DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK

[dannielschoonebeek]

DAILIES

Incredibly honored and honestly a bit speechless to be named among the 2019 NEA fellows in poetry. Speechless why? I looked back over the poems I sent them, which I'd forgotten I sent them, and they are all on no uncertain terms about ripping out the people in the halls of power by the roots. In some poems violently, in some poems historically. When the NEA asked for an excerpt from the submission, they told me they couldn't publish the first one I sent them because it contained the word fuck. When I sent them another excerpt, they called me on the phone, not unapologetically, to tell me that the work was just too prickly and incisive for them to hitch their wagon to it right now and publish it on their site. Which, honestly, I understand. The people in the halls of power want this organization dead. Imagine a job where the psychopaths ruling your country constantly were trying to delete you. All of this happened during the longest government shutdown in United States history, brought about by the same scourges whose reasons for existing I am writing poems in determination to destroy. The offices of the NEA were shut down and silent for 32 days, I wasn't able to say a word about this for three months. None of it feels real, which makes it all feel that much more real. It's made me think a lot about my mom, who still has the same "save the arts" pin that she kept among her bills when I was a kid. She was the first person who explained to me what the NEA is, why it matters, why we keep pushing and voting and protesting to keep it alive. I wrote about this a bit more in the author statement they asked me to send them, which I believe they're posting in a short time. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

OFF-PISTE

First shot by me, taken at the Troutbeck residency back in February. Second shot by an actual photographer, one of the members of Historia Photography, who hung deep with us in the woods that week and get morale high. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

SE7EN

Introducing the seven co-directors behind Bushel Collective. Variously we’re farmers, poets, publishers, architects, musicians, organizers, poker players. Here we are photographed in our new home, 106 Main St. in Delhi, NY, by our friend Heather Phelps-Lipton, director of communications at the Catskill Center, who named Bushel one of 50 stewards of the Catskills and profiled us for a book celebrating individuals in the area who are doing the damn work.  Find out more about the book. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

SCRAWL

Go back to the village where you were born and open an arts collective, I fucking dare you. Visit us at bushelcollective.org. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

PRESSURIZED

I talked with David Olesky in the latest issue of The Brooklyn Review. I don’t really remember a lot of it, but I remember we talked about the novel I’m writing and I remember I said this: 

If we want to use The Inferno as a corollary: quitting a job is sort of paradise, getting fired from a job can be literal hell, but a person who finds himself laid off from a job in the United States often finds himself in limbo. It’s an in-between state whose setting is nothingness. I’m trying to speak to this problem, and while I think the story I’m telling offers some answers, it’s probably more honest to say that the answer is the story itself.  

Read the rest of the interview and check out the print over at BR headquarters.

[dannielschoonebeek]

COMEBACKERS

After three great years and another offsite year of blueprints, renovations, and buildout at our new home in Delhi, NY, the Bushel Collective returns! Starting this collective in 2015 was an absolute shot in the dark and working on it over the past few years with my six other co-directors has been the honor of a lifetime. If you find yourself in the upstate New York, come pay us a visit for art, poetry, books, film screenings, classes, and clothing swaps. You can also follow us on instagram. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

KEYS

Surreal and fun to read poems at the National Arts Club and play incognito among the rich upper crust and sneak around Gramercy Park ($5000 fine if you lose the key) and watch my beloved Oklahoma City Thunder get eliminated from the playoffs on a mega-surreal gamewinner from Dame Lillard while smoking on a balcony overlooking midtown. Their logo is kind of cool too. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

IS IT YOU

An excerpt from the novel I’m writing, It’s the War, appears in the latest issue of Washington Square Review, alongside many pals including Shane McCrae, Jameson Fitzpatrick, Mia Kang, and Iris Cushing. Thanks and shouts to Maggie Rose Millner, whose work I like a lot, for editing this one. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

AUF DEUTSCH

While living at Akademie Schloss Solitude this past year, I had the honor of working with German translator M. Brown on this limited edition dual-language chapbook of three new poems. Mike’s attention to the poems, as well as his incisive and seemingly endless grasp of the nuances of the German language, is a sight to behold. There’s something unmatched in beauty about spending hours on the phone every day with a translator, laboring over a single word or turn of phrase. The interior and exterior of the book were designed by Brazilian artist Ricardo Portilho, and the launch party, where we read the entire book in both languages, was curated by Elmar Mellert and Johanna Markert. If you’d like a copy, drop me a line. Dieses Buch wurde dazu geschrieben, den Fickern Angst zu machen. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

SAINT VS. SAINT

I’ve been gone a long time, living for seven months in Germany inside a castle with 30 other artists from around the world, writing novels, traveling to readings, writing poems, all of which means I haven’t stood behind podiums or microphones or barked in front of audiences in the United States for a long, long time. A week from today, Monday, September 24, I’ll give my first reading in the States in about a year alongside my friend Dan Poppick. This’ll be my first time reading at the Poetry Project, which is its own particular station of the cross for writers in NYC. Come see the dogs bark, ok? 

[dannielschoonebeek]

GUTS

It’s one of those sentences that’s hard to believe even as I’m writing it, but I’ve been editing the PEN Poetry Series since 2012, and we’re still up to no good today. Visit us, won’t you? Maybe you can start with “The Gut,” a new poem by Constantine Jones. Maybe you can spend the rest of your day exploring the archive. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

MAKING SENSE MAKING SENSE

I haven’t been publishing a lot of poems this year because lately all my time has been sponged up by writing a novel, but I’ve got a new poem called “Love Me Til I’m Dead” in print and online in the latest issue of The Harvard Advocate. I wrote the first draft of it in my head while I was walking east on 12th Street in Manhattan after leaving a bookstore, and it contains several stolen lyrics and images of oversized sweaty suits courtesy of Talking Heads, who it took me about 30 years to start liking. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

DEAD SWITCH

Lithub published my poem “Glasnost” last month on Inauguration Day. Each line in the poem is a phrase or fragment of a phrase that will get you red-flagged or etched onto a government watch list if you google it. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

ROOM BY ROOM

I’ve been writing a book-length poem called "Record" for a few years. It takes place entirely on May 3, 2011 (the day after the United States killed Osama bin Laden). This is the first section of the poem and also the first time an excerpt of it has been published. All my thanks to Saeed Jones, poetry editor over at Buzzfeed, for running it as their first poem of 2017. Auld lang syne, and all that, and the law won. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

SUNSHINE

Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 7AM, say goodbye to the apartment where I’ve lived for the past 29 months, drive straight through the snow to Brooklyn, open the door of the other apartment where I lay my head, kiss Emily, kiss our dog, then walk straight to Community Bookstore, where I’ll be reading from Trébuchet alongside friend and lifesource Sarah Gerard, author of the forthcoming book of essays Sunshine State, and we’ll ask each other a few questions and have a plastic cup of wine and pray for the city on the hill to burn all the way down to the plinths. Come out, come out, and let’s go to Soda Bar afterward. 

[dannielschoonebeek]

SALTED

Over at BOMB, Zöe Hitzig wrote a beautiful and hyper-smart review of Trébuchet:

“Danniel Schoonebeek's explosive sophomore poetry collection, Trébuchet, is a call to arms that challenges our contemporary American brand of capitalism and demands that we confront our own role in perpetuating it.

Schoonebeek's vision is one in which we "war" against ourselves and destroy our means of production thereafter, as Rome sowed salt in the fields after conquering Carthage to render the following harvests unyielding.

Trébuchet serves as a powerful reminder to revolt and to dissent—recognizing our own role in perpetuating the systems that we revolt against—and to restore the value of art and literature in in the process.”

[dannielschoonebeek]

DAS KAPITAL

Get ye to the latest issue of The Lifted Brow, the quarterly attack journal out of Australia, whose latest issue concerns all things capital and features excerpts from my in-progress novel, C’est la guerre, in which I skulk around Portland, OR and talk about life after the American workforce sucker-punches you cold in the jowls.