ALR reviewed on NewPages.com

Hey everybody, have you caught our glowing review over at NewPages yet?

Here's a teaser:

On Kaitlyn Palacios’s essay “The Waiver”...

"Palacios’s essay is an unfurling testament to memory, love, youth and nationhood, and it is an irony such as the husband’s statement that makes you suffer on her behalf. Her memories become the reader’s, as the cadence of her language echoes her conversion. The narrative is so well-crafted, ebbing and rushing in an almost oceanic pull, I am late for everything today for reading it, unable to rescue my index finger from holding the page."

On Kyle Mellen’s short story “Just Like A Man"...

"Mellen uses the voice as a clever ruse; what you perceive as an exercise in the voice of the typical American man takes a story wildly out of the formula’s context—when you might expect a certain outcome, you are arrested by escalating violence and grotesque murder in a nihilistic framework that will freeze your blood. The risk in the plot development is well-managed; I found the pacing to be virtuosic. I think the effort would be terrific even in translation."

On our poetry selection...

"From a layman’s perspective, many of the poems tend to inform each other and complement the prose while invoking tradition."

Thank you, Mary Florio, for your wonderful review! 

An Interview with Catherine Lucille Sharpe

April Murphy: I discovered your writing when "One Thousand Kittens" was a finalist for Cutbank's Montana Nonfiction Prize in 2011, and then went on the hunt for more essays from your unpublished collection Ambition Towards Love. What I found surprised me. 

Some essays of yours, like "Proxy" and "Somewhat Organic" are what I think about as being kind of traditional memoirs, but then there are essays like "Shades of Gray" and "Another Lesbian Space Fantasy" that seem to break out of old ways of thinking about the CNF genre - blending the imagination and a sense of magic without the same authentic and honest (and charming!) voice that characterizes your longer work. Can you talk a little bit about these different forms your writing takes? 

Catherine Lucille Sharpe: I am certain that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important, for reader and writer alike.  It must be important; people get quite upset when they discover that the writer has cheated--stepping outside the bounds of "literal truth" to copulate with fiction.  But why don't people get upset when nonfiction parades around as fiction? I am guilty of this.

The Ambition Towards Love collection deliberately flows back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.  Whatever the genre, I continue to circle the same ole boring human stuff--love, loss, more love, more loss, lies, less love, gain, a little more loss, joy, heroism, duplicity, frailty, failure, growth, shrinkage, doubt, love again, loss again, truth, etc..  The usual.  

As a writer and self-avowed nutpouch, I've clearly been trying to sort one or two things out on the page--the mere two dimensions of the page seem so much more manageable than the infinite dimensions of my head and heart. 

I know that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is important to me because I take the trouble to know the difference line by line, paragraph by paragraph.  In my nonfiction, I might forsake a perfectly good "real" detail, simply because it does not add to the meaning of the story, or what I want to emphasize in the story.  And guess what!  I might include that same detail in a short fiction because it creates ambiguity--one of the best ways to make fiction seem just as true and confusing and unknowable as real life.  

The decision to approach an idea through fiction or nonfiction profoundly affects my writing process, even when there are thematic congruities.  I've noticed how the struggle to craft readable fiction has improved my nonfiction writing, in both predictable and surprising ways.

Predictably, being forced to dredge up a believable character is good practice for bringing your Great Aunt Susan to life for the nonfiction reader.  She's the one who always sucks the knuckle of her pinky finger so that she can twirl her wedding ring.  It doesn't fit on her ring finger anymore, and anyway Uncle Frank's dead, so it doesn't much matter where she wears it.  There's something pathetic and familial about all that saliva, and now the reader gets Aunt Susan, too.

Unpredictably for me, engaging in fiction demands that I suffer a vulnerability I don't necessarily feel in the process of nonfiction.  In fiction, my judgment must fade way, way back, allowing the story to emerge from its mysterious place, a place I hardly control.  It can be frankly terrifying to tap in to my subconscious--my id whines, my ego hits, and my superego makes me write the same sentence a hundred times on the chalkboard.  The reader, even as she nods her head vigorously, agreeing that she's reading fiction, is still coming to some conclusions about the writer.  She can't help it!  If the writer goes on and on about cup size, the reader is not going to mistake the writer for a leg man.  Or a leg woman.  (Boy, I can't make that sound right.)

When you read my fiction, don't you dare tell me I'm lonely, or wimpy, or flailing, or crazy-in-love with my offspring (thus doomed to suffer), or bitterly angry, or actually quite sad at times. 

When I am writing the truth, or at least my nonfiction version of the truth, it is so much easier to control what the reader thinks about me.  The persona is deliberate, calculated, securely insecure, always ready with a deflective quip.  The reader will certainly mistake my persona for me, and thus I am safe from scrutiny.  I believe that I am in charge.  Which is, of course, a different kind of fiction, but luckily, the kind I reserve for therapy sessions.

To my dismay, all of this precision about fiction and "truth" does not ultimately prove useful to me in the real world.  Some people tell the truth only to discover later that they lied.  Others lie only to discover the truth.  Some don't even bother to lie, they just keep their mouths shut, suddenly go on diets, go to work early, come home late, and wait to be caught.

Your resumé is one big piece of creative non-fiction.

My Amibition Towards Love collection approximates the experience of a whole story--one where the reader swims through truth, both designated and actual, as well as the lies we call fiction.  Nonetheless, like me, the reader still has to figure out what really happened.

But by the time the words hit the page, it’s all true.

AJM: Do you think that queer writers are obligated to write queer nonfiction? I suppose since nonfiction is about personal experience, the subject matter is inevitable is one is queer. The writer, then, gets to figure out how their queer identity is expressed what (if any) resonance it will give to their more 'universal' life story. 

One of the things that's refreshing about your writing is that the central struggle isn't your queerness - the narratives don't get their tension from a 'coming out' plot, nor do they have a political abrasiveness despite the fact that they are about gay marriage/divorce/reproduction - instead your work exists in a world where all of this is secondary to the love you have to give your daughter and yourself. 

CS: As far as I'm concerned, nobody is obligated to write anything. Well, unless contracts are involved. I do, however, this it's Super Nice when people write about stuff they really care about. The form - fiction or nonfiction - is less important than the question at stake for the writer. When I'm reading, I'm engaged in the investigation that the writer is making into the subject matter, so it better be a real question the writer has, with some juice.

I'm totally way flattered that you find my work refreshing in its absence of Queer Identity Conflict, which I'll just call QIC for our purposes. I haven't written much specifically about QUIC because it is not a painful enough question for me - plus I already know the answer. I'm special. 

When I say I'm special, what I really mean is that I'm like everyone else. That makes me special, because not so many people realize that. And I've decided to worry less about being original and worry more about being average. And writing about that instead.

I'm really, really, really, really, really interested in what it is like to be human. More precisely, what it is like for me to be human. My current line of inquiry is how I am like so many others, not how I feel apart from these other creatures.

AJM: It seems like you really have a focus when you're creating your persona. So, how do you navigate your real lesbian identity with your lesbian narrators? 

CS: Poorly. They are all mixed up inside. Therefore, I try not to think about it too much. The idea of a continuum of truth - from lies (fiction) to truth (nonfiction) - is inept at best. Truth is a blob, a DNA strand, a froth of delicate, short-lived moments. I've had perfectly good fiction turn into nonfiction on me more than once. On the page and in real life. Freaky.

AJM: As someone who didn't enter academia after completing your MFA, can you tell us a little bit about what your writing life is like now? 

CS: Oy.  I’m scattered and slow. I’m undisciplined about my creative work. I prefer black pens and write longhand in a college-ruled spiral notebook.  Usually early in the morning. Sometimes my daughter has to borrow my notebook for drawing or math or to teach me something by diagramming.  For now, I let her because she can’t really read cursive (this is de-emphasized in school now, did you know?). Also, I like what she inserts into my ridiculous musings.

For my paid work, I write all day (or at least sit in front of a computer all day as if I’m writing) for a corporate healthcare services entity. Sexy.  Adjectives are discouraged, as are complicated sentences that involve semi-colons; apparently these are too difficult to follow. It is a constant struggle to avoid being sucked into the undertow.  I have to remind myself that writing has saved my life—connecting and re-connecting to that source is an end in itself even when progress on new creative work is slowed down to a drag-drag-crawl-sob-crawl.

Sharpe wrote mostly for live performance in San Francisco before turning her attention to gay marriage, in vitro fertilization, gay divorce, parenting, dating, fiction, and nonfiction.  Her first collection of interlocking essays and fictions Ambition Towards Love hasn't been published, but you can read some excerpts in Opium Magazine, A cappella Zoo, Word Riot and CutBank, among others. A couple of pieces have even been included in anthologies and she almost won several prizes--one from Montana and one from North Carolina. If you would like to know if she actually ever wins a prize or publishes her collection, join her email blast list by sending a note to catherinelucillesharpe@gmail.com. Put "join email blast" in the subject line.

Review of Michael Martone's Four for a Quarter

Four for a Quarter. By Michael Martone. Tuscaloosa, AL: FC2, 2011. 300 pp. $16.50 paperback.

            Four is not normally a holy number, not miraculous or charmed, not usually held in the collective consciousness as worthy of praise or blame. It’s after three, on our way to seven, not the number of fingers per hand or even a prime. Except that in Michael Martone’s art, four becomes sacrosanct, a number of the body and of the mind and of the spirit, a number to be enamored of and troubled by, a number beyond duality or dialectic. Nothing like Four for a Quarter is being written right now, and while Martone lives in the same world as Kevin McIlvoy, Amy Hempel, and Donald Barthelme, I’m not sure he’s from the same world. I’m also not certain anyone else can so astonishingly balance repetition and variation, obsession, meditation, and revelation—a juggling not of four balls, but of a spinning top, a sparkler, a phial of tears, and a pair of worn, sexy underwear.

Each story in this three-hundred-page collection is told in four linked parts. The first, the title tale, recounts four stories of four booths, and begins the book-long investigation of watching, seeing the self, and seeing others. From the first booth—a photo booth—the speaker delightedly watches four clothed, swimming Amish people; the speaker enters the second booth, a see-through, educational photo booth at the Children’s Museum, and says, “I imagine that they have replaced the camera too with one that takes X-rays, and my souvenir will record a transparent me. My heart will be an opaque dollop in the airy cage of my ribs”; the third booth is a confessional, with a priest hearing cardinal and venial sins, which will be “hauled into the air by fluttering cardinals […] leaving me white and clean as new paper”; and the narrator emerges from the fourth photo booth, one at Woolworth’s, thinking, “I am the same person now as when I went into the booth. I am the same in each of the four black-and-white pictures of me,” while escaped parakeets and canaries perch and flit throughout the store. This blend of internal investigation surrounded by and enmeshed with images of fancy and fantasy occurs throughout the book, creating a texture not surreal but playful, not insincere, but not quite so serious. The stories feel weighted, like they have mass and matter, but they are also full of space. This mix of the marvelous, the mundane, and the momentous allows for an investigation of a wider range of ideas than most story collections hold. Other things that come in fours in this book include, but are not limited to:

                        Four lost pregnancies.

                        Four fifth Beatles, described through haibun written by Yoko Ono.

            Four descriptions of a teenaged farmer whose hands are cut off, titled “4H”: subtitled “Hands,” “Head,” “Heart,” “Health.”

Four tales of days and seconds lost in the historical changes between calendars, in the shift of daylight savings, and in the delay of leap days—lost time two lovers want to preserve.

                        Four seasons.

            Four postcards from four towns in Indiana: Story, Santa Claus, French Lick, and Muncie.

                        Four states that start with the letter I.

                        Four monologues describing the sex lives of the Fantastic Four.

                        Four ways to tie a tie: Windsor, Bow, Half Windsor, Four-in-Hand.

                        “The First Four Deaths in My High School Class.”

                        Four foursquare houses.

                        Four Corners.

                        Four speeds of vinyl records.

            Four sexy stories of four Susans: Lazy, Black-eyed, Sue Bee, and Susie Q, involving sex in the parents’ house, sex wearing glasses while naked to better see the sex, sex with honey as a prop, and sex on a passenger train, respectively—three told from the points of view of the men, the last told from the last Susan’s perspective.

                        Four faces of Mount Rushmore.

                        Four Fourth of Julys.

                        Four Calling Birds.

            But this book does not list—it coils around its subjects, and it magnifies, making the micro macro. This book explores the purpose and possibilities of narrative, and these fragments of people’s lives often compactly capture a moment that feels more resonant than what is contained in an entire novel. Cleverness abounds, but these stories are not slight or sly—or, if they are sly, they are always devastating, as well.

            I’ve had the privilege of listening to Michael Martone talk about the art of fiction, at lectures at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, and in bars at AWP. This book enacts his philosophy of writing, though he’d probably consider “philosophy” too strong a word. In my paraphrases, Michael Martone says and asks things like this:

                        Fiction is an ingredient in a form.

            Where do we culturally put things when we don’t want or need them anymore? In the university. But institutions need not only be storehouses for knowledge, places we call when we need to know something—they can also be generative, places that create new things.

Apollo can play the lyre. But Hermes is the patron demi-god of innovative writers, because he made the lyre out of a tortoise shell, cat gut, and horns, after he stole Apollo’s cattle and made them walk backwards, so Apollo would follow them the wrong way.

                        Learning the rules then breaking them is bullshit.

                        Conventional fiction can be taught. Innovative fiction cannot.

            There are four kinds of stories: narrative realism; nonnarrative realism; narrative irrealism; nonnarrative irrealism.

            I’ve never studied with Michael Martone, but he’s taught me, and others, through his stories: form can be invented, and it is still possible to feel you’re in the presence of something that exists nowhere else. In a time when more people are studying the art of writing fiction than ever before, many people fear that short stories will be codified, normalized, made tame. With Michael Martone teaching and writing, there’s at least one force of resistance. His stories make the question “Can anyone really write anything new anymore?” feel like a stupid question, one with four answers: “Of course”; “Who cares?”; “Why not?”; and “Watch this.”

Erin Stalcup's fiction is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review, H_NGM_N, and a Swiss fashion magazine called Novembre, and her stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, [PANK], and elsewhere. She serves as an Assistant Fiction Editor of the American Literary Review.

What I'm Looking For: CNF Assistant Editor April Murphy

Hello ALR readers and submitters!

As we're in the thick of our reading season, and as we're working our way through submissions, I'm starting to see some trends in what's making the cut to the second round and what's not. In the spirit of transparency, I thought I'd offer some insight on the selection process (you really don't need to be chewing your nails).

I feel I should also offer a caveat - these insights are by no means the ONLY things we're looking for, nor do they reflect the tastes of Bonnie Friedman, the CNF Editor, nor Ann McCutchan, ALR's steward. You can take them or leave them.

1. Reading submissions takes a LONG time. 

 If you've already submitted to ALR, chances are your submittable status shows you are "in progress." What does this mean? If my story is really "progressing" then why is it taking several weeks, if not longer, for it to complete this process? 

The short answer is that we have several rounds of readers and your story must make it through several different levels to ultimately be accepted. Readers will often be assigned up to 5 essays (even more if it's fiction or poetry) at a time. If they take 2 weeks to read that before passing it along to an assistant editor who may take an additional week or two to read it and they pass it along to a busy professor/editor who may take a few weeks to read it.... you get the idea. It's a hot minute. 

This is long process, while tedious and a bit nerve wracking I'm sure, but it is awesome for you as a writer.  Every set of eyes that lands on your piece sees something different and can call attention to these merits. It allows you to build momentum inside of our office. So even if it feels like your submission is stagnant, I assure you that it's got a life of its own. 

Often, a reader will become invested in something and root for it. "Hey! Have you read that essay about the comic book store? AMAZING. I just sent it along." "Check out the scene on page 5 - delicious." etc. We're all involved with ALR because we love great writing. You guys send a lot of it. Keep sending it!

      2.  Cover letters are important. 

I should just state that this is a bit of a personal preference. I always read the cover letter an author sends along before I read their essay. Why? It shows me how seriously you take yourself as an author. Are you professional and friendly? Are you a goofball who writes a haiku? Do you have any previous publications and where were they? 

Cover letters also show me whether or not you are familiar with ALR and our policies. If you've noted that your essay is a simultaneous submission, I will move it up in my reading list because I don't want to  miss out. If I don't know that you've submitted it elsewhere - I can't do that. 

If you send along an essay without a cover letter - of course I'll still read it and if it's awesome, I'll be blown away by it. But! If you can help yourself with a cover letter, why not just take the extra 3 minutes to write one? 

      3.  Essays should have action AND reflection. 

Creative nonfiction writers may be familiar with Vivian Gornick's ideas about the "situation" and "story." She describes nonfiction as being broken up into the plot/action (situation) - learning how to ride a bike, how you found out that you don't like cheese, shopping for a pen - and the reflection on that experience (story) which explains to readers why shopping for a pen was important in the first place. 

Many of the CNF submissions to ALR are filled with well written situations, essays that read almost like short stories. Compelling characters, good description, etc. But by the end of reading these pieces, I often wonder why the author wanted to write about it. I feel as if they are a puzzle that I don't know how to solve. I've been given all the pieces but there's no picture on the box to follow. What's the story? 

I, of course, don't want to suggest that you should dog your essays down with too much reflection and not enough in-scene development. There is a balance that each essay requires and a little reflection goes a long way in covering/framing action. Both of these things are necessary for CNF to work: action so your readers can share your experiences; reflection so that they can identify with and understand why those experiences  resonate with you. 

Some essays that you may want to check out that do this really well: "The Way We Are" by Thomas Lynch, "Street Haunting" by Virginia Woolf, and "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin. 

Thank you, ALR submitters, for the opportunity to read your work. I hope this blog post was helpful. Keep sending your words! We cannot wait to read them!

Best,

April Murphy

Creative Nonfiction

Assistant Editor


April Murphy is a Doctoral Candidate in UNT's Creative Writing Phd Program. April is the Assistant Nonfiction Editor at American Literary Review. She is currently working on her first book Shrouded: Women Who Work With the Dead. 

American Literary Review ABD Graduate Student Reading

Please join us Friday, November 16th at 7:30pm for the American Literary Review's ABD Graduate Student Reading, featuring fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction from Hillary Stringer, Jessica Hindman, and Elishia Heiden. The reading will take place at the home of April Murphy and Nate Logan. All faculty and students are welcome to attend. Please feel free to bring spouses, significant others, and buddies as well.

Elishia Heiden, a Missouri native whose Gammy dated Rush Limbaugh's grandpa, writes non-fiction and fiction (she is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in fiction)--but usually mingles the two brilliantly. For instance, she might've tried out for American Idol--or maybe she didn't? She might've taken her high school basketball team to state--or not. Or maybe she plans to move to Austria in April after her pending book deal is finalized. Or maybe not. What is true is that she likes to meddle with the "what ifs" and "or maybes" against professional advice, and this obsession leads her to write things.

Jessica Hindman's work has appeared in O., The Oprah Magazine and Invisible Citizens: Youth Politics after 9/11. She is a winner of the Hands Across the Middle East essay contest and Joyous Publishing’s Fiction Contest.  She has worked as a freelance researcher for The New York Times Magazine and MTV, where she was the first person to compile research on the show that would later become the nationwide hit Teen Mom.  She also worked as a reporter for her local paper, The Shenandoah Valley Herald, where she wrote stories with headlines like this: "Local Woman's Lap a Pitstop for Flying Rodent."  Her dissertation is a memoir about her past life as a professional fake violinist.  

Hillary Stringer is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of North Texas, where she is working on a novel. In addition to being a Teaching Fellow, she is the Production Editor of the American Literary Review and a coordinating editor for Pakistaniaat, a Journal of Pakistan Studies.  Her fiction has appeared in Synergies, The Tidal Basin Review, and Microchondria, an anthology of short-shorts complied by the Harvard Book Store. She was nominated for a 2011 AWP Intro Journal Award. She received her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati in the spring of 2009.

You can also add the facebook even to your calendar so you don't forget:
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower in Books We Love

This summer I read Stephen Chbosky’s the perks of being a wallflower, and I found it charming and complex.  I decided to teach it this fall, and my freshmen loved it, too.  A friend told me I was  trending on tumblr because my students were discussing the book so much.  It isn’t flashy in terms of literary devices; however, it is a humble, coming-of-age story about a group of friends set during the early nineties.  My students laughed when the characters gave each other mix tapes.  (Most of my students were born in 1994, so there’s that…)  We also enjoyed the film adaptation of perks.  I suppose that it is a rare treat to connect with students on a shared turf.  I cherish this book because it enabled us to discuss diversity, depression, friendship, music, literature, Rocky Horror Picture Show, bullying, The Smiths, politics and even abortion.  A lot of reviewers refer to it as a modern Catcher in the Rye, but I think the act of comparing it to anything else strips it of its funky-freshness.  Check it out, yo!

Shannon Sawyer is a Ph.D. candidate in English, and an instructor at the University of North Texas. 

A Quick Chat with Abigail Thomas

*Abigail Thomas will give a reading at UNT on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012, at 8 p.m. in the Silver Eagle Suite.

ALR: I loved the brevity of sections in your first memoir, Safekeeping­—the way each section seemed to pop off the page, as well as the poetic feel of the book. The sections in your second memoir, A Three Dog Life, are longer, and your voice feels more resigned. I wonder if you can talk about the trade-offs and benefits of such short sections, and why you chose to write in longer sections in your second memoir. Also, were sections orchestrated to talk to each other?

AT: Safekeeping was written after the fact (if fact is the right word). The pieces came flying out of me after my second husband, Quin, died, and I realized, as I think I wrote, that I now had a past. Something was over, there was no changing or fixing it. I needed to face it. The pieces came willy-nilly, one often spawned the next. I think the first piece might have been apple cake, but I can't remember now. I had originally believed the book, if it were to be a book, would end with the death of my old friend, but realized after a few months that although he had died, my life continued without him, and I was left with the fallout and questions and grief and guilt and rubble I found around me. Plus I was alone with it. Quin was gone. This realization dictated that the thing (whatever it was) fall into three sections and three sections are often a very useful way to look to what I'm doing, to try to order it somehow. I don't know why.

Nothing is really chronological, past and present melt into each other, but when I was done I hoped what I'd made was the portrait, messy though it was, of a girl born in the nineteen-forties, who lived through the changes of her times. It is partly as an explanation to my children, and certainly as an apology to what happened to their lives, but that wasn't all of it either. I needed to make sense of it for myself. I also needed to find a way to begin to forgive myself. The pieces were moments I vividly remembered, and writing them I hoped would finally make some kind of sense. Sort of like a constellation. The book was meant also to be an apology, in the form of an explanation, of what had made me who I was, and who I had failed to be, who I was still becoming.

A Three Dog Life was written as it happened. There was no looking back, it was all happening as I wrote it, although it took six years to write. The experience was so tragic, and so precious, and parts of it so mysterious, I didn't want to lose any of it to imperfect memory. It is far more chronological than Safekeeping, given I was describing, recording, events as they occurred. The business of guilt was huge, I had to face that as I was in the midst of it, very difficult. It was also extremely painful in Safekeeping, especially when I wrote about my son, Ralph.

Also the endings were just gifts. The last bit of A Three Dog Life, when Rich collapses time into a happy year, was a conversation I wrote down verbatim, and realized that was where I wanted to end the book. The last piece I wrote for that book, is the opening chapter. You never know.

As far as orchestrated to talk to each other, that wasn't a conscious thing. If they do, great.

ALR: I am also drawn to the ambiguity, the subtlety, in Safekeeping. Some sections veer off into strangeness or mystery, like a poem. Other sections (I’m thinking of your father swimming with a school of bluefish) ask the reader: What is this? Where does it fit? And I love that you don’t feel the need to answer these questions, or edit out memories for seeming irrelevance. I wonder what the criteria is for what material stays and goes.

AT: There is not much point to memoir if you don't surprise yourself somewhere along the way, often banging up against material you'd rather skirt. No skirting allowed. You can't really fool yourself/ it saps all your energy.  If that's what you're after, a pretty picture with angel wings and fairy dust all over you, or a picture in which you were a victim, go mow the lawn.

Of course I don't mean YOU.

As for what I put in and what I leave out, and don't explain, that is entirely a question of taste. If it interests me, it goes in. If it makes me feel whole, it goes in. Bluefish and Daddy? It was who he was. As good an example as I had.

ALR: Follow-up question: I am curious about the function of seemingly ambiguous or irrelevant details/memories. In what ways do such details help readers experience what you want them to experience? How do they work the reader’s mind? Another way to think about this question: Many sections of your books give us the whole memory, rather than only the logically relevant part (e.g. most of the section “Watching Her Father Eat Cake” details you making cake, and only at the end do we see the brief interaction with your father). Why is this?

AT: Cake. I wanted to write about making cake because it was the high point of my day back then. All that delicious batter! The miracle of cake! Making a cake! It was only after that I realized the pleasure of watching my father eat it that was the end result. (The cakes were terrible.) I don't know about [the effect of such a section] on the reader, nor am I sure, in the process of writing, that I give a shit.

ALR: Safekeeping uses first, second, and third person. Did the sections just come out this way, or was this a calculated move? It seems that the intimacy of second person is balanced out by the distanced third-person sections, and this exchange gives the narrative a different feel than one written only in first person. The variety allows us to distinguish shades that would otherwise be overlaid. I wonder if you might speak to this point—the benefits and trade-offs of using multiple voices, how you see these voices working in your book, etc.

AT: The option of first and third persons wasn't a conscious choice…to write certain things in first person made me sound either saint-like or a victim. I also wanted to see myself from time to time through what I imagined my children’s eyes had been. Some pieces were written over and over both ways to figure out how to get at what I wanted. I chose the voice that seemed to be the most honest. The third person was also necessary when I had no connection anymore to the girl I'd been. I knew who she was, but she was no familiar or part of me. I wish I had [a more] intelligent answer about using first second and third persons. Mostly it just felt right.

My memory is poor for interstitial material, long years went by with only a few vivid memories, but  those were the ones I wrote. The piece that took me longest, almost as long as the whole book, was the last one about my daughter Sarah, and the birth of her daughter Abigail. Once that first bath happened, I knew I wanted to end there, but it took months and months and months to get it right. It's helpful when you discover where you want to end, then all you have to do, besides write it, is earn it.

ALR: How do you see the title “Safekeeping” (and the section by the same name) instructing the reader on how to read the book? How did you decide on this title?

AT: My editor named the book "Safekeeping." I wanted to call it "Short Controlled Bursts" and had a little semi-military paragraph to go with it, which I've since lost. I love the title now.

ALR: On your website, you also describe painting: “I’ve been trying to make an ocean. For some reason it never works. So I make another forest which also doesn’t work, but I don’t give up on forests, so I scrape and add various blues and greens to make more trees, but it’s still not to my liking. Some days are like this. I do a little halfhearted scraping, turn it over, and presto, there is the ocean, beautiful, many colors blue, deep water, no sky. I love the way this crazy shit works. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it there it is.” Does writing (or the pursuit of truth) work like this? Do you know where you’re going when you sit down to write? What happens if when you least expect it, it is not there?

AT: I don't know where I'm going when I sit down to write. I think I know where I'm going, but often end up elsewhere, which is the thrill of it. It's just much easier to see with the paintings.

When you're writing and expect it to be there but it isn't, you take a nap. Naps are key. All kinds of stuff swims to the surface. And if it doesn't, you haven't beaten your head against a wall, although that may come next. What I try to do is make something else. A painting. A cake. A caramel sauce, something humbly creative so your mind can wander (and you can eat it at the end). But too often you have to wait years to find what you're looking for, usually when you've stopped looking.

ALR: “I think that’s what we’re all after, truth, although I’d never have said such a thing when I was young.” You say this on your website. So is this a guiding concept in your writing process? Do you use “truth” in the editing/revising process as a filter of sorts? What does “truth” look like? And why is it that you wouldn’t have said such a thing as a youth?

AT: I never talked about big concepts when I was young. Truth? Who was I to talk about truth? What did I know about anything? And it's truth in terms of honesty, I guess, that I really mean. There's no such thing as Truth, although there's good and evil, but there's scouring your dark places for the honesty you'd perhaps rather avoid. That's personal truth. Not facts, of course, that's a whole different category. We're stuck with the memories we've got, they are stored any which way, but that's what's made us who we are, don't you think? I don't use truth for much, no. When I'm stuck, I use grace as a filter. What awful means is sometimes the deliverer of grace? A little Flannery O'Connor in there, I think.

ALR: Your writing is such a pleasure to be with. Thank you for your contributions, and thank you for your thoughts here.

AT: These are marvelous questions. Thank you. If you need more, please ask me. I wrote this very quickly, as I have hideous asthmatic bronchitis, and I'm flying high on prednisone. But your intelligent questions make me look forward even more to coming down to Texas, despite which way it might go.

About the Author (from www.abigailthomas.net): Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She’s lived most of her life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. Her memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. She is also author of Safekeeping, a memoir, and Thinking About Memoir.

Bear v. Shark in Books We Love

I used to kind of be a traditionalist snob, in that I went around telling everyone how great Flannery O'Connor was and how useless John Barth is.  But Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark really changed all that.  The premise of the book is simple:  If your had a bear face a shark in a fair fight, who would win?  That I liked a book about a bear fighting a shark is in no way surprising, but that I liked this book was a bit out of character. 

Bachelder loosely follows a single family who has won tickets to the main event because their son won a national Bear v. Shark essay contest, but interspersed within that free-ranging and all together non-arcing, non-narrative narrative arc, are disconnected fragments.  Sometimes rants, sometimes commercials, once a radio interview with Bachelder himself--the bits in between are as postmodern and non-conformist as any bearded Dentonite would want, but what makes this book stand out is that these bits all unquestionably work together to create a sense greater than the whole, and in the end I came to the conclusion that there was no other way to tell this story.  

So while I still love Flannery O'Connor, and I still hate John Barth (a lot), Chris Bachelder proved to me that you can really write anything so long as you write it good.  And if any one book gets the credit/blame for me trying to write a novel about reality, television, and their freakish offspring--it's this one.


Andy Briseno is a PhD student in Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of North Texas. His quirky personality and insightful comments are always much appreciated by the program.

An Interview with Matt Hart

Justin Bigos: Your most recent book of poems, Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, throbs with exuberance, with the routine yet unpredictable pulse of daily life, with the music all around us, and inside us.  The poems are expansive with what is and what might be.  They are free.  So, first: thank you.  I don’t always feel that the poems I’m reading are a gift.  Yours are – and they know they are.  I think that’s one of the defining qualities of your poems: an intentional giving, even while the poems themselves thrive on the contradictions within intention.  Maybe we can start by you describing the particular book.  How did you get started writing it?  Where has it taken you as a poet?

Matt Hart: Man, it’s so nice of you to say that you feel like the Sermons and Lectures poems are a gift to the reader.  I really love hearing that, as those poems felt, and still feel, like a gift to me too. So much of the book was written in a series of ecstatic bursts.  I sometimes felt like I didn’t know how the poems were being written.  And while I don’t want to get too Jack Spicer about it and start going on about spooks and Martians, many of these poems felt like transmissions, if not from the ether, at least from the past.  I think I told you already that there were times writing these poems when I would sort of wake up typing, as if out of a trance, and there would be this page full of words that I would then get to wrestle with and revel and try to shape, mostly via collage, but there are lyric and even narrative moments in the book as well.

That said, a lot of the actual content was also inspired by discussions I was having in a class that I was teaching, where we used punk rock lyrics as instructions for reading various literary works.  It was a lot of fun, and I would get so charged up by the things that the students were saying.  Then I’d go home and blast off poems.  Or rather the poems would blast me. They were in the air.  I just had to tune in. In the process, I realized how much my years playing in bands and being immersed in music had defined my poetics, and also my life, and that went into the poems as well.  From punk rock, I got that contradictory urgency to make something and destroy it at the same time, to create a space where everything holds together, but might fall apart at any second—to make the self and self-destruct, then pick up the pieces and start the process again.  I also got from punk rock (or through it) the acute desire for stability and calm in the wake of chaos and exhaustion.  Often the balance and ebbs and flows are created formally in the poems, but it’s in the content too, the juxtaposition of the fragment barrage with declaration, wide-eyed descriptions and/or ordinary existence.

I should also note that some of the book’s main themes have to do with inclusiveness and the idea that as human beings we’re all more similar than we are different from each other, and that these similarities are the grounds for empathy (which is itself the ground for celebrating difference).  We have to find our feet with each other first.  We have to be willing to listen and imagine ourselves in the shoes of our neighbor. I don’t want to get too political about it, but culturally speaking, I feel like all the focus on difference over the last 50 years at the expense of our most human similarities has taught us a great deal about how, and when, to object, but it does a horrible job of teaching us how and when to listen to each other, to look and pay attention and be quiet.  Diversity is great—and deserves to be celebrated and promulgated, but the grounds of that are the recognition that we’re all a lot more similar than we are different.  This is something I can’t prove.  It’s something I believe.  It makes me—allows me to—love everybody, even my enemies.  Really.  The poems in Sermons and Lectures deal via inclusion, love, and creative explosiveness (not to mention also via the shades of Walt Whitman and Soren Kierkegaard and Johnny Rotten, among others) with exploring this belief.  These ideas were ones I figured out, found a way to articulate, after the fact of writing the book, but they were what I believed going into it.

Finally, I should also mention that concurrently with the punk rock class I was teaching, my father and my uncle were researching our family history, and it turns out that I come from a long line of preachers and drunks.  Go figure.  My great great great (that might be one too many greats, I can never remember) grandfather the Reverend James Hart of the Folsomville, Indiana, General Baptist Church, for fifty years, stipulated in his will that at his funeral he should be stood up at the pulpit in his coffin with his eyes open staring at the congregation. I love that story.  People fainted during the service.  It was mayhem in the church.  And hearing that, it occurred to me that the difference isn’t that great between being a punk rock singer or a hellfire and brimstone preacher or a really dynamic lecturer/teacher.  All of that got wrapped up in the book, too—which maybe it would be good to point out is really only five poems: three long sequences and two shorter pieces that try and set the stage for, and make sense of, the more sprawling works.  That said, my hope is that one can sort of dip in and out of the book—read around in it—and still get the sensibility of wild inclusiveness, a thing both coming together and falling apart all at once.

JB: Yeah, I noticed that the two shorter poems, “Lamplighter” and “Amplifier to Defender,” in some ars-poetica way comment on the book as a whole.  They feel a little Spring and All – though, I’m not sure that Williams’s book is always read with the notes.  I’ve thought for awhile that the best works of literature are those that teach the reader how to read that particular literature.  And so what at first might be strange and disorienting eventually becomes, not familiar and boring, but in some way a cohesive and still strange world of words.  Does that make sense?  Can you talk a bit about your impulse to give the reader a kind of helping hand?  Did you write these two poems after the rest of the book?

MH: Man, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here when you say, that sometimes providing the reader with a helping hand through the book takes “what at first might be strange and disorienting” and allows it to be “a cohesive and still strange world of words.”  I hope that’s what happens exactly.

“Lamplighter” was actually one of the last poems I wrote, and it was clear to me almost immediately that it would need to be the first poem in the book, that it somehow shed light on, and introduced, the concerns (both of form and content) of the collection overall.  “Amplifier to Defender” came somewhere in the middle of the process.  For a while I actually thought that it was a part of Debacle Debacle (my H_NGM_N book that’s coming out this spring), but then I realized that 1) it was addressing directly (as opposed to demonstrating) the ways that I was using language in the larger Sermons sequences and 2) that it might, as you note, provide a reader with a window into thinking about those larger sequences.  I’m always happy when a book teaches me how to read it, and I hope that those poems can be instructive in that way. I think I felt like it was necessary in this book in particular, because of all the collage elements.  There’s no doubt that the book mostly only points toward the narrative of a life without explicating those events particularly (it cuts up the narrative of a life and rearranges it in fact).  This is by design.  The poems, their composition, their existence is not just about life, they are life, and an extension of so many things: reading, listening, conversations, dinners with friends, playing with my daughter.  Somehow I wanted to get at the blur and speed of that—the notion that it’s all flashing before our eyes, and we get to decide how and when to pay attention.     

JB: Sermons and Lectures is filled with references to punk rock bands, and often includes titles of songs and lyrics.  You’re also in a rock and roll band called Travel, and I’m betting the direct current running from poet to reader in your work has something to do with playing a million punk shows in tiny sweaty venues.  Your record Blank Sermons . . . Relentless Lectures uses much of the poems in the book for lyrics.  Or is it the other way around?  How do the music and the poems live together?

MH: The poems definitely came first and the lyrics second.  The lyrics are in fact cut-up versions of the poems, mainly mis-dis-re-arranged (re-collaged) by Travel’s bass player and my Forklift, Ohio, partner/publisher Eric Appleby. Blank Sermons…Relentless Lectures is Travel’s eleventh full-length record, and I think for most of the previous ten the process for generating the lyrics has been pretty much the same, i.e., I write poems, and then Eric cuts them up and reassembles them in his (or Travel’s) image.  However, it was perfect doing a Travel record to coincide with Sermons and Lectures in particular, because of all the collage that’s being employed and deployed in the poems from the start.

Travel’s songs might best be described as collages that (usually) sound like songs.  Recording for us is getting together and improvising (making racket!) for hours.  We record everything, and then our guitarist/keyboardist Darren Callahan, takes those raw tracks and cuts them up, loops them, and runs them through various weird programs and effects to build songs.  This process often takes several months to complete.  Meanwhile, Eric starts making the lyrics out of whatever poems I give him, but he doesn’t show them to me until I step up to the microphone to record the actual vocal tracks, which are themselves then also improvised, and subsequently cut-up, looped, etc. In this is the idea—not a new idea at all, as it’s one Apollinaire championed—that artistic materials can always be cut-up and reassembled to create new works and new effects/affect.  Collage is the medium of infinite liberty and possibility.  It sees something new in something old.  It radiates rather than delineates meaning.  It’s métier is coherence, not narration, not representation (note: the latter two modes are also ones I love).  My hope is that Travel’s songs (which are collages of collages) allow the poems’ language and music to exist in the air in a totally different way than they do on the page. I also hope that the two projects very clearly talk to each other, expanding the possible windows into each of them.  One of the parameters I gave myself during the initial recording process (I play guitar as well as do the vocals) was that I was to avoid playing any chords or notes.  I failed miserably at that, as it gets really really boring after ten hours of doing everything possible to avoid melody and/or its foundation.  Nevertheless, there’s a lot of banging and feedback and scraping on the record—that’s me.  What’s really funny is that some of the songs are almost poppy.  However, the first song on the record is deliberately difficult.  To paraphrase Dean Young, one has to go through the slaughterhouse to get to the sea.

JB: There’s a reference in the book to a jello mold of Jello Biafra at a kids’ birthday party.  I can’t resist asking if you actually made that.  If so, you win the Coolest Dad of the Galaxy for All Eternal Time award.

MH: Sadly, no. That’s something imagined, not executed.  My daughter’s only six, so not (yet) a fan of The Dead Kennedys, but someday I hope she will be, someday soon!

Maybe what that “Pin the tail/on the sophist or the Jello mold Biafra” bit demonstrates is the “leaping” (Robert Bly’s term for associating fast) between things with speed that was a huge part of these poems, both their composition and mode.  Often in poetry the mind at work is the mind at play.  There’s certainly a lot of fast association happening in these poems (as I said, I wasn’t even particularly conscious of a lot of it when it was happening)—letting the language, the imagination and the transmissions from outside do what they do best, which is wonder and wander.  The idea is to activate/innervate/galvanize the denotative and connotative atmospheres of words simultaneously, to delimit possibility with regard to meaning—to say what I want/need to say, while staying cognizant of the fact (mostly during revision) that the language is always saying something out beyond me, in spite of my best efforts to control it.

JB: You make a reference to John Anderson’s poem “John Clare” in Sermons and Lectures, and there’s a poem – a cento – titled “I Am: Not    John Clare” in your previous book, Wolf Face.  I’m currently reading Clare, as well as the Jonathan Bate bio of him, and so I’m curious about your attraction to Clare.

MH: I’ll send you that John Anderson poem.  It’s in his book In Sepia, and the first two lines are:

I know there is a worm in the human heart,

In its wake such emptiness as sleep should require.

That first line especially seems really indicative of Clare to me—even like something he might’ve written.  The ghost in the machine is a lowly worm, a thing perhaps that’s eating us from the inside out.  Anderson was definitely our Clare. I wish more people would read his work.  He was a terrific poet. His Milky Way: Poems 1967-1982 is still available I think and well worth reading.  The images in his work are so vivid, so strange, and strangely amazing—often tender and terrified/terrifying.  He goes the distance, and it’s into the Void—often to loneliness and isolation, but it’s gorgeous and impossible and huge, like the universe.

Similarly John Clare seems to me, even now, a very contemporary poet.  What I love about his work is its sturdy fragility, the beauty and the muck, the distortion and the noise.  He was a farmer poet, somebody well acquainted with nature and “common” people—and unlike say, Wordsworth, Clare was common people—and he had this rangy, electrified imagination—which tortured him, literally.  He spent much of his life in and out of asylums. If the paintings of him are at all accurate, he looked like Johnny Rotten, like someone on fire in a wild altered state.  And yet, there’s a softness, too, to Clare—the images of him and in his work.  He is ever astonished and desirous of Paradise and rest, which is nearly impossible for him.  “…I am alive and live—like vapours tossed//Into the nothingness of scorn and noise” he writes in “Lines: I Am,” a poem which goes on to claim that “Even the dearest that I love the best/Are strange—nay rather stranger than the rest.”  But even here the poet in the end finds solace in the natural world, “Untroubling and untroubled where I lie/The grass below—above, the vaulted sky.” There’s so much inner turmoil that floods out into Clare’s poems, “in its wake such emptiness as sleep should require” to re-quote Anderson—but nature and wildness is his refuge.  As he writes in his poem “The River Gwash,” “O thus while musing wild, I’m doubly blest,/My woes unheeding and my heart at rest.”  “Musing wild”—that’s why I love Clare, for the muse of wildness in all it incarnations.

Additionally, it’s the constant struggle to not fall apart in Clare’s (and for that matter also Anderson’s) work that I respond to, and think about a lot with regard to my own life and work.  I want the wildness, but I also want coherence.  I want to get somewhere.  And if it takes something wild to get there—a rational derangement of all the senses (Rimbaud) or a debacle of the intellect (Breton)—sign me up.  I’m happy to try and go the distance, but I’m also happy and grateful for the stability of both my family and life outside of the art—a luxury that sadly Clare never had.

As long as we’re geeking out on Clare here, I might note that Sermons and Lectures is full of “headphone tricks” like this one: In “Amplifier to Defender” I quote Matthew Rohrer’s poem “Four Romantic Poets,” from his book Rise Up, where he says: “I must learn to say what I/never intended to say,” but that’s only part of the quotation.  The quotation goes on, and the sentence ends: “like John Clare.”  I certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to get that unless they just happened to know the Rohrer poem.  I didn’t need John there for my purposes explicitly, so I cut him out, but I love that he haunts that moment of the poem, in spite of my sabotage of the line.  He’s in the air, in spirit. So much of the meaning in a lot of contemporary poetry exists in the atmosphere of the language above the page.  I love thinking about all the things (as accumulated absence/shadow) that I often miss in my reading, and also the things I actually get that were never intended by the poet.  This is one of the great pleasures of poetry, the collision of the writer and the language and the reader in myriad ways that can’t be catalogued or accounted for by any of the key players. John Clare is cut away, but John Clare is still in play.

JB: One of the great pleasures of your poems is the sheer amount of inventive and often weird phrases.  From just one poem: “shouting whore-style in Italian,” “Squash blossoms/ Blast site,” “apocalypse investors in the bushes.”  This stuff is delightful on its own, but what’s really cool is the other impulse you have to incorporate what people might call “found” text into the poems, side by side with the strange phrases you make up.  What happens, at least for me, is that all language becomes fair game, and the feeling is that not you, not anyone, can claim it.  It’s for all of us.  And so then I feel torn: I want to keep reading your poems, but part of me wants to throw your book off the balcony and go write my own poems.  I don’t have a question here, I suppose.  But you can respond however you like.

MH: Well, as with the first question, I’m really flattered that you would say this.  If somehow the poems make you want to throw them off the balcony and do your own writing that’s perfect.  That’s a necessary part of all this.  Writing for me is always an extension of reading/listening, and the idea that something I’ve written might, even in some small way, spur someone to do his or her own work is incredibly gratifying.  I would say that that’s true of my intentions for this book in particular: Sermons and Lectures is my call for your response.  I mean, my actual address is even written out in one of the poems in hopes that someone might write back, thus making their own response a call that I would then respond to, etc.

You’re right too that the poems take as a premise that all language and poetry are for everyone, and that poetry is—to bastardize Wittgenstein a bit—the world as we find it.  Poetry wants to be as big as the world.  There’s no such thing as non-poetic language.  Any language is potentially useful in the service of a poem.  Poetry’s language isn’t private language.  It isn’t jargon.  It’s our public language mis/used, mis/managed and re-imagined to create aesthetic effects and affect.  Language is full of possibility, an infinite number of contexts for making meaning, any and all of which poetry is happy to appropriate to do its work. It really is all fair game.  And “game” is clearly a very important word in this context, i.e. poetry is a “language-game” (Wittgenstein again)—a particular context for using words and making meaning—and it’s also linguistic, imaginative “play.”  I’m willing to do nearly anything with/in the language-game of poetry, including ransacking and resisting other language-games to make a poem, e.g. thievery, sabotage and failure are three of my most favorite literary values, not to mention methods that I employ to make works of art.  I try not to be precious about it.  My poems aren’t babies.  They’re poems.  They’re made of words, and I’m deploying them as a means of communicating things that are important to me that I hope will be important to other people as well.  As I’ve said elsewhere: Poems by any means necessary.

As for the images/weird phrases, a lot of that is the result of the collage process—putting disparate fragments together via juxtaposition to see what kind of sparks fly off when they’re made to share the same stage.  I love the shock of that, the surprise, the mysteriousness of the process, the way (when it works) it activates a string of associations, thus putting something new in the atmosphere—on the planet—that didn’t exist before, not in this way, not in this light. 

JB: Frank O’Hara and Gregory Corso are two big, obvious influences on your work.  You also are a big fan of Paul Violi, and you edited a reissue of his first book, In Baltic Circles.  I don’t know Violi.  What’s his work like?

MH: I’ve written quite a bit about Paul in the past, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much. To be as succinct as possible he was one of our most inventive poets and a poet with a huge heart, beloved by his students and fellow writers alike.  Maybe his most important influence on me was in demonstrating that (as discussed above) there’s no such thing as non-poetic language and that everything is fair game for poetry.  For example, he has a beautiful and very funny poem called “Index” which is itself in the form of an “Index.”  Part of its charm is in the way that it creates formal wobble back and forth between being a poem and being an index, forcing a reader to ask all sorts of questions about how each functions in the world.  Similarly to “Index” he also has poems in use the form of a police blotter, a calendar, instructions manuals (of various stripes, including a faux survival guide), toasts, acknowledgments pages, art reviews, a wine list, etc.  These are all very funny of course, as they highlight how absurd and particular to the occasion language in these various contexts often is, but Violi was never (or almost never) out for a quick gag.  Besides being formally inventive and hilarious, his poems have heart and gravity, and they’re very smart without being robotic and soulless.  Anyone who likes Kenneth Koch or Samuel Taylor Coleridge will LOVE Paul Violi.

In Baltic Circles, the re-issue of his first book that I helped edit, and for which I wrote the afterword, came out last year as a part of the H_NGM_N BKS Reissue Series.  We were already working with Paul on bringing it out when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and unfortunately it took his life before we were able to see the book back into print.  I actually think it’s one of Paul’s finest books—a blueprint for the things that he would develop in his poems over the rest of his life, one with a lot of promise that he definitely fulfilled (and went beyond).  He was a terrific poet and a great guy.  I miss him a lot.

JB: Your next book, scheduled to be published next year, is titled Debacle Debacle.  Again: language in the air, language of the popular culture, the news – but also a term from Breton, as you mentioned above (“debacle of the intellect”) – and also a phrase from the poem “Sermons and Lectures” from your book we’ve been discussing.  Let’s end our conversation with a hint of what’s in this next book, and maybe beyond.

MH: Debacle Debacle is in many ways a sort of companion book to Sermons and Lectures, the flipside of the same coin.  Each is the other’s shadow. They are doppelgangers of each other.  Many of the poems in Debacle I was writing at the same time that I was writing Sermons and Lectures, and in a way I feel like the Debacle poems address a lot of the same ideas, but they come at them in a completely different way, using different modes, different means.  Debacle Debacle, unlike Sermons and Lectures, is decidedly straightforward in its approach to the various themes it explores and develops.  It’s a largely narrative/lyric collection, more logical, less strange, less effusive.  It’s set in Ohio, in my neighborhood, my house. There are characters: my friends, my family, myself, and they’re more fully developed than in Sermons.  The book is full of stories and the scaffolding of stories.  That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its wildernesses and bewilderments.  The book’s epigraph is that quote from Breton, “A poem must be a debacle of the intellect,” i.e., a fiasco or a flood.  And those ideas are everywhere in the book.  And even though I used the Breton epigraph, Debacle’s not in any way a surrealist book (it’s a Romantic book), though it might be a book about the surrealism of domestic Midwestern life and values in the 21^st century, i.e., the strangeness of the ordinary, which is essentially that we all eventually die and have to contend with that in a variety of different ways (depending on where we happen to be in our lives).  I guess if I had to sum it up, I’d say it’s a lot about love and being terrified of love, and about the choices one makes on a daily basis—the ways one goes about trying—not to die.  It sounds dark, but it’s really quite exuberant.  It dreams about death, but then wakes up and makes waffles and bacon for the family.

JB: Thank you, Matt.  It’s been a pleasure.

MH: I really loved doing this, Justin.  Thanks so much.

Matt Hart is the author of four books of poems, most recently Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012).  A fifth collection, Debacle Debacle, is forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2013. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL. Currently he is a Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas Austin.