In this new installment of Phoned-In, Dan Boehl reads from his new book Kings of the F**king Sea and talks to Luke Degnan about his collaboration with Jonathan Marshall, censorship, and Spiderman 3.

In the eleventh installment of BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Madison Smartt Bell reads an excerpt from his novel The Color of Night.[podcast]http://bombsite.powweb.com/Podcasts/FFD-SmarttBell-MP3.mp3[/podcast]

Andrew Weatherhead

Melissa Broder

Gigantic

Blake Butler

BB2

Andrew Weatherhead

Melissa Broder

Gigantic

Blake Butler

BB2

A short Q & A follows the (hilarious) reading. Shteyngart’s novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003),and Absurdistan (2006),. His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times.

]]> http://bombsite.powweb.com/?feed=rss2&p=14491 1 Better late than never! Listen to Gary Shteyngart read from his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, at BookCourt this past July. A short Q & A follows the (hilarious) reading. Shteyngart’s novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003),and Absurdistan (2006),. His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times. Better late than never! Listen to Gary Shteyngart read from his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, at BookCourt this past July. A short Q & A follows the (hilarious) reading. Shteyngart’s novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook [...] http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466 http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:16:52 +0000 Luke Degnan http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=14466 In episode #014 of Phoned-In, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside! Click through for the reading and a Q&A with Luke Degnan where they discuss the forest, a generation's obsession with animals, and authenticity.]]>

In episode #014 of Phoned-In, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside!. ALSO a Q&A with Luke Degnan, she discusses the forest, a generation’s obsession with animals, and authenticity.

Listen to Heather Christle read below:

Luke Degnan: What’s your relationship to the idea of a farm?

Heather Christle: I never lived on a real one. People have been asking me that so it’s good that you say the idea of a farm. When I was little, one of my favorite toys to play with was this bag of little miniature farm houses and animals. Some were plastic. Some were wood. They were all out of proportion to each other. They were great. I loved arranging them and playing with them. It’s definitely related to the imagination for me. I have fantasies, like a lot of people around my age do, of moving into the country or even living in the city and having some chickens and things, but it’s not something I’ve been able to manage. So even the more real versions of a farm are kind of a fantasy for me. I love the idea of a farm. I really do. Especially since they’re so full of animals, and animals really get my imagination going.

LD: I asked this same question to Zachary Schomburg, but I thought I’d ask you as well. Why is our generation obsessed with animals and critters?

HC: It’s a good question right? It’s not just in poetry. It’s in music, it’s in art, it’s everywhere. Someone, when I was on tour, had just seen Zach read and had no idea that we had anything to do with each other. He started talking to me about Zach and about animals and our generation. I think he had a theory that we have a desire to get back into narrative and a kind of imaginary coherence to the world. That there was a naivete to what we’re doing. Which I think is perhaps the case to some extent. Perhaps it’s a form of resistance to the machines that we see all the time. If our field of vision is populated with so many machines, perhaps it helps to populate our minds with more animals just to balance things out a little bit. There’s a general interest in the woods too and woodland animals.

I think that a lot of that energy can be traced back to fairy tales and that kind of thing. They feel like really basic images and ideas to work with, which is helpful because then you can make the poem be about the arrangement of images and the logic of how they’re arranged. We don’t get too distracted by the animal or by the trees because they’re so basic. I’m not really thinking of real trees or real animals. They’re these kind of basic forms that are just there to be manipulated or to manipulate me. That happens too.

LD: It seems like our generation is obsessed with critters and the forest in a way that’s not so obvious to the people doing it.

HC: That happens all the time, not just with animals. You think that you have a great idea that’s really authentic to yourself and then you find out that Vice has already written an article about it or something. It’s a tricky thing too because I’ve become more and more aware of those tendencies in my own work to the point where I’m trying to back away from them a little bit and do some other things. It can become awfully predictable too. You participate in these patterns sometimes without realizing it. It’s good, probably, to become aware if it becomes a tic or something. There’s one poem in The Difficult Farm that I read called “Acorn Duly Crushed”, and I totally didn’t realize when I wrote it that there are all these Dear ___ poems out there. It had been brought up to me by someone who suggested that I maybe change that. I felt like I couldn’t change that poem. I couldn’t take away all of those dears. They seemed pretty significant to how it was all working. I hope that it broke the pattern enough as it wasn’t a particularly loving address to the forest. It is at some points friendly, but it’s also kind of insulting. The danger of writing the Dear ___ poem is that it gets awfully twee. I think that what’s interesting about the patterns that you see happening is that they’re very often authentic to a great number of people. If there’s enough of something in the air, people start responding to it independently of one another. Authenticity is a tricky goal. I’m always riddled with doubt about my own authenticity and find myself wondering if it’s something that can be consciously pursued. It’s the kind of thing that you can only reach, if it’s reachable at all, by not trying to get there.

LD: Perhaps also by not worrying about what other people have done?

HC: There’s a quote that I’ve talked about before, that is really pretty significant to me, by the painter Phillip Guston who talks about how when he first goes into his studio to paint, there are all of these noisy voices in there with him of his contemporaries, of the critics, and if he’s lucky, one by one as he’s painting, they’ll all disappear, and if he’s really lucky then he disappears too. That’s just so perfect. That’s really the best feeling that I have when I’m making something. I’m just not there. I go away. In those moments I guess I am capable of feeling authentic in those moments when I’m not there. Those feelings can only really last while you’re making the thing and then they kind of disintegrate.

Heather Christle is the author of The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books), and a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books). Some new poems have recently appeared in The Believer, Fence, and Skein. Born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she now lives in Atlanta, and teaches poetry at Emory University. She is also the web editor for jubilat. More information is at heatherchristle.blogspot.com.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

On a summer night last July BOMBlog contributor Richard Goldstein came across something out of the ordinary in a Chelsea gallery, among Bill Beckley’s photographs was experimental folk musician Sam Amidon. Intrigued, Goldstein picked Amidon’s brain about free-jazz, the history of American folk music, and the skills you can pick up on a beach in Nova Scotia.

Photo by James Walton.

Last July, it wasn’t just art that was on view at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, but a small gathering for a concert by Sam Amidon on the occasion of his latest release I See the Sign.  Hosting a concert, the gallery seemed suddenly more ’80s—not because of Bill Beckley’s photographs—and certainly not because of the banjo and fiddle playing Amidon.  It was a matter of energy and spirit that marked that time-before-Chelsea where art and music crossed paths in and sometimes more often outside gallery walls—the piers, clubs, and beach.

Amidon found his way to Shafrazi via the West Fourth subway station.  He had been playing banjo on the platform hustling some money to catch a film.  A man approached him with two dollars and asked for some banjo lessons.  Amidon went to the man’s house where work by LeWitt, Acconci, and Judd dotted the walls.  The two were in for more than they expected and pleasantly surprised by each others’  talents.  For Amidon, it turned out the man was Bill Beckley, a photographer who had been making story-art in the 1970s and now large quasi-abstract photos; and for Beckley, it turned out the subway player was an accomplished musician and story teller in his own right.  In time, Beckley introduced Amidon to Tony Shafrazi as he had done with Keith Haring.

At the gallery that night, Beckley’s photographs set the stage for the musician.  Reflected on a frame’s glass, Amidon’s silhouette played against the blood and lollipop reds of a large Beckley photograph.  Softly, Sam Amidon started playing his fiddle then began sawing at it with his bow.  It let out a torqued call like his voice and those shape noted ones from 1700s New England and the Northern Revivalists that influence him.  He spun the song back to melody and proceeded to take the audience on a rustic journey well beyond Chelsea.

Listen to a live recording from the show here:

Richard Goldstein: You come from a pretty musical family.  What was that like growing up?

Sam Amidon: The great thing about it was just being in the world of music. Many of my adult friends and my parents’ friends were musicians, so that was the most important thing for me. It’s not so much that I performed, though I did perform as a young child, the most important element was being in an environment of tunes. I played fiddle mostly growing up, but I don’t have any claim to authenticity for folk songs—I didn’t grow up singing and playing the banjo, but I discovered a lot of these old folk songs the way a lot of more indie people did. When the Harry Smith anthology was reissued and the Dock Boggs CDs started showing up at a CD store downtown I had a frame of reference.  My parents played that style of banjo, so I could learn that from them.

RG: Is that the point that triggered a looking back to folk music?

SA: No, it took a little longer. At this point, I was still in high school and was thinking more that what I really wanted to do was go to New York and play free jazz. I came to New York to get away from folk music because I felt that I’d done what I could with it…that sounds horrible, I felt like I wanted something different.

RG: You mention Sonny Rollins as a major influence. Were you playing sax or something?

SA: No, violin. I do talk about Sonny Rollins a lot because I’m a total jazz nerd, and I listen to jazz all the time. I especially love a set of his recordings called Live in London 1965. He was quite scared of the recording machine and these recordings were made when he didn’t know he was being recorded.

RG: So he wouldn’t be good in this situation.

SA: Exactly.  I think he was fine in interview, but playing not so much. So these recordings were bootlegged under a table or something and his playing is so beautiful on them. But no, I always played the violin which is why I never really made it as a jazz musician—jazz violin is a pretty terrible instrument.

RG: What brought you back to folk music?

SA: I don’t really think of this project as folk music in the sense of folk songs.  That’s the source material and just a coincidence, it’s what I have to offer. The people I’m working with are not folk musicians, Nico [Muhly], Shahzad [Ismaily], and my reworkings of the songs are just what I do to them.  Whereas if I’m going to play folk music, I’ll get together with my friend Eamon O’Leary or Rhys Jones and play traditional irish fiddle tunes for three hours. That’s what I think of as folk music—going to play tunes in a traditional setting.  But at the same time, they are, of course, folk songs—but the way I came back to them was because I really wanted to try and learn to play the guitar—I was a fiddle and banjo player.  So as a way of learning to play I just learned some of those songs.  And as an approach to learning to write songs, I would come up with little guitar riffs that were different to change the songs around. I just got stuck at that phase…never made it to the songwriting part—I’m a failed songwriter basically.

RG: But that’s an interesting point, what you define as an authentic writer.

SA: Absolutely.  Those are super vague categories, and if you think about it, it depends on what you are considering as writing.  Though I’m not writing the words in my case, there’s a lot of music that I am. Often, I’ll come up with the music before knowing what song it’s going to be.

RG: Do you think that “reinterpret” is a better word than “cover?”

SA: Yes, and that’s a great point.  The reason it’s a better word—reworking, reinterpreting, whatever you want to call it—is because a “cover” is somebody doing somebody else’s song; whereas, a folk song doesn’t belong to anybody. There is no original; there is no one copy. You’re kind of copying 10 versions but those were all copies of 15 other versions. But most of all, it’s a malleable object to begin with.

RG: Looking back seems like a really fashionable thing to do now. Take the New Antiquarian look.  Is there a certain moment that brought about that enthusiasm?

SA: I think it’s true that that’s happening right now, but I also believe that each moment in music and in US history has a corresponding interest in folk music. People are interested in different aspects of it depending on what their interests are.  In the ‘60s you had a huge folk revival—people were into the community and the idea of it as a worker’s thing. So it was political, this sort of Woody-Guthrie-Pete-Seeger-thing. Then in the late ‘60s it was more of a communitarian thing; and then in the ‘70s…actually, I think there was a kind of Punk-old-time-string band movement that happened around the same time as the punk movement among people in hard core bands—

RG: like Captain Beefheart or—

SA: …yeah, Camper Van Beethoven, maybe and a group called The Horse Flies, who were like a half New Wave band half old-time-string-band, and The Chicken Chokers. It was kind of an obscure scene, but it was like they were obsessed with authenticity and rawness and that kind of intensity. And then Kurt Cobain sang the Lead Belly song and with it, the whole indie side of things and the New Weird America/Freak Folk thing. I’m not really in any of those scenes, but I do like to see the ways people are interested in something different about it.  So sometimes it’s the words, sometimes it’s the melody, sometimes it’s the wackiness or weirdness of these recordings. But I just love the mystery of the songs, the mystery of where they came from.

RG: How are you transforming the song? Are you transforming it to your initial feeling when you hear it?

SA: There’s no real rule to any of it.  I mean, often I’ll just love the song so I’ll sing it. It will take on a shape or other times as I said, I’ll just come up with a piece of music and a song will fit over it or maybe the ways it doesn’t fit are nice and I leave those alone. The main thing is that mystery quality of what is in there, what is confusing, strange, or comforting.

RG: You mentioned the shape a song may take, what was the shape note singing?

SA: The only reason it was called shape note is because it was a way of helping to teach people music by putting the notes into shapes on the score, like the root of the chord is a square and the triangle…But it was used specifically for a kind of choral singing, Sacred Harp music. That’s a tradition of choral singing that started in New England 200 years ago which was pushed West and South and continues in Alabama and Georgia. And now there has been a revival of it since the ‘70s across the country. 200 years ago, the dominating culture, the Puritain culture, was religious.  Many of the younger people in that society were bored with the church music because it wasn’t harmonically interesting. But they knew they couldn’t go singing drinking songs or murder ballads because they would be ostracized. So they took the melodies to murder ballads and drinking songs, put religious words in instead, and harmonized it all.  That was exciting to them and what’s cool about it is that they were totally untrained musicians. So, the harmonies are really weird and very powerful and strange, and modern and bizarre.  It continues as a more religious tradition down South as a Baptist thing but still never in church—it’s a Saturday barbeque kind of thing. In the ‘70s all these hippies got into it ‘cause they saw that it was an early form of intense rebellious weird music. I just love those songs; I grew up singing a lot of them.

RG: And you site Sonny Rollins as an influence and the charge his music has on the body. What does the singing do to your body? You get to some strange pitches and chords.

SA: For me playing fiddle is way more physical. Playing fiddle tunes is like doing tai chi. You know if you go to a Sacred Harp singing you sing loud and it does feel good. It feels really good to sing quietly, I suppose,  especially with a microphone which makes it really loud anyway.  (laughs)

RG: What do you think the orchestra brings to the work, the story-scape?

SA: Well the orchestrations and arrangements have been done by Nico Muhly. Often I feel that Nico has ideas about what the story really is about. Those might be really different from what my take is like. So it just adds this other dimension that I love. The same has been true working with Shahzad Ismaily, who plays pretty much all the nonorchestral instruments on I See the Sign. Though it’s a little bit different because he’s not thinking in the way Nico is necessarily in terms of narrative, but he is getting into the sound with me in a different way.  Collaboration takes it into a different zone which is another element of alien mystery.

RG: It seems like everything is touched by video now. What does video bring to the whole process for you?

SA: I love making videos and I would like to make more. The main connection for me to the videos is the idea of field recordings which captured so much of the personal quality of folk music.  It isn’t always performance music. Very often some of the “original versions” of the songs are just sung by a woman while her kids are asleep in the other room. Another element of those folk music recordings that inspires me is that often the musicologists, the people recording the fiddle players or singers, were getting to them way after the music had kind of died out. By definition those musicians were eccentric. I mean these are people who were living in a culture that had been very rich but basically doesn’t exist anymore. So the field recordings have this great element of bizarre insight. You’re kind of inside somebody’s whole personal space that way. The videos for me are like self-inflicted field recordings of myself.

RG: What you just said has me thinking of the early life of the songs you sing and their intention or lack of it, how you said they were never owned.  So, it’s like by making field recordings of yourself, you’re tapping into a zone of no intention, which must be really refreshing, maybe it’s similar to that jazz impulse to be free?

SA: That’s absolutely correct.  I’ve had a real block about “creating” things new, like composing or writing a song from scratch.  Somehow, I have to trick myself towards it by starting from something else or going into a zone of just playing.  And somehow the following things all have that sense of flow: playing an old traditional fiddle tune, playing free jazz; pressing record on a video recorder while I’m rowing a boat, and then talking; mumbling things with my eyes closed on a stage at an audience.

RG: What was it like producing?  You produced your mom’s album.

SA: That’s true!

RG: Did you produce anything else?

SA: Nope, just my mom’s record. I mean I’ve been involved in the making of a ton of albums through a folk band I had in high school with my friend Thomas and my brother Stefan. So it wasn’t like I was doing something that was that strange to me but it was really wonderful to get her to come out of her comfort zone from what she’d done before and she wanted to. She kept on telling me how happy she was to not have to consult with my dad about material, and I told her to keep me out of the marital disputes. But she did a great job and it’s a beautiful album.

RG: And are you…writing a novel?  I saw that on your Twitter page.

SA: I may have claimed that! (laughs) Yeah, I have all kinds of mischievious things going on but we’ll see where those things go.  That would be really fun, though I’m reading some novels.

RG: You’ve got Ulysses right here.

SA: Yeah, I picked this up at my grandparent’s house. Good summer read.

RG: And who would you like to collaborate with that you haven’t already?

SA: Um, there’s a couple of people. That might happen, but I might as well keep them a secret because it’s more fun that way. Maybe if Sonny Rollins needs help. Instead of just collaborating, I could help Sonny Rollins—musically help him.  But, maybe he doesn’t need help. One of the things that inspires me about him is that, I think, he made a decision 40 years ago to put his personal well-being and happiness above the actual quality of music.  He sacrificed his art for his life, which I find to be extremely inspiring.  So that could be a goal.

RG: What do you mean?

SA: He just started to suck, but you got the sense that he was sucking because it takes a lot of energy and potentially stress to play with only good musicians, even if they are more difficult people, or to fire somebody ‘cause they are not that good because they are a friend of yours. So he just put all those things aside and he said I’m just going to have an easy-going beautiful life and do a lot of yoga and if my music is terrible that’s okay.  So it’s going to be the new thing to get into.

RG: What about your liturgical dancing? How did that come about?

SA: Well, I do love to dance, and I learned how to do that on the beach in Nova Scotia six years ago.  One day, when I was living on a little island, I started doing liturgical dance because it was morning time.  You have to do a morning dance and an evening dance.  The Prodigal Son, for example, is a story that’s been told for many centuries.  It seemed like you could describe it in a different way, there’s the words way, and the song way, and the dance way.  There’s a lot of different ways to tell stories.

This special episode of Phoned-In features poems from issue #1 of the journal Telephone. Listen to twelve poets read their translations of a poem by Uljana Wolf and to read an interview with editors Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault.

Luke Degnan: What is Telephone and how did it start?

Sharmila Cohen & Paul Legault: Telephone is a biannual experimental poetry translation journal. There’s a spiel we’ve been sending around that describes it all, but basically it mimics the children’s game where you whisper one phrase from person to person, changing it along the way. We start with a handful of poems from a foreign poet and then solicit other poets and translators (often regardless of their knowledge of the source language) to “translate” them however they see fit. The two of us started working together after a very productive brunch. At the time, Paul had just finished his English-to-English translations of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson; Sharmi had been studying German and was translating a lot of contemporary work. That common interest turned into Telephone. Actually, our brunch-mate Nick Sumida came up with name for the journal, and we took it from there. It’s worth pointing out that another poetry journal called Telephone predates us, published by Maureen Owen, with the help of poets like Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman, among others. We didn’t know that at the time, but it’s nice to feel that we’re operating in a tradition of small New York presses with an interest in experimental poetics. Brooklyn seems like the ideal place for us right now. In just the past year, journals like Maggy and SUPERMACHINE have been launched out of the scene here, and there’s a lot of cross-pollination going on.

LD: Can explain the idea behind Telephone #1? How did you wind up choosing Uljana Wolf?

SC & PL: The first issue of Telephone seemed to come together on its own. Sharmi had been reading a lot of contemporary German poetry and approached Uljana Wolf to discuss a translation project. Soon after, Telephone was born, and it was the perfect venue to present Wolf’s work. Her book, Falsche Freunde (kookbooks, 2009), and more specifically, the “dichtionary” section where the poems in Telephone come from, is obsessed with false cognates and celebrate the “untranslatable.” Once the source text was confirmed, we set out to collect a group of poet/translators from a variety of backgrounds. Some of the contributors knew no German at all, others had a great deal of experience translating German poetry, some had never translated before. Within the realm of poetry, the rules of translation are extremely flexible. People have done everything ranging from Chapman’s Homer to Zukofsky’s homophonic reworking of Catullus, and yet all of these various modes fall under the same umbrella. With Telephone, we wanted to have a place to put these ideas in direct conversation with each other.

LD: What are your plans for future issues?

SC & PL: The plan is to feature a different language in each issue. For Issue #2, we’re going to collaborate with Michelle Levy at the Elizabeth Foundation of the Arts, a nonprofit gallery based in Midtown Manhattan. She approached us with the idea of doing a translation-based exhibition that combines poetry with visual art and new media. The featured poet is to be Augusto de Campos, a founding father of the Concrete Poetry movement in Brazil. We’re very excited to be working with him because he pioneered so many of the ideas that we are investigating with Telephone and the future exhibition. At the moment, there’s a lot of discussion about planning an events series and expanding into a full-on press—Telephone Books. We recently caught wind that all of Uljana’s DICHtionary poems are being translated by Susan Bernofsky, one of our contributors, and is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse as a chapbook. It’s very exciting for us to see more of Uljana’s work becoming available in the States and we hope to be able to promote foreign writing in that way in the future.

Please visit www.telephonejournal.org to purchase a copy of Telephone: Issue 1, or head over to their launch party this Friday at 177 Livingston in Brooklyn.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America
Three Delays by Charlie Smith
Read by Charlie Smith
Recorded at the studios of Art on Air International Radio
Running Time: 38:48

In the ninth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Charlie Smith reads an excerpt from his novel Three Delays, published by Harper Perennial. Read an interview with Charlie Smith by John Reed here or pick up a copy of Issue 115, on newsstands September 15th.

Click here to subscribe to our feed and download this podcast. Check back with BOMBsite.com with each new issue to listen to audio versions of these stories.

I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way. This twelfth episode of Phoned-In features a reading by poet Jim Behrle. Click through to listen to the podcast and to read a Q&A in which he and Luke Degnan discuss The Boston Poet Tea Party, satire, Snooki and being punched in the face.

Simon Slater - DUDE DESCENDING A NUTCASE (2010), Acrylic paint.

Listen to the podcast below:

Luke Degnan: How did the Boston Poet Tea Party poetry marathon go?

Jim Behrle: It was pretty cool. It’s a lot of work, but then when you see the pieces come together, it’s kinda great. You invite like 120 poets, but it ends up that 20 of them can’t make it to Boston. It’s still pretty amazing. They can be really transformative events. That’s what’s so interesting about them. Aaron Kiely ran one in ‘95 or ‘96, the first one. It was in Cambridge. I was like “holy shit.” I met at least 25-30 poets who I still know today and whose work I think is great. For a long time, when I was a kid, when I was in college, I thought, I’m a poet and I want to be a poet, but I was like, how come I don’t like poetry? How come I don’t like what my teachers are teaching me? Louise Glück is that all there is? She’s nice, but is there anything else? For me that was a huge event, that first one, and then ever since it’s been an opportunity to meet people who I wouldn’t have a chance to hear or see read ever.

LD: Anybody this year that you hadn’t heard before?

JB: I met Elizabeth Marie Young. She did a bit on the radio with me, and I thought she was terrific. There was another Fence guy, Jibade Khalil Huffman, who I thought was terrific. Also I met Geof Huth. He does a lot of word poems and stuff, where it’s like a symbol…I’d never met him before. I had only seen his work on Ron Silliman’s site. It was a pretty intense thing to see him read. He was jumping around, throwing poems against the wall. He was speaking in tongues for a while. I thought that was pretty cool.

LD: You’re from Boston. You’re a big Red Sox fan. Why did you leave Boston and go to the home of the Yankees?

JB: I grew up north of Boston and I lived in Boston and Cambridge for a long time. Even walking around is great. You’re near Harvard, near Harvard Square, near Inman Square. You think this is just an unbelievable, beautiful place. If you get the right weather and you’re walking around in the sun, you think what an amazing city to be able to come to. It’s real different than Brooklyn. I think Brooklyn and Manhattan is beautiful, but there’s something about Boston that seems like a city that’s built on poetry or made for poets somehow.

I’m a huge Red Sox fan. I actually moved the day after the Red Sox won the World Series. I had been working in Brooklyn at a bookstore part time, shuttling back and forth. The last day I lived in Boston was the night the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. I remember walking though Kenmore Square hugging crying old men. The riot police were out. I walked all the way from Boston to my house in Medford up Mass Ave. People were just honking their horns and going crazy. This was pretty much the moment I was waiting for for a long time. I had always wondered what it would be like to live in New York, to be a New York poet. The bookstore I had been working out was closing. I had run out of bookstores to work at in Boston. They called me The Jim Reaper. I think I worked in 12 or 13 bookstores and 11 of them are closed now. I just kinda ran out of ideas. Brendan Lorber let me sleep on a hammock in his basement, I fell in love with a married woman, and I was here in New York trying to do it.

LD: What would you like to achieve as a poet or perhaps as a poet who has ideas on how things should be?

JB: I’ve always wanted to write poems. I try to write them better and better, but they have descended into humor and parody a little bit.

LD: What I mean is, you do seem to have an agenda. You have definite ideas.

JB: I feel like I’ve been a satirist for a long time. I started writing satire when I was in college. I found it to be an incredibly enriching experience. Every once in a while someone wants to punch you in the face, but for the most part at least you can get ideas out there that people want to think about. They say “well, Jim’s crazy, but he might have a point.” I used to write satirical columns for the Suffolk Journal. I went to Suffolk University in Boston. That stuff was some of the best writing I think I ever did, but it was dependent on Gonzo journalism and creating a persona that even I couldn’t sustain. I literally had to stop drinking. I had to stop eating Chinese food at 3:00 AM every night. Even I could not sustain the Gonzo lifestyle.

With the cartoons and the blogging and all that stuff, I dunno. I like prodding poets into better behavior if I can. Sometimes you wonder if you’re actually poisoning the well or if you’re cleansing it. I get as many people who say “Jim’s a crazy jerk” as I do that say “Hey I thought that was really fun. I thought that was really interesting.” That stuff has moved over into poetry too, the satire. When you say “what do I want from being a poet” it’s complicated. I used to think that being a poet meant that you were John Wieners. You’re hanging out your apartment writing beautiful poems that maybe no one ever reads or that you destroy. You make something beautiful, and it gets thrown out when you die. I used to think that that was the ideal. Or somebody like Robert Lowell who I think was the first poet I ever wanted to emulate. This deep voiced character. Now I feel like I can do some things. Through my humor and my ridiculous personality, I can get poetry a little attention that maybe it wouldn’t get otherwise.

I wrote a poem about Snooki for the radio the other day. People just love it, and I’m like “Well, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written.” I literally wrote it on the Green Line. If you’ve ever been on the Green Line when it gets above the street it is just shaking back and forth. I’m just hitting my head against the wall writing this crappy poem. It’s garbage. People are like, “Wow, a poem about Snooki. How interesting.” I don’t really know if it is or not, but for five seconds people didn’t think poetry was an unapproachable, ridiculous, obtuse thing. I love ridiculous, obtuse poems. Those are some of my favorites. I hope I can bridge people between this and that and say “well, poetry is not all that unapproachable. Poetry is not all that obtuse.” Robert Lowell used “BU” for Boston University in one of his poems. Which was a lightning strike back in the 60’s or 70’s. People were like “wow, you don’t have to say Boston University.”

I’m just struggling like everybody else. Poetry is a tough gig. The technology is amazing. I think there are more people who consider themselves poets than ever. You do have to get yourself out there. My anti-self promotion self promotion gig hopefully is transparent. Hopefully it just makes you think okay well, do I need to become a professor and make other students become professors? Does the experience of being a poet mean that everyone has to be in debt to a university or a bank as opposed to, I dunno, having sex in the woods on some couch for free and then reading poems to whoever you just did it on?

LD: You say you have this anti-self promotion self promotion gig. In your essay for The Poetry Foundation, 24/7 Relentless Careerism you wrote,

Negative publicity works just as well. Having the right people hate you is better than having the wrong people like you. Controversy is rare in poetry because poets usually just drink and bottle up whatever is bothering them. If we all just spent a year or two yelling at other poets, we might be better off and have cleaner colons.

JB: I don’t think I meant controversy on the level of some obscure poet threatening to punch me in the face. If Billy Collins threatened to punch me in the face or John McCain, that would be great. We should shoot higher than thinking some other poet wanting to punch you in the face is a big media score. If it was in the New York Post or something like that, that would be great. If I knew that being in the Boston Phoenix was going to make this many people upset, I would have done it a long time ago. I have a big mouth. It’s kind of interesting from my own point of view because I’m a former book publicist so I can powerfully turn one thing into another thing pretty quickly using my magical skills of book publicity that I learned at the Overlook Press.

I would warn poets not to think that the way to get ahead is to just upset each other and then have punches thrown all over the place. I don’t think that’s really helping. We all create personas for ourselves and for each other. Sometimes it’s interesting to see how one persona makes another persona explode. I really do think we need to aim higher. I’m not saying commit crimes to get attention or anything like that. That doesn’t seem like a good idea. If you’re gonna upset people, upset someone like Oprah or somebody who has a lot of media power.

In an interview for the Boston Phoenix, Jim briefly spoke about the difficulties he had setting up the Boston Poet Tea Party. Originally the event was to take place in Philadelphia, but it fell through. On this Jim said, “We found a bunch of poets who were even lazier than we were. We couldn’t get a venue.” This remark was taken very seriously by Philadelphia poets who responded to the article itself, “Well, you’re definitely living in fantasy-land, Jim, if you think more insincere mewling on top of your flippant, unfounded, arrogant stupidity is going to resolve anything”, as well as on Facebook and various blogs.

Jim Behrle's latest chapbook is SUCCUBUS BLUES (Editions Louis Wain).

LD: Can you briefly explain the hub-bub that surrounded the event and your interaction with the Philadelphia poets?

JB: I guess the kids that we were dealing with in Philadelphia were upset that I was a mean person, that I treated them like employees, which is understandable because that’s exactly what I did. We waited around for a month, and they kept saying well we’ve found a bar for Friday night for a venue, and I was like, we used to have classrooms or better spaces. You can always bring beer in. If your concern is poets drinking, that’s never a concern. Poets are going to find a way to drink at any event. They hadn’t really found the kind of venue that we wanted. I was thinking the Kelly Writers House. Kelly Writers House is one of the greatest poetry venues I’ve ever seen. It’s on the campus of Penn down there. It’s a little house. I recall going to something there on some summer weekend which was sort of like a poetry marathon. I guess that’s what I had in mind when me and David Kirschenbaum came up with the idea. Philadelphia would be a great central location for a lot of poets. We personally wanted to go to Philadelphia so we could go to a Phillies game. Also to find out about more poets. I know about 10 Philadelphia poets who I think are pretty cool. I wouldn’t mind knowing 50. I wouldn’t mind knowing 100. It’s built out of a curiosity of my own. I guess those organizers that we worked with spread the word that this thing wasn’t happening because I was mean person, that I made them all quit, which is fine. It’s true. I made them quit because it didn’t seem like they were getting it done. I hadn’t chimed in until 3 or 4 weeks into the thing when I’m like, what the fuck is going on? You want to talk about name of the thing. You want to talk about who’s going to be invited, but we didn’t have a venue yet. You don’t really have an event until you have a venue.

There was some anger from the initial “Jim’s mean” thing. When I made that comment in the Boston Phoenix, I guess it tapped into that anger. I mean I understand. I’m a guy that’s frequently naked in alt-weeklies. I’m the guy that sometimes gets attention for being a total jackass. You see this moron cracking on your town in an alt-weekly, and you say “that’s not what happened. He’s actually a moron.” Well yeah, It’s obvious I’m a moron. I don’t think it’s a secret to anyone. I think what happened too is that it got emailed around, sort of in the political style of the Republicans. Like, “Look at this crazy guy talking bad about us!” That created this whirlwind of Facebook comments and this and that. I’m up trying to run an event. The thing that upset me the most was that the Philadelphia poets who were supposed to come to this event, they were young, they never read in Boston, things that CAConrad had the opportunity to do in the past, they may have felt that they were bullied out of a reading in Boston because someone decided to go thermonuclear. So that’s upsetting. They’re kids, man. They’re just poets who want to meet other poets and come to a reading.

You can ask anyone who was at the Boston Poet Tea Party. The event is not about me. I didn’t read until 5:00 on Sunday when everyone was gone. The event is about the event. I just thought it should happen. I do have an insane ego, but in this case I’m somehow totally in the right. I don’t know how that’s possible. I initially apologized on Jenn McCreary’s Facebook thing. I was like, well I’m upset that poets I like are upset about this. But then it just felt that people were piling on, and I was like “screw it. We can go the other way too.”

LD: It seems that you have a thing against scenes or movements in general.

JB: I really think that the reality is that there’s a bunch of people writing who want to get their work out there. You can certainly market it anyway you want. Flarf has done well for themselves to get themselves in the Wall Street Journal and poetry magazine. That’s fine. But at the end of the day you really do have to define what Flarf is. It’s kind of great that there’s an anthology coming out in the Fall. You can finally say, well I’ve read the poems, and though I may like the poems of Drew Gardner or Katie Degentesh, some of this other work doesn’t really hold up. I’m not even sure what conceptual poetry is other than a foil for Flarf. Like, “if we work together we can have readings at the Guggenheim.” I praise poets for getting publicity for themselves. That’s great, but to pretend that you’ve invented something or that somehow because you hang out with X, Y poets on your scene or because you live in a certain place that you’re somehow a better poet than anyone else, well I’d like to explore that.

LD: Is that what you see coming out from these different scenes? Do you think that people actually think that they’re better?

JB: No. I think the Philadelphia thing was more like “rah-rah Philadelphia.” I live in New York. I understand that people are insecure about New York. I was insecure about New York. That’s why I moved here. In terms of the poetry movement thing, I think that can be kind of flaky. There’s this fetishization of process. That somehow the process is better than the actual poem. That’s a very interesting way to move the cheese on the entire history of literature. “I used this process that makes it interesting.” I don’t think so. There’s plenty of bad poems in the world written in any process. Either a poem is something that you want to read again or listen to or buy or it isn’t. I applaud people for trying to get attention for poetry in any way, but do we really need this to be the only route for people to get attention? Is it that really all you need to do is go out there and call yourself something? Especially with Flarf. Part of the point of Flarf was to create work that was somehow not correct or wrong or was racist or sexist or something like that. It would be fine if at the end of the day you said, well why don’t you talk about the racism or sexism and what you’re trying to create here. That conversation never seems to take place. You say, okay you’ve created this inappropriate art, why don’t you talk a little bit about why? Nobody really wants to talk about that. They just say, I went to a web site a copied a bunch of stuff and put it down. I’m not responsible for what this says.  Well, everything I write I’m responsible for. If my poems seem creepy or weird or stalkery, I can certainly talk about that no problem. Part of what I think makes my poems good is that you have this feeling that this guy is weird and creepy and does want to have sex with you.

I know that the poet is not supposed to matter in some larger way, but actually when you think about it, most of the poets that we think about as poets throughout the centuries have been interesting people not just people who sit and type at their typewriter or whatever. You think that’s a character. Allen Ginsburg wrote five billion poems of which we’ve only seen a couple hundred thousand, but he was an interesting dude. That’s a poet. That dude’s going around banging on cymbals, and you know, he’s a poet! It would be nice to think that whatever generations are looking at us and thinking I want to be a poet, they’re also thinking I want to be a really interesting person too not just a safe and cautious professor who really needs to worry about tenure and can’t say anything too interesting. That would be a shame because poets get a bad rap.

LD: You were saying at the beginning that you were trying to bring poetry to the masses…

JB: I think that 99% people who even approach poetry are themselves poets or maybe want to be. Anselm Berrigan is never going to outsell Stieg Larsson unfortunately. That would be amazing if he did. You can get poetry in front of people who either don’t know it’s poetry or aren’t expecting poetry. There’s always gotta be a way. I dunno if the way is punching each other in the face or stuff like that. I dunno if anyone cares about that. I think there is a way. I dunno. Snooki seems like a good theme. I’m sure there could be poems about pop culture that we haven’t seen yet. It’s pretty heartening that some pretty interesting poets are getting in the New Yorker these days. That’s pretty good. Dottie Lasky is in the New Yorker. Fuck yea! Outstanding! When I was a kid, about the age of 14 or so, I started sending the New Yorker poetry. I had a whole wall of rejections. I didn’t care, man. I was like “I’m sending more poems!” It’s really cool to think that people who are paging through the New Yorker between cartoons might look up and read Dottie’s poem. Or Jen Knox. She was in there. That’s outstanding. She’s about as funny a poet as there is. I still don’t think I’ll get in the New Yorker, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t keep sending them poems.

LD: [Note: Later on Jim sent me an e-mail further explaining his view on poetry scenes]:

JB: I don’t know if I sufficiently answered your question about Poetry Scenes. They tend to become despotic and about the ego of the gatekeepers. If the point of alternative or experimental poetries is to create more Utopian Scenes (not based on academics or fame) then why do these alternative scenes act like the academic ones? Hierarchical, based on chummy networking, exclusive, constantly rewarding fame over poetic achievement. At their worst they are run like little mafias. When I ran magazines and poetry readings in Boston and Cambridge, I always gave opportunities not just to people I knew but to people who hated me. Or if people asked me to set up readings for them, I did. One person can’t do it all, and no one should speak for an entire city’s poets. But the Philadelphia adventure I think exposes some of the dark sides of people who think they need to stand up for a community. To defend even mild attacks and be their attacking vengeful angel. Poetry doesn’t need gangsters. It does need more angels.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

Listen to David Mitchell read from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, at BookCourt on July 16th, 2010. David Mitchell is the author of five novels, most notably number9dream and Cloud Atlas, which were both listed for the Booker Prize. A short Q & A follows the reading.

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Why am I here–in this house–in this world–which also holds a man screaming as other men saw at his neck with an inadequate knife? In episode 11 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Mairéad Byrne reads from her book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven.

Leigh Van Duzer, LIFT, 2010.

Listen here:

Luke Degnan:How has teaching at an art school informed your poetry?

Mairéad Byrne: It’s a slow process. I was attracted to the job at RISD because I wanted very much to teach at an art school.  When I was a young journalist, longing for poetry, the paintings on the walls of the studios of my friends, and the conversations we had in those studios, and watching them work, the visibility and practicality of it, made art real for me and gave me confidence. I am indebted to Michael Cullen in particular, who was just consummately hospitable towards me inevery way.

In my twenties, I also worked in theatre, where many arts meet. I later ran an art center for a while. When I decided to emigrate and pursue an MA, and then a PhD, of course I found writing—and literature—separated from the other arts. A historicity entered into it; a vivacity was gone. RISD seemed a way to join things up again. But it is an institution like many others and the place for writing as an art form is still undetermined here, structurally. However, I have got to work with amazing students, and I have amazing colleagues, all of whom, in their multiple talents and generosity, reinforce my native understanding of writing as material, performative, and hospitable to collaboration with the other arts.

As a teacher, I’ve been able to design and teach courses in Visual Poetry, Sound Poetry, Writing as Art + Design, even the Irish Comic Tradition (in which I carved out a place for myself of course). Teaching allows one to foreshadow, as well as draw from, practice. It’s a wonderful way of life. Sometimes I long for a life of action but I don’t know how suited I would be to it.

LD: There’s a section of The Best of (What’s Left Of) Heaven titled “Interviews.” What is it about interviews that interests you in a poetic sense?

MB: Probably the thing that interests me most is the gap, the silence, between question and answer. In these interviews, I generally write both question and answer so it’s really just play-acting. Sometimes I leave the questions out. I’m drawing casually on techniques I used as a journalist but, because I’m inventing rather than representing characters, I’m just having fun. Also, I’m fundamentally interested in tone and intonation and that plays into almost everything I do.

LD: In an interview with the Poetry Foundation you said, “These days I am much more inclined to compose in HTML, or Photoshop.” Can you talk about this process a bit?

MB: When I did that interview with Sina Queyras, I was participating in a project, Lingua Ignota, by Samantha Gorman, Danny Cannizzaro, and Edrex Fontanilla, which involved translating an invented language. Because the markings seemed iconic, I made some of my contributions in Photoshop. It’s kind of ironic: Samantha Gorman—whose work I knew best—was graduating from the Brown University MFA program in Literary Hypermedia, but she worked intensively with manuscript culture, especially the Book of Kells; and Lingua Ignota seemed runic. There are strong connections and tensions between early and current writing technologies in terms of visuality. That’s exciting, as I am obsessed with color.

Every poet with a blog or website probably has something to say about this. You can feel you’re working for Google so saving Word files or hard copies might be your insurance, or shares. At the same time, Google can feel like a colleague or companion (one who colonizes your brain).

I’ve always been interested in the technologies of writing. I remember, in a very early workshop (with Eavan Boland) someone asked How do you know when the poem is finished? And I said, That’s easy—it’s finished when you get to the end of the page. Since then I’ve developed a subtler appreciation of the space of the page, and palpable space. It seems to make sense to compose in the program of production. I am writing sound poems now, in Audacity. I can do them live, but it’s a different thing. Your question makes me realize that what I’d really like to do is a whole new set of degrees in new writing technologies. After that I would be able to talk about it better.

LD: How do you think working as a journalist has influenced your use of language?

MB: I’m amazed at the extent to which my poetry is formally influenced by my early practice as a journalist. You’ve already mentioned the interviews; I’m preoccupied with voice, hesitation, silence. Also, I was shocked recently to realize that the text-block prose poem form I use in Talk Poetry is a reincarnation of the 300-word theatre reviews I used to do for In Dublin magazine—they were boxed off, usually with an image. My sense of the page is probably influenced by the magazine spread: the economy of text and image, the juxtaposition which, serendipitous or jarring or not, is just the condition of the form.

As a journalist I was always counting words, and trying to make every word count, and figuring out ways where the approach or lay-out could carry some of the meaning for me. Like, I mightn’t have a lot of words but how I chose them and how I disposed them could pack in more punch.  I think I use time, in poetry readings,in the same way. It’s a constraint. It can generate the form. 18 mins, 8 mins, 25 mins, 35 mins: that’s the starting point and shapes what you do.

Then the daily, as with newspapers, is a pulse in my poetry. Putting some sort of news into people’s hands. It was a kick to be up late writing, then see someone in a coffee-shop next day reading what you wrote. It was really pleasurable, a type of performance, and I love everything that is performative in poetry.

Other parts of journalism were difficult for me—the pace, the interface, the in-your-face. Journalism educated me about my city, Dublin. I had a chance to do it all again in New York when I started writing for the Village Voice but I didn’t want to learn about another city in that way. I wanted to be a poet in America. Journalism was the first form that allowed me approach and relate to the world on my own terms—through writing.  That’s still what I do. Ultimately, poetry is my form. It’s probably the sculpture of writing genres. You can do anything with it. I identify so fervently as a poet it’s a wonder I don’t write more identifiable poetry.

LD: What do you think of the Flarf poets?

MB: What is there to think about? Flarf is a phenomenon, very valid. It’s always entertaining, though probably more fun to engage with as a writer and performer than as a member of the audience. But that’s almost always the way. I have friends among the Flarf poets. They’re a vivid, ingenious, strategic, smart and game bunch.

LD: Can you ask yourself a question and then answer it?

MB:

Q: Mairéad, do you think there’s any chance you might write better poetry?

A: It’s possible. I want to read more but I’ve lost interest in reading. I want to write more but I’m no longer interested in audience.  It’s a bind. Maybe if I had more sex. I want to put poetry in danger and put myself in danger and to write the sort of poetry I would not be ashamed to read to people in danger. But I’m a coward in many ways. Poetry has always led me out. I hope for the courage to follow it into danger.

Mairéad Byrne emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1994, for poetry.
Her books include The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven (Publishing Genius
2010), Talk Poetry (Miami University Press 2007), SOS Poetry (/ubu Editions
2007), and Nelson & The Huruburu Bird (Wild Honey Press 2003). She lives in Providence and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

The following recording is an excerpt from an artist talk between Shimon Attie and Beryl Korot held at the Aldrich Museum on June 27, 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening.

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This BOMB Podcast features a reading curated by novelist James Hannaham presenting Nelson George and Jessica Hagedorn. It was recorded live at the historic Montauk Club on June 23, 2010, as part of their new reading series No Book Jackets Required. Nelson George reads from his memoir City Kid and Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson; Jessica Hagedorn reads from her new novel Toxicology, forthcoming from Viking in 2011. A short Q & A with the authors follows.

-This Saturday 7/24, MoMA PS1′s Greater New York presents Warm Up, featuring JD Samson, MEN, Kalup Linzy and the Sweet, Sample, and LeftOva, and DJ /rupture, as well as some surprise guests!

-If you haven’t yet, check out Ben Steinbauer’s film Winnebago Man, screening at Landmark Sunshine through August 9th. The film profiles YouTube phenomenon Jack Rebney, and by our count is not to be missed.

-Allow us to present Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros from The Bowery Presents at Webster Hall @ 7:30 PM this Thursday 7/22. Buy tix in advance and save $3!

That’s all we’ve got this week, unfortunately, but it should keep you busy ’til the next BOMB Alert. And, now that you’ve got a little free time, check out yesterday’s BOMB Radio cast, direct from us to you, care of Newtown Radio!

…then, subscribe!

-The official lineup for BOMB’s Summer Bash has been announced! Moreover, it’s been tweeted! The bash will be bashing at GlassLands and will feature LA BIG VIC, Noveller, Title TK, Gunn/Truscinski, and cheap art to buy from music-lovin’ artist Steve Keene. Come out, dig the music, buy a painting–let’s be real, your Pulp Fiction poster has seen better days–and most importantly, hang out with BOMB!

-Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls and Rangda, respectively, plays at Zebulon every Monday @ 9 PM. Catch an interview he did with Harmony Korine in 2008.

-We’re all in New York, but we bet it’s at least a few degrees cooler in London Town, where Alejandro Cesarco‘s solo project Present Memory just opened at the Tate Modern on July 9. If you’re lucky enough to be in the neighborhood, do go and see!

-Earlier today, American Splendor cartoonist Harvey Pekar passed away. Read an interview from 2003 with American Splendor (the film) writer/director team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini.

BOMB Radio Ep. 5 BOMB’s Lena Valencia interviews performance and net artist Lindsay Howard (aka Look I’m Lucid) live in the Newtown studio. Featuring music by The Alan Parsons Project, Psychic TV, and more! Listen below:

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**BOMB ALERT LATE EDITION** This Friday 7/16 check out 13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol Screen Tests (2009) from Britta Phillips and Dean Wareham, screened at the Guggenheim at 1, 2, 3, and 4 PM.

It was with reluctance that Shane Jones initially submitted his novel, Light Boxes, to Adam Robinson, Founding Editor of the small press Publishing Genius, who accepted his submission with equal reluctance. Now, after being optioned (and subsequently turned down) by Spike Jonze, Light Boxes has been re-released by Penguin. Featuring a recording of him reading from the novel at McNally Jackson in Manhattan.

Listen to a recording of Shane Jones reading an excerpt from Light Boxes on June 24th at McNally Jackson in Manhattan:

I like to think I have my ear to the street, that if there’s an up-and-coming writer with a style that runs against the grain, I’ll know about him/her before that style is being either castigated or revered by my “mainstream publishing” colleagues. This is impossible, of course. There are a lot of talented writers out there that I will never come across, and a lot of small, independent publishers putting them in print, but the volume is massive, and one can only read so much. So as much as I’d like to say I’d read about Shane’s wonderful book on some obscure website and fell in love with it that way, the truth is that I only discovered it when Spike Jonze picked up the film option and Variety reported it. (Penguin has a lot of books on its backlist, many of which have been optioned, and it’s my job to keep tabs on them. I also happen to love film, so it works out well.) This was a few months before Spike’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are came out, but the hype had already begun.

So I ordered a copy online and then emailed Adam, inquiring about the tie-in edition rights, should the movie ever get made. Adam told me that the rights were Shane’s, but I wasn’t convinced, and didn’t want him getting left out of the equation entirely—after all, it was his commitment to the book that put everything in motion to begin with. He persisted, and then the next told me that Shane had since gotten an agent, and that he (the agent) would be in touch. He was, that same day I believe, and he managed to send me an electronic version of the book in advance of my physical copy, which was still in the mail. I loved it, of course, as I’m a sucker for anything that pulls off that rare perfect balance of tenderness and violence, especially if it’s contained in a fable-like story about men in strange masks and trench coats who start a revolution. ¡Viva el vuelo!

—Tom Roberge

Shane Jones: I’ll be honest—I hated the Publishing Genius website so much that I didn’t send Light Boxes to you right away.

Adam Robinson: That’s cool. I was just so proud of myself for learning how to code HTML that I forgot it wasn’t 1995 anymore.

SJ: Yeah, but then everyone else rejected the manuscript and I felt like I had no other choice. What was your first reaction when I emailed you about the book?

AR: My first reaction was, honestly, that I don’t like the name “Shane.”

SJ: Shane is kind of a scumbag name. I imagine a Shane as really weak looking, missing teeth, and a mullet. So it’s understandable that you had that reaction.

AR: My second reaction was that I didn’t understand what the “game of prediction” was, so I stopped reading it. Then one night I read a bunch and I thought it was okay, but a little too saccharine for my tastes. Also, a little too loose. But it was the right length, and you were wicked famous, so I was torn. Eventually I decided what the heck, I’ll just reject the book and get it off my plate. I really did want to publish a woman because that was important for where PG was at the time.

SJ: It’s kind of funny that I didn’t like your press that much and you didn’t like the manuscript right away. I think after you sent that email about wanting to publish a female writer, and me writing back about how I didn’t punch people, things kind of took off from there. Or maybe they relaxed a little.

AR: Yeah. I always appreciated the quickness and informality of your emails. Hey, I just found my acceptance letter.

Hi Shane,

I just want to keep you in the loop here on your manuscript. It’s awesome. It’s a great, interesting story and mysterious and I like all the perspectives you use to tell it. It’s haunting sometimes and you really nail it when the moss grows over the horses.  Sheesh. Thank you for sending it to me; I want to publish it.

So!

I see some areas that can be changed a little bit to “maximize impact.” Some things in the story that can just be maybe expanded a sentence or two, or just the sentence can be honed. Are you open to such things? Really nothing major at all . . .

Forgive the informality of this email. I hope you are still interested in working with PG on this and if so we can iron out some details. I think your book is perfect for what I want to do right now. Let’s call it a chapnovel or something.

Best,
Adam

Ha, “Forgive the informality of this email,” geez! I like how I went from “keeping you in the loop” in the first sentence to accepting the book three sentences later. I wonder if I knew I was going to do that. So were you happy or neutral or what when I eventually accepted the book?

SJ: I was really excited. I was at work. I jumped up a little in my office and walked to the bathroom with a big smile. Then I told some people about it and they were like, “What is Publishing Genius? Is that a vanity press?”

So let’s jump ahead a little. Did you have any expectations for the book? Do you think there was a point where it was like “people are going to really like this book.”

AR: Even when you did that hilarious interview with Sam Pink in which you imagined my “wife” sneaking copies out in the trash and the garbage men finding them and getting pissed off—”This crap is too short to be a novel!”—even then I wasn’t thinking about sales. I was like, “Well, I’ve got $3000 to make a book. Whatever happens will be good enough.”

SJ: I guess my feeling was that we’d print 200-300 copies and maybe half would sell.

AR: At one point I had a crisis, thinking, “This book sucks! I’m ruined!” Did you ever feel that way?

SJ: I think I was just happy to have the book in a printed format. I had done chapbooks before, but this was something really big—a printed and bound book! I didn’t think anyone would buy it, but working with you was so much fun. It felt like a cool little art project.

AR: What were you thinking during the editing stages? I remember the first time I sent you a 4,000 word letter of edits on Friday and on Monday you had a massive rewrite.

SJ: Yeah, I do remember doing one really big run through on the book. What I sent you was a first draft, for the most part. I remember editing like 12 hours a day for a few days. Then we did all the little changes and we probably traded close to a 1,000 emails, working one on one with no other distractions. I miss that.

AR: I’m wondering what your thought process was when, like, I told you to make Caldor Clemens’s death a bigger deal, or to bring in more blood and violence in Thaddeus’s final fight with February. I remember hating the “physics” of how Thaddeus balloons into the clouds. Did I ever hurt your feelings, or step on your toes?

SJ: It was exciting because it was the first time ever that I had someone care about my writing and want to make it better. I just went into this high energy zone of editing. And I don’t think your changes were that huge really. Maybe I’m wrong, but I remember a lot of them were basically making scenes bigger/stronger, and then a lot of little stuff. You never stepped on my toes. I think I took almost all your changes.

AR: It was great when, at the end, I was still sending miniscule changes and you said, “I think we’re done, Adam.”

SJ: Then we had the whole cover problem. I think I was difficult to work with because I kept changing my mind.

AR: Oh yeah, you did. As I look through the emails, so many of them are about that. Not only did I pay two people kill fees, but we also went through a half-dozen other people that you wanted to ask. But it was never a pain because I wanted to get it right and knew that you did too.

SJ: Then we did the preorders. How many preorders for the book did we have? Maybe like 50? I do remember thinking, “This poor guy has like 600 copies sitting in his apartment.”

AR: You know, I think we only ended up with 60 preorders. So I appreciate your concern that no one was going to buy it, because then you must have gone out and done a lot of knocking on doors, so to speak. Did you feel like you were swallowing your pride?

SJ: No. Anyone who is a writer, or who has written a book, has been humbled greatly many times. If not, they should attend a family function and announce to everyone that they have a book out.

AR: How did you go about getting 400 people to add it at Goodreads?

SJ: I think the Goodreads thing—which was that they named it a Mover/Shaker or something silly like that—was the first kind of big thing to happen to the book. Suddenly people were interested. So all these people on Goodreads (millions?) got some kind of email talking about Light Boxes. I think the book was being discussed on blogs and stuff, but nothing too big.

Then the Spike Jonze thing happened. I was wondering if you could talk a little about that.

AR: Well, an intern there called me after they read your interview with Laura van den Berg in Bookslut, and I sent them the book. A couple weeks later the Director of Development told me in a fantastically smooth way that they weren’t interested in it. She said she’d give you a call.

I don’t know what you said, but we were back on. A couple days later I woke up to a Google alert from Variety magazine. Suddenly it was everywhere. I mean everywhere, like MTV Brazil reported it. Then I got an email from Tom Roberge at Penguin. He was the only publisher to contact me, and now that I think of it, that seems strange. Right? Like wouldn’t everyone want a chance? Anyway, I didn’t know how any of that crap worked and I was happy when you got an agent and he negotiated all that for us.

SJ: Yeah, it was strange because they were interested in the book, then they weren’t, then they were again. I think they just finally thought, “This is a strange little book, we like it, let’s just see what happens.”

Other presses were interested, but when they looked up the book they saw (via Amazon probably) that Publishing Genius had it. Tom was kind of feeling out the movie option, but he was also smart enough to ask what the hell was Publishing Genius and get a copy of the book. It was such a wild month or so because the movie option, getting an agent, and eventually signing with Penguin all happened on top of each other. There were three or four presses that ended up wanting Light Boxes, which is odd because so many little presses had rejected it.

AR: That happens. The Quarterly Conversation passed on writing about it when I put it out, but they just ran a review for the Penguin edition.

SJ: Then we had the talk about the book going to a major publisher. That was a bittersweet experience for me.

AR: Was that the phone call where I basically said, ” I want to sell it to a big house. I can’t handle it anymore”? But why was all that bittersweet? I would think it was just sweet.

SJ: Well, I could feel things getting bigger and more out of my control. The book was so small before, just us working on it, and I really liked that. Now there was an agent involved, and a huge press like Penguin, and all that is great and exciting, but I just felt like things were changing. I don’t know. It was weird.

AR: Did you ever feel like you were putting one over on me? I definitely didn’t, but I think we were both aware of risk.

SJ: No, I never felt that. I think we’re pretty good friends. I think I was a little nervous, because you could have said, “I want to reprint the book.” I was already leaning towards going the bigger press route because of distribution and demand. I mean, with PG, you were walking copies to the post office on your lunch break and making what, a dollar per copy on Amazon? So for me, it felt like this natural step to go with a bigger press.

AR: That’s exactly right. I was walking 5 blocks to the post office every day. I was paying, like, $.30 per book Amazon sold, because of the way they fulfill orders. The way I see it is that if I kept Light Boxes, I would have gone crazy and then the buzz would have died in a month and only 300 more people would have read it. Since I love the book, I wanted it to get out there. I am really proud of it.

SJ: Another thing I wanted to ask is about the page layout. I wonder if this is something that really bothers you, because I’ve noticed a few new reviews talking (mostly positive) about the layout in the Penguin edition. It’s almost identical to what you did. There were some things that I did with the font sizes, but then you did things too. I’m thinking especially with your choice of different fonts, the way the book starts and ends with the really big font.

AR: Yeah, the layout does bother me. They cleaned it up a lot, which is good, but for the most part they kept things the same that really didn’t need to be that way. I mean, they used my “artistic interpretation” of things in places where they could have done something totally different. Like, okay, here’s a small thing—the page numbers. I was surprised that they kept them in the same exact place, with that same little line there and everything. And repeating “The End” at the end—what’s with that? I feel a bit like I designed a book for Penguin. But, I mean, whatever. I’m of course flattered to see that what I did worked for them. And how cool is it to see a big house using that 5×7″ format, which has become a staple of indie press books, it seems.

SJ: The page numbers surprised me, and I understand being frustrated and angered by that. That was like your little touch.

AR: But how do you feel about the new version?

SJ: I’m happy. It’s an odd feeling to see it with a new cover and a wide distribution. I remember getting an email from my editor there, Tom, and the subject read WELCOME TO PENGUIN. That was a really warm feeling.

AR: Has it been easier working with them in terms of what you’ll do to promote it? I did give you that $20 for a cab once, which we called your advance, but I suppose they’re going to do a lot more.

SJ: I did get more than $20. I think a lot of people think I made some huge killing on the book, or just because it was optioned I made a lot. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, the option was $100 for a year. My advance was bigger than that, but I’m not going to be quitting my day job anytime soon. And as far as sales, I think things are going well. I’m not exactly sure what they expect, but just the idea that a major like Penguin is releasing what I feel is a very indie and artsy book, is pretty wild.

AR: Did you ever see your $100 for the movie deal? I never got my $1. What gives?

SJ: Yeah, I had to ask a few times for my $100 check. It was pretty embarrassing, but I eventually got it. I’ll send you $1 if you want.

AR: Thanks.

SJ: So have you seen any direct attention come to PG because of Light Boxes? (I guess I’m thinking about getting more submissions, or maybe higher quality submissions) Do you feel any pressure to produce another book that will go the route of Light Boxes?

AR: I am sure that PG has received a lot of attention directly because of it, but people rarely say, “Hey, I’m contacting you because of Light Boxes.” It’s been important to me not to squander the attention, but I haven’t been clear on how I can use it. I’m not a great businesser. Or, actually, I am, but my focus is necessarily skewed to the editorial/production side of things.

I definitely want all my books to go the route of Light Boxes. Mairéad Byrne’s poetry monster would make a great feature film. I have really high expectations for Rachel Glaser’s short story collection. It’s so new. She has a distinctively different and fascinating approach to storytelling. I am excited like crazy for the response that book is going to get.

AR: What’s next for you? Are you freaking out about your next book?

SJ: I’m freaking out a little bit, just because I have to work so much harder now. Or at least I feel that way. I’m trying not to repeat myself and I want to do something bigger. Light Boxes is such a small book, which is great, because I can build on it. I don’t feel like I’m in any rush though.

AR: Your IAMSO book is really good, what I’ve read. I think it beats Light Boxes.

SJ: I’m glad you said that about IAMSO, which I don’t think will be the final title. Anything else you would like to add? Regrets? A shocking confession?

AR: I’m trying to think of a shocking confession, but I can’t. I thought my shocking confession was that I thought the book sucked for a while.

SJ: Well, I guess the book doesn’t suck after all. Of course, some of the reviewers and comments on Amazon/Goodreads seem to think it really sucks.

AR: How about you? Any confessions?

SJ: No big confession, other than it looks like the movie isn’t going to happen. The last I heard was that the option wasn’t going to be renewed and they might revisit it in a year or so. But, yeah, it’s dead for now. I can’t really be bummed out about that though, because I set out to write a book, not a movie.

AR: Boom.

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Joyce Kim, TRACES VI, acrylic on canvas, leather, and framed printed text on paper, 2010.

Katharina Stenbeck performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS.

Katharina Stenbeck performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS.

Carlos Roque performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS.

Carlos Roque performing in MOSTLY SHADOWS.

Following is a recording accompanied by a series of stills from video documentation of the June 11^th opening of Mostly Shadows at Art in General.

If there is an edge to painting, has anyone ever jumped off? Klein jumped, or so staged it. He is the point of departure for Joyce Kim’s most recent body of work. It’s no accident she has made the move from gray, ever present in her Le Samourai paintings, to blue in respect to Klein’s International Blue. Her versions of his blue are faded by time—blues bordering on sun-bleached lavender, cornflower, and robin’s egg. In this way, she recognizes a painting’s past ideals transformed through time and her current exhibition at Art in General is aptly titled Mostly Shadows.

Her June 11^th opening at Art in General featured a new installation of painting, text, and suede by Kim with readings of the artist’s text by actress Katharina Stenbeck followed by musician Carlos Roque on guitar. Seeing the wires of the amps strewn across the floor before the performance brought a sense of anticipation, and seeing the wires in the context of the painting brought the sense of being on the brink of the jump where Kim’s work is perched.

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While there is no lack of outdoor, festival-like shows all over the City in the summer, L Magazine’s Northside Fest is the closest Brooklyn comes to an actual music festival in the traditional sense of the word. Spanning over 20 venues in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick area, the fest this year featured 300 bands, most of them “unknowns.” Rather than curating all those bands themselves, the L reached out to bloggers, labels, and PR firms to create their own showcases which kept the lineups fresh and eclectic.

The problem: the bands were SO fresh and eclectic that there was no way I could navigate the lineup myself. I needed an expert. I needed a music blogger. So I called up my old friend PIXELHORSE (a.k.a Elise.) Elise and I met to watch the playoffs (go Lakers!) at Habitat, where she came armed with a long list of bands annotated with little hearts and x’s—I was dealing with a professional. Together we decided to steer away from the hyped shows and stick to the lesser known bands (sorry, Thao and Mirah!), and, in lieu of the Traditional Review, to stick to AIM banter, videos, and photos, which is mostly the extent of my attention span on the internet anyway.

Come Thursday, we bustled over to L Mag HQ to pick up our press passes and swag bags, chugged some free Heinekens, and decided to jet over to Warsaw for “housegaze” duo Hundreds in the Hands who were opening for Au Revoir Simone.

Hundreds in the Hands at Warsaw, 6/24/10. Photo by Lena Valencia.

Lena: Ok so: Hundred in the Hands.

Elise: oh boy.

Lena: I mean, I get it, but I’ve heard it before. Also, would they exist if she wasn’t pretty? Questionable.

Elise: Jenny Lewis Jr., you mean?

Lena: I was thinking more Lykke Li  but not as interesting.

Elise: If she were uggos, they def wouldn’t be opening for Au Revoir Simone.

Lena: True dat. I liked Warsaw though!  That disco ball was amazing…

Elise: But the scene was 90% eurotrash taking photos of themselves outside smoking and making sexy faces. I couldn’t stand that place. The disco ball was the best thing about Warsaw, just like the singer’s hair was the best thing about the band.  Followed somewhat closely by her voice.

Lena: I am over drum machines. We saw some interesting drummers this weekend, and they are so much more fun to watch than people twisting dials around.

Elise: yeah Hundreds in the Hands were BRINGIN’ the drum machine noise, hard. I think I like a combo of synths/drum machines with good instrumentation. There are some exceptions, like AnCo and other bands that are all synths and shit, but for the most part I think a balance works best.

Our next stop was Union Pool, aka the easiest bar to sneak PBRs into, where we were just in time for Austin transplants YellowFever.

YellowFever at NorthSide Fest from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo.

Elise: Good duo. Another amazing drummer.

Lena: I usually find indie-folky female vocalists overly whimsical but she had some bite.

Elise: Yeah I feel the same way. She is so stone-faced. There was nothing cutesy or too approachable about her, but she was still sarcastic and funny.

Lena: Also the way she manipulated her voice was fucking with the voice recorder.

Elise: Oh? How?

Lena: She’d hit a high note and the levels would go crazy

Elise: She was using a slide guitar. I have a feeling this is the song you are talking about. She would slide the guitar as she hit the same note vocally. I was about to bring up that song because it was my favorite part of that show. maybe even of the whole weekend.

Lena: Yes. That’s what i was talking about.

Elise: It was rad. i love a slide guitar. and YellowFever’s aesthetic is folky and eclectic enough to pull it off.  Their equipment is all pretty vintage feeling. I couldn’t quite see at Union Pool but when i saw them at SXSW I noticed all their amps and cases/stands all look at least 20 years old.

Then, as is want to happen at a place like Union Pool, we were trapped in the backyard for a while. I ate a taco. Since there wasn’t enough time to hoof it out to Glasslands for the end of the Oneohtrix Point Never set, we decided to head over to Shea Stadium in Bushwick for the alleged til-dawn afterparty that Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork was hosting. We all know how that turned out. Damn kids.

DAY 2

Our first stop was Music Hall of Williamsburg to check out the Woodsist showcase, where, naturally, the press list was full. We raced over to Matchless and arrived as nouveau-riotgrrrls Coasting were setting up.

Coasting at Matchless, 6/25/10. Photo by Elise Oh.

Madison of Coasting. Photo by Elise Oh.

Fiona of Coasting. Photo by Elise Oh.

Elise: Coasting are hot. I have trouble discussing their shows though because I feel conflicted. I always use words like sexy and hot and badass, and I feel like it’s anti-feminist or something.

Lena: Yeah, that’s hard to stay away from when discussing chicks in rock bands. But they were pretty badass.

Elise: Right? Fiona is so powerful on drums but never overly-masculine.  But I feel like that’s a shitty thing to suggest, that a woman musician needs to worry about not being feminine/sexy enough.

Lena: I didn’t think they had the most original sound in the world but they had great chemistry. And Fiona is an amazing drummer.

Elise: Yeah she’s got stage presence for sure and their banter between each other is pretty fun and lovable

Lena: Also I think the bands they are referencing (Bikini Kill, Breeders-kind of) are solid ones.

Elise: Definitely. I get a Breeders, sisterly vibe. Coasting just had their first record come out on Group Tightener. An extended 7″ I believe.

Family Portrait at Matchless, 6/25/10. Photo by Elise Oh.

Jackson Polis of Family Portrait. Photo by Elise Oh.

Lena: I thought Family Portrait were standard bar rock and kind of uninteresting. I feel like if you’re going to play that kind of music you need an edge.

Elise: I understand. These guys are my bros. I love ‘em. Their lineup changes a lot due to one or two original members often being out of town, living in China for a year, running Underwater Peoples Records in DC, etc. I will say that I think Brody (lead singer/guitarist) has more charisma than you could give him credit for based on this one show alone. AND I’m excited Jackson Pollis is newly drumming for them. He’s a great drummer.

Lena: Yeah. they were solid musicians. I have no complaints about that. I wrote that they have some “psychedelic y’alternative flair”  in my notes so I must have liked at least one of their songs.

Remember how I said we were going to stick to the less-hyped shows? Well, we ended up sneaking into the Woodsist showcase after all and watching Real Estate.

Real Estate at Music Hall of Williamsburg, 6/25/10. Photo by Elise Oh.

Lena: They are so polished.

Elise: For sure. they have been playing these songs for a while now. I’m just gonna say that I’m excited for these guys and how big they have gotten/are getting.

Lena: They aren’t really my type but I had fun at that show.

Elise: I always have fun at their shows, dancing to their music. It makes me smile

Lena: I yelled at one of the bartenders when he said they sounded like Sonic Youth, though.

Elise: Haha, I remember you told me that and I said they sound nothing like Sonic Youth.

Lena: They have a little shoe-gazey flavor but thats about it. Beach-gaze. Shore-gaze.

Elise: Yeah, it’s more peppy and upbeat than shoe-gaze. It’s definitely pop music, but I love it. I’m afraid Real Estate has no staying power and that they will tragically be swept out with the tide when the whole beach/chillwave/jerseycore trend recedes. I really want them to prove me wrong though.

Lena: Yeah I think bloggers’ obsessive classification of bands kind of pigeonholes them and makes it difficult for them to experiment and become more than a buzz band.

Elise: But to be fair, at the same time, bloggers kinda MADE this band. Real Estate started out as a classic “blog band.” They’re lovable. Anyway, yeah, you’re right, plus there are just SO many bands now and info/trends that move so fast.

Lena: I think the fest definitely demonstrates that in the way they let bloggers curate their own shows. I mean there were so many ‘unknowns’  it was intimidating.

Elise: There are too many bands to get to know. I cower beneath the number sometimes and just give up.

SATURDAY

It was really effing hot. We mapped out our game plan over Life Cafe mimosas and hit the road on our bikes. So Brooklyn. We rolled up to the Newtown Barge Park, ran through the mister in the playground, and caught the end of Cults’ set.

Lena: Cults is totally riding the BK-girl-with-cute-hair-wave.

Elise: Dude so cute. But are they from BK?  Does it matter?

Lena: Oh, I dont know.

Elise: No. They’re on Forest Family Recs, which is Texas-based so I’m inclined to think no. Anyhow, bigger issue here (I think), is that Forest Family Recs is this new blogger-run record label started by Gorilla vs. Bear and Weekly Tape Deck who blog about their label’s artists on the regular, without necessarily stating their own conflict of interest.

Lena: Well, a label seems like a logical progression. Most blogs are more about promotion than journalism, which isn’t a bad thing. I mean, someone needs to sort through the dreck for us.

Elise: Of course.

Lena: Boutique labels are where it’s at. The same is happening with publishing and small presses.

Elise: I don’t personally care about the conflict of interest. I think those bloggers liked those artists before they decided to put out their records.

We listened to a couple of Male Bonding songs but decided to go watch the USA get creamed by Ghana instead. After some much-needed R&R, we reconvened Shea Staduim, an all-ages venue above…I’m not really sure, for the Chocolate Bobka showcase. It was about 90 degrees inside, and not much better on the balcony, where kids clustered clutching their $3 cans of beer.

Dana Jewell at Shea Stadium, 6/26/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Elise: Dana Jewell is a solo artist, but he has performed as part of Pill Wonder, another Underwater Peoples Records band based out of Olympia, WA. I felt the Arthur Russell influence harrrd.

Lena: I was imagining him sitting in his room and playing Beck’s One Foot In The Grave on repeat.

Elise: I know his songs all kind of felt similar in theme and tone but I think he is endearing and so earnest. It’s easy to love him as a performer.

Lena: I couldn’t hear the lyrics.

Elise: You know, a girl broke his heart and he got on a boxcar and rode that freight train out of town…

Lena: Yeah. Not so into it.

Elise: I just wanted to make him feel better about whatever girl broke his heart.

Lena: Yes. he was adorable. I was smiling through most of the set, I couldn’t help it. The cute boy with acoustic guitar formula: it gets me every time. He could have been playing Dave Matthews Band covers and I still would have been smiling.

Elise: Haha, yeah!  And when the crowd sang him happy birthday?? [He was like hardcore blushing] Oh, I wanted to die. So cute.

Big Troubles at NorthSide Fest from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo.

Lena: Big Troubles was just what I needed in that heat. A loud band playing in my face.

Elise: Yeah, Big Troubles are so good. They made me forget how hot it fucking was in Shea Stadium.

Lena: I do like this resurgence of noise rock. I think it’s totally great that people want their bands to sound like My Bloody Valentine. A-OK with me.

Elise: Yeah, definitely. I love how McGregor (Chocolate Bobka) yells out to “play some slow shit,” and Ian, the lead singer goes like “Okay yeah this next one’s sloowwww…” And nope, totally not. They played fast and loud every song, and that was it.

Lena: It was lulling me to sleep for some reason. I was dozing off on a noise cloud. I don’t have much else to say about them.

Elise: I think big things are gonna happen for Big Troubles. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Andrew Cedermark at NorthSide Fest from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo.

Elise: He used to be in Titus Andronicus.

Lena: Haha! he has a song called “Lookin’ for a Boswell”.

Elise: Oh, so he’s an intellectual. I could tell by his glasses. He is a great musician. He has some beautiful songs.

Lena: I don’t have much to say. I love that he fellated the mic. I heard some hints of Jeff Magnum in his voice, which was neat I guess.

Andrew Cedermark at Shea Stadium, 6/26/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Andrew Cedermark at Shea Stadium, 6/26/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Elise: Yum yum. I love how happy the drummer looked to be there. I think getting Patrick up there on drums to play a song and Martin (from Real Estate) on bass was great. If Dana Jewell had actually been in the room and not missed his curtain call, it would have been a great song. Instead it was just a really good moment.

Lena: Agreed.

Elise: He was outside talking to a girl on the phone and breakin’ all our hearts. Anywayyy…

Lena: Perf. He was talking to a girl the whole fest!

Elise: Truth Ruth.

Lena: OH DANA COME ON.

Elise: I just wanna show him a better way.

Ducktails at Northside Fest from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo.

Lena: You want to say something about Ducktails’ show that night, since I had to go to bed?

Elise: Ohhh, I forgot you missed it.

Lena: I can pretend I was there.

Elise: Well, it was cool. Matt Mondanile wore shorts and played with all the dudes from Big Troubles (except guitarist Alex Craig), who are so, so cute.

Lena: Matt is the future of rawk. Big Troubles are adorbs.

Elise: HA! He is the “origin of chillwave.” Anyway, he’s been playing his songs with a whole band lately, which is way diff cos he would normally play solo. I’m not sure why really. He performed with a whole band at Silent Barn like a month ago. He likes Big Troubles dudes a lot and is a fan of their music. They’re going on tour together soon.

SUNDAY

PUPPPIEIEEEEZZZZZZ. Newtown Barge Park, 6/27/10. Photo by Elise Oh.

Hate to admit it, but the festival was catching up to me. Sweaty and dirty from biking, and drowsy from beer, I may as well have been at Bonnaroo or Coachella. The facemelting 90s guitar sounds of Polvo, however, were refreshing—it was also nice to see someone over 30 on stage in this youth-dominated festival. We headed back to Matchless for Mini Boone.

Elise: I don’t like their music. And I didn’t like their show. They’re too excited. Am I allowed to say that? Whatever.

Lena: You can say whatever you want. It was a nice break from the trendy noise bands, but yeah, wouldn’t go out and download the album. I wrote “Uh…good energy…”

And finally, ended our Sunday evening at Brooklyn Bowl for Animal Collective-influenced Keepaway.

Keepaway at Brooklyn Bowl, 6/27/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Keepaway at Brooklyn Bowl, 6/27/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Keepaway at Brooklyn Bowl, 6/27/10. Photo by Emilie Friedlander.

Lena: If I weren’t so tired I would have totally felt like dancing to them.

Elise: Keepaway = AnCo + MGMT + Rapture.

Lena: Yes. With a barefoot upright drummer.

Elise: The standup drummer is always a red flag for me. I think the Beets are the only band I like who have a standup drummer, and that’s DESPITE him.  But the bare feet?  Yeah, too much. Put them over the top in my book.

Lena: You know, it’s good to sound like things that are popular. Makes it easy for people to digest and write about you. So, thank you Keepaway, for being dancey and derivative.

Elise: I do like these videos of them though.

Lena: I’m kind of into his voice. It’s grating and bizarre. And no comment about the hair. Too much hair talk here.

Elise: He’s so cute. I do like his voice but, yes, it’s derivative.

Lena: All of these bands are so young though. It’s almost unfair to judge them too harshly.

Elise: Yeah but that’s the BK scene.

Lena: That is the bloogers duty. blooger. ha.

Elise: Most of them haven’t existed more than a year or two.

Lena: Ok, any final thoughts?

Elise: bloogers rock.

For more photos and videos, head over to PIXELHORSE.

Who was chasing me through the brush? He’s staring at neon graffiti and doesn’t look away. He looks like a rich kid on acid. He turns into a duffle bag. The man I have sex with is me. I don’t dream about you. I find your feelings’ cloud. In episode 10 of Phoned In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Ben Mirov reads from his book Ghost Machine. Click through for a Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss boredom, depression, Lego poetry, and Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Aaron Mette, INVOCATION TO SGT BLAZEKIRK OF THE NORTHERN SKY, 2009. Carving on Blackened Foamcore, 20 x 30 inches.

Luke Degnan: The poem, Ghost Node from Ghost Machine is published in Elimae, but it is labeled as fiction. I’m guessing you submitted it as fiction.

Ben Mirov: I can’t remember what I submitted it as. I’m pretty sure I just sent it to them. I remember once that got put up I was kind of surprised that it had been put under fiction. I don’t think it was what I intended, but it also didn’t bother me. I like the fact that Coop Renner, the editor of Elimae, decided that it was fiction.

LD: I was wondering if you could talk about your relationship with fiction in relation to your poetry. There is a narrative in this book.

BM: Absolutely. That was something that came out over time as I was revising the poems. The unit the poems were built out of was the sentence. So right away they had this relationship to fiction that was sort of incidental. When I was writing the raw material for the poems, they were just pages and pages of sentences. I would just sit down and write to pass time or work out difficult emotions that I was having at that point in my life. I would sit down and write, I hate to say it, as a form of therapy. I would write as a form of coping with my life and reality at that time. I found that the sentence was a convenient unit to work with. I wasn’t really thinking about line breaks or poetry at that time. I was thinking about filling pages or passing time. I was just writing to get from the beginning to the end of the sentence. Over time as I started to revise, I had put everything away for a while, I moved from San Francisco to New York. When I felt that I had the impetus to revise those poems, I started taking the sentences and collaging them together or taking large chunks of sentences that went together and manipulating them into poems. There is an element of fiction in those poems. I wanted that to come out as I was revising more and more. I didn’t want the book, Ghost Machine, to be just a book of poems. I wanted it to be a hybrid, perhaps something people haven’t seen as much.

LD: It kind of reminds me of Murakami‘s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. There’s definitely a woman who has left, and you’re going through these mundane tasks, but instead of making pasta and cleaning you’re drinking and jerking off.

BM: It’s funny that you bring up that book. Ghost Machine was basically written in 2007, most of it was. At that time my good friend Brian, one of my oldest friends, who I mentioned in the machine poem, from that line “the next step is to think like Brian,” he had been telling me to read Murakami a lot before that point. I had never really wanted to. Then I went through a horrible break up with my girlfriend, and I decided for whatever reason to pick up The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle simultaneously while I was writing these poems. Throughout my life I’ve had this relationship to literature where certain books will choose me at certain times in my life, and it will be completely appropriate, and it almost won’t be my decision. My experience with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was very much like that. I felt like that book was written about me. I felt that Murakami had written that book so it could come into my hands at that moment in time, and it was for nobody else and for no other purpose which is totally selfish and self centered, but it was an amazing feeling to encounter that book.

The character in that book is almost transparent. He’s almost not a character at all. He doesn’t make decisions for himself. He winds up in these weird predicaments but not because he got himself there but because he’s followed this thread of decisions that has led him to these places and these weird incidences. It’s been in the back of my mind, but I’ve never really made that comparison so directly until you said that. That’s kind of who I was at that moment in time. One of the predominate emotions, if you can call it that, I was experiencing at that time in my life was a feeling of emptiness like a feeling of not being there or being a witness to things that were happening in my life. Even the more grotesque things, or the very, very quotidian, very mundane things I was doing. Like just staring out an empty window or something more extreme like having sex and not really feeling super present during sex.

LD: Later in the book, a lot of the action takes place in a forest. Why the forest? What does the forest mean to you?

BM: I’ve been reading the book a lot since it came out cause I don’t really understand it. The last section is filled with more dream imagery. There’s lots of sleep that happens or not sleeping or not being able to sleep. I think the forest is tied into that. I was living in the Mission district of San Francisco and there were no forests anywhere. I think that whenever the forest comes into the poems it has something to do with a sublimated desire to be outside of my life or to enter into something that wasn’t the city. I also think the forest is, in fables and whatnot, always a symbol for a deep inhuman mystery, inaccessible to humans or inaccessible to individuals. I think that’s there too.

LD: You mentioned on Scattered Rhymes that you collaged your words “into Ghosts or Machines” and that “Legos are analogous to what’s going on in the poems.” How do you go about collaging your own work?

BM: I was thinking about this recently, and I was talking to my friend Alina Gregorian, who is a wonderful poet, and we were critiquing each other’s poems. One of the most important things that we share as poets is we write by intuition. When you sit down to write a poem, you have all these words and images and ideas in your head, and the only thing that helps you put together a poem is an instinct, what goes well with something else, what piece fits with another piece. In the case of Ghost Machine it was like what sentence went well next to another sentence. Like I said before, the sentence is the constructive unit of the ghosts and of the machines. In the same sense that Legos, you stack them together to make some kind of larger object, that’s what happens in Ghost Machine too. The sentences are stacked together. What happens in between each sentence, that is the most important thing I think about these poems. Almost like Legos, the most important thing is how the pieces snap together.

LD: Could you please ask yourself a question and then answer it?

BM: I’ve been asking myself this since about the time the manuscript was done. Even before the book was even printed. I’ve been asking myself, What do I want people to get out of this? What is the takeaway from the book? I don’t even know if such a thing exists in the first place. When you offer a stranger a book of poems, what justifies them reading this? What is it that they can take away from it? I guess I’d ask myself that. Ostensibly the book is about a person just wasting his time or a person who is just standing by and watching his life happen in front of him.

I was talking to my father on the phone the other day, and he said he hopes I write poems when I’m happy sometimes. He finished Ghost Machine he called me and was like, I really enjoyed it but try writing poems when you’re happy sometimes. That got me thinking that the book is pretty depressing and boring. I think the most important thing is that it exists. Somehow by virtue of its form it exists in the world. The insubstantialness of my experience has been quantified by the sentences and quantified by the poems, and the lack of valuable material within those lines has been altered or has been constructed into these poems which I hope are productive machines or productive ghosts that people think are beautiful in whatever way possible. I hope that in the end their insubstantialness makes people feel something. That the book is a hopeful book in the end and a positive book despite all the negativity and all the bad things that people do to each other in the book. I hope its existence is positive.

Ben Mirov has writing in, or forthcoming from: Did I Shit Me (I & II), The Agriculture Reader, Lungfull!, Absent, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry Blog, and We Are Champion. He is the author of Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2009), I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press, 2010) and Ghost Machine (Caketrain Press, 2010). He is general editor of pax americana. He is also poetry editor of LIT Magazine. He blogs at isaghost.blogspot.com.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

Author and journalist Farai Chideya speaks with Nora Chipaumire and Thomas Mapfumo about the commentary they are making on Zimbabwe today and their collaboration on lions will roar….

Farai Chideya has combined media, technology, and social justice during her 20-year career as an award-winning author and journalist. From 2006 to early 2009, she hosted NPR’s News and Notes, a daily national program about African-American and African diaspora issues. She and the teams she has worked with have won awards including a National Education Reporting Award, a North Star News Prize, and a special award from the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association for coverage of AIDS. She has written three nonfiction books: Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters; The Color of Our Future; and Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans. Her novel Kiss the Sky (Atria Books) was released in hardcover May 2009 and paperback in May 2010.

Montana Wojczuk interviews Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington about their film, RESTREPO, winner of the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary. RESTREPO documents Junger and Hetherington’s experience as journalists in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, at the American military outpost of the same name, deep in Taliban-controlled territory.

RESTREPO film directors Sebastian Junger (left) and Tim Hetherington (right) at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan.

In this podcast, Montana Wojczuk interviewed Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington about their film, RESTREPO, which won the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and premieres this month in New York and L.A. As embedded journalists in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, Junger and Hetherington wanted to create a film that was as narrative as a war movie, with actual footage of war, expressing the anxiety, violence, and boredom of being part of a small unit of American soldiers fighting in what U.S News & World Report has dubbed, “the most dangerous place in the world.” RESTREPO is named for the outpost these soldiers created, high in the mountains of Afghanistan. Named after a member of their team who had died in action, RESTREPO became the “tip of the spear” for the American war in Afghanistan, thrust far into Taliban-controlled territory.

Sebastian Junger has been reporting from Afghanistan since 1996. He is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the bestselling author of the “The Perfect Storm” and “A Death in Belmont.” His latest book, “War,” documents his time in the Korengal valley. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington, author of “Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold” has reported on conflict for over ten years. He was awarded the 2008 World Press Photo prize for his work in Afghanistan and is a contributing photographer to Vanity Fair. Of “Long Story” Hetherington has said “I’ve never seen myself as a war photographer. This is about narrative.”

In RESTREPO Hetherington and Junger have used a light touch in creating a narrative out of documentary material. The result is a film that, while it tells a story, allows us the breathing room to make our own meaning out of the images on screen, and in our reactions may say more about the audience than about the filmmakers themselves. RESTREPO has angered some for not taking a political position, and it is indeed uncomfortable not to be able to retreat to the safety of polemic, but perhaps we can take a page from these journalists’ willingness to enter contested territory unarmed.

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Photo by Carol Rosegg, courtesy of Boneau/Bryan-Brown. Originally in BOMB 52, Summer 1995

–This Monday 6/28 (today, for those of you following along at home) at 7 PM, 92nd Street Y will host a preview of Love Ranch. The film is directed by Taylor Hackford and stars the inimitable Helen Mirren. This screening is the latest installment of 92Y’s popular “Reel Pieces” lecture series. Tickets are $35 (and worth it).

–Author Saïd Sayrafiezadeh and First Proofers Ed Park and Nelly Reifler will be reading this Wednesday 6/30 in the Bryant Park Word for Word series. This week’s event features contributors to UnderWaterNewYork.com, a website dedicated to “stories, art and music inspired by the underwater objects and phenomena that surround New York City.” Take a long lunch–the event reading runs 12:30-1:45.

–Also at 92Y this week, artist Paul Chan of BOMB 92 talks to Artforum editor Tim Griffin at 92nd Street Y this Thursday 7/1 about his latest project in collaboration with Creative Time, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans.

–Christian Marclay stands in two spotlights this week, having just opened a solo show on the 24th at Paula Cooper Gallery (through 7/30) and now with a piece titled “Festival” opening at the Whitney Museum Thursday 7/1.

Now hear this! Artist Robert Greene, phoned-in poet Zachary Schomburg, and fiction writer Danielle Dutton feature prominently (exclusively) in last week’s BOMB Radio broadcast on Newtown Radio:

…and/or/then subscribe to the BOMBcast feed here to stay up-to-date on all (free) multimedia goodies from BOMB Magazine.

Listen to a podcast of Josiah McElheny reading from his recently published monograph A Prism on June 8th, 2010 at 192 Books in Manhattan.

From Rizolli:

McElheny is a unique figure among artists of his generation: his primary medium is glass. Over the last 15 years he has created an extraordinary body of work exploring the relationship between art, history, and narrative. Known for his room-size installations of glass sculptures, the artist’s work is as rich visually as it is conceptually. With contributions by some of the most important writers and scholars today(including curator and writer Louise Neri, art critic Dave Hickey, curator Helen Molesworth, and cosmologist David Weinberg) this is the most comprehensive consideration of the artist’s work to date.

A complete listing of events at 192 Books can be found here.

Read McElheny’s 2005 interview with Arturo Hererra on BOMBsite.

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100 Food Porn, 1989. Television commercial, 3 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.

Most commercials I don’t mind missing, but when Marilyn Minter screened several of her “Food Porn” commercials from 20 years ago at a Strand artist’s talk I was sorry I had missed them until now. The shots were pulpy, the music sinister and dancey—think Ryuichi Sakamoto meet’s Madonna’s Erotica—communicating Minter’s process so strongly.

The videos were played on late night TV commerical slots purchased by the artist in 1990. You would have seen them on breaks from Letterman or Arsenio mixed in with commercials for M&Ms or frozen dinners. Subversive was and still is Minter’s plat du jour.

The lecture happened May 25th at the Strand bookstore on the occassion of the re-released and expanded edition of Gregory R. Miller’s monograph of Minter’s work, out this July. Since the ’90s, Minter has been included in the 2006 Whitney Biennal, worked on projects with M.A.C cosemetics, and her “Green Pink Caviar” video was featured in Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet Tour. Listen to a BOMB exclusive podcast of the Strand lecture below:

To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here.

Danielle Dutton © Katrin Lepler.

BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America Series
S P R A W L by Danielle Dutton
Read by Danielle Dutton
Recorded in the home studio of Hand-Made Records
Running Time: 14:54

In the eighth installment in BOMB’s Fiction for Driving Across America series, Dannielle Dutton reads an excerpt from her novel S P R A W L, published by Siglio Press, which appeared in the Summer Issue #112 of BOMB’s literary supplement, First Proof.

Click here to subscribe to our feed and download this podcast. Check back with BOMBsite.com with each new issue to listen to audio versions of these stories.

The crucible of the Caribbean islands, where Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews coexist, is the primary setting of Tiphanie Yanique’s triumphant debut collection. With a nimble touch, Yanique explores the fragile yet crucial connections between the US and the islands and the nuances of race, culture, class, and religion. Out of these materials, Yanique creates a kaleidoscopic spectacle.

Love is the common theme that runs throughout the collection: a love with missed connections and heartbreak, a dangerous kind of love that momentarily raises Yanique’s characters out of the death-of-the-heart trance in which they live and then, with cruel indifference, drops them back into it. As the elliptical stories open up suddenly, and different narrative threads and characters are introduced, the canvas widens and mushrooms. The haunting title story and the erotically charged “Street Man” especially stand out. In the gem of the collection, “The International Shop of the Coffins,” we are introduced at first to Father Simon and Jean Monroe, a.k.a. Anexus Corban, the owner of the shop. He sells children’s coffins shaped as sneakers, others as lollipops: “the candy part painted in blue and green and yellow swirls, the stick—where the child’s legs would go—painted an authentic bone white.” The two old men, one black, one white, meet every afternoon to drink coffee and watch the sunset from Corban’s shop; both have been broken up by love. One day two schoolgirls, Leslie and Gita, enter the shop. With breathtaking sleight of hand, Yanique picks up the thread of Gita’s life. She is such a luminous character, her story so heartrending, that I longed to read a whole novel about her. That’s the kind of talent Tiphanie Yanique is: her first collection of stories leaves the reader craving more.

—Jaime Manrique is completing Cervantes Street, a new novel.

Listen here to Tiphanie Yanique’s live reading of How to Escape From a Leper Colony and the following Q & A at Brownstone Books in Brooklyn, NY on April 29th, 2010.

To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here.

Listen to last week’s (Xeno & Oaklander, CAConrad, and Sam Lipsyte) here:

Sunday, 11ish

Sunday’s show will feature BOMBstars including performer Cynthia Hopkins, writer Joshua Furst, poet K. Silem Mohammad, and musician Steve Gunn. Get in gear and don’t miss this!

This BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS’ at the final event in their LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. Listen to Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and April Yvette Thompson discussing the many shared themes in their work, as well as their paths to becoming successful playwrights. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. This event was recorded live at the BRICstudio at 57 Rockwell place in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 18th.

To subscribe to BOMB’s Podcast, click here.

Justin Hopper’s Pittsburgh-based Public Record is a series of sound poems created from 19th-century crime reports which will be delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works.

Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.”

In the 19th-century, before modern sewage systems snaked beneath city streets, garbage was filtered into deep, open pits. Night-soil men would climb into the pits, carry up buckets of human waste, and transport it to farms for use as manure. On June 5, 1872, the Pittsburgh Daily Gazette reported the alleged murder of 55-year-old Andrew Kurtzbaner, a night-soil man at the St. Nicholas Hotel, formerly at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue. According to the report, Kurtzbaner was pushed into the pit while cleaning it.

“The guy drowned in feces collected from what must have been a flophouse,” says Justin Hopper, who spends his days reading newspaper accounts of Pittsburgh crimes committed 150 years ago, and then writes “documentary poetry” by directly sampling language from the crime reports, and re-structuring it into verse:

A gentleman who was in the vicinity and saw the excitement,

ran to the place, stripped off his clothing,

and was lowered by ropes into the vault.

Speedy as the work of rescue had been, it was not speedy enough,

and the man was quite dead when brought out

As artist-in-residence at Old/New Media — a program supported by a technology start-up, DeepLocal, and an independent publisher, Encyclopedia Destructica — Hopper designed Public Record, an immersive, multifaceted collaboration: His poems will be converted into audio pieces by a sound artist and delivered via mobile phone to listeners standing on the sites where the crimes occurred, much like a historic walking tour. In a second phase, visual artists will produce illustrations to accompany his poems in a series of hand-bound books. Finally, the project will launch in July with a presentation of the written, oral and illustrated works.

Through this ubiquitous rendering, the buildings, streets, and characters Hopper references can live on, even if they no longer exist. “The idea is to populate the city,” he says. “To conjure a haunting, whereby the people are still here, walking around Pittsburgh.”

Public Record began a couple of years ago, envisioned as choreographed re-enactments of the murders. But a year later, Hopper — a long-time arts reporter — discovered Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, a book-length documentary poem culled in part from court testimonies of the surviving Sago, West Virginia miners. “It’s rooted in actual square footage of land,” he says. “[Nowak] takes something as prosaic as court testimony, and finds the poetic value in it. I realized that this is what Public Record was meant to be.”

Hopper searches microfilm for crimes that occurred on streets identifiable on both a map of 1872 and a current map, within a several-block range. He looks for at least one name — a perpetrator, victim or bystander — as well as discrepancies in language or reporting. People described as “decrepit, homeless, and alcoholic” speaking in language that’s practically Shakespearean, for example, or a report of a stabbing that includes the lyrical admission of a man nicknamed “Bruiser” Lynch (“I stepped toward the bed and a man raised up -/ I saw he wasn’t her husband, raised the knife and let it drive”) alongside his sister’s fragmented, pedestrian rhetoric. He remixes texts to call out ironic juxtapositions of articles (for example, an account of a rape appears beside a sexually charged advertisement for horse-riding accoutrements) using italics, underlining, and bolded typeface to distinguish between sources.

Public Record marks a formal shift for Hopper, who describes his work here as “art,” rather than “journalism” or “non-fiction,” freeing him to eschew structural conventions. Hopper repurposes fact to read like myth that conveys a sense of history in a way that the original documents don’t. “It’s the difference between fact and truth,” Hopper says. “What I’m writing is the truth. I might not end up using all of the facts, and the poems might not be factually true, but hopefully they say something that’s a bit larger than the event. The form gives me permission to do that.”

Hopper's "Knights of the Green Cloth" is set on Forbes Avenue between Smithfield and Wood Streets. Photo by Erin Brubaker.

Presenting the material across genres also allows for new conceptual frameworks, primarily through the use of technology. For example, how can the stories of the dead co-exist among the living, yet free from the constraints of the contemporary world? Hopper originally imagined on-site, audio-enabled kiosks. His conversations with DeepLocal’s software engineers lead to the use of mobile devices instead.

“Public Record evolved, but the shifts were less about practicalities and more about keeping the concept intact,” says Nathan Martin, CEO of DeepLocal. “In fact, nothing about the project is all that difficult to implement from a technological standpoint. But we were able to offer options, such as different interfaces, that would expand what the experience could mean.” The collaboration also forced his designers to consider older, “gutter” technologies and less accurate mapping tools in order to best transmit the historical sense Hopper’s poems depict; thus, the lack of distracting gadgetry that sometimes forefronts new media projects.

iPhone users will be able to download an application that includes a simple map of 1872 Pittsburgh marked with the crime sites. When users approach the site on foot, a red blinking light will appear on the map that, when clicked, will initiate the sound piece associated with the location. Non-iPhone users can hear the same via a pre-recorded message by texting a short code, available on a paper map of the city. Once users send the text, they immediately receive a phone call. In this way, the poems become both ethereal and permanent. “It doesn’t matter how the topography is altered, because there is no physical manifestation. There are no signs that can be removed a hundred years from now,” Hopper says. “It’s an idea that might be lost as people walk from place to place — that it’s not about these incredibly banal sites. It’s about the narrative we’re lending to them.”

If cell phones disembody Public Record in the intangible realm of cyberspace, the handmade books of Encyclopedia Destructica ground it in the tactile efforts of grassroots organizing — key to the their interest in “old media.” What started as a zine for a college student’s senior project has expanded into a sustained exploration of new modes of distributing writing and artwork that sidesteps publishing bureaucracy and traditional gallery exhibitions, says co-founder Jasdeep Khaira. In the past four years, Encyclopedia Destructica has organized community-wide bookbinding parties; democratic, ad hoc PowerPoint displays; and collective drawing activities across state lines. Encyclopedia Destructica prints 250 copies of each book, and uses the proceeds from the first half of a run to fund the production of the second half.

Most Old/New Media applicants don’t understand the “old media” aspect of the residency, Khaira says. Proposals generally offer a half-hearted marketing plan that includes, for example, hand-printed flyers for an otherwise carefully considered project. “But Justin really got it. The idea of inviting artists to produce original works in response to the poems that also resonate in the recordings taps into we’re trying to do,” she says.

The St. Nicholas Hotel, site of night-soil man Andrew Kurtzbaner's death, used to reside at the corner of Grant Street and Fourth Avenue, downtown Pittsburgh. Photo by Erin Brubaker.

Once artists create the drawings, they will likely be reproduced on a solid-ink printer and “tipped” onto pages — adhered only by the corners and margins. Other details of form and process have not yet been decided, as Hopper continues to apply for funding to support future phases of Public Record, which includes the book, an additional iPhone application for poems that document North Side crimes (the first launch focuses solely on downtown Pittsburgh), and a brochure that lists the crime sites and text-message short codes. He seeks to distribute the brochures in area galleries and museums, and hopefully at stops along the city’s existing tour of public art.

Understandably, not all city tourism entities have welcomed Public Record: After all, the project documents rapes and murders in an effort to capture a sullied history of urban America, compelling for the failures and misfortunes of unknown, ordinary people. Night-soil man Andrew Kurtzbaner exemplifies the kind of life that would likely be absent from any historical record, if not for his unfortunate death. Likewise, “Bruiser” Lynch, who chased down a man for sleeping with his sister and stabbed him in the chest, isn’t a figure typically considered when commemorating a neighborhood’s past.

Hopper quotes Raymond Williams in The Country and the City:

The opaque complexity of modern city life is represented by crime, and the explorer of society is reduced to the discoverer of single causes, the isolable agent, and above all his means and techniques.

“He’s talking about the detective and how that character understands a city as a mythology. This is a big part of Public Record,” Hopper says. “Because in most of these cases we know who committed the crime, but we don’t know what happened to them. Yet we continue to remember, and their memory, and psyche, is part of the strata. People say that Pittsburgh is hung up on its history, but I would say the opposite — that the city draws its power from it. It’s the reason people stay in a place through 25 years of unemployment. It’s the malleable thing that writers can manipulate to create mythology.”

Listen to “A Fearful Death” below:

In this BOMBLive! podcast, Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, is interviewed by architect Deborah Gans of Deborah Gans Studio. Part of the BOMBLive! series In the Open: Art and Architecture in Public Spaces, sponsored by Cary-Brown Epstein, Steven Epstein, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

Teaser video below:

BOMBlive: Deborah Gans and Matthew Coolidge from BOMB Magazine on Vimeo.

Complete audio here:

To have this automatically downloaded to your iTunes, subscribe to our podcasts by clicking here.

For more slideshows from the Center for Land Use Interpretation, head over to BOMBsite.

Listen to the Podcast of this post-show discussion at Soho Rep. between playwright Craig Lucas and musician-performer Cynthia Hopkins. Truth: A Tragedy runs through 5/30/10. Also on display is a Cabinet of Curiosities assembled from the memoirs, artifacts and various media belonging to Hopkins’ father. More details and info here.

Cynthia Hopkins in The Truth: A Tragedy. Photo by Paula Court.

Cynthia Hopkins (genitor of the band Gloria Deluxe, the Accidental Trilogy, and a multitude of other notable artistic ventures and triumphs), latest work grew out of her love/hate relationship with Greek Tragedies and the writing she was doing while moving her ailing father into assisted living six years ago. The result is a document unflinchingly genuine and true, if filtered through a highly personal narrative. Through song, dance, and text Hopkin’s conjures Parkinson’s disease, a hoarder’s nest, notions of suppressed homosexuality and a classroom full of ten-year-olds chanting jump to a man on a ledge, with the get-up of a clown and the feet of a Fred Astair. Uncomfortable, hilarious and, tragic, maybe, heroic, definitely, Truth: A Tragedy has you squirming even as you laugh, laughing even as you squirm and softening every time Ms. Hopkins sings.

Look for an interview of Cynthia Hopkins by Annie-B Parson in the upcoming issue of BOMB out June 15th.

The latest BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS features Ugandan-Rwandan-American jazz vocalist and composer Somi and music giant Hugh Masekela discussing heir shared musical influences and the connections between jazz and Africa. This event was recorded live at the Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 11th, as part of 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. Visit www.651ARTS.org for more information.

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You’re panicking / because you can’t remember the meaning / of nonchalant, but I’m massaging / your neck, whispering, / It’s what you are. This ninth episode of Phoned-In, our poetry-reading-by-phone podcast, features a reading by Mark Leidner. Scroll down to listen and read a short Q&A in which he and Luke Degnan discuss Twitter, robot voices, and pitchforking steaming piles of irony.

Emilie Selden, FENCED IN (2008). Digital Print.

Luke Degnan: In your bio, you say you live and tweet in Western Massachusetts. I’ve followed your Twitter feed for a while. Do you consider Tweets a part of your craft? What draws you to Twitter as a poet?

Mark Leidner: I love many things about it. One way to think about it is practice. It makes me practice attention to sentences. I will often think of jokes that I’ll want to share or absurd things, and I love the challenge, as quickly as possible, to change the joke or the idea or the concept into an efficient, little sentence that’ll carry it. I also love how it’s made me think more aphoristically. One feature of an aphorism would be the cinematic way a sentence unfolds. So you get a subject and a verb, and you don’t know where the object is gonna be until you hit the object, and sometimes what the object will be will make you reinterpret what the subject and the verb were. So I like thinking about the narrative of cognition that happens when you read a sentence that’s guided by the grammar. Tweeting has made me pay more attention to that because often the rhythm or the grammar or the alliteration, all those features that make a really good sentence great, for some reason they are foregrounded when all you have is just one sentence as opposed to elaborating on an idea.

LD: What drew you to making videos of your poems?

ML: It was initially an editing process for revision. It helped me revise poems for a page. One of the things I strive for is a conversational seamlessness for most of my poems, not all. I often experimented with text to voice software where you select some text, put it in a window and a robot will read back to you the text. That helps me hear it in a monotone, an uninterested party, articulating those words, so that I can more effectively hear when I’m trying to, you know, be so clever or be too lyrical or too something that disrupts the dream of the poem. I’ll often will try to revise in order to make a poem as smart as possible, and in trying to make it smarter and better and deeper, it loses its believability as a convincing human articulation.

The movies that I made were made with this software called Xtranormal in which you type in text, and a robot is animated and reads back to you the poem. So I just did it initially to hear my own work in another way that was not just me reading it. When I’m reading it, I don’t have enough distance from it. So then when I started doing that I thought, well this might actually be cool, so I started putting more effort in the actual movie part of it, putting sound behind it, trying to tweak the grammar of the text that I give the robot so that it will repeat back even more naturally to create something that seems like it’s sort of alive on the screen. The short answer is I started to edit my own poems for the page, and it became its own form that I really like and enjoy and have learned a lot from just from playing with that form.

LD: In the HTML Giant comments section you wrote,

sometimes there is too much irony all piled up in the barn, and you have to

pitchfork another steaming pile of irony on top of it all, and you have to

pitchfork another, and another, and another

when the world is shit-streaked with irony that is when beauty will emerge

love is irony

purists sure hate farce

but pushing against things is the only possible way to live

Can you comment on this?

ML: I believe that, I think. It’s really interesting to think about how a public forum, like a comment stream, can…it makes everything you do a sort of performance. On the Internet you have to compete for attention because there are a million people talking about a million things, and comments are all over the place. Sometimes it’s just a game to see if you can make a comment that seems interesting in itself whether it’s true or not. I love the challenge: can you even be interesting in that kind of comment frenzy?

Back to the actuall thing about pitchforking irony. I think that comment says something true, but maybe it frames it as this is the only way to achieve beauty. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s just the main way that I’ve experienced it. It’s blowing through irony or so immersing myself, or a speaker so immersed in the antithesis of what they want. In some ways irony is the opposite of beauty. I don’t know. I’m just really interested in exploring darkness, things you’re not supposed to do, things you’re not supposed to say or think and trying to be caught in them that you can emerge from them. Ideally I’d love to write a poem that has this fun and interesting ironic sensibility, but it’s only the surface, and there’s actually a depth and sincerity all pinioned by language.

LD: I chose that quote of yours because when I read it I thought of the Dorothea Lasky poem I Hate Irony. Do you know that poem?

ML: Yeah, I love that poem.

LD: It seemed to be two sides of an argument. It wanted to hear your pro-irony view.

ML: The problem with irony, to me, is that often when you say something maybe intending to be ironic or not even intending it, but it has an ironic effect or shade or tone or something, the act of saying it and standing behind it transforms it into something that’s not irony anymore. I think that poem, I Hate Irony, is quite beautiful and true. For some reason, I don’t even know why, but when I read it I feel like I’m on that side. What I really don’t like, I suppose, is if you defined irony in the sense that when you read a line and you know that it’s not true, then maybe speaker is being ironic, saying something that they didn’t mean or something that they knew wasn’t true. I hate that irony, but what I love is you read it and there is, ideally, an infinite number of ways to contemplate it and to experience a piece of poetry. Shakespeare is full of irony, but it’s not just irony, irony is only one sense. The second you put your finger on irony it moves or changes. It’s not a static thing because its definition is relative to intention and interpretation and all this other stuff. It’s just a big crazy cloud that I love to revel in.

Watch one of Mark’s videos below:

Mark Leidner lives and tweets in Western Massachusetts.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

The latest BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS is a conversation between award-winning choreographer, dancer and community leader Ronald K. Brown and legendary poet and activist. This event was recorded live at The James and Martha Duffy Performance Space at the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn on Tuesday, May 4th, as part of 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. Visit www.651ARTS.org for more information.

In episode 8 of Phoned In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, CAConrad reads from The Book of Frank and The City Real & Imagined. Click through for an Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss Philadelphia, (Soma)tic Poetry, and why it’s necessary to ignore advice from older poets.

Zoe Strauss - Detail I-95 (Merry Christmas House) Courtesy of the artist.

Luke Degnan: How has living in Philadelphia shaped your poetry?

CAConrad: It shaped it completely. You filter everything through your life. I’ve been here since 1986. That’s well over half my life. To be specific: the streets, the sounds. I feel like home here is a hundred things before it’s my actual apartment. I just really feel at home here. I love the libraries and the poets. There’s so many wonderful poets here who spur me into action constantly. I really feel like I learned to investigate the world here. That’s what the (Soma)tics are all about. Ultimately, I want my (Soma)tic poetry and poetics to help us realize at least two things. That everything around us has a creative viability with the potential to spur new thinking and imaginative output and that the most necessary ingredient to bringing the sustainable, humane changes we need and want for our world requires creativity in all lives, every single day. It’s a pretty drastic world. I keep meeting people who say, Well, isn’t it a luxury to write poetry? I think the complete opposite. Art is extremely important right now because we need to be creative. We need to hit our creative core and open it up in order to figure out how to make these changes. We really, definitely need to make changes. We’re on a sinking ship.

LD: In your (Soma)tic Writing Exercise, Radiant Elvis MRI, you describe an exercise to prepare oneself for an MRI. You propose examining a certain place, and you wrote, “The space I chose is a street in Philadelphia, a place I know more than any other place on our planet.” Where is this place, and will you describe it?

CAC: It’s 22nd and Chestnut Street. It’s an intersection in Philadelphia. I had a very magical experience right near there. There’s a museum right near there called the Mutter Museum. I was in the herb garden, and I was reading this document supposedly by a Rosicrucian, that’s very much like this exercise, only it goes a little further. That exercise was to manipulate people and things in an environment. This was to be able to be in that environment when you’re not anywhere near there. That street corner comes up in dreams sometimes when I’m not in Philly, when I’m out doing a reading or whatever in another city.

What’s on the corner? One of my favorite architects in Philadelphia history, Frank Furness, he designed the Unitarian Church which is there. There’s a pharmacy on the corner. There’s so many minute details. The thing is about this corner is since I started the process of absorbing the contents, it’s sort of become addictive. The idea is that you choose something in your life, a place that you frequent, that each time you approach this place, prepare yourself to stop, look very closely at it, close your eyes, imagine what you saw, and then open your eyes to see what you missed, and each time you’re going to keep incorporating all of these missing pieces until you have the entire contents of the space whether it’s a room or a place outside. You can actually go there, project yourself in that place, which is what the MRI somatic exercise is about. The MRI machine works with the water molecules of our bodies to have them face one direction by way of magnetic charge. It’s at that point that you really start to visit that place when you’re inside the MRI machine. Once you find yourself in that place you begin to float, you start to be in that place in a way that you haven’t been before. Then you come out and take notes, and you write your poem.

LD: What advice would you give to a young poet?

CAC: My friend Frank Sherlock and I were just up in Boston to speak to students at Bridgewater State College. They’re amazing kids. One of the students asked, How do you know whether a poem is good or bad? I answered her by saying, There are so many people who love the work of poets that I don’t like, but I realized at this stage of my life that it’s none of my business what people like. The important thing is that people utilize their creative centers and get moving in their own way. So there’s that. The other thing that I think it very, very, very, very, important that young poets don’t take advice, solicited or not. I think there needs to be more rebellion going on than there is. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with these younger poets. There are poets right now who are in their late teens and twenties who are just blowing my mind. They’ve got their shit together far more than I ever did when I was their age.

I feel like there’s too much subservience in some way. I’m from Generation X. We were kind of the generation that everybody ignored because we were so small in numbers. We just didn’t care what anybody thought. This generation now, they’re about twice the size of my generation. There’s too much listening going on, and there are a lot people my age and older with big mouths who keep telling people what to do, and I don’t like that. I was always extremely, extremely defiant when I was a younger poet. There were always these older poets who were constantly yammering, yammering, yammering, telling me who I should be reading, how I should be writing, and I don’t know. I mean, I’m glad I didn’t listen to them. Most of them were kind of boring anyway. I think that when you meet somebody who wants to tell younger poets how things should be, it’s because they’ve kind of failed at what they wanted to do. I hate to be mean about it, but they need to shut up and let the younger poets figure it out for themselves. I think a really important thing is to read, find out what you like reading. Have friends your age whose work you admire. I think that’s good, being around a bunch of poets. They should work together to keep the big mouth older poets out of their business. There are way too many older poets right now who want to dictate how things should be.

When I have these (Soma)tic poetry workshops sometimes people are uncomfortable. I did a series of ten of them at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. I think in the beginning a few people were kind of nervous because I wasn’t gonna have people read their poems. I didn’t want to sit there and be saying who’s good and who’s not. I’m interested in process. I’m interested in going outside and sitting still and choosing three objects around you, drawing a line between them to make a triangle and see what’s inside the triangle, meditating on the world. When you read poems, you’re going to find out what you like. There are a lot of poets being published today whose work I love, and there are a lot of poets whose work I can’t stand. It’s really, in the end, none of my business who likes them and who doesn’t.

CAConrad at Divine's grave. Photo by Dottie Lasky.

CAConrad is the author of The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010).  He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), and Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006).  The son of white trash asphyxiation, his childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift.  Visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.com or with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

In episode 7 of Phoned-In, BOMB’s poetry reading by phone podcast, James Shea reads from his book, Star in the Eye. Click through for an brief Q&A where he and Luke Degnan discuss Japanese poetry and the passage of time.

Rebecca Sargent, FADED WATERSLIDE, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

Luke Degnan: Your book was published in 2008. Has the passage of time made you view these poems differently?

James Shea: The poems are getting further and further away from me so that they seem to be almost like someone else’s poems. I like that because it helps me to move on to the next poem and the next manuscript. They’re kind of like old friends. I know that they’re going to be there for me. I know where to find them if I need them.

LD: Do you consider these poems autobiographical? For example, did you kiss your girlfriend on the mouth after she vomited? Do you feel distanced from them in so far as your life is now different?

JS: I definitely think of my poems as bound up with my life, but in a kind of tangential way. For example, some of the poems in the book I wrote when I was living in Japan, and that was a few years ago. I suppose the distance feels more chronological than psychological. I believe my poems are about as autobiographical as my dreams, in the sense that some elements are vividly true, but many other details are not quite real. Your question reminds me of when I asked a friend of mine if he had ever spent a night in jail. He said, “No, but I feel like I have.” That’s how I feel about some of the lines in my poems—I’ve never flown all the way to Rome only to be dumped at the airport, but I feel like I have.

LD: You just mentioned living in Japan. Can you talk about your relationship to Japanese poetry? How has Japanese poetry influenced your work?

JS: I feel like it’s influenced me in all kinds of ways, some of which I’m not sure I can explain very well. When I first started reading Japanese poetry, primarily haiku, I had been reading a lot of French surrealism, and I found something in the way haiku poets used juxtaposition that I felt had a kinship with the French surrealists. That was something I keyed into very early on and would come back to over the years as I started to study Japanese and then live in Japan and then translate. Recently I’ve been more interested in classical Chinese poetry. In both cases, I’m interested in the ways in which the speaker feels kind of absent or at least not present in the way we are accustomed to seeing the speaker in Western poetry. I like that.

LD: How has the Japanese language itself influenced you?

JS: That influence is much clearer to me. That’s because over the years as I’ve studied Japanese. I became more and more estranged from English and from my own poems in some ways. There was a period when I was revising my work in Japan and after Japan where I felt like I was seeing my poems from a new perspective. I had spent so much time in this other language, even dreaming in this other language, to the point where English seemed kind of new to me.

James Shea is the author of Star in the Eye, selected for the 2008 Fence Modern Poets Series. His poems have appeared in various journals, includingAmerican Letters and Commentary, Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, and Verse. He has taught at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, and as a poet-in-residence in the Chicago public schools. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here. Subscribe to BOMB’s podcasts here.

In episode 6 of Phoned-In, BOMB’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Luke Degnan talks to Portland, OR poet Zachary Schomburg about our generation’s obsession with animals and how poetry lends itself to collaboration. Also, Zach reads some poems.

YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW (2009). Elizabeth Hoy.

Luke Degnan: You seem to have an obsession with the forest and trees. Can you explain why or where this comes from?

Zachary Schomburg: It’s not as if I spend more time than other people in the forest. My forests aren’t real forests I suppose. They’re kind of these dark, dream forests. When I picture them, they’re made of the trees you see in Tim Burton movies. They’re twisty and unreal. I like to spend time in forests. I like to go hiking and that sort of thing. It feels very different when I write a poem. It’s not the same kind of nature. When I write these narrative poems, often times when they exist in poems, they feel like dreams to me. In fact some of them very much are dreams. In a lot of my dreams I’m being chased, and for whatever reason if I’m not being chased through a building or some childhood home or something like that, I’m often being chased through these kinds of forests. Wherever the place is, it’s kind of confusing. It’s easy to get lost in it. It’s easy to hide in it. It’s very dense. A forest is the perfect setting for these sorts of chase scenes, in my daydreams and these dreams that I consciously make up and in my actual dreams as well.

LD: Why do you think our generation is obsessed with critters? Wolves, birds, bears, LOLcats, panda bears, animals in general…

ZS: I have a lot of those. You’re right, I’m certainly not the only one. For me, they’re a way of putting characters into my poems and still give my protagonist the ability to be lonely and isolated. It’s really important that even in the poems that I’m writing, my protagonist, the I, is the only human or the only person we can identify with in each of the poems. A lot of times they’re about loneliness and searching. In order to have these other characters they almost have to be animals, and if they’re not animals at least some kind of inanimate object that becomes a character in a poem. Animals, to me, are very…I’m interested in them I suppose. Especially bears and owls and jaguars and certain kinds of insects and wolves. I don’t know why, but I think that a lot of the critters I just named are critters that are associated with the night. I’m constantly writing poems at night. I can’t write a poem while the sun is up. I guess these are the creatures I think of when I’m writing.

These animals that our generation mentions are kind of like representations of these actual animals. I don’t think they’re real. For example, I don’t think people are interested in real owls, but they might name their band The Owls. It’s this fascination with myth or mythic creatures. The creatures themselves aren’t necessarily mythic, but there is a strange other reality where the animals exist in. Almost like they’re fantastic animals in some way. I think it might be a result of these children’s books that we used to read. There’s this turn in literature that has happened in the last few years where we try to capture the tone and even the narrative style and sometimes even the exact narratives of very simple children’s books. I wonder if it’s this new return to try to recapture innocence, recapture our childhood, in the same way that we would recapture a children’s book as if we want to live in the world of the children’s book that we read when we were six years old.

LD: You’re involved in many different collaborative pursuits. You recently performed with a band, you’ve worked as and with an illustrator, and you’ve worked on Team Sad and two other upcoming chapbooks. What draws you to collaboration?

ZS: Poetry is about connection. It’s about communicating something that’s kind of impossible to communicate directly. You really have to involve other people. I collaborate with other poets, particularly Emily Kendal Frey. It’s a way that she and I are able to communicate with one another. It feels like playing a game. We’re able to play this poetry game with each other and relate to each other through poetry and create these things that I could never have created by myself because I don’t think that way. To be able to bounce my ideas off someone else really produces something that’s impossible.

With other mediums I think it’s really exciting. Like you mentioned, illustration, music, film, I put out a collection of poem films recently. There’s something that happens, this third thing that happens, when you mix poetry and something else together. A third thing happens. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s new and there’s energy there. To me that’s pretty exciting and I’d be a fool not to jump at these chances. That was a dream of a lifetime. That was so amazing to stand in front of Typhoon, the band, and read poems while they played very loudly with driving, dark, orchestral music. I have no musical talent at all. It was great to get to live my fantasy of fronting a band.

LD: When you titled The Man Suit, were you thinking of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Nothing But Death”? It includes the line, “Death arrives among all that sound like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it.”

ZS: No. In fact you’re the first person to ever mention that to me. I’m a Neruda fan, and I’m really excited that you just brought that up. In fact what they bring up to me all of the time is, Does this have something to do with Donnie Darko? I’ve never watched Donnie Darko. I was always kind of disappointed like I thought, Oh no, I’ve written the Donnie Darko book, and I didn’t know it. I still haven’t seen it to this day because I’m kind of afraid that it’s too close.

LD: How do you think a person finds home?

ZS: I think we can try and try, and the way I try is to do it through poetry. I try to find home through poetry or at least write about that process. A lot of the poems, particularly in Scary, No Scary, are about exactly that, the title poem being one of the more direct ones. It’s a concept that doesn’t really exist in any tangible way, though I want it to. So it’s constantly disappointing when you can’t find it. When you find out that your memories are actually false memories or are skewed in some way, you feel that your history is not quite exactly right. It can be one of the most terrifying and tragic realizations when you realize that there isn’t such a thing. It’s something that I’m constantly discovering and finding out but still constantly trying to ignore in my search for some kind of home. I’m doing that through poetry, and I’ll probably write about this for my entire life.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007) and several chapbooks, including, most recently, collaborations with Emily Kendal Frey called Team Sad (Cinematheque Press 2010), Feelings Using Wolves (Small Fires Press, forthcoming), and Ok, Goodnight (Future Tense Books, forthcoming). His translations from the Russian of the poems of Andrei Sen-Senkov have been published in Circumference, Jacket, Harp & Altar, and Aufgabe among others. A DVD of his poem-films, Little Blind Thing, is now available from Poor Claudia. He and Mathias Svalina co-edit Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He lives in Portland, OR.

To listen to previous episodes of Phoned-In, to tune in to upcoming episodes, and for unique Phoned-In content visit here.