#banango lit

[banangolit]

Banango Street Issue 11 has landed! Featuring poetry from Caroline Cabrera, Kamden Hilliard, Meg Wade, Iliana Rocha, Grace Shuyi Liew, Jayme Russell, Michelle Lin, Janelle DolRayne, Jason McCall, Nina Puro, Nathan Lipps, Rj Ingram, Elizabeth Schmuhl, Caleb Kaiser, Jennifer Metsker, Tahir Hamut (translated by Darren Byler and Dilmurat Mutellip), Kenan Ince, Daniel T. O’Brien; fiction by Matthew Fogarty, Kirby Johnson, Duncan B. Barlow; nonfiction by Alexis Pope, Muriel Leung, Peyton Burgess, Liz Blood, Sarina Bosco; and cover art by Emma Zurer.

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We are also excited to announce that Issue 12 will be all-creative nonfiction, edited by our own Katie Jean Shinkle and Issue 11’s Muriel Leung. Submissions are open now and close on May 17th. As always, submit through Submittable:

http://banangostreet.submittable.com/submit

The call for submissions follows:

The word essay derives from the French essayer, which means "to try." In the spirit of our upcoming all creative nonfiction issue of Banango Street, we invite you to question the essay's origins, form, and the implied failure of the attempt, as well as to live in the celebration of success, the experiment, the expansion and extrapolation, how the essay is playing and in play, how it lives and breathes and dies and resurrects.

Let us know the ways you insist and persist. We want to hear about your quietest or loudest, your most hazardous attempts and your necessary and rudest awakenings, we want your screams and your whispers. We want to see how you embody the essay, how the essay embodies you, how you fill and empty it. If the essay splinters and falls apart, so be it.

We are especially seeking work from writers who are frequently underrepresented in literary conversations. This includes people of color, women, those who identify as non-cisgender and/or non-gender conforming, queer and/or transgender perspectives/LGBTQIA voices, disabled voices, etc. We want to hear your narratives, we want to see your experiments, we intend to hold a space for you.

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Finally, we recently released our 2nd Banango Editions echap, Elinor Abbott's “Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life?”, a must-read to get you in the mood for writing some gut-wrenching nonfiction of your own.

[banangolit]

The Banango Interview: Caitlin Neely

Caitlin Neely’s “After Sappho” & “Tinder Language” appeared in the tenth issue of Banango Street. Neely’s poems also appear in DIAGRAM, Thursh, & Devil’s Lake. She’s an MFA candidate at the University of Virginia. I had a great time emailing back & forth with her for this interview. Keep reading if you want to know more about poems & MFAs & writing.

Carter: The works of other poets are integral to both of these pieces. "After Sappho" uses language from Anne Carson's Sappho translations & "Tinder Language" is a response to Brenda Hillman. I'm a big fan of work that relies on other poets, but I'm always worried, when I write these types of pieces, that they aren't doing enough to rise above merely being imitations. One reason I loved "Tinder Language" so much is that I could feel the Brenda in it, but I didn't feel overwhelmed by the Brenda. How did you find the right balance of your voice/ the other voices in the poems we published?

Neely: I constantly struggled with balancing my voice and these "other" voices. When I'm reading and engaging with a poet's language, it tends to creep up in my own. I try my best to embrace multiple voices in my first drafts. If I shut out something that's happening organically (like these voices) it's going to be that much harder to get at a poem's center. Once I begin revision I start working on balancing it out—making sure the poem sounds like "me." This usually involves playing around with individual words/phrases and punctuation. Sometimes line breaks as well. It's also a lot easier to maintain balance when I'm focused on the voice as a thematic entity. For example, I embraced Brenda's use of fire imagery and scientific names in Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire as I was writing and revising "Tinder Language."

Now I'm writing a lot of persona poems so I tend to channel the voice of whoever the language is embodying, as opposed to a specific poet.

Carter: I started a project where I was going to write my own version of one of my favorite books, but I felt, after three poems, that I couldn't sustain the project without letting too much of her voice take over the poems. It's tough. What voices are you using for the persona poems? Persona is one of the things I almost never experiment with, because I feel just--so bad at taking on the voice of someone/something else. I'm always worried that I won't be able to do those voices justice.

Neely: That sounds like an interesting project! Sorry it didn't work out. I can definitely understand the difficulty; especially when you're covering an entire book.

Mostly female voices from religion and mythology: Merope, Persephone, Undine, Eve, Mary and others. I also have a Chopin poem which fits and doesn't fit. In undergrad I was dead set on not writing persona poems. I didn't think I could do it. I was very much on the personal 'I' path with my poetry. Anything outside of that realm felt impossible. But I gradually changed my tune last fall. Maybe it was the new environment. It started with a poem called "Season" which is half addressing Sylvia Plath. Then I wrote a poem mostly from the viewpoint of Persephone (I say mostly because I don't think it's possible to write persona without injecting some of yourself into it).

And it felt really freeing. I was saying things in my poems I never would have said otherwise. I also sometimes worry I'm not doing their voices justice. At the very least I hope I'm bringing a different perspective to their stories.

Carter: That reminds me of a few things: Mary Biddinger's chapbook about St. Monica, & Caroline Crew's recent book about saints. Mythology has always been this well that all poets are supposed to draw from, but it surprises me how little that well is actually used. Good to hear you're drawing from some of those voices! So, you run a blog called The MFA Years, where MFA students blog about their experiences. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails/ what you've learned from doing it?

Neely: The MFA Years is a blog that follows first and second year creative writing students through graduate school. They blog about their experiences teaching, writing, navigating workshop and basically anything else that goes along with the MFA. We also interview graduate students and publish guest blog posts. I edit everything, manage the social media accounts, occasionally solicit people for interviews and posts, and answer any questions that come our way.

I've learned how necessary it is for students to talk about their experiences. We've received quite a few emails and tweets from people thanking us for sharing snippets of our lives. There are things happening in programs and in the creative writing world that need to be written about, discussed and, most importantly, stopped (more recently—Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, the list goes on). I'm glad The MFA Years is contributing to some of these discussions. And I've discovered so many people outside of our blog who are talking about what the MFA is, what it does and what it perpetuates. I recommend reading VIDA's columns and features. Misty Ellingburg's MFA Confessions is great as well.

Carter: I didn't know the MFA Confessions site, so thanks for linking that! It's great that you're providing a platform for discussing the MFA-- it's a subject that so often breaks down into a fight between GET AN MFA & LOL BYE MFA, & the focus isn't as much on the variety of experiences in the MFA. Keeping on the subject of MFAs, you're at Virginia, yeah? Which is also where Lisa Russ Spaar teaches, yeah? YOU LUCKY YOU. What are a couple of big things you've learned in your first year of grad school that have helped your writing?

Neely: Lisa and everyone else in the program are the best. Seriously. Some of the books Lisa assigned in her fall course, "The Poetics of Ecstasy," really changed the way I was approaching my poetry and reminded me of how important it is to read, read, read. It's easy to forget this. Brian Teare's Pleasure gave me permission to get weird with my syntax. Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters blew me away in terms of the language. I think she's partially the reason why I started writing more persona poems.

And then during my spring semester I'd walk into Rita Dove's office with a line I felt wasn't original because it wasn't weird enough. And she'd give me a funny look and tell me that wasn't the case. So I also learned I don't have to be strange all the time. It's okay to write things that "make sense" (in terms of my sense-making). I've never thought I was good at writing "straight forward" lines, but I'm incorporating them more into my poetry and it gives me a thrill when I do.

Carter: I love that Teare book. I gave a copy of it to a student to borrow last time I taught a poetry workshop, though I haven't read her work since then so I don't know how the Teare book changed any of her work. It sounds like you're getting the chance to experiment with working in different modes of poetry at once. That's something I often struggle with, & when I put my manuscript together I ended up keeping one of those modes & saving the other for some other project. Do you ever feel like you're writing poems that you can't conceive of eventually fitting together in a manuscript? If so, how do you combat that?

Neely: He's so good! And he has a new book forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Sometimes I have poems I don't think will fit with the others but not usually. When I decide not to include poems it's normally because I don't have the creative energy/interest to revise them. Or because they're not good. I'm pretty loose when I'm compiling a manuscript. I think my different modes/styles can come together as long as they're connected on a thematic and/or emotional level.

But when I do run into that problem I'll save them for later. Maybe they will never see the light of day again or will be published in a journal but not a book (if that happens!) or become relevant five years from now. I have poems I like but have pushed aside for various reasons and no one else besides me will probably ever read them. It's a little disheartening but it's mostly oh well. There's always more.

Carter: What poets are you currently reading?

Neely: Right now I'm taking a class about sequences and series so: Nick Flynn, Mary Ann Samyn, Claudia Emerson, Bhanu Kapil, Louise Gluck, Greg Orr, among others. I've also been reading a lot of graphic novels.

Carter: Alright, here's a tough one: Why do you write?

Neely: I write because I enjoy messing up and messing with language.

[banangolit]

Banango Street Issue 10: now live! We’re so thrilled to debut our brand new website. Featuring poems by Claudia Cortese, Kat Finch, Bianca Stone, Ginger Ko, Nathan Hauke, Eunsong Kim, Mike Young, Susan Yuzna, Rochelle Hurt, Alicia Catt, Jane Mead, Erin J. Mullikin & David Wojciechowski, Caitin Neely, P.J. Williams, Francesco Grisanzio, & Melissa Ho. Fiction by William VanDenBerg, Erin Armstrong, & Meredith Luby. Nonfiction by Sarah Xerta & Joshua R. Helms. Artwork by Ben Austin.  http://banangostreet.com/issue10/ http://banangostreet.com/issue10/ http://banangostreet.com/issue10/

[carrieabigstick]

A Review of Banango Street's All Women's Issue, Edited by Emily Kendal Frey and Julia Cohen

Heather* is late for his conference. I have been in the habit of grabbing the biggest cup for coffee at the shitty gas station down the street. The guy behind me tells the cashier, whose nails are always wild and long and decorated, he’s SO MAD AT HEATHER ABOUT THE CARROT CAKE. While I wait for Heather, I settle into coffee / poetry bathing. The cup is “a huge screen at the edge of the room.” It is “a bit basement” in that it makes me feel like I’m able to hide in the library, this room full of brand new shoes and studded hats and writing center consultants watching youtube videos of FIRE. “What is an act of poetry,” asks Eileni Sikelianos. I think it is my constant return to the gas station, to the cup, to the uncertainty I always have about what I should do in between classes, in between the margins of “blue-evening-light dresses.” These poems remind me of something I have tried to explain in class. The possibility for the small word to blow up / the iceberg / the privately owned russian rocket in the sky. “I can pluck and pluck,” says Sikelianos to Heather, wherever he is. The possibility for the largest concept, for the unreachable, to suddenly feel plush, is here: “Sappho, how’s it going?” I, suddenly, have the distinct feeling like I’ve dreamed of Sikelianos before. We rode in a limo and ate popsicles. We were “leaping out of that terrible habitat,” or screaming through the moonroof. 

I misread a line in Cynthia Arrieu-King & Hillary Gravendyk’s “Cautionary Arrow" as, ”Is there a word for when you pull / a nail out of a wall?” as “Is there a word for when you pull / a nail out of a wolf?” Heather isn’t sure she is using the text right. We talk about what it means to afford something a necessary amount of complexity, what it means to refuse received language. There’s another student, Heather, who can’t spell piano, who can’t make any sentence coherent, and I want. I want / I have desires for him to be able to make sentences / not on the world’s terms / but on his / and to have them be understandable / radiating. ”We grow old and find / our hearts in a series of removals. A grid with each box / erased, the paper soft as tissue paper. But we know what we want.” Heather tells me school is his favorite place today in class. I can’t help it / how much I have desires for Heather to be able to voice his complexity further / or more / or continuously / or in new places / or to have all the power that has been denied to him / that he deserves.

There is a boy and a girl in the class with the same name (Heather). The boy wrote in his I Remember paper (based on Joe Brainard’s I Remember) that he had a crush on the girl with his name. Today his girlfriend, who is not the girl who has the same name as him, found me in the library. He was going to be late. I told her his conference was actually a couple days from now. I tapped the schedule. I realize how little I know about their lives. How close I feel to knowing something. How scared I feel / driving home / to face my own life / my lack of a life / my exhaustion / and sometimes, weeping. 

"Crybaby Bridge," Kathy Goodkin: 

"Her skeleton when I kill her is a plastic water bottle,” says Lindsey Webb / a sunflower / a sunflower that studs the rain. What it means to be crushed / explosively / or delicately. As if you were gathered to be crushed. Heather tried out Heather’s new scooter and cut himself. He sits down and bleeds. He gets up and grabs disinfectant from the writing consultant’s table, rubs it into the wound while we talk about Whitman. “a flooded church.” I tell him he should take a poetry class from my boyfriend, Heather, next semester when he transfers to FSU. I tell him, soon, we’re going to go outside / and live / take measurements of the weird way blossoming occurs here. Across the street, a small burst of white dangles onto the tendons / of light / the electric lines. “Being a round chamber, I emit a low / series of vibrations.” 

"I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened I nearly never happened", is a beast Hajara Quinn says. I listen to Blood Orange's "It Is What It Is” over and over while I read the poem. I lay in the bed / in the middle of the bed / last Saturday / and told my boyfriend that I’m worried I’m depressed / that I know I’m depressed / in a vein / clipped with ice or steam / that I’m in love but horrifically / exhausted / unable to collapse in / release / A Garden / because I'm so rattled / unpaid still by one place. As we walk into Winn Dixie, I tell Heather I meant what I said / that I am sad / in a difficulty of sadness / unable to balance adjuncting / with 

_________________________ happiness  Not a factual brink Not a smoking quibble Not a barn collapsing Not unused implements or a hammer’s bass

God, Khadijah Queen, do I love that drag in the title. God, do I live there // ?? 

I don’t want him to worry. I’m sad / but not undone / not unwilling to find / to be found. You are brave, Heather says, with just some glass in his mouth. We buy gummi worms / beer. 

"What is understood to be susceptible," says Heather Napualani Hodges poem, "Each Love is a Selfish Love."  Language, I say, to my class of Heathers, is a beast / an animal that can, suddenly, be the thing that kills you. I mean this to be, I say, a great source of energy. What if Language were alive? "I’ve loved most everything in my life incorrectly," says Heather Napualani Hodges to my class of Heathers. Everyone turns over their papers. They are done with their quiz. 

Heather sits down. Her pregnant friend who drove her here is nearby, stretching. Sometimes on the drive home, at the stop lights, I put my one foot out the window, stretching. Sometimes, I scream out, ANIMAL CHALLENGE. Heather is worried that to effectively address her argument, she will have to introduce conspiracy theories. I tell her, for this paper, there can only be one source. Oozy woods, is how Shelly described the coral in the sea. As it first emerged, parts of the world. Oozy woods, my body so slowly wrecked in it, a raw glint. "A story, to represent the truth. / It’s supposed to help,” says Kate Greenstreet. What did I say in my status. I always imagine Greenstreet is made of deer. I meant that. 

Heather's nails are painted the same color as her t-shirt. This is the only time I really get to see many of them up close. I like that / about this. It “queers the feminine fleshed / revival so nicely,” says Soham Patel's "song:". I’m terrified I’m growing stupid / not reading as much as I’m used to / not writing as much as I’m used to. I don’t mean that in a sense of / wanting to bathe in the sun. I want to see my face / to make sense of its movement / my own intimacy / where it is was / or is / lapping. ”resonances / surprise some power holders holding no standard—from the gutter / in my glitter girl excess and frame,” says the poem, licking my wrist.  

I drive in the dark. I can’t believe how different it becomes / crossing the state lines (Florida-Georgia). Sometimes I drive with my boot stuck out the window because sometimes I fear I am becoming a cowardly person. "Suddenly I’m a cowardly person," says Yona Wallach as translated by Linda Zisquit. It is important, though, that the title is only “Suddenly I Become.” I will survive this and not consider it a weakness that I have worded it as such. Though I know there is more out there / blades / slicked sheets.

"RE: RE: yr a raccoon.” A few days ago, I wrote you an email / in the hope that it might reach you. A few days ago, the police swarmed our place looking for an intruder that had been squatting at the abandoned home across the street. The woman below us, let's call her Heather, says she saw a pizza being delivered there. Heather tells me, since our class, she can't stop using the word chartreuse. Alex Niemi joins us in “committing black magic with a chartreuse word / by the paint cans." How do we create boundaries, I ask the class. What does it mean for us to be broken into? 

Sometimes I think about drinking / with the adjuncting / the problem of the rock meeting the flow / a coursing over. I am wary / careful. Heather adjusts the camouflage strap on his sunglasses. "In the drinking I believed things," says Hannah Brooks-Motl. Heather's attention getter in his intro paragraph is something about how we gauge the consequences of a potential mistake before it happens and how that gauging cedes once we’ve been caught / and the consequences simply become real. “The ancient way kept complexity from hands.” What is this, Heather screeched during the movie. What is this supposed to be? I wore all black today, to the conferences, to class. I don’t know. All black / the stop light / the wrap light. Sometimes, I told Heather, you have to bury yourself / leave yourself / dug in. 

Fred Moten says, Fred Moten says, Fred Moten says, that when you are born at sea. Oh deep / slit clenching. Mourn something / or with urgency. Oh Koch $ / flooding into education. “The system has recovered from a serious error,” says Dana Levin. 

"Hey Mrs. Lorig This is Heather, I got your email," says Heather. "I'll be there at 2:00." She signs it, "Ars longa vita brevis," which means "Art is long / Life is short." Heather won’t look me in the eye when we talk in person. "she is happier / in this poem not looking at the sky,” says Katie Mertz. How long do I look at you / proximity? How long do I look into you / cut off bullet vial? I put our black cat, Heather, on my lap, and I quote Keats for her, “All say / that ye may love / in spite of beaver hats.” 

I haven't made time for running. I worry / my softness. I stand at the sink and grip my self. I worry / my softness. Constellated foam, I think, looking for the car in the parking lot. "Big Myths were present," Sara Sutter's poem utters to the squirrels loose in the galaxy. Next week I will go to a workshop meant to teach me how to fill out learning outcome paperwork. For each paper, you fill in the bubbles accordingly / the bubbles that reflect the intensity to which goals were met. I ask a student, what she imagines the jungle feels like. "Overwhelming / layers," she says. I nod.

"Nowife Makes a New Skin," Bronwyn Valentine:

I forgot Bhanu. How did I forget Bhanu? I will combine her and Ana Božičević. Few people / are a bending or soft statue / a forest / a city of skin / as these two are. It is time for the onslaught / the barrage / the inner tube slaughter. "Is this a magazine," Bhanu asks. It is. It is not. It is a crystal bouquet, I say. It is "[l]ike I'm not from a different time," says Božičević / inside the floating flowers / the unexcused gorge. I see in terms of unexplained desert. I see in terms of encroachment. Each week, I cry some. There is a question of (my) uselessness / that is to come / that comes. “Melissa, café. This unrecorded life. Small ecosystems where we don’t see what’s being destroyed or what’s emerging. Acts that don’t reproduce. A question of uselessness. (Bataille.) Melissa brings the coffee and then the cream, in a little jar," says the rouge notebook. "You're right to despise / And fear imagining. / Stay in the rot," is sometimes the Božičević I want to scream / do scream / to the nothing in the field / the small burst that tears away. "That shakes in windy weather / above the rusty heather," says Christina Rossetti in the middle of the Goblin Market. Poetry, you cannot leave me. Pigments, please tie me to the cliff / leave me there floating. "Floating," says Božičević. "The inability to perform it,"says Bhanu, floating while lying down. Please know I miss you, is what I think when I fold the jewel in half. When I watch it crush me.

<3 / "Shitting Flowers**",

C

*All my students are named Heather. 

**Sara Sutter. Also, this symbol * looks like a shitting flower. 

Take us out, shitting flowers. 

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[altlitgossip]

Tonight

You are a reflection 

of either Satan 

or a smiling 

translucent

mountain on my

bedroom ceiling

I miss you terribly

I am looking at

pictures of the 

Northern Lights on

the internet

_ Dalton Day

http://banangolit.com/post/87789160800/dalton-day-interview

[banangolit]

Banango Street Issue 8 Coming July 15th Featuring: Laurie Saurborn Young, Michael Mlekoday, Kimberly Ann Southwick, Tyler Cain Lacy, Caitlin Scarano, Brandi Wells, Sally Delehant, Mary Biddinger, Jesse Donaldson, Portia Elan, Jill Khoury, Franklin K.R. Cline, Adam Boehmer, Joshua Ware, Ellene Glenn Moore, Olivia Kate Cerrone, Justin Lawrence Daugherty, Zeke Hudson, Blythe Baird, Emily O'Neill With artwork by: Josh Pinson

[banangolit]

Interview: Gale Marie Thompson

Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2014) and two chapbooks. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Better, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Best New Poets 2012, Guernica, and others. She edits Jellyfish Magazine and writes, teaches, and lives in Athens, GA. We interviewed Gale about her Elizabeth Bishop cover poem, [“Cal, have you ever gone through caves?”], in Banango Street's recent Covers Issue. You can also read two of Gale's poems, "No Heart" and "Explorer in the Classic Mold," in Issue 5.

RH: Most all of the pieces in the covers issue are after a particular poem or poet, but judging by the title and some Googling, [“Cal, have you ever gone through caves?”]  appears to be inspired by a letter that Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell, paraphrased by Lowell. How did this particular cover come about? What was the process of writing it like?

GT: I love that you followed the title’s history—it makes me so happy! Well, I’ll say it came about through a kaleidescope of things. I took a seminar in my PhD program last year based entirely on Bishop, whom I just adore. We read all of her poems, prose (short stories, travel writings, etc.); then, we went through One Art, her collected letters, which I’d read in college and could never get enough of. The collection of letters between her and Robert Lowell were put into a book called Words in Air that came out in 2008. She called Lowell “Cal,” which is my favorite nickname for anyone. (Speaking of nicknames, here’s a little factoid: a young Robert Lowell used to give his friends “bear names,” and that’s how you knew whether he liked you or not.) Their relationship is one of the deepest for me, despite its serious issues—it’s how I view my relationships with my own, close, poet friends. It is a love deeper than most, accepting faults and defending to the death. It’s a platonic, idealistic love, a la Mulder and Scully (and yes, I know, they ended up non-platonic, but you get my drift).

The letter to Lowell including the lines, “Cal, have you ever gone through caves?” and so forth, which Lowell pretty much used verbatim in his poem, was written in February 1970. This was three years after her longtime love Lota’s sudden death. Bishop was desperate. She had worked for years on an elegy to Lota, drafting over and over again this replaying of her death. She never finished. Reading these drafts in Edgar Allen Poe and the JukeBox is haunting—it’s painfully obvious she’s having a hard time “mastering disaster,” as she says in “One Art.” And here’s a gut-puncher: One of the lines in the poem is, “No coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you.” As you can probably tell, that plays a little part in the poem. So all that comes in when I think of the letter. And, that horrible thing called optimism, where you really just wish you could give up everything, but instead you have this nagging hope that if you just hang on for a little bit longer, you’ll come out of the cave.

So, I’m a PhD student at the University of Georgia, specializing in “the poetics of memory,” for lack of better words—and the way Bishop’s work deals with loss is a big part of my interests. I am obsessed with, and have written about, the unique way Bishop views memory, and the art(ifice) with which she portrays it. I won’t go into too much detail, but her poems end up resulting in both a recognition of loss and an acknowledgment of its persistence—a continual mourning. That the work of grieving and attempting to fill in for that loss can never be completed. And all of this leads to me writing the poem. 

It started out slowly—I thought it was a failure at first. I just played with some Bishop imagery, some things I’ve written about Bishop, and then sort of faltered. Then at some point, whatever it was that was supposed to bit, bit. I suppose it had to do with a recent personal loss as well.

  RH: The poem deploys repetition at key moments—"where others won’t wake up they won’t wake up” and the “diver”/ “please dive down” towards the end. We also see this in the two poems of yours we published in Issue 5. Can you talk about the role of repetition in your work? 

GT: Haha, I guess it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I never noticed all of this until recently, and then was pretty insecure about it. But now I’ve gotten both used to it and fulfilled by it—I do repeat often, and for a couple of reasons, I think, both practical and otherwise. Part of it, I’m sure, is just a tic I have to keep going, to work out a thought or emotion without having to disconnect or pull away, or feel the pressure to fully complete and connect what I’m trying to say right away—I can just keep going, and work it out in my own way.

I’m thinking also that it has to do with that obsessive compensation for loss, maybe—I’m reminded of Freud’s “fort-da” case study in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. (If you don’t know about this case study please go look it up now because it’s so strange and necessary!!!!) So, basically, in this case study, a young child ends up obsessively repeating these  words in a game (“fort” means “gone” and “da” means “here” in German) in attempts at substituting the loss of his mother. Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy includes the “fort-da” incident as an example of “successful mourning,” in which the child compensates for this loss by substituting language in for her absence. Except, I’m much more interested in that mourning that cannot be easily made redemptive or easily whole again. It’s what my brain does—what all our brains do to some extent—it replays and obsesses and tries again and again to master trauma and rebuild the walls that were torn down during the traumatic event. I can see this happening during the “they won’t wake up” part, and Bishop’s “no coffee can wake you” lines.

  RH: In this poem, as in the two from Issue 5, you have these ending lines that just blow me away (and the repetition plays a part in this). It’s like the entire poem builds up to an ending that just…creates this space of silence and gravity that echoes out. How do you usually arrive upon the endings to your poems?

GT: Oh wow, thanks so much for all of these really thoughtful, kind questions, and I’m sorry I am babbling on and on! For this poem in particular, as I mentioned before, I was having some trouble getting through until something bit. Once it bit (which I think was around the time of the “it won’t quit”), it was a pretty big rush. I began to put things, a lot of repeating things, in italics, and…well, I lost my breath. I almost typed “I lost my shit,” but I’ll say “breath” and call it a day. I had a good three minutes of getting out the remaining things I wanted to get out in the poem, then I had to, well, abandon it. I didn’t finish, I just had to get out of the moment, and I suppose repetition helps me, perhaps, settle the score before I can leave.

Although in recent poems I’m doing a similar feeling but the opposite of repetition, really—where I sort of just take little steps out of a poem with either a fragment or small piece of something dropped so that it doesn’t seem like I’ve just run away.

RH: Let’s turn this issue’s concept on its head. If you wanted to see someone cover your work, which one poem of yours would you choose? And who would you ask to cover it?

GT: Hmmm…it’s really more series of poems that I’m working on right now, and am desperate for other voices for it. So, I started writing a long serial poem about 3 years ago called Observatories, that deals with the construction and survival of memory using Joseph Cornell ephemera, space, snow, World War II, food, bodies, etc.—that’s it in a nutshell—and have never really felt finished with it. Then, earlier this year I started writing a pretty deeply personal long poem called Helen or my Hunger. I actually started writing Helen for my Adrienne Rich seminar—I was trying to explore her use of the serial poem, together with issues of trauma, memory, the female body and its experience, being an identified woman in the world. I ended up taking some parts from Observatories and blending them into Helen because they seemed to grow into each other—in actions or images occurring both infinitely far away (deep space) and intimately close up (the body); they both exist in the feelings of both awe and utter terror when we consider the infinite.

So what I’m trying to say is that I’m lost in these two worlds of poems, which may in actuality be the same poem, and what I would want more than anything is to swim through these worlds with another voice echoing back to me, letting me know how far I’ve gone, where we’re going, or even just to let me know—we’re okay, I’m here. Is that super corny? I feel like I need to keep calling out, “are you still with me? are you still here?” all the time. 

Here’s a little bit:

dear Helen, our dead names are on your tongue

my space in this seat of language, patient


as the teardrop shape of a hand


as it dances through the other hand

I can't change that: I wait until the hunger

returns, ever small this loss of canopy


That it is difficult to settle this hollow,

that I bleed above my lip and don't mind


the mechanism: that I deserve this riddled hunger 

So, okay, who I would like to help me with these poems. My poet-loves, Anne Cecelia Holmes and Caroline Cabrera, yes yes. They’re already ones I call out to a lot. Anne’s poems have such a fierce language and hearty/hardy voice that I’ve rarely read one of her poems without having my hand involuntarily on my heart—I called her the Barbra Streisand of poetry one time. Inside joke. And the Justin Timberlake of poets is Caroline Cabrera. Her poems just “say the thing,” as my creative writing students and I call it. You know how we live in this mundanity and see so many patterns in the mundanity, but can’t seem to just get down to it and say the thing, like it’s a poem? That’s Caroline. She does that. Seeing patterns in the everyday and blowing them up to mean everything. Also, Russ Sara Woods, and Carrie Lorig, with their bellowing, throaty love for the world—although very different writers—are both voices I’d love to have call back as well. RSW and I have in particular talked about this sort of sprawling, specifically female voice in poems, re: Stevie Nicks, so I think she and my poems would get along just so well. <3

  RH: And finally, because we ask this in every interview: why write?

GT: For me, poetry is a way of working through emotions, obsessions, and events that don’t necessary need a narrative right away. That can come later. I think that’s why I’ve never been much of a fiction writer. My ADD brain can’t/won’t put information into an immediate logical, narrative order, and poetry allows for that overlap, that displacement of time and separation of body and experience, and lets me say what I need to say in a way that is impossible otherwise. I think in blips, and here I can arrange and figure out the blips on my own terms. And I feel like I have to make meaning and find pattern, and poetry is historically a type of meaning-making. Poetry has taught me more about myself, my experiences, the way I interact with people, the way I love and hate and mock and obsess, much more than I think could happen in any therapy session (Obviously I’m exaggerating. Therapy is good for everybody!)

And, I’m just going to quote a little bit from Dan Chelotti over at Huffington Post: “Read poetry because birds, honeysuckle, lit windows, new shoes, walking outside, donuts, lipstick, fresh peaches, cocktails, kisses in the rain produce in you a feeling that you never want to lose, but you will, and the only thing you can do is pay better attention when the feeling comes again. And here it comes. And there it goes.”

[banangolit]

The Banango Interview: Tyler Gobble

Tyler Gobble is a multiple-hat wearer for Magic Helicopter Press & the host of the Everything Is Bigger reading series in Austin, TX. He has a couple of chapbooks & a full-length coming this fall from Coconut. Tyler & I emailed about his poems in the Banango Street Covers Issue.

Where did the idea for the OPP (Other People’s Poems) project originally come from? I love the idea of it, taking all the poets you love & briefly becoming them.

Great question and one I'm happy you're asking. Simply, these OPPs welled-up inside this TGOB outta love and admiration, influence and downright joy for a bunch of years because of reading books/manuscripts, sharing poems, reading together, etc.  

The first one I ever blurted out was "Carrie Lorig Poem.” In the first half of 2013, my big joy device was editing Carrie's chapbook NODS. for that good ol' Magic Helicopter Press. Scribbling !'s and flinging suggestions and underlining all across the manuscript, chattering with Carrie about intent vs. content/LOUDNESS/new ways of making, hearing her breath those poems through the phone, I got irreparably engulfed, I got joyously overwhelmed, I could only respond in such a way through poems. 

It wasn't meant to be a project or chapbook or whatever. Like little notes in the margin of a book, I slipped these outta myself and into the world as ways to unleash a particular joy. Eventually, also as a kind, small thank you (always sent them to the person). 

Here I must clarify: these are not just poets whose work I love. These are poets whose selves I love. These are my pals (in various connotations). 

To circle back and chip in the end of this answer, this project exists at all because of other remarkable people, the same people who are the reasons I poem at all, the same people who probably are the reasons I live at all. As I stumble outta the earliest of stages as a poet (first book in the fall, as well as starting the MFA dance), this seems like a necessary artifact for the most necessary of my lovin' that's come before. 

  I'm glad you brought up that first book. I'm in the process of trying to get my manuscript in order & ready to send out right now & it's so difficult, in my opinion, to know when to stop writing & start trying to order things.

What advice do you have about ordering a manuscript? What kind of connections did you try to make in your book & how often did you find yourself throwing out poems you loved because they wouldn't fit in with what you were trying to do.

Yup, so this first full-length book of mine is called MORE WRECK MORE WRECK (though I've been scraping at the idea of scrapping it and branding it with something fresher, haha, but titles for books is a completely other styrofoam cup of worms, so I continue...) and it'll plop off the tree at the end of October from the gorgeous and loving Coconut Books.

Ordering, yikes, isn't that a mess? This book has probably at least 6 or 7 considerably different versions over its three year incubation, and with that is issued an exponential herd of orders. I think the difficulty with it for me has always been how far removed it is, both in time and in practice, from doing the shit I love to do: write and edit poems, in order to make them huff as individual cathedrals of joy.

And then, what? I've got to hunk this all together as one big wooooooooot? I'm remembering something Matt Hart said to me once in a creaky house in Indianapolis, about slapping together his early collections, something like: "I don't write books. I write poems." Because of this, right, it's very tedious, this ordering, because you're overwhelmed and drained, hopefully in a good way, from writing all these poems, and then your spirit's gotta turn them precious poems into puzzle pieces and find the picture of the rowboat on the pond or whatever. 

I'm glad I can finally answer this in terms of what my book, like the final booky-book, is gonna do. I still gotta swap final ideas with main-man Bruce Covey, but as long as I'm not a total fuck-up, I think this version I've got sprung up right here is it. It shook out as alternating between these tad bit long poems and sections of 8-10 single pagers. The long poems (hopefully) prepare the reader for what I see as the slight shift of mood/tone/oomph in each section. For example, the first poem in the book is "The Big Permission," which is available for eyeballs at Punchnel's, to kind of start the stomping, to encourage both myself as book builder and the reader as absorber/the entertained to let loose and be prepared to mosey wherever, as the book tends to do, especially section to section. But did it work? Is this advice? I don't know, but I found when my play-time ordering was done, this version felt the most enjoyably manageable (which is all I can ask for in a review, haha).

 None of that was advice, but let me try:

I let myself enjoy it. I think the key is to play. Create new shapes. Throw shit around/out.

Do up a couple different versions, as far as actual content. Make an all-inclusive version--every poem you got that might have any chance of fitting goes in. Or very narrow versions--only one page poems, or only poems that talk about cats, or whatever.

Do up a couple different versions, as far as ordering those content-varied versions. I have one version where I slopped all the titles into alphabetical order. Maybe if it's all one hunk, add sections, or vice versa, and see wassup.

Printing it out seems necessary, too, for ordering, the physical form across the linoleum floor.

If I set one rule, it's to save every version, well-labeled and such.

But to say again: I think it is necessary to play. That's certainly more fun.

  Let's open up that worm can, though. Titles. I can't think of MORE WRECK MORE WRECK without thinking of Adrienne Rich's book "Diving Into The Wreck," & also of the fact that Alexis Pope's Coconut book is (unless she's changed it) "More No Good."

The Pope thing is probably just a coincidence (though a great one, since you'll both be on the same press & Alexis is a good friend of yours/ a poet you love), but I wonder about the Rich-- it's such a well-traveled book. Was that title in mind when you titled this? & also, how did you come about that title?

Totally dig both of them connections. The Rich connection is brand-spanking-new to me, but one I much appreciate. The early poems in the book got their seeds planted from my divorce (one of them young, wacky, wrong-reasoned marriages) and I do think my reach towards wreck in this collection, like Rich's poem, vibrates onward because of those grievances, heartbreaks, and mistrusts, along with most importantly probably, the head-on confronting of those things.

As for that Alexis Pope, wow, she's a darling, huh. I do believe she has swapped out the title (Okay, okay, I know the new one, but that, my friend, is a secret I'm keeping). Under whatever umbrella, I'm stoked to have my book now and forever beside Alexis's--it was the same first book prize we snagged, they'll be released together, we are gonna tour together (tentative tour name: THE TANK TOP TOUR). Her poems lean on their wrecks in another particular way, but the connection of both needing MORE and both harnessing the various "good," both no good and beyond to good-good wreck, is fascinating.

Oh, I yammered about my love of Alexis's work over at The Jealous Writer: http://www.thejealouswriter.com/2014/03/alexis-pope.html.

My title actually came from Dean Young's poetics book "The Art of Recklessness." Post-divorce, I hugged that book as a recovery tool, as a reminder to embrace recklessness and wrecks in both my poems and my life. I plopped the phrase MORE WRECK MORE WRECK into a poem called "Poem" that was in Country Music Poetry Journal way back when, the phrase wielded as a call-to-action more than a low-down-no-good-sad-cry. Yup, I have been thinking of changing it, especially since that poem got yanked from the final manuscript, but I'm hesitant, too, loving the crisp sound of it, the various connotations, and the idea of making beer koozies that say MORE WRECK MORE WRECK.

  I love "The Art of Recklessness." Dean Young's been a big influence on you-- I mean, you have his lines tattooed on your body, & now-- you're about to start an MFA at Michener.

How exciting is that, getting to work with a poet you love that much?

& also, I just found the poem:

The ruin of imagination is a steamroller flattening your existence, is your ship safely docked and full of boring people. I'M SAYIN' MORE WRECK! MORE WRECK! 

If one end of the spectrum is this safe, boring dock & the other end is wrecking, what's in the middle? As a poet, do you always find yourself gravitating toward this wreckage, or do you try to maintain some balance, somewhere in the middle, sometimes?

It's gonna be a wacky thing sitting in Dean's workshop in my tank top and his lines flapping around as I wave my arms while commenting on someone's use of couplets. Dean was actually one of the first people to see it, via text message; I was chilling with Matt Hart the day after I got it done and he texted Dean a selfie beside my arm. Haha. 

I think wreck is the middle. Wreck is everything else besides being boring, from the flailing to the failing to the wailing with joy, the fucking-up, the fucking, the launched canoe, the fist fight on the front lawn. What else are we supposed to do? Where the fuckyeah and the fuckno and the ahfuck all come together, that's the wreck, and it's inescapable. Through divorce and boo-hooing and a knuckle across your jaw, it's about putting the damn thing back in the water and paddling on. The other end is death, and gracious, I am not quite ready for that plunge.

I'm not ready for that plunge either, hah.

  It sounds wacky, but it also sounds perfect. I've been traveling through Indiana a little lately, once on the way to & back from Iowa & then again on the way to & back from Chicago, looking at the landscape & thinking about how much it reminds me of home. Maybe I'm off here, but Indiana feels, to me, to be like the Texas of the Midwest.

I also have this feeling, one I've had since you moved to Austin, that Texas is the perfect place for you, a space to grow more as a writer that is both familiar & defamiliar. What do you like about Texas & Austin, & also I want to hear some about the ATX lit scene-- I've done three readings there, but they were a few years ago & it seems like things have exploded since then. One of the Houston grad students once told me that Austin was the place people went for an MFA, but Houston was the heart of the Texas literary culture. It feels like that's been shifting over the past couple of years, though.

Wow. I'd never thought about that, but in significant ways--geographically, culturally, and politically--I see it, that proclamation you made up there--"Indiana: The Texas of the Midwest." Get your bumper sticker machine fired-up; we got work to do.

First time I met you, you rolled down with Joshua Kleinberg to read in Muncie, Indiana, that endearing (to me) shadow in central Indiana. Just got reminded of a bumper sticker often seen cruising around that there town that says, "Muncie: We're Trying." Better than the plunge to nothing, right?

Indiana is the only home state I've ever known 'til now and like a good couch on a good porch, the comfyness, the chillness, made it shine for me, regardless of the stupid and frustrating things that undeniably bloop up around me/inside it. I miss it everyday, mostly because of the folks there--my parents especially--because of the nice pace and odd-jolly that hums there.

But I do, I do love Austin. Thank you for your very kind-hearted thoughts. 

Over at the H_NGM_N tumblr, I chatted a bit about my love of this town. Here's the quick list I gave them, my five favorite things about Austin, Texas, though probably in no particular order:

1. Malvern Books – easily one of the raddest bookstores in America! (yup, biased, as employee, but geesh, it’s hard to deny, folks)

2. The Disc Golf – over two dozen good-to-stellar courses within an hour drive of me, the best disc shop I’ve ever seen in Disc Nation right down the road, and some of the friendliest golfers I’ve ever met.

3. Austin Beerworks – my favorite local brewery

4. Mother Merey and The Black Dirt – I’ve put my hands up so many times for these folks being my favorite musicians here in Austin. Listen to their debut Down to the River, but be prepared to hoot and holler: http://mothermereyandtheblackdirt.bandcamp.com/

5. Toobin’ – Gotta head outta the city and hit it when the water’s stacked, but man, toobin’ is where it’s at: beer and buds and chillin’ all dang day.

Absolutely, the number one thing I love about this place is the sights, the real sights, the nature. L and I were both blown away by how much access IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF TEXAS we have to uplifting plots of earth. The rolling, fresh lawn of the Capitol building. That massive expanse called Zilker Park housing Barton Springs (and it's free, run-off side!), the start of the Green Belt, and a quick little ditty of a disc golf course. 

Oh and no surprise I turn to disc golf, right. On one road, Slaughter (which I'm declaring the best road in disc golf), in a ten-mile stretch, you've got one of the most popular courses around in Searight (a short, challenging wooded course) and Circle C (the beefed-up version of Searight--big and wooded and technical) on the other end. And between is Disc Nation, an honest-to-goodness brick-and-mortar disc golf store complete with a 500-foot driving range out back! Actually, I just blabbed myself into plans tonight. As for literary stuff, I can't speak to Houston--only been there once and not for a literary thing. But I'm already chest-deep in the literary scene here in Austin, so I feel mighty confident saying this literary scene is wow. Sure, there's some odd divides and some glaring holes, but goodness, we're trying (harder than Muncie even, haha). 

Reading series a-plenty here now: my Everything is Bigger series, Sam Sax's most-welcoming New Shit Show, Dan Boehl and company's Fun Party, Smoking Glue Gun Magazine's new SUNCHILD shindig, Caroline Gormley's sporadic Shitluck (only two so far, but already have had Ji-yoon Lee, Monica McClure, Timothy Donnelly, Lisa Olstein and more!), and a bunch of others I don't have time (I'M A PERSON) to tromp to. Add in random events at places like Malvern Books, the hunk of art spaces, and UT, and boom, I'm trudging to at least two or three readings a week. 

And speaking of Malvern Books (disclosure reminder: I work there and they house my Everything Is Bigger series), there's a decently bopping bookstore scene here too. A lot of specialty shops that are tops: Malvern for indie/small press stuff; BookWoman for feminist/LGBT/gender stuff, Resistencia Books for Chicana/o & Latina/o stuff, and on and on. If there's a book you want, one of the stores here can keep you off the interwebs shopping spree (or they can definitely hook you up eventually).  

But yes, yes, I'm so stoked about the scene here. There's a hum of great writer folks here. Lauren Becker--whose book just dropped from Curbside Splendor--rolled into town recently. Ben Kopel (I'm spilling the beans here; sorry Ben!) is boogieing down in August. Add those additions to the already awesome cohort of MFA students (Sam Sax, Vincent Scarpa, Blake Lee Pate, Laurel Hunt, and on and on), UT faculty (Dean Young, Lisa Olstein, Elizabeth McCracken, and on and on), and folks sticking around (Jess Stoner, Laurie Saurborn-Young, Ryan Bender-Murphy, Fernando Flores, and on and on) and it's a constant buzz of literary goodness. And of course, I’m missing some really important folks and niches of the scene. My ignorance speaks even higher to the variety and scope of the lit community (I’M STILL A PERSON). I'm just happy to be here (regularly scheduled Mark Cugini nod).

  The first thing I did when I got into Muncie, when I realized you & Kleinberg weren't in town yet, was look for a Chinese buffet. It was a good Chinese buffet. I like cities with good Chinese buffets.

The best Chinese buffet I've ever been to was in Austin. It was my senior year of high school & we were on a PALS trip & we had X amount of money each to spend on food so we stopped at a place over on the west side of town, the far west side where you're out of the main part of the city altogether. It was a good place.

You missed out on Domy Books, didn't you? I loved that place. It was down on Cesar Chavez. I think there's a new store that took its place.

How is tubing influencing your poems? Serious question.

If you could pick five writers who you don't personally know (either via real life or internet life) to come read at Everything Is Bigger, who would they be?

Super happy to know the reading scene is alive & well there. I'll boogie down to Austin sometime to check everything out. 

Favorite places to eat in Austin. Go.

  Oh goodness, Chinese buffets. That's one of L's happy places, trashy to classy and every type in between. I'm probably losing some Midwestern points here, but gracious, I can barely stomach that gunk, and I eat A LOT of rough stuff. I don't even like the American food they serve up for lame-o's like me. Usually, when love drags me there, I just get me a plate of them sugar biscuits and sweet and sour chicken (minus the sweet and sour sauce, so I guess they're just chicken nuggets). 

I did miss Domy books. Is that where Farewell Books is now, I wonder? Working at Malvern, and also living a block from it, I've been shitty about getting to other bookstores. Lots of my literary needs met here (I'm working now haha) + the guilt of tossing money elsewhere (especially if we have/can get the book) + my hulking to-read pile. That is a summer goal of mine--to check out some of these other places better.

Toobin' is a necessary style of leisure activity, like disc golf and hiking, for my writing. It reminds me that I'm not a machine, often so self-slung up to my beep-boop machines. The muck on my bare toes. A little bit of sunburn. Real air. I know a lot of people in the Midwest that write a whole bunch and read a whole bunch come winter time, their snow fort of concentration keeping them inside, but I write and read most (and most importantly, enjoy those activities the best) when I can get out and explore and float (metaphorically or not) through this good earth. Also, toobin' brings together pals of all sorts--my sports buds and my poetry pals and friends from shows--and that is another necessary thing for my poetry.

EIB reader list (assuming we are voiding any restrictions for realistic possibility): 1) Tomaž Šalamun 2) Tytti Heikkinen

3) Mary Ruefle

4) Maurice Manning

5) Roger Reeves

Who are some of your favorite readers, whether you know them or not?

In my less than a year here, my eating-out habits and go-to places have rollercoastered majorly. First, I was overwhelmed, two-to-three times as many eating places in my neighborhood alone as in my entire hometown, and of course, quantity and quality both maxed up here. Then, making some pals, they tugged me here and there and found some mighty cool spots, which evolved further, you know, to "my spots." Now, I'm back exploring, less overwhelmed now, and super into food trucks. 

Anyhow, here's a bit of a breakdown of my favorite places to grub down:

- Loveballs (awesome varieties of rice balls) - East Side King (who am I?) - Gourdough's Donuts (I about sunk myself with a massive chocolate donut yesterday)

- Crown & Anchor (greasy burgers and fries + good spot to watch games) - Double Dave's (shitty pizza, but with great beer specials and TVs for games) - Torchy's Tacos (damn good is right) - Black Star Co-op (always dig places that serve good beer and food AND pay their employees a livable wage)

What am I missing? Where should I go?

  Yeah, I think it's over where Farewell is. The guy that ran Domy was super cool (& does some cool "weird" art stuff too).

My all time favorite reader is Carolyn Forche because when she reads "The Colonel" there's just this moment where the entire room gets quiet & we all lose our breath. It's magic, or something. Kleinberg is a fun reader. I think I'd love to see Ruefle read more than anything, not counting people we could bring back from the dead. 

Food, food! I know it's probably a little overrated, but I love Kerbey Lane. Gourdough's is great. Thundercloud Subs has a great egg salad sandwich. Big Bite has phat sandwiches with fries & everything else you can imagine on them. I like the wings at Pluckers a lot.

Best place in the world is an hour south of Austin, a gas station called Hruska's, where they have the best kolaches I've ever had.

Okay, let's wrap this up-- why do you write? We try to ask everyone we interview this because it's an important question.

  Oh my goodness, that Forche piece. I read that in undergrad, but haven’t thought on it much lately. Must return to it (soon as I finish this typing). That does have AWESOME READING PIECE written all over it in invisible ink.

I’m down for some best kolaches. Next time I mosey south, I’ll find this Hruska’s, no doubt. And I actually think Kerbey Lane is super great, too. Reminds me of Midwestern diners a tad bit (though a tad bit fancier). Oh and they serve Red Gold ketchup; it is housed in Elwood and L and I lived across the road from the plant before we moved here. All times of day, big huffing truckloads of tomatoes coming in.

It is an important question, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to sparkle like others have. I’ve been squawking into this glow box for a few days now, the ol’ add-and-delete-and-blabber dance. Honestly, my first thought was “what else am I supposed to do but write,” which of course sounds shitty. I don’t think my mind conjures that response as a this-is-my-destiny sort of thing; rather, it feels that movement is a necessary part of life (an obvious statement). We got all these years (life, for a lot of the lucky us, is longer that people give it credit for). Writing is a way to not burst from the inside over time.

Exercising, being social, flexing the brain with poems, looking around—these are all ways for me to trade bits of inner Gob Life with the surrounding wacky world. Out goes an odd thought for a hypothetical porno and in comes a rooster clucking in the flower bed next door. Later, the rooster in the flower bed gets poemed and there enters a camper half-buried in snow. It is winter now, but not forever.

Or, let me put it this way: I shake hands with a nice, new friend and I find myself both moving towards death and away from it at the same time. I write a poem about it—maybe the feeling of being on the death-is-inevitable conveyor belt, maybe the new friend, maybe the handshake, maybe the flock of geese that bannered his peculiar head shape, maybe nothing or everything at all—and I’m both here and not here, there and not there.

For me, it’s not a matter of a legacy or a necessity or even a particular drive. Writing keeps me connected to my own life and the lives of others, keeps my little dust particle from growing too big before the poof. I write because it’s a hell of a good time being alive. Thank you so much for chatting, dear Justin Carter. You folks do good stuff over there, and I’m honored you asked me to do this chitty-chat. See you in Texas or Ohio or somewhere in between soon.