By Matt McDermott
In your experience, is there much productive cross-over between the different artistic disciplines in Chicago? If so, has that impacted your work?
Definitely. My friends Ray Bianchi (poet) and Waltraud Haas (painter) are currently doing a book collaboration of poems in conversation with paintings titled Immediate Empire. The poet Kristy Bowen is working with artist and writer Lauren Levato on a collaborative book arts project titled at the hotel andromeda, inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell. Mainly, there’s the reliance on local artists for contributions to covers. For instance, my friend Brandi Homan’s new book Hard Reds is using one of Ursula Sokolowska’s photographs for the cover image; Gabert Farrar provided the cover art for a collaborative chapbook, Sonoluminescence, that I wrote with the poet William Allegrezza. Vera Klement and Wesley Kimler’s dazzling artwork graces the cover of both of my books. Artist Kelly Vanderbrug is providing the cover painting for poet Kristy Odelius’ Bee Spit. Leroy Bach turned an old poem that I wrote into a song—bad poem, beautiful song! Then there’s the ever-charming Tim Kinsella venturing from music into film with the release of Orchard Vale that has an excellent soundtrack. And Howling Hex member Philip Jenks and I are in the middle of a collaborative writing project, with one of my favorite pieces of the project titled “Dear Leatherface.”
A beautiful poem of yours, /One Swallow Doesn’t Make a Summer,/ seems to meditate on the nature of poetry and being a poet. What concepts were you trying to convey in the poem?
For me poems tend to be palimpsestic: one is constantly writing over various voices or reconfiguring previous voices, both personal and historical. I remember when I wrote this poem I was teaching my students to write an ars poetica and we were looking specifically at Vicente Huidobro’s poem that begins “Let poetry be like a key / opening a thousand doors. / A leaf falls; something flies by.” I loved that idea of entry and exit and I wanted to let anything that “flew by” be able to exist in the poem in the manner of the surrealist technique of automatic writing, allowing as many voices as possible float through the poem; thus, the nod to Benjamin Peret, Baudelaire and his muse, Jeanne Duval, Duchamp’s “cuttlebones,” my grandmother, Aguirre, Mina Loy, and then the actual insertions of Auden’s and Stoichoff’s lines. The idiomatic title “one swallow doesn’t make a summer” (which for some reason I’d never heard before) was discovered reading David Bordwell’s film commentary. I’ve always been fond of Jack Spicer’s idea that “the poet likes to think that s/he’s a pitcher, but really s/he’s a catcher.” I placed the poem in numerical sections instead of just stanzas to reinforce that idea of moving through various doorways and catching snippets of sound.
How would you describe the state of poetry in Chicago?
Chicago is in the middle of a poetry revivification. There’s no other city in the U.S. that I’d rather be living in right now in terms of poetry communities. Two recent anthologies have just been released that represent the broadness of Chicago poetics: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, edited by the fearsome duo William Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi and The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, edited by Mark Eleveld.
There are so many amazing poets involved in interesting projects in Chicago right now. To list only a few: Brandi Homan, Becca Klaver, and Hanna Andrews who recently established Switchback Books; the prolific and tireless Kristy Bowen who runs dancing girl press; Jen Karmin who curates Red Rover Series; Kerri Sonnenberg who directs the Discrete Series; Joel Craig and Chris Glomski who run the Danny’s Reading Series; Larry Sawyer who hosts the Myopic Series; Bill Allegrezza’s Series A; Lauren Levato of Woman Made Gallery; and Fred Sasaki of Printer’s Ball fame. There’s a whole slew of poets whose work is spacious, sustaining, and to use Milton’s word “diuturnal”: Kristy Odelius, Jackie White, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Mark Tardi, Garin Cycholl, Luis Urrea. . . And then there are people whose work I love, but have only recently been introduced to, like Ela Kotkowska, Suzanne Buffam, Jennifer Scappettone, and many other poets in the City Visible. There are several marvelous poets who recently moved here—Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Philip Jenks, Stefania Heim and Joshua Corey. I could fill up pages with all the wonderful reading series and poets that currently reside in Chicago or nearby—Tim Yu, Michael Robins, Erica Bernheim, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Joel Felix, Robert Archambeau, Chicu Reddy, Robyn Schiff, Francesco Levato, etc. For every person I’ve listed here, there’s an equally great poet that I’ve failed to mention. If I sound hyperbolic, it’s because it’s exciting to reside in a city so chockfull of stunning, substantive work.
Some of the local literary journals, presses and organizations that are helping to represent this renaissance, and which are definitely worth checking out, are Make Magazine, Chicago Review, Milk, Ink & Ashes, ACM, Wicked Alice, Absent, blossombones, Poetry, Rhino, The Common Review, Spell, LVNG, Court Green, Bookslut, Moonlit, Cracked Slab books, House Press, Beard of Bees, Answer Tag Home Press, Literago, The Poetry Center, Chicagopoetry.com, and The Guild Complex’s BYOP.
You fill different public roles as poet: professor, reviewer, actively publishing poet, contributor to a site like Sharkforum. Would it be accurate to say the way you present poetry and yourself as a poet differs with each role?
I think of these roles as being inextricably bound. When you love something, you immerse yourself in it, not just in the construction of it, but also in the dissemination and the community of it. My role as an editor, professor and poetry blogger is all about the broadcast side of poetry and I consider this participation to be an integral side of existing within a community.
It seems on some level you have a passionate involvement with words that extends beyond the discipline of poetry. Would you agree and does having these different outlets for your involvement with words enrich your overall poetic practice?
Yes, I love doing the “word of the day” series for Sharkforum. Dave Roth chooses the illustrations to accompany the words, so it’s always a pleasure to see what he comes up with visually. Two of my favorites are his images for “formicophilia” and “vellicate.” Dictionaries for me are like wunderkammer, those old cabinets of curiosities stuffed with arcane artifacts. When I was a kid my parents didn’t have a television, though my grandparents whom I stayed with during summers did (which is where I first fell in love with Universal and Hammer horror films as well as Johnny Weissmuller). During the rest of the year though, especially around the ages 9-13, I read avidly and indiscriminately from Watership Down to Harlequin romances to The Iliad to True Detective. My mother would never tell me what a word meant when I asked; she’d always insist that I look it up in the dictionary, so I did. I felt I was privy to multiple secrets, which is always seductive especially when you’re a kid. Words took on physicality and there was something animating about learning what particular words meant. This sense of language as kindling is beautifully illustrated in The Monstrous and the Marvelous when Rikki Ducornet writes about being “infected with the venom of language in early childhood when, sitting in a room flooded with sunlight, I opened an alphabet book. B was a Brobdingnagian tiger-striped bumblebee, hovering over a crimson blossom, its stinger distinct. This image was of such potency that my entire face—eyes, nose, and lips—was seized by a phantom stinging, and my ears by a hallucinatory buzzing.”
How does your poetry relate to the postmodern movement and has that changed over time?
According to a friend, I never made it past modernism, so when that changes I’ll get back to you.
What are the advantages and disadvantages to being both a practicing poet and an academic?
The main disadvantage is the lack of time to focus on one’s own work. What some people don’t realize about academia is that it’s not limited to teaching and research. A large part of my week is taken up by what is referred to as “service:” department meetings, faculty meetings, committee meetings, task force meetings, student advising, student teaching supervision, etc. It’s easy to get lost in all of it. You have to learn superb navigation skills or you start experiencing “meeting-meltdown.” I’ve never watched so much TV in my life as when I became a full-time professor. (I’m currently addicted to The Wire and Battlestar Galactica).
On the up side, the teaching component of academia is something I actually love, and is often an ignition switch for my imagination. I tend to assign exercises to my students that I commit to doing as well. It allows for a structured environment in which I tend to be more productive. Teaching represents the same kinds of opportunity that drew me irresistibly to writing—both practices, for me, being founded on a constant dialogue that sustains a shared world, as they explore the loop between self and other and back again, with a special attention paid to the medium in which that loop exists, language.
Teaching film courses allows for another type of ingress into poems. I often let a phrase or an image from a film become the activating mechanism: using a line that catches my ear as the rhetorical device or refrain for a poem, like Double Indemnity’s: “I wonder if you wonder,” and Claire’s Knee: “I’m like you, my dear”; or, the image of Leatherface twirling his chainsaw in the sun that the previously mentioned “Dear Leatherface” is built upon.
The other advantage is I don’t have to steal things from work anymore, à la King Missile, as I get them for free: books, paper, envelopes, coffee cups.