#nathaniel farrell

[katyturner-blog]

All the farmer will find us to have left behind in that place will be the smaller duck the one that dives and hides. Everything else eaten or taken, even the skunk cabbage broken, stinking near the creek. Some of the bark on the trees cut away by things we tied to them. Bits of spider web cling to my teeth.

Nathaniel Farrell

[uglyducklingpresse]

Lighght Reading with Nathaniel Farrell

A poem from Nathaniel Farrell's book of poetry, Newcomer, followed by a questionnaire with Nathaniel who will be reading at Lighght Reading: Saturday, August 9, 7pm at IF/Then in South Kortright, NY. 

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My mother used to cut our hair in the grass, to hold the scissors at my ear and tell me to sit up in the chair as its legs sank slowly into the lawn until the roots and runners stopped some. The bird bath tilted in the wet earth. My heair looked funny all around me in the grass.

-from Newcomer

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What is poetry?

  In my dissertation I wrote a lot about poets’ answers to this question over the past few centuries.  In the process, I found out that answers about creative energy, imagination, newness of form, breaking down barriers, or the “enlargement” of this or that faculty are deeply classed, originally coming from aristoractic efforts to police what counts as poetry as newly literate classes began to take up the pen.  I reject definitions of poetry that continue in this tradition because they’re on the wrong side of the class struggle in the republic of letters.  So as tired as I am of people coming back with “What about prose-poetry?”—which is it’s own thing—I’ll take the most generic definition over the superlative any day: poetry is the use of line breaks.  I say this not to dismiss thinking about what poetry is, but because line breaks do something in the world that we haven’t thought enough about. 

  What poets/writers/artists do you keep coming back to?

  I’ve never really left behind my William Carlos Williams or Ezra Pound who’ve traveled with me along with copies of Leaves of Grass and Paradise Lost.  Recently, I’ve been reading Ronald Johnson’s Ark and I think it will be one of those books I come back to.  But right now, poetry-wise, I’m in a discovery phase, trying to get through some of the books my friends have given me.  I’m not ready to come back to anyone just yet.  Theory-wise, I do find myself coming back again and again to Hannah Arendt.  Her take on the history of politics, both the remote age of Plato and Aristotle and the 20th century continue to shape how I understand the relationship between ideas and action.  Whenever I go back to The Human Condition or Origins of Totalitarianism I recognize her deep influence.

  What do you think when you see the word lighght?

  I wish I had recognized Aram Saroyan’s poem at first sight, but all I could think of was the new Kishi Bashi album, which is pretty good.  (I’m listening to it right now actually.)  Phenomenologically, who couldn’t think of “light.”  But the more I look at it, the more I see ghosts instead.  Little ghosts in the mouth.

  Which new writers and/or small presses are you excited about?

  I just subscribed to Primary Information a few months ago and I’m looking forward to cracking the Conceptual Poetry collection.  (And yes, this is why I feel guilty for not recognizing the Saroyan since I now have not only one but two copies of the Complete Minimal Poems.)  But in general, I’m out of touch with the contemporary or rather, my contemporary is a very small world.  Out respect for my friends I won’t simply give a list of their names and the new books they have coming out in the next year.  They know who they are and one couldn’t really call them “new writers” anyway.  They’ve put out so much great stuff that I’m starting to realize as I write this that I’m the new one.  Anyway, not to be a stickler, but I think it’s dangerous to be excited about writers rather than something on the page.  (Of course that’s what the question really asks, isn’t it?)  When one starts to get excited about the writer, the person becomes the fetish, right?  Reputation or promise becomes the commodity.  I’d rather fetishize the product, keep all that alienated labor where it’s supposed to be.

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Nathaniel Farrell, an educator and poet, was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York. His chapbook The Race Poems—a take on race relations during the Iraq War and the Second Intifada—was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2005. Newcomer (UDP, 2014) is his first book, a long poem set in an undefined American-soil campaign. He has published poems in 6×6, Greetings Magazine, and The Recluse. He currently resides in St. Louis.