Poet Kevin Prufer Reading at UNT October 23

Poet Kevin Prufer will be giving a public reading of his work at the UNT Denton campus next week. Please come join us!

Kevin Prufer  

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

University Union, Golden Eagle Suite

8 p.m.

Kevin Prufer is the author of five books of poems, the most recent of which are In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011), a finalist for the UNT Rilke Prize; and National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly.  He’s also Editor of numerous volumes, most recently New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/Wayne Miller), Dunstan Thompson: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (Unsung Masters Series, 2010; w/D.A. Powell), and Until Everything is Continuous Again: Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin (WordFarm Editions, 2012; w/Jonathan Weinert).  Among his forthcoming books are Churches (Four Way Books, 2014) and Into English: Essays & Multiple Translations (Graywolf Press, 2014; w/Martha Collins).  He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

American Literary Review Submissions Guidelines Update

Hi all! Lots of things are changing at American Literary Review this year, particularly since we are gearing up to release our final, double-sized issue before we move to being a full-time online journal.  Because of that, we've made some changes to our submissions guidelines, which are posted below.  The most important change is that we are now using an online submission manager, which means that we no longer accept submissions through the good old USPS.  The system should help streamline our process and make your life much easier when it comes time to submit.  And hey, did you remember to submit?  We're always on the lookout for the best in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by established and up-and-coming writers, so we look forward to hearing from you!

The American Literary Review welcomes submissions of previously unpublished poems, short stories, and creative non-fiction. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable if noted in your cover letter. For any questions not covered in this section, please refer to our Frequently Asked Questions page.
 

• Our reading period extends from October 1 to May 1.
• Submissions can be sent to us through our online Submission Manager.
   

We do not accept submissions via email or via postal mail. We also do not accept any previously published work, including online publication and "revised" or altered versions of stories, poems, or essays. Unsolicited manuscripts received outside the reading period will be returned unread.

FICTION GUIDELINES:

Submit only one story at a time. American Literary Review seeks distinctive, character-driven stories.

We have no set maximum for length, but stories under 8,000 words have the best chance of publication. We generally avoid novel excerpts unless they can stand alone as stories.

Short fiction submitted for publication in the American Literary Review must:

• be double-spaced
• have the author's name, address, and phone number on the first page
   

POETRY GUIDELINES:

Submit no more than five poems at a time. Poetry selections are made by a widely-read group with eclectic tastes who look for the best poems, regardless of form or subject matter.

Poetry submitted for publication in the American Literary Review must:

• be accompanied by a cover letter with the author's name, address, phone number, and poem titles

NONFICTION GUIDELINES:

Submit only one work at a time. We welcome submissions in personal essay, memoir, literary journalism, and experimental nonfiction. We prefer submissions shorter than 6,500 words.

Nonfiction submitted for publication in the American Literary Review must:

• be double-spaced
• have the author's name, address, and phone number on the first page

We encourage writers and artists to examine our journal. Please note that after our Spring 2013 issue, ALR will transition to an online only journal and will be accessible free of charge. To subscribe to our double Spring 2013 issue just print out our submission form and mail it to ALR with your check. Individual subscriptions for our Spring 2013 issue are $14.00. Institutional prices are $25.00.

Back issues of ALR are $5.00 + $1.00 shipping and handeling. The current issue itself is $7.00 + $1.00 shipping and handeling.

Please add $5.00 per year for postage outside of the U.S.

Mail your completed form to:
American Literary Review
P.O. Box 311307
University of North Texas
Denton, TX 76203-1307


 http://english.unt.edu/alr/

An Interview with Sarah McCarry

April Murphy: When you began blogging as The Rejectionist, you were anonymous - and the persona you created was pointedly bombastic and irritable. Eventually, this kind of melted away, evolving into a more reflective and sometimes-even-soft Le R, that suddenly, revealed itself to be you - owning up to your real identity and your past and your (exciting/literary) future. I'm curious, did the anonymity help you find your writing voice? Or, once you revealed your identity, did you suddenly feel the need to start writing about your life? 

Sarah McCarry: The funny thing about that is that the early persona of the blog is really what's uncharacteristic for me as a writer, and the personal stuff is more like what I've been writing all along. I've been writing a personal zine since 1998 or 1999, and although obviously (well, hopefully) my writing has evolved a lot over the years I've always used the lens of my personal experience to examine whatever it is I'm thinking about. Everything I've published up until now has been some form of personal essay. When I moved to New York I thought, very briefly, that I wanted to work in publishing, and the blog started as a lark and a sort of escape valve as I was flailing around in that endeavor. But I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't an industry I wanted to stay in, and I really don't like writing about publishing--or writing, for that matter--and so the blog shifted back to the kind of writing I've always done. 

Although I've never thought of that early persona as particularly constructed--I mean, there's certainly a lot of me in there. I'm a cocky bitch. It's a big advantage, especially if you're a woman writing on the internet about yourself, to come across as terrifying. 

AJM: This reminds me of something Rachel Maddow said recently in an interview with Rolling Stone. Maddow was referring to a confrontation she'd had with Alex Castellanos where he said he liked how passionate she was when she called him out on denying the gender wage gap. In the interview she's quoted "I wanted to say, 'Are you saying I'm cute when I'm angry? But I didn't, because when you're a woman on television, you can't even say the word angry."  I think you could substitute 'woman writer' and Maddow's remark wouldn't ring any less true. 

One of the things that I admire about your writing is that you aren't afraid to let people know when you're angry - and you make no effort to conceal that you have strong opinions about how women are treated both in the publishing world, how they're treated by writers, and how they are treated at large. I understand it's nearly impossible to answer "What advice can you give to women writers, people who talk about women writers, and people who write women?" and you've been tackling these very questions for years, but what can you tell them about anger? 

SM: I think anger is the most amazing thing that's ever happened to me; I think anger can be constructive and instructive and it can make you into a force and it can keep you alive. It has kept me alive, certainly. It's the thing I recognize in other people and it's the thing that tells me how much I'm going to love someone, whether we are angry in the same ways about the same things. It can make you totally fearless. But also I think anger is something you have to learn to live with carefully--for me that's been true, anyway. It's also important to learn how to take care of yourself and give yourself permission to take breaks from it. Anger for me is like a sort of tiring houseguest; sometimes you have to be like, "Dude, take a walk so I can clean my damn apartment and read some trashy books and drink a beer." I don't know what to say about it exactly; if you are a woman your anger will make people scared of you, for sure, but the angrier you are the less you'll care, and the people who understand your anger and make a space for your anger and are angry with you are the people you want around you anyway. 

AJM: When I was in undergrad, one of my professors upon hearing a student say they'd been accepted into a graduate writing program exclaimed that "Dante didn't need a degree to write the Divine Comedy."  This has always bothered me, probably because I fear the truth in it. As someone who escaped the MFA/PHD/BA/etc.circus (for a more exciting and literal circus), what has your experience trying to break into the writing world been like?

SM: The short version is that it was about fifteen years of fucking up and going nowhere and then when everything came together for me at last it came together very quickly; like I woke up one morning and the universe had left me a unicorn, pretty much. I knew when I was very young that I didn't want to do an MFA; I took a couple of writing classes as an undergrad before I dropped out of college and I had no patience for it. I am so bad at workshop, I can't even tell you. I don't mean to disparage MFA programs at all, I think they can be wonderful for people who are suited to them, and they can be amazing spaces to get a lot of work done and hopefully find people who understand what you're trying to do and read your writing well. But I go totally bananas and say hateful things and make people cry, and I think if you're that sort of person it's fine too. Just don't inflict yourself on an MFA program. 

This is going to out me as a total hippie but I think it was hard for me for so long because I wasn't ready; when I started taking myself seriously as a writer and telling people I was a writer, when I started taking my blog seriously and treating the things I was writing as though they were real essays and not just running jokes, that's when things started to happen for me. I think it's absolutely true that, MFA or no MFA, if you are moderately talented and willing to work your ass off and never, ever give up, at some point it will pay off for you. There's no one way to do it. 

AJM: Vivian Gornick, in The Situation and the Story, describes a similar process. She says that sometimes you can't write the right story until you've decided who you must be to tell it. Do you any insight into this process? 

SM: Well, I wish I had something very deep and insightful to say about this process, but honestly it happened to me by accident and I have spent most of my life being terribly impatient and frustrated with myself and ecstatically self-flagellating and all that other awesome stuff that comes from being a human. Things didn't start happening for me until I was ready for them to happen, but that place is so different for everyone. Some people get there when they're 23 and some people get there when they're 63 and either way is fine. I can say for sure that right now is the most amazing place I've ever been in my life but I never would have gotten here without aggressively running my life into the ground for a while. If you can get to self-love and dream achievement without epic mismanagement that's probably a way more advisable route. I've been pretty much the same person since the womb but it took me a long time to figure out how to love myself and have faith in what I'm doing. I've also been really, really lucky, and there are a lot of incredible people in my life who have supported me in so many ways. Anyone who tells stories is telling them as part of a community and I have been tremendously blessed by the community that I have.

AJM: Serious question: preferred whiskey?

SM: Bulleit Rye. 

Sarah McCarry is the author of the novel All Our Pretty Songs, forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2013. She has published the zine Glossolalia since 1999 and blogged at www.therejectionist.com since 2009. She is the editor and publisher of Guillotine, a series of chapbooks focused on revolutionary nonfiction (http://souslespaves.bigcartel.com). 

American Literary Review Announces Spring Double Issue and Move to Online Journal

Greetings, friends of ALR:

Most of you have noticed our recent switch from paper to online submissions.  We’re delighted with the new system.  It’s more convenient for both authors, who can send work at a click, and ALR staffers, who are already reading and sharing incoming poems, stories and essays more efficiently and pleasurably than before.  Plus, less paper saves trees, and we now have room in the office for a coffee pot and snacks.

Yet more change is afoot.  Beginning with the Fall 2013 issue, the journal itself will move completely online.  I won’t deny budgetary constraints have something to do with this, but we’ve also discussed an online version of ALR for some time.  Accessibility is important to our authors, and therefore, to us.  The Internet offers that, as well as more space.  In the new ALR, you’ll see more content -- a more substantial book review section, for example – and of course, a new approach to graphics. 

At the moment, we’re busy producing our last paper issue: a generous Spring double book featuring our 2012 contest winners, and much more.  Watch this space for additional details about ALR online, and thank you, authors and readers, for rolling with our changes.  We’re all very excited about our new medium and its possibilities!

Ann McCutchan

Editor in Chief

Find submission information at  http://english.unt.edu/alr/submit.html

Sexing the Cherry in Books We Love

Sexing the Cherry is by far one of my top five favorite books of all time. I read this for the first time years ago, and am proud to say that I have read it at least a dozen times since. Jeanette’s ability to masterfully craft poetic prose is just as impressive as the images she presents. One of the scenes that strikes me the most is the scene in which Jordan goes forth, as one of his fantastical expeditions, to a city where the very air is crowded with words. What Jordan does not see though, is that two lovers suffocate in a church at night, their words unable to escape through the lead above. A magnificent paragraph that has such power and beauty that I am still, years later, completely enamored by it.

This book is a must read for those who have interests in literary fiction set both in a historical and fantastical setting. It’s a short read but does not lack anything within its pages. Set in England during Cromwell’s rebellion, the dog woman (a half-reference to Jeanette’s adoptive mother, this she reveals in her memoir Why be Happy When You Can be Normal) finds a boy Jordan, who upon reaching adulthood, he leaves her to embark upon travels that take him to meet the twelve dancing princesses, lead him to a house with no floors where the inhabitants walk on tight ropes, and also in search of a love that always seems to be fleeing him. It is still in print and widely available. Get it. You will not regret it.

 http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/

Gwendolyn is a Master's student in Creative Writing Non-fiction at the University of North Texas and an avid consumer of literary genre.

ALR Fiction Editor Miro Penkov Wins BBC International Short Story Award

A hearty congratulations to American Literary Review Fiction Editor Miroslav Penkov who has won this year's BBC International Short Story Award for his piece "East of the West."

From the BBC website:

Bulgarian author Miroslav Penkov has won the £15,000 BBC International Short Story Award for his story ‘East of the West’. The announcement was made live on Radio 4’s Front Row from a ceremony at the Free Word Centre in London. South African Henrietta Rose-Innes was the runner-up, winning £2,500 for her story ‘Sanctuary’.

Penkov emerged victorious from a strong global shortlist that included stories from Man Booker-shortlisted Deborah Levy as well as previous winner Julian Gough and M J Hyland, who was shortlisted in 2011.

Set in Bulgaria during and after the Cold War, ‘East of the West’ explores the difficulties of love, relationships and identity in a region ridden with conflict and sectarian violence. The narrator takes us from his childhood through to present day, ruminating on the loves and losses which both constrain and define his life.

Penkov on his winning story:
‘I wanted to write a story about those Bulgarians who, at the will of the Great Powers, were severed from our country, and who inevitably will lose, if they haven’t already, their sense of being Bulgarian. At the same time, I wanted to write a story about myself, abroad in America and in many ways alone, with a huge body of water between me and the people I love.’

BBC Radio 4 broadcaster Clive Anderson chaired the judging panel this year, joined by novelists Anjali Joseph and Ross Raisin, novelist and Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Michèle Roberts, and Editor of Readings, BBC Radio, Di Speirs.

Michèle Roberts:
‘The judges were unanimous in their choice of Miro's story ‘East of the West’, as the winner, as it so ambitiously and successfully united personal and political life, joining inner and outer worlds through its deployment of different kinds of realism: social and magical and folkloric. The narrator's voice is unforgettable, his bleak vision redeemed by a strength of feeling that is unusual and unfashionable in modern fiction.’

Ross Raisin:
‘What I like about this piece is its understatedness. It is rich in historical detail, and imagery, without over-reaching for these effects, and as a result the story manages well the conveyance of epic with the building of interest in the individual struggle of the narrator.’

Henrietta Rose-Innes’ story ‘Sanctuary’ is a subtle but powerful account of a nostalgic trip back to a childhood haunt in the South African bush. The narrator’s encounter with another family explores the experience of domestic violence and its consequences.

For the first time since it launched in 2006 – and for one year only – the BBC Short Story Award invited authors from across the globe to enter alongside UK practitioners. To reflect the global breadth of the International Award in 2012 the shortlist comprised ten short stories rather than the usual five. The eight other shortlisted authors received £250 each.

Ten of the UK’s top actors – including Rory Kinnear and Andrew Scott – read the shortlisted stories, which were broadcast over the last two weeks on BBC Radio 4. Each of the stories are now available as a commercial audiobook download via AudioGo.

American Literary Review Student Reading

Please join us for the second reading in the ALR series on Friday October 12th at at 7:30pm. We proudly welcome PhD candidates Caitlin Cowan (poetry), Justin Bigos (poetry), Erin Stalcup (fiction), and Sidney Thompson (fiction). All students and faculty are invited to attend, and of course, please feel free to bring friends and significant others. 

Caitlin Cowan’s poetry has appeared in Catch Up, Fugue, The L Magazine, Fawlt Magazine, Crate, and The Offbeat. She is a graduate of The University of Michigan, where she won an Avery Hopwood Award in 2006. Her poem, “Flight Plan,” was selected by Ilya Kaminsky to win the Ron McFarland Prize for Poetry in 2010. In 2011, her Twitter poem aired on NPR’s “Tell Me More” with Michele Martin for National Poetry Month. She is currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow at the University of North Texas where she serves as president of the Graduate Students in English Association, and is also well-known for having the cutest cat in Denton.

Justin Bigos holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and is currently a second-year PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at UNT, where he serves as Interviews Editor for the American Literary Review.  His poems have appeared in magazines including Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, and The Collagist. 

Erin Stalcup's stories are forthcoming in Freight Stories and H_NGM_N, and have appeared in in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, [PANK], Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her first collection, Gravity: Stories & a Novella might finally be done, so she'll spend this semester working on her first novel, as well as writing creative nonfiction, two things she doesn't really know how to do. She's counting on most people in the room to help her out.  

Sidney Thompson is the author of the short story collection Sideshow, which was awarded Foreword Magazine's Silver Award for Best Story Collection of 2006.  His stories have appeared in such literary journals as The Southern Review and The Carolina Quarterly, and four have been reprinted in anthologies of Southern fiction.  A series of poems about his wife's recent pregnancy is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry and The Fertile Source.

One Week Left to Submit for the 2012 Literary Awards

The deadline for ALR's contest is in one week, and this year three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in the Spring 2013 issue of the American Literary Review will be given for a poem, a short story, and essay.

Check out the ALR website for full contest details and a link to the submission page: http://english.unt.edu/alr/contest.html


Please note that we do not accept submissions via email.  Please submit your work through our online Submission Manager or via regular mail. We also do not accept any previously published work, including online publication and "revised" or altered versions of stories, poems, or essays.  

For online entries: 

• Submit up to three poems, a short story of up to 8,000 words, or an essay of up to 6,500 words with a $15 entry fee between June 1 and October 1, 2012 by using our online Submission Manager.
   
• Please do not put any identifying information in the file itself; include your cover letter in the box provided.
   
• Short Fiction: One work of fiction per entry ($15), limit 8,000 words per work.
   
• Creative Nonfiction: One work per entry fee, limit 6,500 words per work.
   
• Poetry: Entry fee covers up to three poems (i.e. one to three poems would require an entry fee of $15; four to six poems would be $30, and so on).
  
  For mailed entries:
   
• Submit up to three poems, a short story of up to 8,000 words, or an essay of up to 6,500 words with a $15 entry fee between June 1 and October 1, 2012. Make checks payable to American Literary Review. Entries submitted before June 1 or after October 1 will be returned unread.
   
• Include a cover page with author's name, title(s), address, and phone number. Do not include any identifying information on subsequent pages except for the title of the work.
   
• Enclose a $15.00 reading fee (includes subscription) and a SASE for contest results. Multiple entries are acceptable; however each entry must be accompanied by a reading fee. (Note: only the initial entry fee includes a subscription.
  Subsequent entry fees go to contest costs only and will not extend the subscription.) Make checks payable to American Literary Review.
   
• Short Fiction: One work of fiction per entry ($15), limit 8,000 words per work.
   
• Creative Nonfiction: One work per entry fee, limit 6,500 words per work.
   
• Poetry: Entry fee covers up to three poems (i.e. one to three poems would
  require an entry fee of $15; four to six poems would be $30, and so on).
   
• Label entries according to contest genre and mail to ALR's regular submission address:
  
  
  For example: American Literary Review Short Fiction Contest
                      P.O. Box 311307
                      University of North Texas
                      Denton, TX 76203-1307

An Interview with Paul Otremba

Justin Bigos: First, I’d like to thank you for coming to Denton to read for the kickoff of the Kraken Reading Series.  You read your work beautifully, and we in the audience were grateful to have you.  Before we begin to discuss your first book, The Currency, I’m wondering if you can tell us a bit more about most of the poems you read, which sounded like newer work.  Whereas The Currency is very serious in tone and makes allusions to high art, I noticed that the newer work had references to pop culture, and was often pretty funny.  Are any of these changes intentional?

Paul Otremba: Thank you for having me to Denton. I had a wonderful time at the reading. It was a great venue, and you were spectacular hosts. The majority of what I read is new work. Those poems are from my second book, which I’m calling Pax Americana right now, and it’s scheduled to come out with Four Way Books in January of 2015. The attempts at humor and the pop culture references you noticed are intentional. After completing The Currency, there was a period of time when new poems were scarce in their arrival, if they came at all. As I was finishing up that manuscript, I felt every new draft I wrote was in some way auditioning for the book, so there were formal and thematic affinities. During the extensive editing that went into the book’s final version, I became painfully aware of those affinities, which on generous days I’d want to call obsessions, and on self-critical days I’d call merely habits. I try to keep a balance between those days.

It took me a while to find the new obsessions. I didn't want to write the same poems over again. I believe in the work of poetry, of grinding out daily with the art. Reading and playing around with bits of language—which I consider doing my work—can sustain me for a long time, but eventually I want something resembling a draft of a complete poem. Some things I did to pass the time were formal exercises, setting myself arbitrary constraints that potentially could be generative. I don’t think you need an idea to start a poem or even a particular voice figured out. All you need is a little bit of structure to react against, to set some words down in an arrangement and see what they produce. I wrote sonnets and psalms and epistles and these short narrative pieces; those exercises led me to some surprising diction, rhythms, and subjects. I was also treating the poems as repositories for the various things I was thinking about and encountering. I had turned off that internal editor I had needed to guide the subject matter and tone to complete the first book. In that process I realized there were many aspects to my personality (specifically humor) and interests (mostly movies and television) that hadn’t made it into the poems yet.

It’s not like I had some aesthetic revelation or conversion. The poems of The Currency are merely the poems I was interested in figuring out then. And sure, there is my temperament and the accidents of what I was reading and thinking about at the time. I don’t believe there is a poet you are supposed to be, some poet-homunculus hidden in there you need to discover so it can express itself. When I think of a poem having a voice, that is not what I mean. Recently, I was reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” and in it he talks about the lyric voice as being an expression of the poet’s thoughts and sentiments, an “obscure impulse,” “a demon against which he [sic] feels powerless,” which the poet must find the words for, as if she or he were performing an “exorcism of this demon.” When I read that, I couldn’t help but transpose it to exercising the demon, which feels a little more honest to how I create poems. Whenever I feel myself getting comfortable, I try to push myself toward what at the moment might seem like my opposite.

If I’m honest with myself, I’m just as likely to be watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as I am to be reading Moby Dick or selections from Kenneth Burke, and I enjoy listening to Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as well as ESPN radio and the occasional Rihanna song. As David Ignatow wrote, “I live with my contradictions / intact.” But it would be a mistake to think of these interests as contradictions. While I was working on a poem for the new book that was alluding to Virgil’s Aeneid, which I happened to be reading for no particular reason, I realized that I was really thinking about Battlestar Galactica. Both of them are trying to frame experience and to figure it out. Writing a poem about them is just another way of doing that. Thinking about both of them led me to images and reflections I found interesting. I was learning to trust the voice of the poem as a means to keep all of the disparate parts together. These new poems feel much more voice driven to me. I like when poems talk to you. I guess I’m trying to connect to that.  

JB:  I love that you brought up Ignatow, a poet I don’t hear mentioned very often.  I love his plainspoken, ribald yet tender voice.  I don’t see him as an obvious influence on your work, but is he?  What is there to be said about oblique or hidden influences on poets?

PO: It was the voice of Ignatow I was drawn to, his actual voice, because I had this set of CDs called “In Their Own Voices,” which I listened to obsessively late in high school. The CDs start with that wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading from “America,” the one recently used in a Levi’s commercial, and they end with Li-Young Lee. There are a handful of Ignatow poems, mostly from his Shadowing the Ground. Those poems are contemplative and macabre. I used to repeat lines from them to myself like morbid koans. I’m sure that got in somewhere in my own poems. Perhaps in a rhythm, a habit of phrase, or temperament. There are many oblique and hidden influences, I like how you put that, and maybe this comes from the course of study poets seem to adopt, the way poets live with what they read. I could never read systematically enough to be a strong scholar, which is what I thought I might try to be when I started studying philosophy in college. I never know what I’m going to find useful, and I have no problem putting a book down and erratically picking up another one in the hopes that something will spark. My nightstand is like a library of good but unfulfilled intentions. In my reading, I’m always making connections, webs and echoes of significance, even if those are only private associations for me. Influence might also work as a kind of negative space, to continue convoluting my metaphors here. Sometimes what I’m reading turns out to be what I’m defining myself against.

JB: The poems in The Currency, many of them ekphrastic, often question the very relationship between the eye and what it sees – it is a question of how the eye sees.  And this how is in some way dependent on language.  “How can I know/ the eye without its names?” asks the speaker of “Gray Windows.”  I admire how you are not a poet content to write striking images – what’s most striking is the interrogation of what is seen.  Can you talk a bit about this attraction to the visual, and how your poetry enters and transforms that space of the seen?

PO: While voice, utterance, and allusion are driving the recent poems, The Currency is dominated by description, image, and ekphrasis. Yet those different drives feel equally meditative to me. I might call the approach in The Currency a phenomenological one. The poems often dramatize moments of recognition and misrecognition in how a person might experience the world or come to knowledge about it. Yet, a poem is still language, which is never really transparent, and in a poem even less so. My poems don’t simply report on the experience of experience; they try to make a kind of experience of themselves. Or at least that’s what I hope they do. I also believe that knowledge and the awareness of experience are strongly linguistic acts. I know the world because I describe it. I’m present to the world by calling it names. This drama of description elevated to a crisis of presence and epistemology is something I was attracted to early on in the work of poets whom I consider some of my first loves: Robert Hass, Carl Phillips, C.K. Williams, Jorie Graham, Elizabeth Bishop, and Larry Levis. In their poetry, I discover minds groping after the sense of things, and doing so by talking through it. The point is not so much the outcome but the process. The end of A.R. Ammons’s “Corsons Inlet” could serve as a motto for this: “Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, / that I have perceived nothing completely, / that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.”

To have this kind of encounter, you could be Bishop and catch a fish, or go stare at a reservoir like Hass, or be Levis looking at that “holy” moment of horses drinking from a trough, but you could also have it by standing in front of a work of art. As much as a landscape, a painting or sculpture or installation can be a catalyst for connections and reflections, for making experience significant, which is to say full of meanings. Yet, it’s no more stable than a shifting landscape. The context of experiencing an artwork and the mood you bring to it will affect the significance. It’s this debt to context that for me makes the meditative lyric and ekphrastic poem such viable and interesting modes. They don’t have to be poems that turn away from the world, solipsistic and merely aesthetic. They can be powerful sites of engagement where you bring along your own mediating and mediated position.

JB: I’m interested in your ghazal, “Childhood Monochrome.”  I notice that the radif is simply the word “blue.”  I did not hear a strict qafia, though after I read the poem a couple times I heard a bit of patterning, in the first few couplets, with p sounds, and in the last few couplets, with words ending in a long vowel followed by an n sound.  And I love the makhta of St. Paul.  I recently asked another poet about the ghazal, and how important it was to her to show fidelity to its Arabic and Persian tradition.  How important is it to you?  Did you begin by attempting a strict adherence to the tradition?

PO: For that poem? I don’t quite recall the exact circumstances of its composition. I know it is the second oldest poem in the book. I was definitely aware of the formal requirements of the ghazal, and I did try to employ them in such a way as to make an interesting and satisfying poem, I hope. The repeating word and the signing of my name into the final couplet (the radif and the makhta) acknowledge the tradition, but why the rhyme in the second line of each couplet, the qafia, never materialized, I can’t say. I do recall wanting a form that would allow me to give a portrait of childhood, of the condition of childhood, without having to be tied to a single, central anecdote. I also remember wanting a more musical form that could accommodate ranges of tone. When tied to a single anecdote, you have to find ways to please cause and effect. If you want to bring something up, you have to show the reader how you get there, lead them across the room, so to speak. The ghazal has ways around that. It has a great capacity for letting sudden and disparate juxtapositions make sense.

Adhering to a technical purity is not something I feel is necessary when using conventional forms, and I do use them. My allegiance, though, is always to making a satisfying poem. If the technical requirements get in the way of that, I’m happy to see them go. There can be satisfaction in demonstrating your skill with technique, like the pleasure you might get in playing games, but technique is not an end in itself for poetry. I think using conventional forms requires a bit of humility, humility to say you don’t have everything figured out before you start a poem, but instead let the form lead you to discoveries. Also, you need the humility of knowing that in writing a poem you are entering into something larger than your self, your sentiments and ego. Writing in a traditional form, you enter into the conversation coming out of that form. Knowing its history, then, becomes important. It helps to let you know how your poem will signify to readers, which lets you make good decisions in the creation of your poem. When writing a poem in a traditional form while jettisoning some of the technical or thematic conventions, I should be able to answer the question of what happens as a result of those omissions while still calling the poem a ghazal, or a sonnet, or an elegy, etc. If the answer is an interesting one, then I’m happy. I love poems that innovate on convention, where the poems gain a larger sense because of their participation in the form. I’m thinking of Ted Berrigan’s and Karen Volkman’s sonnets or Levis’s elegies.

JB: I notice a recurring theme of narrative in your poems.  While the poems themselves are not usually narrative in an apparent way, they do circle around the question of what story is, and how we create it.  In “Abstract,” the speaker imagines a biographical timeline that shifts, resists narrative; it ends with the question of “the immense/ effort it must have taken/ not to give the day its story.”  The poem “Noise Like Wings” ends with the speaker “trying/ to build” a “story” after the beloved has moved away, and then seeing the hallucinatory image of photographs moving under glass.  In each case, the effort to create narrative seems to lose to imagery and song.  I don’t think you are intentionally saying lyrical poetry is superior to narrative poetry, but rather creating a very powerful friction between the two.  Can you talk a bit about these metafictional moves in your work?  Have you also written fiction?

PO: I believe that language has the power to influence how we think about our world, so how we say things is inseparable for what we are saying. This is just as true for the connotations around words as it is for how we frame our experiences with narrative structures. I guess that has been a theme in some of my poems. I tend to have a sweet tooth for poems and stories that take acknowledging their “poem-ness” and “story-ness” as part of their significance. It can be witty, funny, or a form of serious investigation. I’ve just finished rereading William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is all those things. Still, I’ve become bored with poems that have anxiety about being language. I’m just not moved by the fact that a signifier is not the thing it signifies, or that a poem should be an invention. We seem to be able to make meaning just fine.

I don’t consider myself a successful writer of fiction, but I do occasionally practice at it. I get pangs of jealousy for the longer form, which can allow things their time to develop, which can get more things in. I think that’s why I have been writing epistolary poems lately. They move closer to what conventionally is considered the province of prose. I also like the way fiction can more easily accommodate the exploration of social interactions or the complexities of character. Poetry can do those things, but it’s not what we immediately think of for them. You could write a short story in lines, and in a way where the lines are doing those things with rhythm and pacing of meaning that you want out of lineation. Frost did as much in poems like “The Death of the Hired Man” and “The Witches of Coos.” I can’t think of any contemporary poet who is writing narrative poetry like that. I thought perhaps Maurice Manning might be doing something like those Frostian narratives in his The Common Man, but ultimately those poems feel more dramatic to me than narrative. These generic distinctions aren’t important to me beyond simply having something interesting occur when asking the questions: “How do I read this piece of writing differently because it calls itself a poem? Or a short story? Or an essay?” Just the other day, I was reading in The New Yorker a personal essay by Salman Rushdie that uses the third person point of view, a choice that has the particular significance it does only because the piece is memoir. In fact, the invitation to immediately make meaning out of the choice of point of view really only seems relevant because of the genre it claims.

There seems to be a lot of talk right now about narrative poetry and lyric poetry, but I tend to get confused when I use those terms. I don’t think I’m alone in that. Earlier I mentioned Eliot’s “The Three Voices of Poetry,” and what he considers lyric poetry in that lecture is much narrower than what we are compelled to call lyric. I’m also not convinced what we call narrative poetry would be recognized as such before the latter part of the twentieth century. The term “narrative” often gets used simply to mean an identifiable speaker in a determinate setting, particularly in poems that take a more representational approach towards the world they describe and that are perhaps anecdotal. Also, I think the term “narrative” has the tendency to be used wrongly in place of “boring.” If a poem is boring, that is not because it exhibits narrative tendencies. I think the term “narrative” has become a shortcut for thinking, a way to be dismissive without having to articulate and defend aesthetic principles that explain the choice to banish narrative. Have you seen Demolition Man? Too often I hear poets deploy the adjective “narrative” in the way Rob Schneider’s character says of Sylvester Stallone’s, “He doesn’t know how to use the three seashells!” Again, by narrative, this means an identifiable speaker in a determinate setting with an anecdotal and representational approach to the description. Some of the confusion in terminology can be traced to here, I think, because what I’ve been describing is often called the “lyric-I” or the “self” in poetry. Saying that one subverts or eschews the “lyric-I” or self in poetry amounts to pretty much saying one is against narrative in most instances. I’m waiting for a more useful terminology and a more useful critique of narrative. Lately, I’ve been thinking of poetry as a series of drives, which are not mutually exclusive but show up to differing degrees in poems. I’ve labeled the drives as voice, rhetoric, and story, which manifest as personality, structure, and narrative detail. Yet, a taxonomy seems to be most useful for the person inventing it. I’m not being reactionary; I just don’t find that the old complaints against narrative and the self in poetry really articulate the needs of our time. The theater’s changed.

JB: Sure, taxonomies are probably most useful to their inventors, but it’s still pretty interesting to see how others comprehend and categorize what they love.  I like your skepticism toward the labels of “lyric” and “narrative,” and I think many if not most writers share it.  Maurice Manning is a great example of someone, as you observed, who is difficult to describe in conventional terms.  I too tend to think of his poems as dramatic – I guess the dramatic monologue would be the most obvious tradition to locate him within.  But he’s so slippery, and unpredictable.  Have you heard him read his work?  He’s an incredible reader, and the way he reads adds to my experience of the poems on the page.  And he’s funny!  At one of his readings I saw Brooks Haxton fall off his chair laughing. 

PO: Yes, definitely, the dramatic monologue does seem right. Like the epistolary mode, the dramatic monologue offers a useful way to think about bringing back narrative elements or story in poems, and how to employ those elements in engaging ways. I have heard Manning read a couple of times. It’s always been a pleasure. There is so much personality in those poems.

JB: One of my favorite poems in the collection is “The Birds,” which is part of a triptych titled, “The Birds.”  I was really excited to see you pull off a very kick-ass Hitchcock poem.  The poem ends with the image of Tippi Hedren being attacked by birds, and the interesting fact that Hitchcock has tied them to her with string: “When she moved, they moved. So even if she were innocent,// they’d still come.”  Amazing.  I have seen that movie a bunch of times, and your poem made me see that scene in a new and horrifying light.  There was a panel on the influence of Hitchcock on poetry at AWP a few years ago.  If you had been on that panel, what might you have said?

PO: I wish I could have heard the panel. Myself, I couldn’t claim to know much about Hitchcock movies, but I’ve had some encounters with them that have made great impressions on me. Generally, though, I’m envious of how a movie can give you all the complexity of story by just showing you a scene, how a movie can give you this composition, this simultaneity that delivers all the depth of a world, a way of life, so quickly. In a poem, an image gestures towards that, but there are limits to the world an image can evoke. I think what I’m talking about are those moments in a movie where you feel like the world the movie is presenting to you is expanded or deepened. That’s a kind of happening in a movie, part of the story, even if it might not fit into conventional notions of narrative, of cause and effect moving some conflict forward. There is a small moment in Ming-liang Tsai’s What Time Is It There? where the lonely protagonist, a young street vendor in Taipei, demonstrates the quality of the watches he’s selling by clanging one against the metal railing of a bridge. It really resonates for me as a scene that throws into relief those conditions that make a person possible. What more do we need of conflict? With Hitchcock’s The Birds, I’m also envious of just how visceral the emotional experience created by a movie can be. With those birds, Hitchcock is able to tap into some primordial fear, one elevated to myth. I am genuinely terrified by that movie. I have the same reaction to certain scenes in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway. I’m not sure how often I have been affected like that by a poem. I’ve definitely been made to feel spontaneously a profound sense of existential dread, such as the weight I get in my stomach when I arrive at the end of Berryman’s “Dream Song 28,” “If I had to do the whole thing over again / I wouldn’t.” But I’m not sure I’ve ever been actually scared by a poem.

JB: Your title poem, “The Currency,” is set in Prague in the early 21^st century, when its citizens want to believe their post-revolutionary future has arrived, if not as utopia then at least a place where couples can kiss in public, and old men in their green work uniforms aren’t “afraid/ to be seen eating ice cream.”  The poem’s final image is striking: the clay pipes sold by a girl seem to come to life, “a small grace/ so amazed it had currency at all.”  Tell us about this “currency,” and why this poem, a sad love poem in a foreign land, is your title poem?

PO: I think of the speaker of that poem as needing to see the citizens of Prague as acting with philosophical and historical significance, more so than perhaps they need it. That’s part of his transaction, his conversion of their lives into meaning for his own. I was also trying to demystify that need. Exchanges, conversions, and transformations are central to the book; they include turning perception into a provisional knowledge, sensory details into figures of speech, experience into significant story, and actions into their moral content. What is a symbol or narrative structure but a kind of coin? A tender for meaning provided? But of course, what you get for it is always in flux, and the tender itself has its own material reality and consequences. The poems in The Currency are constantly cycling through transformations. Travel is just another iteration of those transactions, and travel has a way of making them appear more vividly. While Prague is not the subject of the book, it did provide me with some significant experiences to draw from, and it provides the book with a physical place to house the meeting of the personal and the historical, the self and the world. Also, I was there in the first year of the new millennium, so I was able to use that as another type of conversion. I see the passing of my Cold War youth into the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as forming a palimpsest over that larger timeline. The new poems I’ve been writing have been thoroughly on this side of the millennial divide, embedded inextricably in those wars. The title The Currency is a bit ironic, too. The speakers are constantly trying to stay current, whether it is just being present to their perceptions or taking responsibility for the conditions making their social, cultural, and philosophical positions possible.

JB: Thank you for the conversation, Paul.  And best wishes for the next book.

Paul Otremba is the author of the poetry collection The Currency (2009) and the forthcoming Pax Americana, both from Four Way Books. His poems, reviews, and criticism have appeared in such places as The Kenyon Review, Witness, Hotel Amerika, Southwest Review, The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, Poetry Daily, and American Poets in the 21^st Century: The New Poetics. He lives in Houston, TX, and is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Rice University.