CruelestMonth.com

Much Ado

To relieve my inbox of what ails it, here's a highly incoherent post (My Outlook inbox has become the barometer of my anxiety level.  How terrible is that?  I'm too sensitive for all these e-mails.  What are they really saying!?)

Okay, retournons à nos moutons:

The war of the War & Peace's continues!  We never wanted to pick a fight, but, as these things go, it was picked for us. Newsweek runs a feature this week. Galleycat weights one side with links. And Publishers Weekly reports.

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The 2007 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, which honors the most outstanding book of poetry published the previous year, went to Alice Notley's Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (Wesleyan University Press).

Judge Marie Ponsot had this to say, "[Notley's] poems give us thirty-five years of political, personal, death-defying engagement.  The nature Notley most loves is human nature.  That urban passion propels her speculative dramas of gender, class, and race; of Vietnam and Iraq; of schemes of power and the claims of art.  Ardent and agile, she is willing to cry out, to drift, to stammer, so as to put every turn of language to her use.  Her aim is to speak to everyone; her book shows her success."

The prize is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets and carries a $25,000 award.

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Did you know that HC United, HarperCollins 6-time-defending Metro League soccer champions, has a fight song?  I didn't until last week when it was composed by our friend Brock.  As you listen, please note that we're singing about the "Libro League" not about the unfortunate, though reasonably successful, league of another era.  Download h_c_fightsong_rough1.mp3

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I received an e-mail about the launch of Literary Comments, a site run by Daniel E. Levenson, author of the poetry collection Are These My Lions?

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Stephen Burt reviews Time & Materials by Robert Hass for the NY Times: "The Limits of Influence".

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Thomas Fink interviews Noah Eli Gordon at E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S.  Follow the link to read more thoughtful questions like the one below (there are answers too):

TF: Novel Pictorial Noise (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), selected for the National Poetry Series by John Ashbery, consists of fifty prose-poems, each a page or less in length and each followed by a line or two or three or sometimes more of verse. Sheila E. Murphy’s “American Haibun” is a prose-paragraph followed by one line, but your approach is more variable. I like what Ashbery has to say about this in his blurb—that “each prose-bloc” is “modified or modulated by the ghostly fragments that interleave them,” and the ghostliness often has to do with grammatical anomalies, like two prepositions in direct proximity that don’t normally interact. The modifications that Ashbery talks about are mysterious to me; how did you establish a relationship between the paragraphs and the verse, at least in your own mind?

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Finally, stretch your legs and make an event.  The American Academy of Poets offers proof of a busy October.  Academy events, Non-Academy events.

The Kenyon Review interviews Stanley Plumly

It's taken me all week until now to read this interview.  It's been maximized and minimized a few dozen times, but now that I'm done, I think it's safe to share.  If you have any interest in Keats, definitely click on over: "A Conversation with Stanley Plumly". 

An Interview: Tao Lin

Tao Lin is the author of the poetry collection you are a little bit happier than i am and the simultaneously released fictions Bed and Eeeee Eee Eeee, a story collection and novel, respectively.  He runs the blog reader of depressing books and various other online publications.  I can't express exactly what his writing is or does beyond the fact that I read it quickly and with satisfaction.  Resigned yet emotionally attuned, simple yet new, his voice leads the reader through hallways and trap doors and ladders that descend into underground realms of teleporting animals.  His poetry makes me feel like a Honda Civic, and he was kind enough to answer a few of my questions:

Michael Signorelli: Congratulations on your three books. I like each one. When I started you are a little bit happier than i am, I thought the table of contents was a poem, one that I really liked. Has this been a popular confusion among readers?

Tao Lin: A little popular I think. Matthew Rohrer in a blurb for the book said, "I accidentally read Tao Lin's table of contents as a poem; it's a hilarious poem and it hooked me right away." I read the table of contents a few times imagining it was a poem and I liked it. It can be a poem. It is a poem. I will submit it somewhere as a poem.

MS: In general, do you enjoy hearing other people's interpretation of your poetry?

TL: I don't feel excited or good or amused or anything when hearing interpretations of my poetry. Because when I read the poems myself I don't interpret them, I just read them and feel emotions. When I read other people's poems I don't interpret them. If I read a poem and it says, "the sky was orange with satellites. / And satellites know everything," (Matthew Rohrer) I don't think, "What does orange symbolize? What does that line mean? What does it mean that satellites know everything? Is he talking about God?" I just read the words and then feel amused or a little excited. Then I use that excitement to go answer an email that I haven't felt like answering for a while, due to feeling unexcited about life or something, or I go do something for someone, or I go write something, or I go outside and look at a tree. I do something in concrete reality.

But if I thought, "The satellite symbolizes God because God sees everything and people think he is in the sky like satellites are in the sky but you can't see them," I do not feel excitement. I feel bored. I feel inhuman, because I am using my time and energy not to do things in concrete reality that have to do with other human beings, or trees, but to do things having to do with abstractions and concepts, which do not exist in concrete reality but in a metaphysical place, or something. That is not life-affirming, it is the opposite. It is denying that conscious beings feel emotions, denying that pain and suffering exists, and focusing on things that do not exist in concrete reality and that do not therefore feel pain and suffering. I could only do that sarcastically I think. I feel very bored and very unexcited when I hear or read people "interpreting" fiction or poetry in a non-sarcastic way. I feel nervous about this paragraph. I hope it makes sense. I think I articulated this better somewhere else on the internet.

MS: In your poems you often talk of not wanting to exist anymore. Now that your books have been published, will they exist for you? Do you prefer living in a world where your books are published?

TL: My books are just books. I do not "own" them. They are not connected to me physically. People only know that I wrote the books because I tell them my name and then they look at the names on the books and see that the name is the same. There is no concrete connection between myself and my books. A dog or a baby or person who doesn't know my name can look at my books and then look at me and see no connection. My books will not exist for me. I exist for me. I think I was being sarcastic, or not completely literal, when I said in my poems that I didn't want to exist anymore. I do prefer to live in a world where the books I wrote exist, because I like my books. It is okay, and even moral, to like one's own books, as if they were someone else's books. Moral, in part, because to view one's books as separate from oneself teaches that "ownership" is not a thing that exists but was created, as a concept, in order for people to have more power over other people, and make more money, and things like that.

MS: What poets do you like?

TL: I like Matthew Rohrer, Michael Earl Craig, Ben Lerner, and Ellen Kennedy.

MS: Do you like reading to audiences?

TL: Sometimes I do. I have a poem that is a lecture about eating meat and dairy. I like reading that to an audience because I think it is funny. I like reading sometimes because the audience can't argue with me and I have time to lecture them calmly and rationally and in a monotone, while they are staring at my face. A lot of the time when I am reading I feel bored of myself. I feel both the audience's boredom and my own boredom.

MS: What questions do you ask yourself when deciding if a story is complete?

TL: When I worked on the stories in BED each day I would start reading from the beginning, and keep reading, and once there was a part that didn't feel very interesting to me I would do something about it, like delete it. When I had one entire draft, with an ending, I would be aware of whether or not things prior to the ending were in service or not to the ending, while reading each day from the beginning. If not I would try to do something about it, like delete it. Ideally I want every word to be in service of the entire story.

I used to think that people were just being dramatic when they said about a certain writer, "Every word has been excruciatingly chosen," or something. I think almost every writer has had that said about them. I still think people are just being dramatic when they say that. Only Lorrie Moore possibly, out of the story-writers I have read, in many of her stories, has, it feels like to me, "chosen" each word "excruciatingly." I think I "chose" each word "excruciatingly" in a few of the stories in BED. The last story. If a writer uses a cliche of language like "screamed at the top of my lungs" or "give him the boot" the phrase has been chosen, not the word.

An Interview: Dennis Loy Johnson

Dennis Loy Johnson and his wife Valerie Merians, publishers of Melville House Publishing (based in Hoboken, New Jersey), received 2007's Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing.  When the opportunity arose to interview Dennis about his press and about his perspective on publishing in general, I couldn't resist.  Even though the Cruelest Month is very much a product of HarperCollins, and HarperCollins is very much a product of News Corp, I figured we could afford to celebrate some of the truly good things happening on smaller scales.  (Since its inception, the Miriam Bass Award has gone to Soft Skull Press, Akashic Books, and McBooks Press.)  Dennis is well known for running Mobylives.com, an online journal of the highest quality, and is the author of Big Chill: The Great, Unreported Story of the Bush Inauguration Protests.  He was kind enough to answer a few of my questions:

Michael Signorelli: After learning that you had received the 2007 Miriam Bass Award you said that “Valerie and I honestly believe that books are more important than ever.” Why now more than ever?

Dennis Loy Johnson: Look, no one in America believes the mainstream media anymore. They regard it with the same disdain and distrust with which they regard politicians. Bill Keller, David Remnick—they all supported the war, just like Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, where else are you going to find any kind of long-form writing? In a time of short sound bites and insufficient public access to in-depth analysis, we find ourselves with a twice-unelected president and in a stupefyingly senseless war that everyone else in the country knew before it happened was stupid and based on lies.

But meanwhile the one form of media that people have an inherent faith in is the book. I mean, one thing I’ve learned as a publisher is that every body either has written a book or believes they can. Everyone just grants the book a certain sense of honor. And I’ve been encouraged by what happened at a couple of significant points in recent history. After 9/11, the best-selling books in America were all from independent and university presses, and they were books about Islam and spirituality and books about the twin towers and so on—people were searching for the kind of information the newspapers and television weren’t really covering. And they were buying these books in large numbers, and totally ignoring the entertainment tripe on offer from the big publishers. This is a story—a little remarked upon story—that says something really glorious about the American book buyer. And it’s in stark contrast to the accepted wisdom, which is that there is a diminishing audience for serious books. The other thing I found inspiring was how, in the run up to the 2004 election, it was books that really drove the political discussion in this country. It started at the turn of the year with Ron Suskind’s book about Paul O’Neill fleeing the Bush administration, went on with Richard Clarke’s book about Bush’s manipulation of intelligence to back the war, and went on through books by Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward and even the Swift Boat Veterans’ evil little fantasy—it was all books. The book would come out, 60 Minutes would do a story on it, they would get record viewership, then the topic would get some lengthy and serious discussion from the rest of the media herd. That year, books ignited discussion after discussion, and most of those discussions were good for the country. So I don’t care what anyone says, nor what sales figures indicate, books still have meaning, and in fact still have real power. Despite the failure of the rest of America’s mainstream media, and despite this fact that this has become a virulently anti-intellectual culture—because of those things, in part—even here in Dumbfuckistan books have awesome super powers.

MS: Does being a writer make you a better publisher? Or, how does your experience as a writer shape your approach to publishing books?

DLJ: Sure it makes me a better publisher. For one thing, it makes me a lot less snotty than the average Ivy League wannabe novelist that has been the historic character of the big New York publisher, and a lot more open to good books coming from unusual places. And by that I don’t mean, you know, whatever is the new hip ethnicity—I mean unusual places such as the slush pile, which is something the big houses don’t even have anymore. We’ve published quite a few books now that just came in over the transom. (As, similarly opposite to the big houses, we usually reject out of hand things that come in from agents.) Beyond the attitude difference, I also think simply that my years in the writing trenches just make me a more discerning reader when it comes to craft—I really don’t like the kind of shallow constructions and total ignorance of form that is the hallmark of most new big house fiction, for example, and think that the kind of mind that can construct a smarter narrative and have some sense of linguistic control is more apt to have something clear and engaging to say. I mean, there is no poetry without form.

MS: After Bush was re-elected you crashed the publication of What We Do Now in three weeks. As a book publishing “professional” that time frame makes my stomach hurt. Did that crash entail the writing of the book? Even if not, what drove you to such lengths?

DLJ: That time frame made more than my stomach hurt. It entailed everything – we got the idea a few days after the election, when everyone we knew was just sitting around massively depressed. I mean, the election had once again been pretty clearly stolen, no one was reporting on it, we were still being governed by right wing pigs that had taken us into this insane war …. It was pulverizing. People were taking days off from work. A couple of people we knew actually left the country. Then some kid from Athens, Georgia drove all the way up here, climbed down into the pit at the World Trade Center site, and shot himself dead, leaving behind a note explaining that he was upset about the election. Valerie and I, who had been among the massively depressed till then, looked at each other and just said, “Enough. This is getting way out of hand. There’s got to be something we can do.” As it turned out, we decided we had a publishing company and the thing we could do was make a book—a real book, something that would motivate people in the spirit of democracy. I mean, this country was in a very essential way founded upon the inspiration of a book—Tom Paine’s Common Sense. So it seemed a historically sound thing to do, although given the current situation and the culture, suitably revolutionary and inspiring. We thought about it for another day or two, then when the title came to us we started.

"Reconsidering the World"

An excerpt from a highly excerptible interview with Noah Eli Gordon at Rain Taxi:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson: I understand that you used to keep a daily blog and then gave it up only to return to it recently only to give it up again. What's your sense of the blogosphere for poetry? How do you see how it shapes the contemporary poetry scene?

Noah Eli Gordon: As your mention of my own involvement makes clear, I've got pretty mixed and uncertain feelings about blogs. On the one hand, I think it's amazing how our ideas about community are in flux, how the Internet is able to have a very democratizing effect. On the other, I do see a real danger in the poetry blogosphere, one which is twofold: first, there's the whoever-talks-the-loudest-and-most-often-wins conundrum; of course this exists in any sort of social interaction, but, to me, it feels really amplified when it's online. Sometimes things seem to be more about carving out one's own little chunk of cultural capital than anything else. The other issue for me is the way such typing matches can effectively warp or shift how folks conceptualize contemporary poetry. I've noticed a new phenomenon in the last few years among poets who are just a little younger than I am; I call it the everything-I-know-about-poetry-I-learned-from-reading-Silliman's-blog syndrome. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have Silliman's blog around; I think he's done, and continues to do, a great service for innovative writing. But I have had several conversations with younger poets who are clearly prostrate to Silliman's opinions. I suppose much of my concern is also undeniably solipsistic; I know I could start blogging about poetry on a daily basis, effectively strengthening my ties with a larger poetry community, while also increasing the possibility of a readership for my own work, yet something about this as a calculated move feels sort of slimy to me, hence my blog's continual disappearance and reappearance. It's the adherence to the cult of personality that bothers me. I suppose I'm more interested in focusing my energies in other areas. Although I'll admit to a voyeuristic interest in how other poets are spending their time—not necessarily in what they ate for lunch, but in what they're reading.

For more of the latest from Noah Eli Gordon visit the links below:

Conversational Noise: Noah Eli Gordon and Erik Anderson from Jacket
A few paragraphs over at Real Poetik

Noah's book Novel Pictorial Noise will be published by Harper Perennial this coming Fall.

An Interview: Mark Doty

Dog Years, a new memoir from poet Mark Doty, tells the story of Doty's life with his beloved retrievers, Arden and Beau.  It is a poignant, perceptive meditation on life, death, and the nature of canine companionship.  Even as a non-dog person, due to hyperactive histamines, I was completely taken with this story.  It transcends any categorization one might want to make based on its subject.  Doty offers wisdom and insight beyond genre.  So to help kick-off NPM, he kindly answered a few of my questions.

Michael Signorelli: You write both poetry and memoir.  Why do you alternate between the two?  What does memoir afford you that poetry doesn't?

Mark Doty: More space!  I often write long-ish poems, but no matter the length, there's a kind of intense compression a poem requires, and there's a limit to the amount of narrative and of meditation that you can put into a lyric without it losing its tension and sagging.  In memoir, I feel I have room to spread out, wander a little, and let that wandering deepen things.  In Dog Years, for instance, there are a couple of Emily Dickinson poems and some talk about them, there's a little travel writing, and some consideration of the nature of the relationship between people and canines.  I'd be hard pressed to do that in a poem.

But I respond to the intense focus of poetry, too, and the music of it, so I always find myself drawn back.

MS: In between each chapter of Dog Years you've written an "Entr'acte."  What are these doing in the book?

MD: I like how in very old-fashioned plays there used to be these little side entertainments between the main acts -- little diversions or sideshows.  I wanted to make a kind of breathing space, writing these little bits that behave kind of like prose poems in between the chapters.

MS: What of the "not-to-be-narrated cats"?  You write that for dogs, "some of the terms we'd use to describe a human character (observant, thoughtful, desiring) are the best we can do to name their not quite knowable inner lives."  Do cats not allow for the same type of emotional graphing?  Or are they all just bitches?

MD: You know, I felt that I was already asking a lot of the reader to go with me on a full-length book in which I chronicled my relationship with two pets.  So I felt if I put my OTHER two pets in there it was just going to be over the top.  Then once I called them "not-to-be-narrated" it became a running joke.  They're hiding in the background, which of course cats like to do.

MS: Were you worred that this book -- given the success of you-know-who -- might be automatically categorized as a "dog book"?  Do you care if it is?

MD: I started writing Dog Years before the big dog book wave, and now it feels weird that there's about to be a dog movie wave, too -- with films coming out called Year of the Dog and A Dog Year.  I am either right in synch with the zeitgeist or a pulse behind it!

In truth, I don't care too much.  People will come to this book from different angles -- because they like dogs, because they know me as a poet, because they read one of my other prose books, and that's all fine with me.  People who just want to read about retrievers may be surprised to find themselves reading about, say, Emily Dickinson and drag queens impersonating Judy Garland, but I'm guessing that a lot of them will enjoy the adventure.  After all, dogs often take you places you wouldn't go otherwise.

Mark Doty will sign books this Saturday, April 7th, 2pm, at Three Lives Bookstore (154 W. 10th Street)

An Interview: Gabriel Josipovici

Goldberg: Variations by Gabriel Josipovici is one of two titles (the other being The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic) that mark the debut of the Ecco7 line of paperbacks.  "Dedicated to publishing notable works by acclaimed and award-winning authors from around the globe," this series aims to remind American readers that they are not alone.  Gabriel was kind enough to answer a few of my questions, which, we hope, will give you an idea as to what this novel is all about, and what Gabriel has acheived in his recent work.

Also, the first ten readers to write me at CruelestMonthPoetry@yahoo.com will receive a complimentary copy of the book.  Be sure to include "Goldberg" in the subject line and your address in the text.  Until then, enjoy:

Michael Signorelli: When/how did you decide to shape this novel after Bach's Goldberg Variations?  How did Bach's work help you manage the many, varied subjects contained in your book?

Gabriel Josipovici: This is the novel I have taken the longest to write.  Usually I write short compact novels and need to write them in an intense burst of speed.  Not so with Goldberg: Variations.  I wrote the first lines in 1988 and the last in 2000.

In 1988 I read a book about Bach in which I came across the famous anecdote first recounted by Forkel about the origins of the Goldberg Variations: how Count Keyserlingk, a Dresden nobleman, was subject to insomnia; how he required his young house-musician, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, to play him something from an adjoining room during those sleepless nights; how the Count asked Bach to compose something for Goldberg to play; and how Bach complied.  Scholars have thrown doubt upon the anecdote, but that doesn't matter.  I decided to write a little homage to a composer I revered by transposing the elements of the anecdote while keeping its basic 'rhythm,' a procedure which struck me as having affinities with some of Bach's own.  I combined the player and the composer into one, changed him from a musician to a writer, and set the whole in an England of around 1800, which meant Keyserlingk metamorphosing into an English country gentleman, to whom I gave the name of Westfield to signal that the story had moved westwards.  I described how Westfield, unable to sleep, hits on the idea of sending for a noted writer, Samuel Goldberg, a Jew of German descent, to read to him; how, on his arrival, he is asked not just to read but to write something new to be read by him; and how he accomplishes, or perhaps does not accomplish, this task; The story worked out well enough, and it was duly published in Alan Ross's London Magazine. A short while later I heard my friend, the composer Judith Weir, on the radio, talking about how important Bach was to her, in a programme about Bach and modern composers. I liked what she said so much that I sent her the story. She wrote back a few days later, saying that she had read it in one go on a train journey. Then came the fateful words: 'I look forward to the other twenty-nine.' (Bach had written his Goldberg Variations in the form of what he called an 'aria,' which appears at the beginning and is repeated at the end, and thirty variations upon it.)  I call these words fateful because when I wrote my own little homage I had nothing in mind but a short story.  Judith's words, however, would not get out of my mind.  Whatever I was doing, I found I was coming back to them.  I listened to the Bach again.  I thought about how exciting it would be to write a novel in thirty separate sections, in which each section would be completely self-contained yet the whole would add up to more than the sum of the parts.  I began to sketch the thing.  And, finally, I plunged into it.

The result was a disaster. It is all very well setting a short story in an earlier period, but I had no desire to ‘research the period’ as I would have had to do if I was to write a whole novel set in it. I not only do not particularly like historical novels (with a very few maverick exceptions, such as William Golding’s The Spire), I don’t believe in them or think they are a viable road for the modern writer to go down. Moreover, though I love the form of the short story and think I have written several pretty good ones, I realised, as I made my calculations, that in thirty years of writing I had written no more than two dozen viable short stories, whereas here I was taking on the task of writing twenty-nine in one go! I plunged in, however, and got about half-way before I finally had to admit to myself that I was bored and stuck. I decided to drop it.

Yet it wouldn’t let me go. Though I wrote three more novels, and a book about the phenomenon of touch, in the course of the nineties, I was, I discovered, still turning over in the back of my mind a way of responding to Judith’s challenge. In 1996, my mother, to whom I was very close, died at 85. Strangely, the novel I was just completing at the time, Now, prefigured her death, as if in my writing bones I knew this was coming, though consciously I had refused to recognise the fact. I managed to get Now off to the publishers but then, in those long days, when I found it impossible to settle down to any sustained work, I began to think that writing a series of short pieces on more or less given themes might be the answer to my problems, and I turned again to my Goldberg book.

Quite soon I found that I could, as it were, open a window onto the present, and use that as a means of extricating myself from the tyranny of the historical novel. Suddenly the work began to excite me again. In the course of the next three years, a portion of them spent in Berlin, a city I had not known till then, I slowly found a shape to the book that satisfied me. A late painting of Paul Klee’s, a postcard of which had adorned my desk for the past five years, suddenly took on a pivotal role in the book. The last fifty pages were among the hardest I have ever had to write. I felt as if my head was coming off. But suddenly it was done. The book was finished.

I didn’t want to follow slavishly in Bach’s footsteps and mould each ‘variation’ to the equivalent one in his work. But I did want to respect the continuously mirroring effects he achieves, and in particular to make chapter 16, which starts the second half, reflect Bach’s own grand variation 16, which critics have pointed out is in some ways more of an overture than the first. Here I adopted the anecdote that is often told about the genesis of another of Bach’s late variation masterpieces, the Musical Offering, again transposed to an English setting. Elsewhere I have taken pleasure in echoing Bach in less direct ways and when I felt it would lead me where I wanted to go.

The book was finally completed in 2000, the 250^th anniversary of the composer’s death.

MS: Do you have a favourite recording of Goldberg Variations?

GJ: In the years of writing the book I managed to listen to most of the available recordings, and I cannot think of one I did not get something from (and how many there are!). Like so many people I was deeply moved by Glenn Gould’s two recordings, especially the earlier one, but it was Maggie Cole’s 1990 recording on the harpsichord that I found myself returning to more often than any other.

A long interview with John Koethe, originally published in the Southwest Review, will run for a week on Poetry Daily. 

Nadine Sabra Meyer Interviewed by John Koethe

Nadine Sabra Meyer's The Anatomy Theater (Harper Perennial, 2006) was selected by John Koethe as a winner of the 2005 National Poetry Series Open Competition. John's most recent collection of poetry Sally's Hair (HarperCollins, 2006) is forthcoming in paperback this March. Last week they discussed an array of topics, from questions of the soul to stereotypes of aesthetics, from sources of inspiration to logistics of book arrangement.  Here is their discussion:

JK: As I said, by a sort of odd coincidence just after I selected The Anatomy Theater for the National Poetry Series I was visiting Bologna where I saw the anatomical theater at the University there with its sculptures of flayed men. It was a rather powerful experience and it made me wonder whether your book was inspired, at least in part, by seeing an actual anatomical theater, or by the kinds of illustrations you refer to, or if the inspiration was  pretty much imaginary.

NM: I had not seen an actual anatomy theater, but I would love to. That must have been fascinating. These poems were inspired by the anatomical drawings. I have seen drawings of that theater in Bologna. I wonder what it looks like now, if it still looks like those drawings, or if it’s changed.

So yes, the poems were inspired by the anatomical drawings from the Renaissance that I came across in my studies. I was reading Renaissance verse and I was doing some studies on issues of gender and sexuality: the way that Renaissance people viewed the body and felt about the body, and the differences, as they understood them, between masculinity and femininity. I stumbled upon these anatomical drawings and was fascinated by them because they are so strange. You have probably seen some of them: the pictures of people who are tearing open their own bodies to show you internal organs. These drawing were produced before the whole idea of objectivity. If you look at anatomy texts today there is a real attempt to show what the body looks like objectively. Whatever that means. But back then these drawings were entirely full of emotion: whether warning the viewer about death or strangely associating sexuality with the violence of opening the body and exposing it. There is a strange sense of people sort of exposing themselves in sexual ways in some of these anatomical pictures. There is even a connection to pornography in some of these drawings, drawings which appeared in scientific texts. They are sort of posing and exhibiting themselves that much. Those drawings inspired these poems because I thought they were so strange, disturbing, and interesting. They allowed me to think about, on so many different levels, the culture that would produce something like this, to think about the ways in which our culture today may have inherited some of those ideas.

JK: Those drawings are fascinating. I have seen some of them. You should certainly try to go to Bologna sometime to see the theater. It’s beautifully preserved. It’s just stunning. One of the central ideas in that anatomical sequence in the first section, you wrestle with the kind of opposition of the body and the soul—as it’s sometimes perceived—particularly in form of the pre-Renaissance notion that somehow dissecting the body poses a threat to the soul. And it seemed to me that you wanted to portray the spiritual, or intellectual, or whatever one wants to call it, as really a part, or an aspect, of the bodily or the anatomical. I’m thinking of your lines that I liked very much, “distills from the stench of flesh pure thought.” I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how this mind-body theme figures in your work.

NM: Sure. I am fascinated by the idea of the soul because I don’t know what it is. I grew up in a family that was atheistic, so I don’t have a spiritual core or learning, but I think I have that sort of yearning. I have the sense that we exist in our bodies and that’s all we have here. I don’t know what else there is, if anything. I think that any spirituality that I find is located in the body, in the mind, in the brain. It’s associated with scientific thought. Is the soul made by electrical impulses in the brain? These are the kind of things I wonder about. I think that’s an interesting question. Without even trying, in a sense, those poems are exploring the ways in which the body is deeply disturbing to me—if at death we decompose, and if that’s all we are, that’s pretty disturbing. There is also a desire to find something spiritual, something beautiful in the body. I think that in these anatomical drawings you see that: both the rotting flesh and the body made beautiful as a work of art.

JK: One of the things that I find wonderful about poetry is the freedom it allows to entertain various ideas and thoughts, like the soul, without actually believing in them in some doctrinal or religious sense. And that seems to be one thing that you are doing.

NM: Yes, it allows you to explore what that idea means.

JK: I completely agree. Your poetry itself seems to me to embody, or enact, a kind of reconciliation of the bodily and the spiritual, because, you know, on the one hand because its subject matter it is extremely immediate and visceral, almost gut-wrenching, yet the cadences, the vocabulary, and language that you use and these beautiful sentences that you fashion makes it also a kind of meditative poetry of ideas. It seems to be concrete and abstract at the same time. Most poets write either concretely or abstractly, but few of them combine them in the same way. I wonder is that something you are aiming at, or aware of? How do you think you go about achieving that?

NM: I don’t think it’s conscious. Hearing you talk just now about the way you experience my poetry, it is in some ways the way I think of the body—as both concrete and also as spiritual, or as larger than the self. I definitely have the desire to look at the body and our human life and make of it something more beautiful, some sort of art, something aesthetically pleasing that has larger meaning than just the self. I think that I must have been trying, on some level, without realizing it, to reproduce in the form of the poems that sense of both the visceral and the transcendent.

JK: It strikes me that your unit of composition is the sentence rather than the word, or the line, or the phrase, which is what it is for some poets. Does that seem true to you, or am I just imagining things?

NM: I think it is true particularly in the anatomical poems in the book as well as the painting poems, in the third section. I was purposefully working with the sentence and exploring what I can do with that, using these long sentences, in which I was trying to keep changing the idea, sort of turning and turning, to make surprising, interesting things happen with the language. And to let the language lead me, to let the language help me make discoveries. So yes, I was definitely working with the sentence and forcing myself to complete ideas, to think of the logical conclusion of a metaphor that started this way.

JK: That was one of the things that drew me to the book. I’m a sucker for sentences and I especially liked yours. As one goes through the book, one of the striking things is the way those anatomical poems in the first section, which are third person and largely historical, mythological, segue into these equally visceral poems in the second section, which are first person poems. I was just curious as to which group of poems came first? Did you write them deliberately to relate to each other in that way? Or is that just an artifact of how you decided to arrange the poems in the book?

NM: I wrote the first-person poems first. The one called “The Paper House”, in which a first person speaker talks about her experience with surgery, came first. When I finished it, I wanted to keep writing about similar issues—issues having to do with health, disease, death, and the body versus the soul. Those issues were coming up, but I wanted to write in a different manner entirely. I felt that if I wrote a whole book in that one style that it would be too self-indulgent. I had a purposeful desire to write about the same themes, but in an entirely different way. And, as I said before, I had come across those anatomical prints in my studies and was fascinated by them—probably because I was working out these ideas about the self—so I thought: let’s explore these drawings and see what happens. I felt that these issues coming up in my poems were larger than me and that they were interesting issues. They could be put into a more historical, larger sense. I wanted to approach these same preoccupations from an entirely different angle, and that’s when I began to write the anatomical poems.

JK: I see. So the anatomical drawings allowed you to continue exploring some of the same issues and themes without repeating the style in a more impersonal way.

NM: I found it really liberating actually. I made all kinds of discoveries that wouldn’t have happened if I continued writing in that same way.

JK: On that note, a lot of your poems, obviously in the third section but also throughout the book, have some kind of symbiotic relationships to paintings and other works of art. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how the visual arts impinge on your work? Is that something you set out to do, or just when the impulse strikes you?

NM: It’s not something I set out to do. I’m just very moved by painting and sculpture. I think they work very well at helping me find a place to start with my writing. I look at these images and I read them like I might close-read a poem. They immediately move me in some way, and then I question why I feel as I do. Whether I am disturbed, irritated, or moved by its beauty, what specifically about the image makes me feel and think the things that I do? Then I explore that in my own writing; I find images to be very fruitful in helping me access how I think and feel.

JK: I felt there was a rather striking example of this way of merging the personal, or extending the personal into the aesthetic. There in the fourth section of the book where you have this quite strong poem about your father’s experience in the wake of the holocaust and that’s then followed by a sequence based on Chagall’s paintings of Vitebsk. Of course, those were done well before the holocaust. Again, were those two poems connected in your mind as you wrote them or was that a connection you noticed later?

Read a great interview with Carl Lennertz over at Gothamist.
- MS