Her poems “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth” appear in the forty-second issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about “Swill-n-swagger,” “Afloat,” “Mid-tide,” “Ripple. Tank.,” “Unremarkable,” “Thread” and “Stick in river’s mouth.”
A: Impetus: A flash fiction workshop leader asks for a six-word autobiography. I offer a seven-word fish tale—the opening words of “Swill-n-swagger.” Then I wonder: “why seven seas?” Having moved close to the Pacific Ocean, one of my childhood landscapes, I am once again confronting my fear of wading in, riding the waves. The poem plunges not only into seas I’ve seen but other water/land interfaces floating in my mutating memory bank. Hence the “I lie.” All autobiography is fishy. “Afloat” enacts that process when the unreliable narrator confesses in the poem’s second ending. “Thread”—also a memory piece— tries to puzzle out a connection between humans’ holding objects dear and cougars’ need to prey on deer. “Mid-tide,” and “Stick in the river’s mouth” re-enact recent encounters along the Oregon Coast. “Unremarkable” explores re-enactment but not mine: my partner’s neurological disorder allows them to physically act out dreams in bed. This often poses a danger for me, but so far the threat dissolves as it does in the “Ripple. Tank.”—a poem that withholds the actual bomb threats made repeatedly at a high school across from a YMCA where my limbs swim. All these poems open the first section, “Sound Water,” of my manuscript, Fathom. The rest of that section includes epistolary and ekphratic prose poems that reference writers Barry Lopez and Meredith Stricker, musicians Steve Reich and Maurice Ravel as well as artists Luis Buñuel, Krist Goto, Leah Wilson, and Eva Kmentová, Georgia O’Keefe. We could call these prose endeavors “diary entries,” but they travel in time and place from trauma to bliss. There is Ghanaian dancing at Naropa and mopping up of flood mud in NY’s Southern Tier. On the simplest level, I am composing to meet an assignment I gave myself: write only prose for a year.
Q: How do these pieces compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
I got several projects going—each spilling out of each other. A version of Fathom had a fourth section called “Bound Daughter” featuring letters to my ancestors. My goal for Fathom was to hand-sew (stab binding) the “finished” manuscript. I experimented and settled on an 8.5-inch by 8.5-inch format devoting only one page per poem. The prose blocks in “Bound Daughter” were too long to fit on a single page, so now they are their own entity—Reverse Dance. That title is borrowed from a tune for the hurdy-gurdy (vielle à roue) by Andrey Vinograd here. I got turned on to the hurdy-gurdy after seeing Le Vent du Nord here in Eugene. You can hear Nicolas Boulerice here. The opening poem in Reverse Dance addresses a paternal great-great grandmother who (along with her younger sister) came to the U.S. as a “hurdy-gurdy gal.” In 1854, the city of Murrhardt, Germany thought it cheaper to send orphaned teens to San Francisco than to keep them as wards. Previously, I wrote a failed novella about her sister who was murdered by a suitor who then killed himself. For years I’d accepted the account my dad found in an 1857 newspaper, but maybe it is a lie. What if the second gun, the derringer, belonged to my great-great grandmother. “Did you murder your sister’s murderer?” I ask in a letter to g-g-grandma Charlotte.
The second project also springs from a panel book structure I am learning to make. (I just took a fabulous class from Elsi Vassdal Ellis at the Focus of Book Arts festival in Monmouth, Oregon.) The unfolding structure will feature: 1) a heart-shaped Yellowstone agate book was cut-n-polished by my maternal grandfather that my mother bound onto a pounded copper belt buckle she made; 2) tale of my paternal grandmother’s grief after her brother drown in the Yellowstone River in Glendive; 3) tale of maternal uncle’s deep diving escapades in the same river.
I have been traveling often to Montana to tend to my 89-year old maternal aunt who is losing cognitive function rapidly. To deal with the stress of that, I’ve become obsessed with my paternal grandmother (who died before I was born). When she was 15, her newlywed brother drown in the Yellowstone while bathing. His body, I presume, rode the river. Nonetheless, I keep taking my maternal aunt to see his 1914 grave marker which is a half-hour drive north of Glendive. Why? My aunt never knew him. He’s no relation to her. But she still loves a road trip. She never seems to mind where she goes. She never remembers going. Juxtaposing my “ghost” grandmother’s grief over her brother’s death with my real aunt’s concern about her memory loss is my coping mechanism.
Minding how stories are told keeps me in the present. My aunt: “I told you I fell in the shower the other night. But now (we are in the doctor’s office), I think I fell in my mind. If I had fallen in the shower, I’d have pulled the curtains down. So I must have just fallen in my mind.” The gouge in her ear and the scab on her elbow are ample evidence of a fall, but I love how she uses words as a veil between her worlds. That’s why I’m interested in moments we called “curtains.”
Q: I’m curious about the way you discuss your compositional process, blending elements of music, book binding and hand-stitching. What brought you to your writing being but one element of these larger hybrid structures?
I grew up watching my mother, an outsider artist, making sculptural objects from scavenged junk. Our whole stucco house was her studio/ gallery. Consequently, art play—moving objects in space to sound— is always a part of my literary composition process. The most formative period this kind of hybrid making was when I was earning an MFA in integrated electronic arts at iEAR Studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1999-2001).
There, I was in constant collaboration with musicians (Seth Cluett, Warren Burt) and artists (Caz McIntee, Marco Loera). Influential faculty include Tomie Hahn, Curtis Bahn, Branda Miller, Pauline Oliveros. Silly me, I thought digital integration of image, sound and word would supplant book structures. Financially, I could not keep pace with every-changing software and operating systems. Within five years, my digital work was no longer accessible because it was in “formats” that were obsolete. I turned to making physical zines by hand.
Poets Deborah Poe, Laura Moran and I offered homemade books for “art” displayed at the first of the High Water Salo[o]n chapbooks. I had started a salon series and the press Stockport Flats in the wake of a 500-year flood on the Upper Delaware River. Deborah Poe went on to curate the Handmade/Homemade series (originally through Pace University). I took a bookmaking class with book artist Laurie Snyder in Ithaca, NY. A few years later I worked with Pauline Myers-Rich at her No. 3 Reading Room & Photo Book Works in Beacon, NY. Now, I am meeting and learning from the book artists in the Pacific Northwest through Focus on Book Arts. The physical challenge of working with knives, papers, glues is keeping my cognitive function alive.
Q: Do you tend to see your work as a singular, ongoing project or an overlapping sequence of self-contained works? How do you keep it all straight?
Both. Lately, a pleasant sensation comes over me often as I realize all my work is one long conversation: iteration plus iteration plus iteration plus …. ad nauseum(?). Maybe this gestalt is a product of aging. Or, maybe I am getting better at recognizing design principles of gestalt (good figure, proximity, similarity, continuation, closure, symmetry). Nope. I doubt it is increased awareness—just more googling. Overlapping sequences are not confusing to me: such imbrication is vital connective tissue. Maybe I can blame my early training in hypertext.
Book publication creates the strongest “end stop” to a writing obsession. Or newness. Suddenly, I fascinated with thermophiles—those colorful mats of microbes that thrive in thermal pools. My partner and I will be visiting Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone next week as we head back to Montana to tend to Aunt Audree. Maybe the thermophiles I meet will spark some new poems that aren’t ghosts of old ones. [Note: we never made it to the hot springs. In the backroads of Idaho, my husband got very ill. He is recovered now. My fascination with thermophiles is on hold.]
“Keeping it straight” is only important when shopping manuscripts. In question #1, I said I chopped on the last section of Fathom because it didn’t fit the hand-binding format I wanted. Well, I just got an encouraging rejection note (“engaging book” and “it came very close”) from Fonograph Editions’s open genre contest for the full manuscript ( last section included). Now, I will shop both versions. But I will also use the last section (“Bound Daughters” …see question #2) to start a new manuscript Reverse Dance. The failed novella I mentioned in question #2 is now a ten-page poem with two nine-line stanzas because I needed a long poem to make a stick-bound book in last-week’s book arts workshop (I used a 4-inch sail needle as the spine). Maybe that poem is part of the new manuscript too. Everything is mutable.
Q: With a handful of published books and chapbooks under your belt, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work headed?
A: Progress? Do you think about your writing within a narrative frame of progress? I don’t. I’d like to do a better job wrestling/resisting the legacy of settler colonialism and white privilege I was born into. That is a life’s work and extends beyond writing, but I hope my current and future poems help me live as a human who does less and less harm to others.
I have a poet friend who wants to win a Pulitzer Prize, and she might just do that. My goals are smaller: at first, I just wanted to outlive my parents. That’s done. Now, I want to outlive my aunt who I am helping. Pretty soon my focus will shift to my sibling and my partner’s siblings. In these “hospice years,” I make short term goals: learn a handful of artist book structures and write work to populate their pages; explore Oregon’s literary presses; study climate change in the bioregion where I live; develop relationships with non-human beings. As I feel my own cognitive decline increasing, I try to immerse in the present.
Q: I think of progress in terms of progression or evolution, certainly. I’m not the same writer I was five or ten or twenty years ago. Different experiences and concerns prompt shifts in the ways in which I approach or even consider what it is I do. Do you see yourself and your writing in the same way as you did a decade ago, or further?
A: I tend to think of my writing in cycles or orbits. Patterns repeat themselves—not necessarily with the same frequency or amplitude—but they repeat themselves. When I was a kid, I saw this amazing juggler televised (on the Ed Sullivan show?): he didn’t toss similarly shaped objects of the same heft. Instead of five orange balls, he tossed a ping pong ball with a clothes iron and a shoebox and a wet sponge. Then he’d throw in an axe. Not sure when I started describing my writing as juggling, but I did start warning audiences at readings to expect these ingredients: a slice-of-life-experience + plus a pinch of literary theory + some scientific curiosity + a punch of primal drama + some musicality (mind you, not a melody or chorus) + some word play with a tinge of political rage or ambivalence. The particulars and pyrotechnics of these juggling acts were and continue to be influenced by the techniques and preoccupations of my writing communities as well as my body’s bandwidth. When I was younger, I thought our language experiments could one day permanently break the subject/object relations always already in syntax. When I was younger, I thought our protest poetry and the liberation is brought was part of an ongoing progression/evolution improving the material conditions of all beings. Now I see cycles, impermanence, an ongoing _____. Now, I am not able to just fill in the blanks. My writing practice always involves experimental reading, thought play, art play, sound play, body play, water play, dog play and prayer and conversation and listening and +++++. Discerning the quality of the resulting “product” or its place in some literary evolution is a task for ______.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A. Reading Don Mee Choi, Jordan Able and Paisley Rekdal at the same time is electrifying. This summer, my immersion is in Mirror Nation, Empty Spaces, and West: A Translation. The political power, the historical reach, the technical range, the image/word interaction, the heart the heart the heart. The book designs. The continuity. I love how each of these “new” collections send me back through each writer’s previous work.
I am also reentering Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, Book 1 in response an essay poet Don Byrd sent me. Byrd meditates on AI generated images he and a bot recently created: “But I’m in a fix. I don’t know what I am seeing, even though I am the initiating agent.” I am still trying to respond to Byrd’s essay and images. My gut instinct was to use Bök’s words to help me do that. Now, The Xenotext is becoming linked (weirdly? aptly?) to U.S. electoral politics. I write some postcards to voters in Georgia then I reread Bök’s reworkings of Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV. Bök’s book prompted me to start chapbook, Whittle Gristle (to date it is 27 pages long.)
Today, my answer to your question about evolution of writing sent me back to this 1993 book: I downloaded a pdf of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science: Cognitive Science and Human Experience Varela, Thompson and Rosch. I have owned hardbound copies of that book twice before; it is a book I like to share. I return this tome once a decade not because I better understand Cognitive Science but because I have grown more mindful of my daily life. The first chapter is entitled, “A Fundamental Circularity.” This time around, I might need to read the updated version to see if/how thinking about being has changed.
A book that comes off the shelf more times than I can count is Pentti Saarikoski’s Trilogy translated by Anselm Hollo. I can always find a page that talks to me. “Today a new bird came to the yard / mute / no need to look for it in the book / the bird of the god of song.”
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