TtD supplement #299 : seven questions for Joel Chace

Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as Lana Turner, Survision, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, Golden Handcuffs Review, New American Writing, and The Brooklyn Rail. His full-length collections include matter no matter, from Paper Kite Press, Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, fata morgana, from Unlikely Books, and Maths, from Chax Press. Underrated Provinces is recently out from MadHat Press. Bone Chapel is forthcoming from Chax. For more than forty years, Chace was a working jazz pianist. He is an NEH Fellow.

Four poems from “against which” appear in the forty-ninth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “against which.”

A: “against which” is the title of the third and final sequence of poems in a full-length collection, Bone Chapel, set to be published by Charles Alexander’s Chax Press later this calendar year.  In this series, there are sixty poems total, and eight that begin with the exact words “Against which.”  The remaining fifty-two poems all start with words that make approximate rhymes with “Against which”:  “A guest which,” “Egress glitch,” “Unclenched fist,” and so on.  As I recall, the words “against which” somehow popped into my head, possibly in a dream, though they may have been triggered by “Against which, advance the war,” from Macbeth, a play that I must have taught a hundred times over the course of my career. I honestly don’t remember how the notion of developing an entire sequence occurred to me.

Q: How does this work compare to some of the other writing you’ve been doing lately?

A: The collections that have preceded Bone Chapel – fata morgana, Unlikely Books, and Underrated Provinces, MadHat – represent, among other things, a greater focus on spirit as it manifests itself in nature, including human nature, and in an ongoing conversation among thinkers and writers across centuries.  In addition, in Underrated Provinces I began using strict counting as a structural method, especially in the first sequence of that book, where the first poem employs single-line stanzas, the second poems employs two-line stanzas, onto the ten-line stanzas in the tenth piece.  In Bone Chapel, all the poems in the second section employ five-word lines (as well as five-line stanzas), and the pieces in the third and final section employ six-word lines.

Q: What brought this interest in working, as you call it, “counting as a structural method”? What do you feel working such structures allows or provides in your work?

A: I started using this procedure as I developed the sequence entitled “toe” [Var(2x): Joel Chace, toe], which will be the second section in my upcoming book, Bone Chapel.  Five toes led me to five-line stanzas.  Then I thought, “Why not five-word lines?” I enjoyed what happened with that series, so I continued using the method in two sequences that followed.

Q: Do you have any models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? 

A: Yes, I do.  Just one.  Louis Zukovsky, in various sections of his A.

Q: Explain.

A: About halfway through his tour de force A, Zukovsky started to use lines based solely on word count, primarily five-word lines and even two-word lines in one section.

Q: With a handful of published collections, as well as your current works-in-progress, how do you feel your work has progressed? Where do you see your work heading?

A: Right now, in this country, it’s extremely hard for me – for most people, I believe – not to feel tremendous concern, if not despair.  I’m being drawn to address political, social, and cultural crises, but to do so while continuing to maintain a wrestling with spiritual crisis.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: There are many.  To name just some poets: Oppen, Zukovsky, John Taggart, Norman Fischer, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, Nathaniel Mackey.