book is obviously personal and lyric, I see it as an objekt d'arte--while there is the impression, if not proof of spontaneous emotion, it is expressed within a framework of meticulous craftsmanship. I admire the combination of contrasting talents and wonder what your thoughts are on the marriage of the "liminal" state that you experienced, and the sense of identity and discipline that must have been necessary for the revisions and final form of the book.

Specifically, I am curious about your writing process. Anthropologically speaking, the linimal state will result in a reintegration with society, with a new identity. Since you wrote these poems over the course of a year, while experiencing anguish, how did their formal structure evolve and when?

 
AFW:

I do not think the liminal state is a formless state, though such form as arises is liable to be very fluid, experimental, improvisatory, and at time chaotic. Liminality is openness, in-betweenness, a threshold time in which one may pass between worlds; one's "angels" and "monsters" are permitted to come forth and roam freely. It has great potential for anguish and terror, but also for healing.

Largely, Carta Marina launched itself forward poem by poem, day by day. I never knew ahead of time what I would write, whether I would write. I began at the beginning, sitting on the floor of the Carolina Libary one drizzly afternoon, looking at the huge map behind glass on the wall before me. Part I ended naturally at Samhain, All Saints' Day, a time of maximum liminal intensity. It ended with the prayers for the dead--both my own beloved dead, and the dead who are buried in the Uppsala University graveyard. A couple of weeks later, Part II began, as winter began to deepen in Sweden and the dark pulled at me ever more strongly. Part II is called "The Coming of Winter." It too ended naturally, just before the winter solstice--the day of greatest dark--when the self or soul would gladly surrender even the remnants of common sense because of some darker knowledge that is drawing close--a knowledge bound up with possession, and grief, and death, and the sacred, and sacrifice.

It was not difficult at all to write the first two sections of Carta Marina, but then there is a gap of nearly three months in the book, during which time the events of my life continued. I knew that I had a book, that it was not finished, and that I had to finish it while I was still in Sweden; I would never be able to add to it once I left the arc of that year. This is how "Les Tres Riches Heures" came to be, which begins mid-March and leaves everything still unresolved on April 20, when with every moment spring is gathering sweetness and the light is growing stronger and more encompassing.

Then, the manuscript sat. Part I, "Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina," won a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. I made some efforts to publish the book as a whole once we returned to the States, but though it was a Finalist several places, it didn't get taken. Eventually, I had enough distance from the writing to realize that I did need to edit the book. This is the point at which I enlisted the keen editorial eye of Pat Fargnoli. Originally, Carta Marina had a short section called "Interlude" between Parts II and III, consisting of individual poems, and Pat advised me to take the section out, to save a few of the poems ("The Anatomical Theater," "There ought to be a poem," "I know how to find you") and weave them into the texture of "The Coming of Winter." Also she pointed out that the plot involving the resurfaced lover began too late in the book, so I moved that first email forward a few pages. Finally, I cut a few sections of the Key to the Map section dated October 26, which now skips from "C" to "H." That is just about the extent of the changes.

I am honored that you speak of the book's "meticulous craftsmanship." I've been writing and reading all my life, and I'm a person who lives in terms of language. So the language and form of Carta Marina were prepared for, without my knowing it, over a long, long time.

RP: 

I wasn't aware of the awards the poems have already garnered. I believe they are well-deserved.

One last question:

I want to thank you so much for the insight into the editing process of the book. Did you find that working with Pat Fargnoli during this process helped you acheive a kind of "ostranenie" in regard to your own poems? Had you worked with a consultant in this way before?

AFW:

Yes working with Pat was a big help. So was just letting
the book (and my life) have time to settle; I always knew I
believed in the poetry, but it helped to be able to see it
at some distance. No, that was the first time I'd worked
with someone, except that Beth Ann Fennelly (friend and
colleague) and I had traded MSS in the past.

RP:

Thank you so much for your time, Ann. And for Carta Marina. 

Carol Dorf reviews Carta Marina in this issue of Babel Fruit.

Hyperrealism in Literature

An Argument for a Hyperrealism Poetics (as surrealistic technique)

Hyperrealism is a term mainly used to describe a movement in the visual arts that arose around the turn of the millennium. Artist like Ron Muech create works that reproduce the illusion of reality right down to every single pubic hair. They often strive to create works that are “clearer and more distinct than the subject itself”. According to Tal Danai, “the Hyperrealist process as a transformation of perceived reality into a manifestation of objective conceptual reality, which in turn illuminates perceived reality in a new light.”

In his essay, “Hyperrealism and Conceptual Art: What yo see is what you get?”, Danai writes:

While the difference between “Realism” (as in real life) in Hyper-realistic works and that in Surrealistic works may be simplified as the difference between a clearly imaginary and “unrealistic” (in its most common laymen’s sense) reality on the Surrealist side, and the “almost real” or “could be real” or even outright “Real” (in the same laymen’s sense) on the Hyperrealist side, the making of the latter is of a much more illusive nature. […] In trying to analyze it one should be constantly aware that that reality is not made for the purpose of creating an imaginary reality. It is developed by the artist as means to an end of making comments on the reality the artist lives and operates in. That means that the visual work functions as a telling mirror allowing the artist to direct it at issues, ideas, emotions or any other elements of the artist’s ‘real’ world. The better polished the mirror, the more telling it is.

For the last 12 years, my poetry has been increasingly riddled with footnotes. I struggle to pack poems with all the information relevant to the metaphors I am creating. Just as the existence of the very real narwhal drives us to conceive and search for the unicorn, the bizarre details of nature and history drive me to conceive of and search for correlations in my perceived existence: in the poem, as metaphor and mimesis. My intention goes beyond literary allusions, geological allusions, or biochemical allusions.

While Surrealists often use the minutiae of reality in the fabric of their form, and many of my poems are surrealist, I have begun to write more poetry that seeks to avoid the dream-like elements of gowns made of egg shells (“Spinster’s Shroud”, mixed states. Wigestrand, 2004), to focuses increasingly on the facts alone to provide the quality of heightened experience:

A child unconscious                                      An child consciously
under cold water                                            held under cold water
experiences laryngospasm,                            reaches the breaking point
asphyxiates,                                                   after eighty-seven seconds,
but the heart                                                   inhales
keeps                                                              involuntarily,
beating                                                            but the heart keeps beating.
five                                                                  Ashes falling on water
full                                                                  float
minutes—                                                       like rotting wood,
every instant bobbing in and out of view.

(“Red-eared Slider", mixed states. Wigestrand, 2004).

In the poem “A Request for Sound from a Televised Report from Afghanistan” (An Intimate Retribution. Wigestrand, 2009) the line, “bitter as giant fennel” can be processed as a metaphor based on a general idea of what the desert plant looks like, or the simple fact that it is bitter. However, the true metaphor, the core of the poem is found only with the knowledge that giant fennel has been, and probably still is, used as an abortion agent, as a treatment for asthma, as a remedy for menstrual discomforts and that the oil from broken leaves is so caustic that it causes blisters. The literary allusions that could be claimed are unnecessary and actually unwanted in this poem. The poem is about the facts. Nothing more than reality is necessary to create mimesis. In fact, anything more than reality steals focus from the metaphor.

The poem “A Guide to Knowledge” (from the forthcoming collection about Dorothea Dix) takes its title from a small encyclopedia written by Dix herself. In the poem I present the parasite Peltogastridae; Peltogastrella sulcata, which dissolves through the shell of the hermit crab and de-sexes it. It is the stuff of myth. But the hyperreality of this little fungiform serves as a far more polished mirror for the gender issues forced upon Dorothea Dix - by her contemporaries, herself and historians, than any myth.

For the past two years I have been exploring techniques for selecting and sharing information with the reader. How to keep poems fluid and readable while focusing on the unfamiliar microscopic activity within the gonads of hermit crabs.

I think I may be approaching a literary style of Hyperrealism... or not.

Turning to Horace Well's story will mean a more demanding craftsmanship when it comes to weaving of scientific and the hallucinatory experiences.

Poet With the Inside-Out Undies

Other people never put their underwear on inside out. They never get too personal, never spill coffee on a white shirt at 9 am, and never pretend to forget a PTA meeting.

It’s a fact.

That’s why I never leave my house. Except on pain of bouncing checks or to get on a plane headed where no one knows me. Sometimes for three whole days I can be one of those other people—if I avoid carpeted staircases, buffet dinners and slit skirts.

That rarely happens. Not that it matters because on day four I show up at breakfast with a hangover, electric hair and lipstick on my teeth. And on my fingers and my napkin and my coffee cup.

A couple of years ago I was at a literary festival with a high profile writer from New England. Poised and cool. Trim and reticent. She read in an auditorium. I read in a bookstore, competing with the slurps and buzz of espresso drinkers flipping through their copies of Ms. High Profile’s book (it is good, by the way).

After spending a wonderful afternoon trawling one of the city’s little museums with a fraction of the delegation, including a charming poet from Scotland, four of us went to lunch. Poet Charming was there and halfway through the appetizer, a local, creamy white cheese (it is very good, by the way), he remarks on what an exciting group of people we are: Bohemian Poet, Erudite Poet, New England Gracious-Dignified-Feminine Poet (there were more adjectives here, but it hurts too much to call them to mind) . . . then he got to me.

Bohemian Poet offered me more cheese.

I’m never going to be one of those other people. The sliding doors at the grocery store are never going to acknowledge my existence and open for me. I’ll never be able to use my wit to intimidate my kid’s mean math teacher.

I think there’s a PTA meeting tonight. I’m going now to change my underwear. If I get in a car accident I don’t want to be Poet with Inside-Out Undies.

Talking with Stacia Fleegal

One of the nice things about being involved with three journals is how sometimes "not right for Babel Fruit" doesn't have to be followed by "good luck elsewhere". When we accepted one of Stacia Fleegal's poems for the upcoming issue of Babel Fruit, I was also able to send two others over to Protest Poems where they were a better fit. I also thought this blog would give me a chance to ask her about influence, form and candidness. I am happy she agreed to the interview.

"I really do enjoy pushing against physical constraints, I don't in any way see that as limiting, and I think the idea that form is limiting is quite outdated. I live in a capitalist society, but I can still boycott Wal-Mart, after all." (Stacia Fleegal)

RP:
There is a candid sensuality in much of your poetry that pulls the reader into the speaker’s private world: your poem “A Blind Date With(out) My Mother” (3rd Muse) is rich with tactile, domestic details: scrubbing cereal bowls, putting on a bra, etc. that create a convincing, private context for the relationship the speaker has with her mother; the title of your chapbook, A Fling with the Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2007) reveals itself as a sexual act, as frustrated intimacy, in context of the poem from which it is taken, and when Jen Garfield reviewed your chapbook for Prick of the Spindle she pointed out the dedication, “For me, for getting over it”, as a sign that the collection is about the “poet’s…love affair gone sour” (emphasis mine). Your dedication clearly invites the reader to see a speaker/poet undivided. Since you’ve done so, I will dare to ask: What are some of the issues you face in regard to self-censorship and the assumption that the lyric (and even narrative) poet is telling the personal, biographical truth?

SF:
First, thanks for the kind words and the opportunity to talk to you about my writing. In A Fling with the Ground, I did want the reader to see the speaker and poet as being the same person, so I'm glad you and Jen Garfield feel the dedication accomplished that. Unrequited love is arguably the oldest topic of poetry, so I tried to make it new, but I also feel very strongly that the extremely personal is what distinguishes one individual from another, and those details are what make poems fresh. Sure, every topic has been written about, but every person has a different combination of background and upbringing and insight, a different set of experiences, with which to interpret those same old topics. My favorite poets are those who fearlessly mine(d) their lives for the most personal details to say something in a new way. I don't self-censor. My mouth gets me in trouble sometimes. That's ok. Perhaps in the future I won't take such obvious steps to assure the reader that I'm "telling the personal, biographical truth,” but I'm not writing fiction and I'm not co-opting someone else's experiences. In Fling, I was reaching out on purpose.

RP:
You have said that you are influenced by formalist poetry. Which poets, formalist and otherwise, do you admire and how has their work influenced you as a writer, reader and editor?

SF:
My favorite formalist is Molly Peacock, but first and foremost, I love her work because she’s fearless in terms of writing about her life. All of my favorite poets have that in common. I can’t get enough of Sexton, she’s just fierce, and she was smitten with form as well. Other favorites of mine are of course Dickinson and Whitman, Thomas McGrath (hugely underrated), Judy Grahn (poems and feminist scholarship), Sharon Olds, and Frank Bidart. I recently discovered Milosz and love everything of his so far. One of my favorite people to see read is Sonia Sanchez, she’s incredible. Books published in the past few years that I admire greatly are Aaron Smith's Blue on Blue Ground, which won Pitt's first book prize a few years ago; Eloise Klein Healy's The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho; Susan Deer Cloud's The Last Ceremony; Erin Keane's The Gravity Soundtrack; and Glenn Sheldon's Bird-Scarer. My partner, Dan Nowak, also won Quercus Review's 2007 poetry book prize for his first book, Recycle Suburbia, and my biased and unbiased opinions about it are the same: it's fantastic and important. Buy it here.

How they influence me? It might sound obvious, but they make me want to be much better than I am. Writer, reader, editor, they are all linked in my mind. Each of the above poets has found new ways to say things, so whether I’m reading new books or submissions or writing new poems, I’m thinking about whether the words in front of me are familiar, have I read this before, etc.

RP:
So you are influenced by formalism, but prefer to “break the rules”. You have also very boldly stated, “No line breaks? No poem.” Can you say a little about how you use line breaks and why you think they are necessary in a poem when you choose to break the rules regarding other formal elements of poetry, like meter and strict adherence to rhyme or repetition in your pantoums, etc.?

SF:
I stand by "No line breaks? No poem." even though I know some people will disagree with that. I invite discussion on this issue. My stance technically comes from the definition of poetry as it occurs in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, “text set in verse, bound speech,” and that it “has traditionally been distinguished from prose by virtue of being set in verse.” This leads us to the definition of verse: “‘Verse,’ we may recall etymologically, means ‘turn,’ namely, the turn at the end of the line,” wherever the poet chooses it to be. That's my fundamental idea of a poem—one personal choice after another of where to break a line, what you want the reader to focus on, to linger a moment over, or where you want the reader to pause or begin to pick up speed, or how much white space or "lag time" you want to provide the reader in which to form her or his own interpretation of what's going on. Without that device, how does one define a poem? (I'm really asking.) It may seem too clinical, but without that kind of structural definition, poets are opening ourselves up to poetry being defined by something else...but what? Content? That makes me very uncomfortable. Now as an editor, I've published "prose poems," and as a reader, I've loved some work that claims that classification. Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean I would shy from arguing a bit about what to call it, or on the flip side, that I’m incapable of changing my mind. It comes down to one thing: the poet chooses how to present his or her work, how to define it, and where and if to break lines. I enjoy that liberty and so should everyone else.

As for form, I really do enjoy pushing against physical constraints, I don't in any way see that as limiting, and I think the idea that form is limiting is quite outdated. I live in a capitalist society, but I can still boycott Wal-Mart, after all. (I also don't think my reverence for line breaks is in any way contradictory to my love of "breaking the rules." In other words, I don't think my rule of "No line breaks? No poem." is meant to be broken (for me), any more than the unspoken rule that a poem must have words can be broken. Without words, something might be poetic, but it ceases to be a poem.) The sonnet, for example, is a form that was historically used to objectify or entomb women. Imagine the power women can harness by writing in this form about distinctly female things. It's subversive and political and fascinating. Many contemporary poets are doing this, and not just within the neo-formalist movement. I’m not saying anything new here. I won’t make friends with this, but I find it interesting when poets claim to hate form but consistently break their poems into couplets or tercets or quatrains. Or when poets say they hate rules so they’ll never write in form; they’ve essentially made a rule to never follow rules. By ignoring form entirely, poets are potentially ignoring, among other things, a very large part of what poetry is, of the origins of the craft: song. Musicality. Forms provide built-in guidelines for employing rhythm and music in our poems. Certainly those things can be done in free verse, but I guess I want to know, if you've never written in forms, what are you "freeing" yourself from? I personally needed to learn the rules before I could break them. I like putting puzzles together and then taking out a piece or two or twelve and seeing if I still have the essence of that puzzle. Is a sonnet still a sonnet without rhyme? Yes. Without meter? Yes. Without being fourteen lines? Yes. Without all of those things? Possibly. Without a volta? No. Lastly (promise!), I love making poems in which the structure underscores the content. Multi-dimensional poems. I do NOT write in traditional forms all or even half the time, but I never write a poem without thinking about how its construction can serve its subject, how the physical can balance the emotional.

RP:
You got an MFA a few years ago and have said you missed the milieu at Spalding. How do you feel your writing has changed since you graduated? How do you see to it that you continue to grow as a poet?

SF:
I grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania, so never before Spalding had I ever been involved with such a diverse group of people who all have the same passion as me. I obviously haven't attended any other MFA program, progressive or traditional, so I have no frame of reference, but something about Spalding feels unique, like all of us are keeping a secret together. The faculty alone is more than worth the trip. The program nurtures individual talent, is rigorous and demanding, and places heavy emphasis on interdisciplinary study. Applying was without a doubt the best thing I ever did for myself, and the low-residency format was perfect for me.

Since I graduated, my writing has of course changed because all the editing is up to me. I self-edit constantly, that’s totally different from self-censoring! How do I ensure that I continue to grow as a poet? I read. Anything. All the time. And I still have read practically nothing.

RP:
You co-founded Blood Lotus with your former fellow student Teneice Delgado (who also has a chapbook with Finishing Line Press). The fiction editor also graduated from Spalding’s Low Res. program. Can you say a little about the kind of fellowship you think Low Res. programs can foster and why you decided to found an online journal?

SF:
First, yes, Teneice's chapbook is called Flame Above Flame and it was published as part of Finishing Line Press's New Women's Voices series. She also has a second, kickass chapbook out from Rocksaw Press called The Goldilocks Complex, which just came out in April.

Second, my Blood Lotus coeditors are awesome. Fantastic writers and brilliant people. I met Teneice on day one at Spalding and it couldn't have been a week later that we decided we'd like to start a journal someday. Our reason for wanting to do so was basic at the time: we tended to squeal over the same poets and someone said we'd be good coeditors because we'd never argue over poems (ha!). A year later—we hadn't even graduated from Spalding yet—we just did it. We came up with a name (people really respond to our name, we love that) and plagiarized some submission guidelines and created an email address and made all our friends send us work for the first issue. We are now going on four years old and get between 400 and 500 submissions of poetry per three-month reading period, which we of course argue over occasionally. John Steele (a master of suspense stories and also a screenwriter) gets about the same number of fiction submissions. I love having him as our fiction editor because his taste is for plot- and character-heavy prose that exemplifies a lot of what I said earlier about personal details making writing more rich and fresh. So in essence, Spalding introduced me to people whose aesthetics were just enough like mine that we work well together, but just different enough that we learn from each other. That was and is the beauty of a program like Spalding. It’s not about classes and theory and scholarship, it’s about becoming a better writer, and when left to focus on just that, all the while learning how to work it into your own unique life and schedule while under the guidance of an accomplished mentor…well, it’s like hitting a fast forward button.

RP:
What do you learn from sitting in the editor’s chair? Has it changed you as a poet? The way you write or the way you take it when other publishers don’t choose to publish your submissions? (I won’t say reject.)

SF:
I've probably learned almost as much about writing, and of course editing, from my work with Blood Lotus as I did in Spalding workshops. Being an editor gives you the unique experience of being able to see what a large group of your contemporaries are writing about, what emerging writers are doing, where people are publishing, etc. I get a lot of my new book news from submissions. This obviously influences what I read, which obviously influences what and how I write. I suppose it has also affected how I handle rejection, although I'm pretty used to rejection. I've been sending my work out for a long time...plus, have you read A Fling with the Ground?? Kidding. But yes, I know what's in my head when I have to decline publication, and it's never "you suck, stop writing" (quite the opposite, in fact), so I'm less apt to take rejection letters personally.

Of all the editorial experience I’ve had, from The Louisville Review MFA assistantship to News Sins Press to the U of Nebraska Press, I find running Blood Lotus most rewarding because it's a reconstruction of the community at Spalding: writers in conversation with each other. The internet makes the impossible possible by closing distances and introducing people who might not otherwise have crossed paths.
RP:
You have a new book coming out next year, Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter, through WordTech. And I assume that since sending that manuscript out you have continued to write. Can you see your own development as a poet through your pre-MFA poetry, the 2007 chapbook, Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter, and the work you are doing now? Are you still proud of the earlier work? (I’m not implying you shouldn’t be. “You Induce”, Blood Orange Review 2006, is a brief, well-crafted romp.)

SF:
Thank you! I'm very excited about Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter, and by WordTech as an independent publisher of poetry. I love what they do. Finishing Line Press is a wonderful independent publisher as well. Both are extremely concerned with promoting the work of emerging writers, and doing so with a practical emphasis on author involvement (in editorial matters, in design, and most importantly, in marketing) to stay true to the author's vision and to really capitalize on publicity within the author's own circle of friends, family and acquaintances—the people who are most likely to purchase the book. It's unpretentious mutual back-scratching to distribute quality poetry, and I appreciate their support (WordTech's and FLP's) immensely.

I've been writing up a storm, as they say, and last year I finished my second full-length book and have begun sending it out. The poem that appears in the upcoming issue of Babel Fruit, "Spending My Inheritance from Whitman," is in the second book, which is called Versus. Other poems from Versus have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Inkwell, Skidrow Penthouse, The Kerf, Fourth River, New Verse News, and Protest Poems. I also recently found out that I took second place in Ĉervená Barva Press’s chapbook competition, so my chapbook The Lines Are Not My Friends (comprised of poems from Versus) is forthcoming from another independent press I admire for their support of emerging writers.

I definitely see a difference between these newer poems and the older ones, which is encouraging. As for being proud of my earlier poems, I will say I appreciate them as stepping stones; I suppose if I'm going to say "I don't self-censor," then I shouldn't cringe at anything I've ever said in a poem. The poem you mentioned in your first question, "A Blind Date With(out) My Mother," is the third poem I ever got published, and it was written in 2001 while I was still an undergrad. The first poem I ever had accepted for publication is in Anatomy, as are many of the poems from A Fling with the Ground. So the first full-length covers a lot of ground, a lot of time, and no matter what comes after, it will always be very important to me.

RP:
Not that I have to have the last word, but: congratulations on the chapbook competition. We can keep up with Stacia in The Red Room.

The Ubiquitous Present Tense

This morning, pulling into the school's parking lot, I caught the tail-end of the news round up. I always have the radio on, even though the speakers are broken and I can only hear it during that brief space of time between shutting off the engine and taking the key out of the ignition.

"Dennis Hopper dies." The guy says. Said.

Dennis Hopper died a couple days ago, so I think I must be hearing a reprise of some BBC broadcast. But then I wonder what I missed. If the reporter had actually been there as the actor was passing on. By his side. Play by play.

Of course, like the reporter, I was also taught to avoid gerunds, avoid passive language and use the present tense to give it all a feeling of immediacy. And, with the advent of twitter and other social media, which take our human desire to be "in the loop" to a ridiculous extreme, it would seem odd that our language would relax into a meditative or reflective tense, but at what point do we hit present tense overload?

I think with my perverted disappointment to have missed the reporter's play by play was that point for me.

I am going to check out of the present tense and read an old fashioned novel today.

Tribe of Mad Orphans

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