‘Oh please throw me. It’s totally cool’: Thomas Patrick Levy on karaoke, prose poems and corn.
A while ago, I had some email interaction with Thomas Patrick Levy. He carried this conversation, as I was being a most awful interviewer. I first got to know his work when he appeared in the very first issue of ILK and taught me how you DO a prose-poem. Unsurprisingly, given the man’s straight up stellar talent, Yes Yes Books (aren’t they great?) have just published his first full collection I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone.
If you haven’t read it, just do. (Poems from it are everywhere, including my own stand-out, ‘IOWA,’ here) .
CC: I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone does some things. Actually, quite a few. But first, first of all, the concern with sequence jumps out at me. What makes something need to be spoken in this way?
TPL: I Don’t Mind went through several different phases. The portions, as in the sections, of the book we’re never intended to go together the way they did, at least not originally. I kind of squished the whole thing together in a word doc at one point so that I would feel as if I had a full-length collection of poems. And then the thing that happened was that I realized all the sections — which were sort of formless — were actually different parts of the same story. I Don’t Mind is a story. It’s categorized as poetry because that’s what Katherine (KMA Sullivan, the immense force moving the gears of YesYes Books) and I decided to call it. We were going to call it “lyric prose” and “prose poems” at different points in the development of the book, but ultimately rested on calling it “poems.” The category doesn’t matter really, as far as I’m concerned. And really, every poem tells a story in a way, so, in my opinion, a collection of poems can – but doesn’t necessarily always — tell a story in the same way a novel can. To me, I Don’t Mind is like a Tarantino film. Each touches on different parts of the story the whole book (hopefully) tells.
Engulfed by Andalucia: Lisa Marie Basile.
The night I started reading Lisa Marie Basile’s new book of poems, Andalucia, I was supposed to be reading another book of poetry. And by “supposed to be,” I mean that I had told myself I had to read that other book first. But that book was trudge-worthy, and my eyes kept glancing at the fiery cover of Lisa’s book. Finally, I gave in to the pull and cracked it open.
As I read, I found that I’d started to read the poems out loud to myself, in that sort of whisper-talk that is used when you don’t want to draw attention, but want to hear the words.
“I ate my own body
in parlors of no color,
to the bone, to the hooves. I become
so thin I buckle under myself. I am
a mane of white on fire.”
I still haven’t gotten back to the other book, and it’s been two and a half months. But I still find myself opening this book and reading a poem here or there. The poems have no titles, and I imagine someone could read this book as one long poem (I may try that).
Some favorite lines (don’t ask why – I don’t know):
“Time walks up walls on stilts”
“You can bite yourself out of cocoons.”
“I count six thousand lemons in the wet and colorless ground.”`
“Today I almost saw my mother.”
“You might be rid of transgressions/but o, they’re not rid of you.”
I found these to be seductive poems, not in that way, but in that they drew me in and made me wonder about them. For me, that’s what makes a poem interesting to me. Where did that image/idea come from? Why that word? Why break the line there?
The last poem in the book starts “It all felt very normal.” But it does not end that way at all. I’m not sure why, but I will probably keep coming back to this book. It’s one of those kind.
Lisa Marie Basile is a Brooklyn-based poet and writer. She’s the author of the forthcoming “A Decent Voodoo,” (Červená Barva Press, 2012) and a chapbook, “Diorama” (Wisp Press). The Poetry Society of New York will release her chapbook, “Andalusia,” on Brothel Books. She is the founding editor and publisher of Patasola Press and currently reads poetry for Weave Magazine. She performs with the Poetry Brothel as Luna Liprari, and she is a member of the Poetry Society of New York. She is an M.F.A. candidate at The New School. She works for the PEN American Center as the prison writing program coordinator. She studied English Language and Literature at Pace University in Manhattan, where she won several writing awards, including first place in poetry and fiction in 2009.
Scenes from the Seedy Underbelly of Suburbia Book Party.
Saturday, April 21, at The Bowery Poetry Club, 2:00pm.
Jackie Simmons is Emily Dickinson’s 7th cousin 5 times removed, but that fact has not helped her writing one iota. Her poems have appeared in RealPoetik, Purple Fiction, Half Drunk Muse, Amaze: A Cinquain Journal, A First Tuesday in Wilton Anthology, Poetz, Short Fast and Deadly, Pagan Friends, Radius: Poetry from the Center to the Edge, and the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. She’s been having on-stage anxiety attacks in New York City and Connecticut since 1995.
I’ll be there – wouldn’t miss this! 
$8 at the door gets you three things:
1. A warm fuzzy feeling from supporting the Bowery Poetry Club.
2. A solid half hour, perhaps more, of witnessing an on-stage anxiety attack. (How often do you get to do that?)
3. One half of a book (50% off the price of a book or bring a friend and take home a book to share).
“Jackie Simmons shows her range—from long poems to haiku—from mantras to prose poems—always finding her target. I call this In-Your-Face Poetry, because Jackie is not afraid to explore with unflagging courage the things we take for granted, like love. The last poem is a moving tribute to the Occupy Movement and that in a nutshell is what Jackie does—occupy our minds with images that won’t go gently in the night. Her poems stay with us, like a nudge in the solar plexus. Unlike John Cheever who also explored the underbelly of suburbia Ms. Simmons isn’t afraid of unsettling her readers—she goes to the jugular every time and doesn’t miss.”
—Hal Sirowitz, Former Poet Laureate of Queens, NY
Apparently Uncle Jesse was busy.
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Ladies represent: Amy Letter.
A fair while ago now, Caroline and I talked about the VIDA Count. I guess pretty much everyone did. We wanted to ask a bunch of great writers who also happen to be ladies about their publishing experience and basically just open up a space to talk about gender and publishing, or call bullshit on it, or spout conspiracy theories.
This will be ongoing. This has to be ongoing.
Next up is Amy Letter. Amy is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in journals including PANK, Quarterly West, Fringe, and others, as well as gallery spaces including the Jaffe Center for Book Arts and the 18 Rabbit Gallery. Amy Letter is a professor of Fiction and New Media at Drake University in Des Moines Iowa. More at amyletter.com
Amy:
I’ve been told many times that I “write about strong women.” While I have the utmost respect for authors whose goal is to “write about strong women” (or any subject that moves them), it is not remotely one of my artistic goals. I write about problems understanding time and reality, the contagion of hatred, conflicting agendas, the concept of escalation — how small things become everything. I write about ideas that interest me. But if my characters are not male, I am told I “write about strong women,” which concerns me because it means some people aren’t seeing what I’m writing about at all. I recognized this issue a long time ago, and wrote a few stories with all-male casts to see if my ideas got through. They did: my first published story was one of these man-fests. But I am stubborn and offended by the idea that men are people and women are something else, so when gender isn’t an issue for a character (and for my work it almost never is), I default to women characters. Screw em.
I’m always submitting work. I get a lot of rejections. When I was earning my MFA, a decade ago, I decorated the wall behind my desk with my rejections, and it almost went floor to ceiling before I’d ever published a single thing. I was, and am, proud of that. One of my friends called it a “monument to effort, if not success.” Effort is important. I don’t always submit at the exact same rates because life things happen: you move, someone dies, you go through a crisis where you hate everything and want to re-write it all. But I consider it an important part of who I am as a writer. If I’m not sending it out, I don’t exist.
I don’t think there’s a mechanical solution to the VIDA numbers. We can’t “all just do one simple thing” and stand back to observe that the problem’s been solved. The solution will come when the problem disappears, when people no longer equate a Y chromosome with credibility and authority or view a vagina as the mark of something less than human. If we were born into a world where the genders of people in political power, economic power, the various fields of science and arts, and so on, roughly matched in their proportions the population of the world, our brains would be completely different — better brains, fitter brains. The brains we have now are crap. They were programmed all wrong. When I was a kid, if you saw a white man among a gaggle of mixed sex/race employees, he WAS the manager! Those kinds of associations are hard to break. So time will tick, people will die, kids will replace us, the world will change, slowly, too damn slowly for me.
Have some thoughts? Comment and let us know.
Also check out what these ladies had to say:
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Evolution of the fist bump.
What do we mean when we say a poem is a machine? Part 9: Heather Christle
Heather Christle responds to the question “What do we mean when we say a poem is a machine?”
1.
There is no such thing as only a metaphor. Our bodies move through the literal and the figurative simultaneously, as experiments in embodiment cognition have proven. For instance, researchers at Yale discovered that literal warmth affects subjects’ perceptions of a person’s figurative warmth, as scientist Robert Sapolsky describes:
“Volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. In reality, the experiment began when the experimenter, seemingly struggling with an armful of folders, asks the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee. As the key experimental manipulation, the coffee was either hot or iced. Subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.”
Similar experiments have shown links between literal and metaphorical perceptions of weight, disgust, and pain. So when Williams and Valéry write that a poem is a machine, I am happy to take them at their word. There is no other place from which to take them. (I am tempted here to make an argument for the uselessness of the ironic/sincere binary, which resembles that of the literal and metaphorical, but will hold my tongue—seriously, against my physical cheek—for now.) This is a beginning. Where next should we go?
2.
It seems wise to approach making a poem as building a machine whose doings one cannot wholly predict or understand. If the poem is a transmitting machine (and I think that it is), then part of its work is to absorb and make use of the noise it encounters in transmission. The poem moves through time and space. The world through which it moves constantly changes, and, on a smaller scale, the thoughts and surroundings of the poem’s recipients constantly change as well. Even a reader’s immediate physical environment gets encoded into her reading of the poem. The particular light of the subway car where I first read Anthony McCann’s Moongarden is forever shining into those pages.
Before I was a reader I was an abstraction, imagined by everyone who has ever written anything I’ve read. As I step out of the abstract I bring with me noise. I am covered in it; it lets me become specific. Anthony McCann did not imagine me in particular, but the machines of his poems have room for me in them. They have room for the light I was in. And then what?
3.
From the first moment a poem is read, its energy begins to dissipate into the world. We do not have to imagine this process as loss. It is possible to imagine it as how a poem changes the world.
The incorporation of noise is part of how our poems dissipate. To return to Spicer, whom Nick Sturm mentions in this post:
“But things decay, reason argues. Real things become garbage. The piece of lemon you shellac to the canvas begins to develop a mold, the newspaper tells of incredibly ancient events in forgotten slang, the boy becomes a grandfather. Yes, but the garbage of the real world still reaches out into the current world, making its object, in turn, visible—lemon calls to lemon, newspaper to newspaper, boy to boy. As things decay they bring their equivalents into being.”
To live with the knowledge of this decay can be surprisingly reassuring. I am decaying even now, as are my poems. Of course a poem can be reproduced, but its reproduction will not leave its energy unchanged. Every second it is a different world, with different noise to affect the poem’s transmission. Or, as Spicer continues in his third letter to Lorca:
“…every place and every time has a real object to correspond with your real object—that lemon may become this lemon, or it may even become this piece of seaweed, or this particular color of gray in the ocean.”
A poem moves through the world, into the bodies of its readers, bringing with it the noise of its correspondences. And then the noise is not just noise, but gets absorbed into the message. The noise becomes a part of the news.
4.
Nick, in his first post on this subject, mentions Matvei Yankelevich’s anecdote about Daniil Kharms’ machine, “which he made of found scrap. When asked what it did, Kharms would retort, ‘nothing. It’s just a machine.’” That machine did not do “nothing,” though; it made people ask about its purpose. It was a question-producer. Or perhaps its work was to make Kharms make it in the first place.
This is (just) to say what if, in the way that a basketball is a machine that makes players jump, poems are machines whose work is to make us write them?
***
Heather Christle is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and a chapbook, The Seaside! (Minutes Books, 2010). Her poems have appeared in publications including The Believer, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and The New Yorker. She has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. She is the Web Editor for jubilat and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Western Massachusetts.
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The Hipster Games: “I do miss beer though.”
Mark Leidner: “the poetic is forced to grapple with the absurdity of a Hollywood imagination”
Ladies represent: Roxane Gay.
A fair while ago now, Robin and I talked about the VIDA Count. I guess pretty much everyone did. We wanted to ask a bunch of great writers who also happen to be ladies about their publishing experience and basically just open up a space to talk about gender and publishing, or call bullshit on it, or spout conspiracy theories.
This will be ongoing. This has to be ongoing.
Our first lady on the spot is the might Roxane Gay: to list all the ways in which this woman does awesome things for and about and with words is impossible. C0-editor at PANK, Essays Editor at The Rumpus and a fictioneer of sparkling lucidity.
Roxane Gay lives and writes in the Midwest.
