Interview about Poetic Obligation on blogtalkradio

Please check out the interview I did with Alaina Alexander on her blogtalkradio show, "Unobstructed." The topic was my recent book, Poetic Obligation, which came out from University of Iowa Press in April.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/2008/05/17/UNOBSTRUCTED-hosted-by-Alaina-R-Alexander

Currently listening : In Rainbows By Radiohead Release date: 2008-01-01

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Correction on Linda Russo’s info

    Dear all, I’m sorry, but I made a mistake on Linda Russo’s appointment for next year. She’ll be an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Washington STATE University.  My apologies to Linda.  gmj 

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Briante, Greenstreet, and Russo in Tulsa

Last week, poets Susan Briante, Kate Greenstreet, and Linda Russo all visited Tulsa for a reading on their current book tours.  I had a great time with them here.  We met for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Monday, March 10, and the collegiality was a much needed breath of fresh air for me in the poetic desert of Tulsa.  They visited my poetry writing class for a workshop that evening--their conversation and answers to my students’ questions presented a fine model of what it is to think and talk like poets. 

At 7:30, they read in the beautiful recital hall in the Tyrrell building on the University of Tulsa campus.  The Q&A afterwards was lively and provocative--notable was one audience member’s dissing of Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird as racist.  After the reading, we celebrated at McNellie’s Public House downtown.  My only regret was that I was so involved in conversation that I zoned out and let everyone pay for their own meals, a boneheaded move on my part.  However, I shall recompense everyone in some manner or other along the slow spin of the karmic wheel...Thank you Susan, Kate, and Linda for an memorable experience.  Below I inlcude my introduction to their readings:

I would like to welcome everyone to this very special evening of poetry.  It is special first because we are lucky to have with us three excellent poets—Susan Briante, Kate Greenstreet, and Linda Russo—w hen events like this usually just offer us one writer.  It is special likewise for a second reason.  Eating lunch with the three of them today outside on a bracing but sunny March day, I suddenly realized that we had dived in, without any hesitation, into a lively discussion about poetry and one of our favorite poets (it turns out), Lorine Niedecker.  The sheer joy I felt at that moment talking about poetry with serious and thoughtful people in a café on Cherry Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma made me realize what I had stayed with this vocation at all, despite its absolute absence of pay, its promise of little fame, and other challenges.  These three women have brought with them the spirit of poetic community.  Yes, we all know each other through various lines of connection—either virtual or actual, geographic or telegraphic, textual or verbal—and, yes, we share similar educational backgrounds, experiences, identities, influences, teachers, and friends—but the love of art and form and language bonds us across these various lines of demarcation.  For me, these three visitors emblematize and embody the open and dedicated community that marks poetry dedicated to innovation.

I’ll introduce each of the writers individually, going in alphabetical order, and we will have some time for questions at the end of the reading, which should take about an hour, so I encourage everyone to stay and take advantage of this opportunity to participate in the ongoing production of poetic community.

Our first reader is Susan Briante, who is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas (which is oddly enough two blocks from where I grew up).  After a year or so working for the old Tulsa Tribune as a reporter, Briante worked as an editor and a translator for the bilingual magazine Artes de México in Mexico City.  After seven years, she returned to the States received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA from Florida International.  Her latest book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, was released by Ahsahta Press in 2007. 

Kate Greenstreet is a poet, painter, graphic designer, and erstwhile professional blogger.  Her poetry blog, kickingwind.com, reflects on the life as a poet and features over 100 interviews with authors about their first books.  Greenstreet herself is the author of a first book, case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006), and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, forthcoming). Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta in 2009.  She lives in New Jersey and received a Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts in 2003.

Linda Russo, who received her PhD from SUNY Buffalo, currently teaches writing at the University of Oklahoma and has been a faithful supporter of poetry and the arts in Tulsa and all of Oklahoma.  She has organized readings in Norman and Oklahoma City as well as supervised a project by OU students on the sound of poetry.  Her latest book is Mirth, from Chax Press.  Next fall, she’ll be an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at Washington State University. 

. 

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The Colony Collaboration

More and more I am exploring collaboration as a way to get my own ego and author "authority" out of my poetry.  Below are links to four poems that Ryan, Sarah, Melanie and I wrote while drinking at a bar called (somewhat ironically) The Colony.  We used a modified exquisite corpse method (modified meaning lubricated by much cheap beer).  The texts are housed at Sarah's blog:
the colony 1
the colony 2
the colony 3
the colony 4

Enjoy.  It was lots of fun for us. gmj

Currently listening : Highway 61 Revisited By Bob Dylan Release date: 01 June, 2004

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Morph 36

Don’t tell me what to do, depending on lack.  Close down the fort, old close the front door to friends.  Use the ladder to get off the bisexuals and, however tempting, don’t tempt redemption.  Parataxis Reform to comfort confrontation when this deictic writes.  I morph re: insignificant other.  No me with space; uptake agreements.  The me, another paradox, an Other I.  I.  A one-word sentence, both verb, noun and object in case of the blues.  Hope rightly rifts noise from the well-oiled hinge in expectation of you.  Case the case, just not there.  Control consciousness in case of injustice.  Off-hand lies tell me there’s no going beyond what’s ageless, and long before gone, we went beyond the bay beyond being.  The ho pricks higher the race wristwatch, while passenger gauging gore fades until nights repeat.  Twenty percent of those were one, curtains of the human, twenty percent being into slumming.  Officially the haves have been bested by curtaining where chilling and is also in the tongue—this is my own form of "no."  Try a disposable warrantee; pat me and keep me.  Mini ads phase what’s out and auf, sell out but you add.  I matter to my own—this is inescapable.  The voice questions with a lengthy period to mark enough ownership and ads show what’s mine.  Voice imperatives vie for the imperial watching.  Watch the listening and listen to the straying of dogs.  A tentative material, our nightly fire—the very ten is this fire.  From materialism, something good, such as advice from the world, "Withdraw, can’t we just withdraw?"  Word in my head I must keep closed: You do well to never stray from marriage.  Ripe advice.  Such good cats honor and fight fierce.  Avoid the "let’s make something."  To phone in the getting off and the lies, face the fun in the ocean and fan storms in the desert.  Riding on the pumps, see sump in happen.  On the phone, make dears get lies, ocean in the face, an orphanage is fun, etc.  Morph changes earth and morphing the meta makes hearth the changeling.  A changeling of the garb hanged in the closet, as a nervous heart voice unchanged.  His are what sotto voce means.  Egg nog going solo so go-go goes heart the changed, gone to gong.  "You" goes to the heart of the question.  Going, going, golem.  Yourself heart.   The art is the matter.

Currently listening : Between Shadows and Sunrise By Congress of a Crow

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Morph 35--Cheryl

1. Don't tell me what to do.

2. Don't do what I tell you.

3. You tell what I don't.

1. Close your mouth.

2. Close my mouth.

3. Mouth the closing.

1. Connect to absence.

2. Blend with the issue.

3. Lack the lawless art.

1. Secretly get it off.

2. Genuinely sound agreeable.

3. Rapidly impersonate a gathering.

1. You go.

2. I go.

3. From where.

1. Sigh, ache, pull.

2. Into tissue.

3. Informal sounds.

1. We are distinct units.

2. We are untied.

3. We are spared.

1. Forage.

2. For age.

3. Or.

1. Teach me to depend on myself.

2. Teach me to depend on a self.

3. Reach in.

1. What position do you suggest?

2. Which teeth guarantee rhythm?

3. Whose question tempts?

1. Close.

2. Form.

3. Urge.

1. Success depends.

2. Love depends.

3. Depending on.

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Morph 34

1.

Close

                        mouth

            indistinct                                                sounds

                          reference                                 invariable

                                                                 with

                                                            form

                 her

                                    success

                                                                        pending

                                                                        design

                   a

                        gest                  to      connect     to

                                                                    absence

            a tax

                all

                   lack                                    an

                                                   issue

                                                        blending

                                                                        law and

                                                                            art

2.

                                                Get off

                           secretly         with genuine sounds

sighs

agreeable

In person

            gather

            rapid

                    aching

                              pull

                                                into tissue

            bites      bare      wood

                                    love

                                                melting

<span style="">fort       door. Friends             get off

and stop                                    the music

            distinct units                               form     sounds

eventual                                         pair

sweats

3.

                                populate your

                        pasture                          for        urge

            to turn                          social   

revolution

               inform                                   transitions

            of humans                                             depending

on the                           teaching of

                                                                                    self

            suggest                                      tissue, connecting

                 on the human plane                           in position

                                                guaranteeing            teeth

            blending                                                in rhythm

                  with                        claws                I suggest this process

                         smelting                             tempting

Currently listening : Taking The Long Way By Dixie Chicks Release date: 23 May, 2006

11:30 AM - 4 Comments - 5 Kudos - Add Comment

Morph 33 -- Cheryl Pallant

Hold down the fort. Close the front door. Friends, use the ladder. Get off the bicycles and stop foaming at the mouth. Drum the music of the spheres.

Secrete logic in distinct units or secretly call a taxi. Seed form with genuine sounds - blasts, sighs, ughs, guffaws. Reference animals as stable, Grade A selves, eventual, invariable, agreeable, as disclosable as a pair of jeans or an unarmed sweat shirt.

In person, rest above the cut, populate your morphing polynomials with a rowing crew, a pod of dolphins, a pasture for persimmons or chairs for social reform. Urge one and All to turn the key and gather for social alterations, the cultivation of a self revolution.

Each form informs animals. Each in rapid succession transitions from plant into a paraphrase of humans stalking a body expansively, sometimes furtively, depending on the grade of the land, the ray of light, the teaching of evolution or intelligent design. If your jeans slide down, for -od sake, reach for the waist and pull yourself up.

Suggest the unsuggested, easily digestible, absorbed into tissue, connecting to a process attainable on the human plane, remodeled from the old,  in position of absence that points to presence, a tax guaranteeing refund, bites with teeth bared, wood blending with metal, rain with fire. Gallop into the night in rhythm with relatives with cloven hooves or claws and don't look black.  I suggest this process before tossing the key and smelting for new artillery, however tempting.

Currently listening : Too High to Die By Meat Puppets Release date: 25 January, 1994

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Morph 32

Form 32

In significant reform, I write this deictic.  When comfort confronts.  To morph re:

In later use also: In the course of its life cycle, as if forming the worn in their mouths.

Hum the music of the fears.

A discrete phonological unit inserted parataxis, a variant form.  Of an animal or

plant produced by genetic differences; any of the distinctions become sound,

eventually degrading unstable.   

The person, I cut hears the rest and urges the monkey troop avail new social forms pre-

sent in a polymorphic population.  He places them in a discrete series of paragraphs.  

The crew gathered the alliteration.

Each of the different forms exhibited by an animal or plant in rapid transitional phra-

ses to leave this sector.  Stalking rays, the body teaches evolution.  Pensively, she en-

graves five.  Sliding genes down.

Thus the relative proportions of the planarian are attained by a remodelling of the old

tissue. I would suggest that this process of transposition be called a absence of morph-

allaxis.  Tempt redemption.

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Morph 31

            Agreements    take up            space

and time          and time          and time

            tempt the redemptive

            redeem the temporal

            not                   her

            not                   her

           an     not          other

Your I              Your I            odious

            break reforms the last

            stalling frays fibers

Guileless                     Insignificant

Wake up          your                 magnificence

            if                      can

            if                      cannot

what he did to him he did to him

not her            not another

            I am                             my other

in agree           meant              with me

with me           No                   other

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