An Interview with Sara June Woods

Sara June Woods is one of what I consider to be a small group of “magic” writers – someone able to take an ordinary moment (or a line) and then transform it into something else, something desperately, beautifully tender. In case you’re unfamiliar, in the best cases of leading by example, here’s a short one (originally published in jmww):

 We Woke Up Neck Deep in Cherry Blossoms and the World

We woke up neck deep in cherry blossoms and the world
was spinning around us. You were mouthing a phrase to me,

something like I am sorry for this but the blossom smell
was in my nose and clouds began to form over us s p i l l i n g
l i t t l e  s t i c k y  d r o p s and they tasted like a sweet
vinegar on my face.

You are a bird in the crook of my arm and I want you
to have this spice rack our daughter
made in woodshop.

These clouds
have come          here to
save us.

Sara June Woods’ new book of poetry, Wolf Doctors – released by Artifice Books in March – may be her first full-length collection, but really, she’s one of those people who seems like they’ve been around forever. I had the opportunity to talk with her, below, about Wolf Doctors, revision, sweetness, and of course, the lurking specter of death.

Simon Jacobs: One of the first things I noticed upon opening up Wolf Doctors is the visual differences in how some of the poems are presented now from the form in which I originally read them – i.e., you’ve shifted a bunch of them from stanzas into prose. What inspires these kinds of decisions? Is it an aesthetic thing? How does a poem dynamically change, in your estimation, when it goes from one format to another, if at all?

Sara June Woods: I think a lot of those got switched around because I had a vague sense of “not totally happy with this” and just started trying things. I think at the time I was feeling a lot more picky about how exactly things appear on the page and was super drawn to making those rectangular blocks of words. In some of those I was still attached to the idea of line breaks, though, and that’s why the slashes ended up in a handful of them, even after I switched them to prose poem style blocks.

I think it changes the way you read the poem. On the page and in your head-voice and out loud. Generally now I know what kind of poem I’m going to write before or as I’m writing it. Usually because it’s in the style or voice of something I’ve written before. I’m usually working on projects or series now, but when I was writing Wolf Doctors I ended up doing a lot of trying to reinvent what kind of poem I thought I could write whenever I sat down to write a poem.

SJ: When I started reading your poetry a few years ago, I was enamored by the tone, which is very specific – your poems feel very intimate and sweet, borne by sort of casual and unfussy language and, I don’t know, something like wonder. What I mean to say is, sometimes I think to myself when reading your poems, “russ woods house style.” I know this is kind of a tricky thing to ask about and possibly explain, but can you talk about tone in your poetry? Is this tone something you’ve worked at crafting over time? Has this always been the way you write poetry? Let’s talk about deliberation.

SJW: I do know what you’re talking about. I think it’s a way of communicating that a) comes very naturally to me, b) is more or less consistently interesting to me and c) I’ve developed over a long period of time. Before I was writing poems I was writing and performing songs and before I was writing songs I was writing & drawing these little gag webcomics and before I was doing that I was writing poems, and I think the style I write in now is something I’ve slowly cultivated through all those different forms. I think it has something to do with my sense of humor and what I think is a fun or interesting way to say something, even if it’s a really sad thing. I think I am in wonder a lot. At least the side of myself I like the most is always in wonder. I have always been a strong believer. When I was younger I believed in God (which my phone just tried to autocorrect to Godzilla). Now I believe in the universe, in beauty, in magic, in poetry, in love. Not separately, but maybe like the thing that ties all those things together. I think things connected to that belief in some way, whether it’s reaffirming it, or wallowing in it, or questioning it, or screaming at it, are what inform all the poems I write. Or at least the ones I finish.

I think this has always been the way I’ve written poetry, but it’s gotten a lot more refined, more distilled. If you were to go back and read my song lyrics, for example, you’d probably find plenty of examples of that voice you’re talking about. Some similar “moves” to ones I do now. But you’d also find a lot of me trying to write like other people and kind of giving up halfway through and then performing this kind of half-song like it was finished. Poetry taught me how to revise, and I think that’s been really important.

SJ: Let’s take this a little further. Would you be willing to share a bit of your revisioning with us? Maybe a part of a poem and what it was tempered into, and how it got there? I am all about demystification, and this is process, process, process. Show me your seams.

SJWW: Yeah, I’d like that. Here’s one I changed a lot. I will say it’s super rare anymore for me to revise things quite to this extent, as I think I know a lot more how I want to write poems and how to make them get there than I did then. I think this is interesting though. Here’s the earliest version of the poem I can find:

SOUTH FORK

I’d like to begin this poem by giving a shout out to all my people.
Hello people who think they can make their lives better  by balancing
the amount of time they are productive, amount of time they are lazy,
amount of time they are at home, amount of time they are with friends
and amount of time they are out and the various combinations of these
states. You are my people.

When I was about seven years old one time I was walking down the
stairs to my parents house and said to myself After all these years I
have finally found a body! This might be the most important thing you
can know about me, but we are always navigating original doubt.  I
know that our parts can be fit together in a certain frantic way but
more and more I am questioning the importance of that.  Maggie Nelson
says that fucking doesn’t affect anything, that it is no foundation
and I want to be clear that I am talking about fucking here.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to
me on a platter that is comically small for him to be sitting on, and
I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to
shit. This would be totally acceptable. Ideally, though, he would lay
there and let me try to eat him for a minute first. In the best case
scenario I would walk up to him, pretend to shake his hand, say I
finally found a body and then he would lay down and I would settle in.
I would even get through the fur and get a bite, get to taste what
living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down,
crushing my skull. What a saint.

This is one of those poems that you see in an online literary magazine
and you skip, because there are too many words in a little space and
it seems like it would take a lot of effort to read. Don’t worry, I
do it too. It’s okay.

I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem.

People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the
building you’re currently in  I want you to smoke a cigarette. If
you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke it.
I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I
want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more
like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your
fingers around each new one like something great is about to happen,
and to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for
the environment. NOT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. But for the sadness that
comes with seeing that little white tube go. This addiction is
something you can treasure, and I feel slightly less bad about
encouraging you in this because you are the people who did not read my
poem.

Lately I haven’t been getting enough sleep. Not because I’m busy or
doing work or whatever because I’m not. It’s just one of those things.
Either I can’t sleep or my dog can’t sleep and if my dog can’t sleep
then I can’t sleep and if I get up then my dog gets up so usually
we’re both up, with us rotating from sitting on the couch to him
peeing and me smoking to me peeing and him watching me. This is how I
spend my nights.

Yesterday you were sleeping and I tried to get back in bed and I put
the dog in bed and then I got in bed and you said No stop dusting me
and I said dusting you? and you said there’s just all this
and I said tungsten? and you said that was a joke and I didn’t get
that joke, but I kept looking for the tungsten because I realized I
didn’t really know what tungsten was and maybe it would help me get to
sleep and maybe it would be the thing that would make every damn thing
stop feeling like a circle, like I am going around and around and
around I’m the kind of person who feels like they forget everything
when their life isn’t repetitive but I’m the kind of person who gets
tired of that repetition too fast.

And here’s the version in Wolf Doctors. It retains a few things, but it’s really a whole new poem:

I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT

and I know that our parts can fit together in a certain frantic way. 700 million years ago there were no eyes. This whole light dimension of seeing and being seen of me seeing you and you seeing me was exactly null. Nature seeps new inventions. Solar flares have been known to cause heartache. Our species is founded on original doubt. This is the beginning of the poem.

I want my last meal to be a live bear. I want him to be delivered to me on a platter that is comically small, and I want to go up to him and try to take a bite and just get mauled to shit. In the best case scenario I would walk up, pretend to shake his hand, and he would lay down and I would settle in and he would let me start gnawing his leg. But just for a minute. I would even get through the fur get a solid chunk of his meat get to taste what living bear flesh tastes like before his enormous paw comes down crushing my skull. What a saint, that bear. This is the poem’s middle.

This is one of those poems that you see in a literary magazine and you skip because there are too many words. Don’t worry, I do it too. It’s okay. I am now talking to the people who did not read this poem. People who did not read this poem: I want you to go outside the building you’re currently in. I want you to smoke a cigarette. If you do not have a cigarette, I want you to go buy a pack and smoke one. I want you to then keep smoking them whenever you have free time. I want you to become addicted to cigarettes so you become a little more like me because I am addicted to cigarettes. I want you to curl your fingers around each new one like they are these tiny miracles, to feel sad about each one you throw out your car window. Not for the environment. Not for the environment. But for the sadness that comes with seeing that tiny miracle disappear. This addiction is something you can treasure and I feel a little less bad about encouraging you in this direction because you are the people who did not read my poem. This is almost the end of the poem.

I made a Facebook status update that said I wanted to drive my car into the south fork of the Chicago River and jump out at the last minute. Or maybe even not jump out. I was in a bad mood. They call that part of the river bubbly creek because there are rotting pieces of dead animals from the stockyards of the industrial revolution still decaying, releasing gas that makes the water bubble. Three days later I read on the news that they found a car in the south fork of the Chicago River. There was a body inside. Part of me was afraid afraid that the police would call up my wife and start calling her ma’am and tell her the body was mine.

SJ: Fascinating – I love how “south fork” reappears in the revised version, like a gesture towards the poem that it once was that only you (and now, all of us) would know about. How long ago did you write “SOUTH FORK” vs. when you revamped it into “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT”? Do you allow a kind of “settling time” while you’re writing poems before you determine that a poem is “done,” or is it a gut thing?

SJW: It’s totally a gut thing. There was another version of that poem that was published in Ilk, much closer to the final version, but I still wasn’t totally happy with it and ended up revising it again before the book came out. I think the original “South Fork” was written a few months before the version that was published in Ilk, and then at least a year went by before I revised it again into the version that went into the book. Usually if I’m not happy with a poem I’ll either work furiously to revise it over the next couple weeks or else I’ll just set it aside indefinitely until I am putting together a chap or collection and then will see if it’s salvageable.

SJ: Do you take poems on an individual basis, or would you say you’re more project-focused? Has that changed over the years?

SJW: I think Wolf Doctors was the last time I focused mainly on working on standalone poems without having a kind of project in mind. Outside of the poems that went into the making of Wolf Doctors I’ve written a chapbook about mole men, a chapbook-length poem in eight parts, a chapbook-length poem in sixteen parts, various collaborative projects, a book about a lady named Sara and a series of letters to people and things that either do or don’t exist. So yeah, definitely more project-focused these days. Even within Wolf Doctors I sort of have mental groups all of the poems fit in, some of which are reflected in the sections divided by the writing prompts in the book. A good portion of the poems in Wolf Doctors are some of my earliest poems, or later poems I wrote when I was taking breaks from more specifically designed projects.

SJ: I’ve started going back through Wolf Doctors with a mind towards transformation – I feel like, beyond the sweetness and intimacy and playfulness of these poems, there’s a certain fear, a kind of death-theme that resurfaces. Looking at a poem we talked about earlier, “I AM A POLITICIAN OF LIGHT,” it seems to be about loss, about how tiny we are and all the things that end – the central image is of driving a car into the Chicago River, of pulling up a body that is/isn’t yours. Is it accurate to read this dread, or am I just imagining it? (Keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies.)

SJW: Hahah I love how much you get me. Yes absolutely (keeping in mind that we are all tremendously unhappy with our bodies) there is some death in here. I think it’s one of the things I think about in writing a lot because it adds perspective. When you juxtapose something with death you immediately can tell how important or silly it is. It’s terrifying in the concrete, but kind of freeing intellectually when you’re someone who tends to get wrapped up in anxious thought spirals. To remember that none of the stuff you’re worried about really has that much weight to it in the long run. There’s a kind of downer stretch of poems in the book that come after the second writing prompt that are all about this, but I like that they come so early in the book. It’s like, okay, death, yeah, but we have to keep living still. So then what. You can’t just check out mentally forever. I’ve tried and it sucks. I think more than anything I’m always trying to figure out that “so now what.”

SJ: Ah yes, the “death suite” of Part II. The death-aspects of the book I think, though, do remain “lurking” for the most part – overall, the work feels very optimistic and wrought with a love that – while occasionally crushing – is for the very best. (Your poems have always made me really happy to read; the tacit acknowledgment of their dark aspects – “hugging isn’t / even the word for what i want / to do to you i will break / your bones” – is, in my personal experience of your poetry, a part of that.) 

That wasn’t a question. What are you working on now?

SJW: Well, I finished my third book a few months back and it’s out at publishers, it’s called Careful Mountain. I’m working on some more collaborative work: doing a sequel to rootpoems with Carrie Lorig that will be called stonepoems. Writing more Love Stories/Hate Stories with Brett Elizabeth Jenkins. Other than that, I’ve started and put down a couple of new project ideas. The most recent is I’m trying to write little journal entry poems. Just to capture brief moments. I always try to plan these new projects and sometimes they gain traction and I write a ton on them and sometimes they don’t.

SJ: “the universe, beauty, magic, poetry, & love,” as it is.

SJW: Can I close this with a song? Can the song be this?

More Than Ephemeral Flashes of Light On A Screen: An Interview with B.J. Best

B.J. Best, seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of previous poetry collections State Sonnets and Birds of Wisconsin, takes a step into the risky literary unknown with his new collection of prose poetry, But Our Princess is in Another Castle. Drawing heavily from the kaleidoscope imagery of videogame worlds, But Our Princess is in Another Castle explores not games themselves, but the real lives of their human players. Journeying from “Beginning World” to “Heart World,” “Do World,” “Mind World,” and many others, Best’s collection traverses romantic relationships, childhood friendships, fear, death, and love – all the best things about our truly strange real world.In this interview, we discuss not just the craft of writing itself, but also the difficulties of producing serious literature around the pop-culture theme of videogames.

ELS: Your website says that But Our Princess is in Another Castle is “a book of prose poems inspired by videogames.” Did you go into it knowing that it would be centered on videogames, or did a pattern in your writing give you the idea to write about them?

BJB: I did go in thinking that’s what I wanted to do. I took a long writing retreat weekend and I wrote ten of them (something like that) up there as a means to explore and see if it would actually hold together. I liked the process and the ideas enough that I thought maybe it could work. You know, of those first ten, maybe two made that final cut into the actual book. In fact maybe it was only one. So obviously my writing changed a lot. I thought a lot about what it should actually be. I actually prefer working that way, because it helps eliminate some of the choices you need to make early on. If you told me to sit down right now and write a poem, I would be terrified by that because I would have no idea where to go. But if you said “Okay, well, write another videogame poem,” I would have at least some sort of grounding to base what I’m thinking about, and it would give me a much clearer direction to get that poem, especially in that poem-a-day kind of thing, as opposed to “Well, now I just have to sit around and think about something completely unrelated to anything else and see what it turns into.”

ELS: How and when did you get that idea to write a poetry book about videogames?

BJB: Those first poems were written in November of 2004. I don’t know where the original idea came from. They’re all prose poems, and they started life as prose poems, too. I think part of it was just that I wanted to explore that form because I hadn’t written many of them up until that point. My main thought (if I can even recollect what it was) was that it was something worth writing about (and at the time not a lot of people were writing about it) and there might be some possibilities for turning something that’s mass produced and very pop-culture-y into a different art form. I saw the opportunities there so I thought that would be a cool area to explore because I didn’t see it happening. When I started in 2004 I think I could point to two books that I had that were using videogames in a literary sense. There have been more since then, but that was the main genesis of the project.

ELS: It seems like a risky move to publish a serious work that openly admits to being about videogames. Were you afraid that the literary community (especially) would ignore your book?

BJB: Definitely. There were several times during the process where I just threw up my hands and asked myself, “What on earth am I doing?” The idea that it may very well be 100% frivolous was never lost on me. But the poems are serious; they’re not intended to be frivolous, so one of my goals with the book was to show that videogames can be treated seriously and to show how they can move into other aspects of people’s lives. So I knew I had that much to stand on, because it wasn’t about how much I love Pac Man or Tetris. But I knew it wasn’t a typical, serious university press kind of book, so my gut said I needed to approach more indie publishers with it. That’s where I wound up going because I didn’t figure I would win a contest judged by some other eminent poet, but I figured there would be enough people out there who would find it to be an interesting approach. The small press thing seemed like a more logical place to make that happen.

ELS: You mentioned a couple of times in your blog that it was important to you to make the book accessible to people who don’t play videogames or didn’t have experience with them. Don’t you think they lose some of the richness of the references, or was that not the point?

BJB: I’m not entirely sure, and it’s hard for me to answer because I know exactly what I’m talking about in all of those poems, but really my goal was that to not get any of the references wouldn’t matter, and it would still be a good poem that would hold up on its own. I definitely think you could argue that it’s just like any other ekphrastic work: If it’s about a work of art, it’s useful to be looking at the painting, photograph, or whatever. All of a sudden the connections start to make a little more sense. So there is an advantage to knowing the games themselves, but the actual details are pretty small – they’re in the poems, but they don’t necessarily influence the poems very much. So someone who knows the particular games could go through and say “Oh, I know where that’s from, and I know where that’s from,” but I’m not sure (with the exception of a very very few cases) that actually knowing the game inherently enhances the understanding of the poem, because one of my goals with the poems was to take them to places other than where the games happened to lead.

ELS: Why was that one of your goals?

BJB: I didn’t want to write a book gratifying for people who know all this arcana about classic video games. I did want it to appeal to as large of an audience as possible. There’s already a lot of writing out there on the web about the games: what they are, what they do… There’s enough commentary on the games as they currently exist, and to me that operates more in the review world, which is perfectly fine, but it doesn’t really transform the material into anything new.

ELS: What was your writing process with But Our Princess is in Another Castle? Was it different or similar as for your previous works?

BJB: Well, I mean, this was different because it was ekphrastic. Basically, I made several lists of fifty so videogames I would conceivably want to write about. Halfway through the project I made another list, and I have a feeling I maybe even made a third one. And then it was just brainstorming to settle on one that maybe seemed interesting, and literally I would go and play the game. It’s weird to think about playing video games for research, but actually that’s exactly what I did.

Most of the games in the book are small, especially compared to modern games, so it didn’t take long to do it. It’s not like I played any of them through to beat them. I played them long enough to get a sense of details that interested me. I would literally keep my eyes open and try to pay attention to things that simply seemed weird about the game, or unusual, or things that even though I’d played this game a million times, I’d never noticed before. Those were the details that were impressed on me, and those are often the ones that wind up showing up in the particular poems. Because ultimately, videogames are weird. If you sit back and objectively look at them, the things they ask you to do, and the worlds they create are just strange. I really like that, I think that’s really interesting. Compared to other books I wrote, I had to sit down and get the videogame in my head enough so I knew I could pull from that wealth of images that the game happened to have, while also limiting myself by not playing it over and over again, because I usually find if I know something too well it actually makes it more difficult to write about. You lose the sense of wonder and the idea of what makes it interesting and important versus “Well, here’s my encyclopedia of knowledge about something.”

ELS: Had you played all of the games before, or did you try some new ones also?

BJB: Most of them I had played before, from what I remember. I think there were some that I had never played before or some that I had always wanted to play that seemed interesting that I had never gotten around to, but no, they’re not inherently my favorite games, or anything like that. I cast a pretty wide net in thinking about what was valuable and what was intriguing. And there were also plenty of games that I wanted to write about, but just didn’t work for whatever reason. I wish Sonic the Hedgehog was in the book, but I tried three different times to write a Sonic the Hedgehog poem and they all blew up in my face, so I’m like “well I guess that’s the way it goes.”

ELS: You published a Sonic the Hedgehog poem on your WordPress blog that I really liked, and I was actually wondering why you didn’t include that one in But Our Princess is in Another Castle…

BJB: I published three: that one, “Minesweeper,” and “Mappy.” What I realized about those three particular poems is that they just seemed a little stranger, and that they didn’t quite seem to hit the same notes as far as the overall tenor of the book. You always have to draw lines. Those three were just on the edge and fell.

ELS: That’s unfortunate for Sonic.

BJB: Yeah, that’s right!

ELS: Did you have a problem poem when you were writing But Our Princess is in Another Castle? One particular poem that gave you more trouble, or something that you worked on longer, or edited a million times…?

BJB: Many of the ones that I did have problems with wound up not being included in the book to begin with. There were a couple that flat-out got rewritten because the first time they made it through, they did not work very well. The first one’s in the first section of the book. It’s called “Gauntlet” and it was actually one of the first ten. What I remember about that poem is that it was mostly an exercise of seeing how often I could alliterate words that began with the letter Q. I distinctly remember that because Gauntlet is this game in which you die very frequently, so if you’re playing this at an arcade you just keep pumping quarters into the machine. I don’t think that version of the poem even made it to the very first draft of the book.

ELS: Not sure you could have gotten too far with Qs.

BJB: Yeah, exactly. Once you’ve got a version of a poem, it’s difficult to go back and say “I’m going to write about this game again” and do it completely differently, so the version of “Gauntlet” in the book was written in 2010-2011. I tried again once enough time had passed that I honestly could forget about what that first poem was about.

ELS: Do you keep copies of your first drafts?

BJB: Oh, I’ve got them somewhere. I’m not quite sure what draft of the book finally got published, but I’ve got a feeling it was draft number twenty or something like that. Just out of curiosity one day, while I was going through the final edits, I pulled up draft #1 and it was fascinating to see how completely different the book was compared to what was finally there. My first draft was written in 2005 and I thought there was a book there, but it’s very clear there was not.

ELS: Did you include any favorite childhood games?

BJB: A lot of them were favorites. My first videogame system (that I remember) was the Nintendo. I played Super Mario Brothers until all hours of the night. I was so proud when I finally beat Super Marios that I took a picture of the screen with my mom’s camera (this was just before digital cameras), and I went up to tell her that I’d just beaten Super Mario Brothers. At this point I’m eleven or twelve. She just looks at me, and all she says is “Go to bed,” which in retrospect was a completely reasonable suggestion at the time…

So the system I’m fondest of, because it was my first, is probably the Nintendo. There’s Mario in there, and Legend of Zelda in there, and Kid Icarus in there… I tend to have more nostalgic memories with those particular games, but I tried not to let that influence what I chose for the book.

ELS: What was the editorial process like?

BJB: The book was accepted in 2011 and actually I was still writing some new poems at that point. I had sent off a copy of the manuscript even though I had some new poems I was working on, and they accepted the manuscript, so the first thing for me do was figure out which, if any, of those new poems were going to belong. I went through about nineteen drafts on my own – when I say “on my own,” I mean me and a couple of trusted readers that I give virtually anything tobecause they give me all sorts of good feedback. But then we went through three rounds of edits with the editors. Very detailed, very thorough, and very much appreciated. We worked back and forth up until the last draft. In the final draft I actually cut four poems out of the manuscript, “Mappy” being one of them, just because I didn’t think at the time that they quite fit. Even up until then we were still making major changes to it to make it as strong as possible.

ELS: Poor “Mappy”! Almost made it.

BJB: Exactly.

ELS: What kind of edits did the publishing house make – mostly stylistic, or…?

BJB: It was everything and anything. Sometimes it was making sure things were spelled correctly, sometimes it was suggesting cutting poems, sometimes they recommended a new ending, definitely a lot of trimming of language, which I almost always agreed with, like extra adjectives, adverbs, some details that didn’t seem like they went anywhere or were needless at that point.

ELS: You had two “Heart Worlds”; was there a reason for that?

BJB: Yeah. The first one is not a very positive “Heart World,” and in fact talks mostly about a relationship breaking up, all negative falling apart, whereas the second one is more a positive, developing, lasting relationship and in many ways autobiographically based on me and my wife. I like the idea of two “Heart Worlds” because it’s mnemonic of videogames in a certain way. Videogames (either because they were lazily designed or cleverly designed, one of the two) often have you go back to a place where you’ve already been and make you do something else with it. But the goal was for each poem to stand on its own, even though together they’re thematic. I tried to be pretty clear about the themes, by virtue of the different worlds that each poem winds up in, like “Heart World” or “Map World.” The goal was to keep them apart and not try to necessarily rely on narrative, or for one to rely on another one, because that becomes one rickety house of cards pretty quickly.

ELS: Is there a specific line or image that you’re particularly proud of in this book?

BJB: Oh jeez, that’s a tough question.

ELS: I figured it might be.

BJB: What I like – and it almost becomes my own little cliché during the book – is poems that close strongly. I have so many poems that end with basically a single-sentence paragraph at the very end. For example, the end of “Mega Man”: “Being an electrician is different than being a doctor of light.” It even includes a reference to the game, because you’re fighting on behalf of the character Dr. Light in there. Another one that I really like is the end of “Legend of Zelda”: “We become the stories we tell ourselves.” That carries throughout the book too, and it’s also true about videogames. You’re the one enacting the story, so you become the story as you go through it. That strategy particularly does it for me. I don’t know if it winds up irritating other people because it happens so often, but I feel that they’re like daggers at the end.

ELS: Did you pick the title at the end or did you have it in mind from the beginning?

BJB: No, I had that from the beginning. The old manuscript in 2005 had that as the title. It just seemed to me like it was a pretty famous videogame phrase and that no one at the time was using it for anything, and honestly since I’ve been doing this and talking about the book, I’ve had several people either tell me or it gets back to me that they think it’s a great title. But I was terrified that between then and now someone else would come out with something called precisely that and I would have to change as a result. There is a “Mountain Goats” song called “Thank you Mario, But Our Princess is in Another Castle,” but I figured I was just far enough away from that that it would still hold up. I chose it because it’s a videogame phrase and I like the idea that it suggests, what so many videogames suggest: that you need to keep trying, you need to keep searching, you need to keep working, because you’re not quite done yet, and I think thematically that addresses a variety of the poems in the book, too.

ELS: The phrase has become a pretty popular meme; not sure if was back in 2005.

BJB: Memes didn’t really exist in 2005. It was one of those things that was sufficiently familiar that I hoped it would pull people in. It definitely has become meme-ified.

ELS: Do you still play videogames, or was this a thing of the past that you revisited for this project?

BJB: It’s weird. I began this project in 2004, almost ten years ago. I had no kids then, so I had time to play games and do what I wished. Now I’ve got a son – he was born in 2010 so he’s three and a half. Honestly, playing videogames is one of the things in my life that has fallen by the wayside. I still enjoy doing it, but I have a hard time justifying it, especially since so many modern games take up so much of your time if you actually play them. So I don’t spend much time playing games anymore, and I’m actually fairly comfortable with that idea. I balance that out by saying that I actually teach a videogame course at Carroll University in Wisconsin, so I get my fix that way. I assign all sorts of games: some classics, some contemporaries, and a bunch that the students have never heard of. So I’m still playing and thinking about them, just in a more academic context these days. When it comes down to it, my free time is fairly small, so when it gets to 9:30 at night, I would rather read or do something else than spend half an hour playing a videogame.

ELS: Does your videogame course focus on literature, mechanics, design, or…?

BJB: It’s called a “Cultural Seminar” – that’s the big touchstone for many of the general education courses. We want our students to learn about culture through different lenses, so mine is videogames, and believe it or not there is actually a textbook about how to study videogames. We talk about the academic theory of videogames, how they reveal culture by what they reveal within the games themselves, and how they impact the larger culture. We look at why Pac Man was so popular, why Tetris was so popular, and we also deal with the question of “Do violentgames cause violence?” We look at how the games are situated within American culture as well to see what their impacts are.

ELS: Do you think some of that came through in your book?

BJB: I don’t really think so. It wasn’t something I was necessarily thinking much about during the writing. So many of the poems are not inherently autobiographical but they’re autobiographically based, so I was writing more from personal perspective than from a broader perspective. It’s definitely more of a lyric voice in this particular book as opposed to trying to teach– because the poems are ultimately about experiences other than the game themselves and the comment is the game itself.

ELS: So you don’t think you had any messages about video games in mind for your readers when you wrote?

BJB: Other than that they’re worth serious inquiry. And I think that’s important. That they can be treated seriously, that they’re more than ephemeral flashes of light on a screen, that they do have meaning and can have artistic meaning either through transforming them or even in and of themselves. The question I’ve been asked a couple of times is “Are videogames art?” People wrestle with it, so it’s something I’ve tried to comment on. My answer is very clearly yes. More specifically, it’s my goal to show that videogames can be a generative source for other artistic endeavors.

He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

I have been trying to write a book review of this X Marks the Dress: A Registry for months. I’ve been nervous about writing this book review. This is a complicated book, intentionally and fruitfully complicated, but rewarding. It’s an incredible mash-up of voices, perspectives, forms.

Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess have written a book and written a book and written a book. What I mean is, they are getting at the problematic idea of marriage in a variety of ways. The poems are written from varying perspectives, and later include footnotes and then erasures that serve to render the former poems skewed and different. All of this accumulates into what feels like more than one book. Though compact it is certainly a multitude of voices. Marriage isn’t one thing. It isn’t just that.

In Appendix C an earlier poem is almost entirely erased to leave the remaining words:

I can’t decide between/ a candy bride/ a glass cabinet

And neither can the reader. I don’t want to decide. I want to hold all of this book in my  head at once, but I can’t. I want all the contradictions and restatements. I want to understand it all as a truth, because the truth is varied and layered.

Reading this book felt like a kind of game. I flipped between the poems and their erasures to see what actually got erased. What were these words’ original contexts? On page eighty-one, the only words left behind are “I was stolen.” From what, I wondered? I flipped to page seventeen to find its original context. “On Wednesdays she says I was stolen, not birthed. On Thursday, no talking. Weekends are for orphans. I’m so many men in the back of a cab. Husband or lover? Plastic or paper? Sometimes I’m a woman, too…” But if I flip back to the near empty page containing only the words “I was stolen,” I find a different narrative is created. The words lead right into the next page, which reads, “stashed between/my mother/clawing.” I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between the sections, thinking about the words on their own and in the different contexts this book creates for them.

This book made me think about marriage, about how easily I have accepted its conventions. I’m not married, but it looms as this standard that I haven’t often questioned. It simply is. It is an absolute. It possesses authority. Marriage is and no one can stop it. But that’s not true. I think Darling and Guess are doing important work to look at marriage, what it is, how it’s perceived, what’s wrong with it, what it’s doing to everyone, and the dangers inherent in these assumptions.

We get a lot of information from the footnoted sections, which are footnotes to blank pages. I imagine them as instructions for reading this book. A section of footnote five reads, “The autobiographical novel depicts a heroine’s pursuit of an alternative to marriage, particularly the social conventions governing the ceremony itself.” This points at the book, points at marriage and the idea of a marriage as the standard.

Marriage feels like a kind of intrusion, a thing forcing itself into the picture. My favorite poem in the book is Pizza:

How odd, I said, that a stranger ended up in so many of our photos. He’s even in the photos we took at home. Look, I said, he’s petting our dog. He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

Look. Here’s marriage. It’s in the home. It’s in my head. I didn’t even notice it before. This complicated book with its erasures and footnotes to blank pages and quickly changing perspectives demands a close read and a good deal of thought. As a reader, we are forced to involve ourselves in the work of the text. We’re doing more than simply reading and are therein implicated, held responsible. This isn’t a book to read and put on the shelf and never think of again. This is a book to be read carefully again and again, to be talked about and then leant to friends.

*

Carol Guess is an American novelist and poet. Her books Femme’s Dictionary and Gaslight were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Switch was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.

Dreaming to (Be)come Alive

For Australian Aborigines, the beginning of the world is the ‘Dreaming’ (or the ‘Dreamtime’). Here the ancestors became manifestations of all living creatures and the elements. The Dreaming is the sacred seat of the Earth and infuses and inspires all aspects of tribal life; it is this network of complex relationships with the natural world reflected in the creation myths and songs that makes, evolves and informs everything.

In the way of the shaman, led by her own totemic animal guides (her animal selves), Hélène Cardona takes us on a journey through her inner-world, into the labyrinth of the poet’s unconsciousness where anything and everything is possible.

The dream opens forgotten worlds of creation.
(“Pathway to Gifts”)
In dreaming is the Divine created.
(“From the Heart with Grace”)

This, of course, is Jungian territory; yet, Dreaming My Animal Selves, does not offer conjecture on the meaning of dreams, there is little interpretation here; this is a poet’s personal metaphysical journey of discovery, where, by tapping into her ‘collective unconsciousness’, she reveals her ‘truer’ inner-self and begins to unravel the alchemical symbols of her very existence.

In the words of Jungian scholar, Marie-Louise von Franz, “If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift, so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities.”  These, it seems, are the forgotten worlds of creation that Cardona is re-discovering, re-awakening.

And, through the Dreaming, the reader is informed that these forgotten realms may well be what the real time is (is there time on the outside?).  As the poet tells us, you can’t capture a dream, you can simply move into its stream. The dream world is not only more real. It is entirely effortless.

…it’s so easy on the other side.
(“Illumination”)
The mind flows through like wind.
(“Breeze Rider”)

The more the poet explores her childhood at the foot of the Alps, on Lake Geneva, the more her fragments of memory intertwine and interweave to reveal a poetically invigorated mythology, a mythology built upon the bricks of both ancient archetypes and her own modern visions.  Like the shaman, with the help of her animal selves, Cardona is conjuring herself (back) into life.

Through the glow I witness / the melodious dance of the wistful / wizard, statuesque sleek crane.
(“Isle of the Immortals”)

Eagle teaches / me to hunt … raptor / uncovering secret codes …
(“Parallel Keys”)

The dream is the wellspring of her creative healing process, the creature voices (now eagle, now coyote, now Peruvian horse), her guides—transmuting familiars who may be herself, or may, indeed, also be her ancestors.

In dreams like rain
my mother visits.
A bird in the shower
takes messages …
(“In Dreams Like Rain”)

And, who help her find her way without a map:

I’ll […] rely
on memory embedded in my mother’s embrace
on stormy nights at the foot of the Alps.
(“Dancing the Dream”)

Oh, but there is a map.  The map of Cardona’s inner world is the book itself.

For the Indigenous Australians, ‘songlines’ are tracks across the land that mark the routes created by their totems during the Dreaming. Bruce Chatwin explores this in his interviews with tribal elders in his book The Songlines: “Aboriginal Creation myths tell of legendary totemic beings who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path — birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing the world into existence.”

Cardona’s imagistic dream poems are timeless artifacts, little ‘songs of innocence’ from a primordial / universal age. Cardona’s Dreaming My Animal Selves is not only a poet’s spiritual awakening, but a sacred journey whereby each individual poem (or song) serves as a marker within the larger map of her inner geography, a map which, in turn, guides her through and breathes her back into her physical world with a renewed vigor—

On the cliffs where the wild ones come
to show themselves.
(“Pathway to Gifts”)

Reborn again, Cardona,

. . . seeps into sand in search of treasures.
(“Shaman in Residence”)

This is the poet as enchanter. We can’t resist the urge to follow her inside.

Her voice will not be silenced
for it is formidable
and echoes those of all beloved.
(“Dreamer”)

Your Very Own Ghost Knocking at the Door: On Mat Gould's A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter

A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter is a book of poem that suits the mantra. Where is the end to all of this? Whatever this may be, there is no end, it is just the daily deluge of reality . . . simple, suggestive, poignant, natural, and at times plain fucking funny and yet full of gospel sensibility. I don’t want to throw names at it, Gould may borrow, mimic, denounce, or battle but all that matters is that he writes and owns these poems.

This collection of poetry will put you in the place, push the dust and grit up your nostrils to the point where you’ll have to blow it out at seasons end. You’ll feel your own meditations in these lines, you’ll recognize your own ideals, your own cures, your own perversions, and the inevitability of what may be your very own ghost knocking at the door or be it window.

Gould puts us in his vision, keeps us in his flagrantly pounding heart, shows us the view from his porch and pronounces to us in many forms that if we must do anything than we must do what it takes to survive this barrage of existence and what that takes, is everything. Sometimes he tells us in those exact words and in other words with other ways he tells by strapping on the loincloth and taking us out into if not beyond the wilderness to hunt jackal, to seek jackalope, and begs us to not forget the myth nor dismiss reality . . . the very reality in which all of these poems enrich.

Gould should be read in sacred places. Gould should read when you are half buried by burden. Gould should be read when you are in no need of options. Gould should be read when you are imbibing. Gould should be read when lackluster and clutter will not do. Gould should be read, and you might as well start with A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter.

Millions of People Feeling Every Human Emotion

how our tongues

unhooked the vowels of this

language that never dreamt of us.

A fierce testament and testimony, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water is poet Cynthia Dewi Oka’s first collection, published by Dinah Press. It manages to be simultaneously cinematic and intimate, much in the way a large metropolis like Los Angeles or New York City can be — millions of people feeling every human emotion while somehow as a whole, the city is so much larger than the details.

Each poem in Nomad is an important detail in that landscape. While embedded in personal specifics, the poems tell us something about gender, motherhood, abuse, and loss. From “Vulture”:

            because the door bolted

behind rabid eyes  six foot two

            shade of apple blossom  my oesophagus

                        a vice of pink knobbed claws

             so it took three weeks to taste

                                                      sugar again.

As the collection progresses, the reader witnesses introspective moments, self-reflection, and rebirth — invoking strength, solidarity, and beauty. For example, in “Roads to a Dance,” Oka crystallizes a rich, youthful moment:

in the age before

crushes and stilettos,

I made my body

silver tambourine,

ready for God’s clap.

Nomad packs a kaleidoscope of impressions into short spaces. It is anchored by persona poems of various nomads — daughter, warrior, oracle, moon, midwife — which take the collection into mythical, archetypal realms, from the “sky where I come from water” to “declaring war on encroaching rock,” to “tongues / of aloe peeled open.”

Throughout, the narrator demonstrates a keen love for herself, a kind of looking back and wishing well while not flinching away from the hard details. It is also framed by reflections on history, especially Indonesian — in the time “before bows and backs were snapped alike” as well as Dutch colonization, Japanese invasion, Sukarno, and Suharto.

Nomad is a litany of survival, a personal dialogue between past and present, and a stirring reflection on histories and legacies.

You Will Never Understand

I.  BEN MIROV IS MOVING THROUGH YOU. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM.

Ben Mirov is a mirror placed roughly at chest height. Ben Mirov cuts a hole in the sunshine layer and disappears momentarily at times. Do not be alarmed is what Ben Mirov says to you. Ben Mirov then becomes a second mirror, a highly polished reflective window, which Ben Mirov affixes to the tops of his shoes, which I am assuming for the purposes of this text, are probably brown and pleasantly relief-map textured — worn in; not shabby or overly distressed.

SIDE NOTE (mine):
it is sometimes necessary
for Ben Mirov to look down
in order to see up.

When the speaker of Ben Mirov — a human head hologram made of snow that is also Ben Mirov — talks, both of his mirrors become electroacoustic transducers, oscillating and modulating, their operator manipulating phase and static as discretely separate instruments so as to obscure the nature and direction of sound itself, effectively rendering it difficult to determine which Ben Mirov the momentarily stunned viewer is experiencing at any given time.

SIDE NOTE (mine):
it is sometimes necessary
for Ben Mirov to look up
in order to see down.
this is not a problem for Ben
Mirov. in short, this is not a problem.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (a)

an excerpt from Light from Dead Stars Doesn’t Lie (p. 19)
I dream all of my friends at once
are Amy. Amy injects me with a vial
of Joseph Conrad. She says it will help me travel
the crooked line to the point where I do not exist
on Earth. All of my friends exist on earth
and if you punch their face for long enough
it will become a common type of gem.

As the speaker of Ben Mirov continues, Ben Mirov wishes more for his friends, and perhaps more from himself. Ben Mirov is deconstructing/rebuilding Ben Mirov again. The speaker views his ever-mutable world from inside of Ben Mirov, too insignificant and helpless to save those most cherished by the aforementioned Ben Mirov:

I am trying to tell you about my friends.
The way they have no body or face.
The way they cannot save the Great Barrier Reef
or the people in the cities or anything.
They cannot even save themselves.
They walk slowly into the thunderhead.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (b)

an excerpt from Instructions (p. 70);
wherein the reader is gifted an eyeball)
When you have carried it far enough
give it to the next person you meet.
Or bury it in a pile of shards.
Or smash it on a rock.

III. CONCLUSION: BEN MIROV AS A FORCE CARRIED BETWEEN TWO OPPOSING POLES

Ben Mirov is a complicated cycle of oscillation between existence and its opposite state, consisting equally of both reflective and refractive physical parts. Should the reader happen to glimpse his inner working machinery, it should be noted that said reader should experience no cause for fear. The intricate parts and gears necessary to the movement of Ben Mirov might at times suggest the brutal violence of rigid metal and wire; however, these gears are made of cloud meat, lubricated and drunk with the common blood of ours. It is recommended that the reader allow Ben Mirov to move uniformly through them; to allow both Ben Mirovs passage through the fingers, the mind, and ultimately, the heart.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (c)

an excerpt from Hider Roser (p. 11)
rearranging the letters in horse rider
you get hider roser, which means something
you will never understand