CATHERINE OWEN runs her own tutoring and editing business and writes freelance reviews for Suite 101. She has also “sold advertising for a tattoo magazine and run workshops for at-risk teens on video poetry.” She has no MFA. Only an MA. “I learned my craft by writing everyday. The difference is not professionalism, the distinction is that one comes from a less direct “stream”.

She works on manuscripts every day: “poetry in the morning and prose etc in the afternoon/evening and I have my seventh collection coming out this fall.”

Best parts of her current configuration? “A diversity of projects and collaborations with artists in other disciplines and genres. Book tours. Time to read deeply.”

Is she waiting for that dream job? “Nope. I fear my loss of freedom more than anything.”

MICHAEL KELLEHER works as the Artistic Director for Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, NY. “It’s a full-time job whose main purpose is to help build and maintain the many diverse literary communities in Buffalo. I cover the gamut in my work from organizing avant-garde literary happenings all the way up to introducing and interviewing some of the bigger names on the global literary scene as part of a quarterly literary lecture series.”

Does his job feed his work? “In two ways. First, it allows me a lot of free, flexible time to do my work. I get a lot of vacation time, which I tend to take in blocks long enough to allow me to get some serious writing done. The other way it feeds the work is by keeping me in touch, in a very literal way, with happenings in the literary world, from the local open reading series to winners of the Nobel Prize and everything in between. I get to meet a lot of amazing writers and I get to talk to them about what they are doing and to see and hear them doing it. It’s hard to believe sometimes that this is actually a job.

I studied for a PhD in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. My professors were almost all poets—Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Robert Creeley. I loved the almost structureless learning environment and I was lucky enough to also go to school at the same time as a lot of really great poets and fellow travelers who were deeply involved in the literary world: Jonathan Skinner, Thom Donovan, Kyle Schlesinger, Barbara Cole, Graham Foust, Roberto Tejada, Linda Russo, Rosa Alcala, Patrick Durgin, Alicia Cohen, Joel Bettridge, Brent Cunningham, Ben Friedlander, Taylor Brady, et al, were all at various points classmates of mine. It was a great place and time to study poetry. On the other hand, I found the atmosphere of academia outside of our little bubble stifling—I found the pettiness of faculty and students alike, the wretchedly hypocritical politics of the department, and the anti-intellectual (not to mention anti-creative) attitude of the university administration to be, shall we say, not to my liking. At a certain point, I began to question whether I wanted to spend my life in this environment. And then I answered, “no.”

If I had role models, they were actually within the academy. I always admired Creeley’s insistence that poetry needed to happen outside of the academy and his tireless efforts to make it happen there, despite his comfortable position as an endowed chair in the university system.

I believe that poetic communities are ultimately more useful and vital to poets than degrees or classrooms and I try to make those communities useful and vital through my work as an arts administrator.

Like many writers, I wish I wrote more. I write SOMETHING every day, but I tend write poetry in bursts. The past couple of years, I have taken a month off here or there in order to put in a lot of concentrated writing time. Since I began the Aimless Reading Project on my blog, I feel like I have created an interesting practice of daily writing that is very much involved with my life and my creative work. I usually write for a half-hour to an hour before I get to work in the morning. I am working on the manuscript for what will be the third book of poems I have published since beginning this job in 2003. I hope to finish it with a burst of creativity this summer.

Does he feel part of a community?

Very much so. Buffalo probably has the largest and most active poetry community outside of New York, San Francisco, and maybe Chicago that I have ever seen. One aspect of my job is to help publicize all of the community based AND academic literary events in Buffalo. There are some weeks (like this one) where there are two, three, even four literary events per day! It boggles the mind, given the relative size and geographic isolation of Buffalo. The poetry community here has a long history that stretches from the university out into the community and back. People like me have come and stayed. There are people that have grown up here and stayed. And then there are the people who come to study for a few years and leave. Some even come just to be a part of things for a few years before moving on. All of them contribute in different and constantly changing ways. I also feel connected through my job and through giving readings in other cities — perhaps most importantly through the internet, where I connect daily to a much larger community of poets that blog and publish and write polemics in the comment boxes of others’ blogs.

What makes for a vital life as a poet in your mind?

Poetry connects me to the world by creating a space in which to give presence to the unformed and often chaotic thoughts and feelings in my head which would otherwise remain unformed and chaotic (and solitary). I love the process of writing as a mode of thinking and being in a world which sometimes feels like a very cold and abstract place.

Is all of this just to bide time for that perfect teaching job to come along?

“Hell no! I would take another job in an arts organization, but it would take a lot to lure me into academia — a lot of money, a lot of guarantees that I would not have to get involved in department politics, and a lot of free time. Maybe I should just leave it at ‘no.’”

BRAD CRAN is a poet, poet laureate of the city of Vancouver and a tax accountant.

Do you find that your day job feeds your work?

“Only in that it is flexible, and I have less financial stress in my life which allows for creative thought.”

What made you decide to take that job, or create that job?
I spent just over a decade working in writing and publishing and in 2004 I received a grant to write Hope in Shadows which is a book of oral histories about financially disadvantaged people who live in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. While working on the book I lost my day job and had to apply for emergency funds from the George Woodcock fund just so that I could pay my rent and feed my family.  The financial realities of the writing life were clear to me through that personal crisis and at the same time I could see myself (and many poets I know) heading into similar situations as pensioners I was interviewing in the DTES–people who simply hadn’t saved for retirement. Around that time I enrolled in the Diploma in Accounting program at the Sauder School of Business, UBC.

Were you tempted by the Academic route?

“I have an MFA and planned to teach. The first tenure track job I applied for after my MFA went to a poet who had a number of books out and a Governor General’s Award. I couldn’t even get an interview. In contrast, during my first week of classes at Sauder accounting firms set up kitchens outside our classrooms and handed students free breakfasts or lunch with fliers asking us to go and work for them when we graduated. If I lost my job as an accountant tomorrow I would have a thousand possible employers in the greater Vancouver area. If I wanted a tenure track teaching job in creative writing then I’d have to wait until someone retired and then apply for that position against the highest profile writers in BC.”

Did you have role models that you wanted to emulate?
Stephen Osborne the publisher at Geist has been an important role model to me both as a creative influence but also as someone with pragmatic business sense. He is one of the finest writers I know and at the same time he is not shy about engaging in the business side of things.

Did you do an MFA? IF you did, did you do it with a teaching job in mind, or to take time to write, or some other reason?
Gillian and I both did our MFA’s in Arizona. We were both on full scholarship so we justified it as time to write but we both really hoped to move into teaching.

If you didn’t, how did you learn your craft?
I did an MFA but I don’t think that is where I learned to write. My first publication was in Geist and it took me a month to write the piece and another year of constant revisions before it was published. The people at Geist worked with me over and over again and until things began to click. That was more important than the classroom.

Do you sense a different level of professionalism with poets who do work in the Academy, or did do an MFA?
In the long term I can’t see the benefit of an MFA on one’s writing. In the beginning stages it is important for a writer to get feedback and be a part of a writing community, and perhaps an MFA is a mainline into that, but it can be found outside the University. Overall the workshop format is a peculiar torture where a new writer is made to read mediocre writing and a writing instructor is given a frame work to teach with little effort. I would highly recommend that MFA programs move away from the workshop model and teach creative reading instead of creative writing.

Are you satisfied by your relationship to your work? Do you have a daily writing practice that works for you? Do you have an upcoming book?
For the last ten years I have been working on a book called Cinéma Vérité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan. It’s a non-fiction book on the history of propaganda in motion pictures. I also have a book of poems I’m working on. I’m boom or bust with writing. I try to devote myself entirely to writing or working for income. When I’m writing then I like to work 8 hours a day if possible, half of which I’d spend reading and half of which I’d spend writing. When I’m working I will write poems sporadically but for the most part I wait for larger chunks of dedicated writing time.

Do you feel as though you are part of a community? That you are in dialog with other poets?
It’s easy to generate community around the arts. There are many opportunities to connect with people through readings, Facebook and Twitter. And all of this is happening outside of the university. The key is not finding the community but getting away from it. I’m new to social networking but in the past when I’ve started writing I limit my email use and later this year when I start my writing time I will suspend my Facebook and Twitter accounts. With the exception of a few close editors I don’t find the social side of the writing life to actually help with the act of writing.

What makes for a vital life as a poet in your mind?
I’m happiest when writing connects with the real world. I felt that with Hope in Shadows and I’ve felt it a few times with poems I’ve written. So for me connecting with social issues is vital and poetry is how you get there. If poetry itself is the vital and driving force then I would write for literary prizes and to flourish in Universities. Prizes are nice when they come but they feel secondary if the subject you are working on is truly meaningful.

Is all of this just to bide time for that perfect teaching job to come along?
Thank god no. It took years to get that dream out of my system but it is now gone for good. (See Cran’s poems re: the Olympics in Geist)

GARY SULLIVAN

“I am managing editor of publications for the National MS Society. I took the job nearly 10 years ago; it’s sort of the perfect day job for me, as it involves writing, editing, and dealing with printers, designers, authors, database managers, etc. It doesn’t exactly feed my poetry or cartooning, but has had enormous impact on my publishing my own comics.

I studied music in college, but wound up getting a BA in English/Creative Writing, after abandoning music composition a few credits shy of graduating. I was in school mainly because it was cheap at the time (I paid for it by washing dishes and prepping food in restaurants) and I loved studying (both music and literature). I am not sure who among my peers have MFAs, actually, so I’m not sure I can speak to levels of professionalism and whether or not MFAs are more professional. I have no problem with professionalism, myself, though I’m not altogether sure what is meant by the term. I do think that academics tend to invite other academics to read for their classes much much much more so than they invite people like me, and I wish that would change. (I have been invited to read at universities two times in the nearly 25 years I’ve been active as a poet.) I mean, I don’t mostly book non-academics at Segue and the same is true of curators at Zinc Bar and Po Proj. So, come on, peoples.”

Is he satisfied with his relationship to his work?

“I am definitely satisfied. I have no daily writing practice–I never have. I do what moves me when I’m moved to do it. I am working on the fourth issue of my comic, Elsewhere, and starting to think about putting together a poetry manuscript. I just finished co-editing the flarf anthology.

Do you feel as though you are part of a community? That you are in dialog with other poets?

“Yes, especially through the flarflist and the Segue reading series, but also with a few (mostly older) poets here in NYC.”

Is all of this just to bide time for that perfect teaching job to come along?

“Nope.”

DANI COUTURE

When I go to work each day, it’s to provide support for a half dozen not-for-profits. My job, by virtue that I work closely with several wildly different clients, is an endless source of information I may have never encountered otherwise. I know more about fall arrest systems than any lay person should.

I took the job because I knew it would mean working with good people who care about something. It’s far too easy not to care about anything, but the people I work for volunteer their time–their free hours– to bettering the corners of their lives. I don’t mind spending my day supporting that kind of passion.

I’ve never been enrolled in an MFA program. How did I learn my craft? I read, I write. I read and write some more. I ask what others are reading. I learn by doing the work. It’s a simple lesson plan. I suspect it’s not unique.

Like most, I would like to deepen my relationship with my work. I would like more time with it; however, as it stands, I make the time. When I lived in Vancouver, I had a friend who always said, “If I didn’t bike when it rained, I’d never bike at all.” I’m not waiting for more time to write. I’m just writing.

I have an upcoming book with Pedlar Press. Sweet is due out in May or June of this year.

On good days, I feel connected to community. On bad days, I feel alone and adrift with the last sentence I wrote.

On the good days, I feel a part of several micro-communities. One community that’s been particularly important to me is The Scream Literary Festival. I’ve been involved with The Scream in some capacity or another for the past five years. That I keep going back makes it feel like family. Tough and worth it. The Scream feels like one of the longest conversations I’ve ever had.

What makes for a vital life as a poet in your mind?

It must include risk, the willingness to see if the ice is solid yet.

Is all of this just to bide time for that perfect teaching job to come along?

No.

Recently received my copy of this beautifully produced anthology a few weeks ago. Edited by Marata Tamaira, The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific, is a “collection of graduate student essays, poetry, and art explores the indigenous Oceanic concept vā, a space marked by tension and transformation as well as confluences and connections. The art of Maui-born Roxanne Chasle is featured on the cover and throughout the volume. The Space Between is available electronically via ScholarSpace, the institutional digital archive of Hamilton Library, University of Hawai`i, Mänoa.”

I sent the editor a few questions and she was kind enough to respond:

What is the purpose of The Space Between?

The purpose of the publication was to clear a space and give emerging scholars the opportunity to articulate their ideas and to exercise their own unique brand of scholarship, whether it be in the form of academic writing, personal reflection, poetry, or the visual arts. My goal was that the publication would give graduate students first-hand experience with the publishing process, and that it would empower them and give them a sense of confidence in knowing that what they have to say has meaning and importance. That their voice can impact how we think about things.

Why did you personally pursue this project?

I had wanted to publish a graduate journal for several years before Vili Hereniko, the Director of the Center for Pacific Islands studies at UH Manoa, asked me to take on the project in 2008. When I was in graduate school, I had the wonderful opportunity of working on one of the leading publications in Pacific studies, The Contemporary Pacific (tcp). As an assistant to Jan Rensel, the managing editor of tcp, I got to read through many manuscripts—manuscripts that were written by top-notch scholars. It’s wonderful to read the critical insights of seasoned writers, but I felt there wasn’t any room for new, emerging scholars to grow. At the time, too, I was struggling to get my own work published and I learned first-hand just how tough a skin one needs to develop in order to survive the publishing process. I wanted to create a more nurturing, yet rigorous, environment for upcoming scholars to exercise their ideas. So, when Vili asked me if I wanted to edit the Center for Pacific Islands studies inaugural graduate journal, I pounced on the opportunity!

What were your experiences as an editor/publisher?

I feel so fortunate, because I picked up so many valuable skills from my dear friend and mentor, Jan Rensel. She’s so incredibly generous and gracious with writers and it’s through her that I learned how to build and maintain a good working relationship with the contributors of The Space Between. It’s a very humbling experience being an editor, because you’re essentially the caretaker of someone else’s work. My sense of obligation to the contributors was very intense; I didn’t want to let them down in any way! There were a lot of sleepless nights. I liken the job of editing to having a baby (although I’ve never actually given birth myself). There’s a gestation period, during which time the contributors’ works are fine-tuned (in the case of The Space Between, this part of the process took a year) and then there’s the delivery, when the final product is published. It’s an amazing experience to care for and nurture peoples’ work and to see it in all its beauty—bound together and waiting to be picked up and read. It’s an extremely fulfilling experience and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

What do you feel this project contributes to Pacific Islander
 Studies/Literature?

I hope this publication inspires other emerging writers out there to start submitting their work to journals, magazines, and so on. The written word is a wonderful way to share your thoughts and perspectives. We’re all unique and we all have something valuable to contribute. You don’t have to have a doctorate to have something of substance to say. I think this publication underscores that notion and I believe it breaks down the wall between the academy and everyday people. Many of the contributors are not only emerging scholars, they’re practitioners—they live their scholarship. They’re artists, poets. They’re also deeply imbedded in the issues that confront their island homelands. To me, that’s really powerful—theirs is the voice of experience rather than theoretical musings from a distance.

*

Marata Tamaira hails from Aotearoa/New Zealand and recently completed an MA degree in Pacific Islands studies at the University of Hawai’i that explores the construction of New Zealand national identity through the deployment of Māori cultural symbols. Her research interests include issues of representation in the Pacific, specifically through the visual arts and filmmaking, and the use of indigenous material culture and symbols to construct national identity, particularly in settler countries in the region. She edited the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies graduate-student publication The Space Between: Negotiating Culture, Place, and Identity in the Pacific.

R’s Boat

I first heard Robertson read from R’s Boat, or what was then the chapbook, Rousseau’s Boat, at Haverford. Around the time of her visit the Village Voice had referred to her as the “thinking woman’s Anne Carson.” We were reading both Robertson and Carson in both my poetry and fiction workshops. In the “fiction” workshop we were reading the Seven Walks from Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. The morning we were due to discuss her I arrived at my office to find one of my students pacing in the hall. “You have to talk to me about this writing,” he said, “I had no idea writing like this could exist. I have been up all night walking around in it…” The responses are usually variations on this.

Here is some of my email exchange with Robertson.

SQ:  How did R’s Boat come about? I know there was the chapbook with Nomados, and some of the pieces–”Utopia/” for one–were constructed from text you gleaned from your own archive. Is this a process that continued?

LR: All of the poems in the book are built from my archival gleanings. I went over the entire heap of 60-odd notebooks afresh for each poem, each time from a different point of view, or with a different quest in mind, and sometimes with years having passed in the interim. But with each poem I ended up recomposing the gleanings according to very different principles. The first couple were slightly programmatically composed, then less and less so. The poems were written over about 5 or 6 years, so my priorities shifted. But my simple idea was that I wanted to make an autobiographical book that was not self-referential.

SQ: The phrasal gesture, or the signature structure that you have been perfecting over several books now seems to have taken on even greater clarity in this book–if that’s even possible. It’s a way to build a sentence that is propulsive backward and forward, and yet exists utterly independent within a chain of other like-minded phrases. It is densely, intellectually layered and imagistically condensed. And you offer, in pieces such as “A Cuff/,” which begins “It is always the wrong linguistic moment,” and “The Present/” and throughout actually, lines that can be read multiply, but certainly as notes on your process. Did you sense something different click with this text?

LR: I’ve always been completely seduced by sentences, certainly. I think I’m a sentence-lover before I’m a writer. Much of my earlier work has been testing the internal structure of sentences as wildly psycho-sexual-social units. But here I wanted to find a way to include extremely banal, flat, overwrought and bad sentences, by devising a sequencing movement that could include anything. My thought was not to judge, but to float the disparity of the units in a continuum. I think what happens is that the caesura, the space between, becomes extremely active, more active than the sentences themselves are. This has the effect of making any sentence semantically legible in several registers– the meta-textual, as you point out, may be one of them.

SQ: Your texts have been so visually different. Here there is evenness, spaciousness, a quiet command of the page that is heightened by what seems to be a mutual or simultaneous discovery. In “Utopia/” for example, we go from “mercurial botanies” to “muses of women” to:

thI had the body of a woman as far as the hips; below sprang the foreparts of

threthree dogs; my body ended in two curled fish tails.

thI see this from a train.

thI wanted to mould verbs from clancking fragments of justice.

I love how expansive this is, how it is both observer, observed, still and moving, this morphology and jouissance of visual splendour. The cataloging. The image of the boat being, as Zizek notes in Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, an almost necessary mode of being for our fluid, highly changeable times. Is it also a perfect vessel for thought?

LR: Well, I borrowed my boat from Rousseau, who describes, in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, floating aimlessly in a lake observing only the flickering of his consciousness in concert with the various patterns of afternoon–light, water, breeze, foliage. He calls this the pleasurable sensation of existing. There is no longer a foreground and a background, but a cognitive continuum. For me the boat became the figure of this lascivious and boundless perceiving. In terms of composition, this meant an entirely pliable handling of perspective. No subject position, but a distribution of subjectivity as equivalently charged at any point.

SQ: There are wonderful resonances in this text with Lyn Hejinian—particularly Happily—and Juliana Spahr’s work. What do you make of the relationship between the sentence, thinking, and the fact of such an engaged and subversive poetics of the sentence, and of the autobiographical, at this moment in time?

LR: Actually it was Lyn’s My Life that was the starting point for Face/, which next slowly became R’s Boat. Rod Smith is/was editing a special issue of Aerial on Hejinian, and was asking for contributions. Face/ was my response. Then I wanted to keep going. But I’m not so sure about “this moment in time”. For me the polyvalent time of the subversive sentence would “begin” with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and loop everywhichway to include Djuna Barnes, Ruskin, Nicole Brossard, Libanius, Vanessa Place, Montaigne and Rousseau. The autobiographical is always subversive, because the political subject, bios, is subversive, in suspension, always beginning. In terms of the sentence and thinking, I’m with William James’ proposition that there exists a feeling of “if”, a feeling of “by”, a feeling of “when”.

SQ: People assume that Langpo, a camp you are often associated with, knows or cares nothing for line breaks. Marjorie Perloff has questioned the use of them in contemporary poetry as well. I appreciate calling attention to the convention, particularly where it has seemed to be a fact taken for granted, but I see that nowhere in your poetry. Not even when, as in The Weather, the poems are in a block of justified text. How much attention do you pay to line breaks? Or specifically to the fabulous enjambment that occurs in R’s Boat? For example, from near the beginning of A Cuff/:

One’s own places realism in doubt

But now I want only the discretion of realism

I can’t say it any more clearly than this

I can’t say it any more clearly than this

Philosophers taught me a conversion narrative

LR: Sorry, but I don’t see L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as a camp. So I can’t be associated with it. Mine is a different nationality, a different generation, a different politics. I feel more conditioned by the FLQ than by the language poets. I read many of their works and sometimes drink with some of them, but for me, as for those poets themselves I think, poetry is not bound by movements, periodicities and canons. Poetry is a continuity fueled by political passion. The Songs of the King James Bible, the songs of Cheika Rimitti, Donne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Denise Riley, Moure, show us the breach as being the active but submerged tradition of a subversion. The caesura, its turn, as Agamben reminds us, is what distinguishes poetry from prose, not the customs of distribution of words on the page. In the time of the caesura a thinking gathers, dissolves, moves. The immaterial work of the caesura is to subvert the fixing of language by protocols and institutions, to renew a historicity within the subject.

SQ: Do you see a difference between critical writing and poetry? Is this necessarily gendered?

LR: I have often tried to blur the distinction, but maybe I have done this out of an insistence on the primacy of pleasure. Right now there is a particular body of critique that I am working on, a political reading of prosody, in the work of Meschonnic primarily, but also in Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, and early linguistics, that I simply want to communicate quite clearly, to represent to others hopefully for their excitement. But in the past I have had a certain comfort in approaching critical writing extremely variously. This comfort may come from a lack of stakes in dominant discourse formation, which certainly could be interpreted in terms of gender. It could also come from my long work in Vancouver, where cross-genre and cross-media work has established its own counter-tradition. But I think that none of the possible identity positions in themselves, whether regional, sexual, racial or class based, no matter how non-normative they could seem in terms of centrist positions and their programmatic exclusion from those centres, is any guarantee of a particular subversion of genre. I think that where poetry and criticism may meet is at critique–the active critique of the duality of the sign and its various governances and institutions. Either poetry or criticism may fall short of such a critique.

SQ: What are you reading?

LR: Hannah Arendt, Barbara Duden, Angela Carr, Ivan Illich, Henri Meschonnic, Etel Adnan, Emile Benveniste, Stacy Doris, Goethe.

SQ: What are you working on now? What’s next for you?

LR: Yoga.

SQ: Can we end with a poem from R’s Boat?

________

from Palinode/

/
Though my object is history, not neutrality
I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme

That which can no longer be assumed in consciousness becomes insolvent
Because it doesn’t finish I can be present

So I decide to speak of myself, having witnessed sound go out
Fear is not harmful, but illuminates the mouth

I am not qualified to comment on the origins of the shapes
The archive pivots on a complicity neither denial nor analysis can efface

It is not true, it shines from your face
Against the hot sun that hits us, nothing’s peace

And pairs that cannot absorb one another in meaning effects
Go backward and forward and there is no place

This is the border—nothing further must happen
The spurious clacking of grass is a dry spell in thought, but not abstract

Just as in dreams there is no limit to further over-determination
I do not wish to enter into that discussion

Memory’s not praise or doubt
It is not a substitution, since there is no prior point

There is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not create
I do not in any way wish to escape.

a few years ago, achiote press (the press i co-founded) published a chapbook that included new poetry by Padcha Tuntha-obas and an essay by Alysha Wood titled “Translation as strategy within the work of Padcha Tuntha-obas and other poly-lingual texts.”

Since then, “Alysha Wood” has transformed into Jai Arun Ravine, a “trans-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed race who has previously published and presented work under the names Alysha Wood and Woo Wood. Jai received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Hollins University. Jai is a proud Kundiman Fellow.” Jai is working on a new project that I am very excited about…

The Spiderboi Files. Here’s Jai’s description of the project:

The Spiderboi Files began in August 2007 after I moved to San Francisco. Having completed an intensive, long serial work that took up the greater part of that year, I was eager to begin writing within the parameters of a radically different practice.

I started by cutting up kari edwards’ a day in the life of p. with old journal entries and mashing them with that particular day’s experience of being a gender-variant queer stuck in a random mall job in the middle of suburban California. I shoplifted structures from that environment and stole overheard text. I was inspired by the idea of “files” or case studies as segments of a larger whole (The X-Files and Max Wolf Valerio’s The Testosterone Files), as well as by the idea of documenting my ongoing confrontations with gender assumption. I also wanted to expose and confuse my own trans-identification with consumer culture’s promise of providing the power to choose and create identity.

I decided to write and complete one poem per day in a rather rough and imperfect manner. After several months I had collected about 50 some pages of Spiderboi’s journey, a character that draws from the power of the Spider and the Web as well as the popular Spiderman, a young man bitten by a Spider (a symbol of creative, feminine energy) and thus transformed. The super-hero archetype became a way to explore gender transition and gender transformation in relation to the desire to be fully embodied.

In late 2007 and early 2008 I began the process of inking the poems out into panels. I was further intrigued by the idea of a graphic poem-novel and the “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” novels I remember reading as a kid. I wanted to explore the idea of “choice” in relation to gender (versus sexuality) by placing that choice in the hands of the reader in the exact places in which those choices were difficult for me.

The result is a living document of my first year living in San Francisco and identifying as trans. Through poetry, spoken word, graphic novel, web comic, and hand-sewn chapbook, the web of Spiderboi is the force-field a gender-variant person must build to envelop themselves in the strength that allows for change, individuation and transformation.

there are a number of things i love about this project: it’s artful handbound packaging, the act of unfolding the panel/poems, the engagement between the visual and the textual, the exploration of race, gender, and sexuality. volume 1 includes 5 panel poems, and can be ordered here for $7.

But I do feel a sense of responsibility to discuss the realities of the writing world as a career choice. Though admittedly, when I decided, way back when, to apply to do a BFA in Creative Writing the chair of the department advised me strongly against it. I can’t recall what he said exactly, but it made my blood boil, and I said something like, “I’m going to write with or without your program.” Which is to say, I make my own decisions thank you very much…

It’s a cliché by now to quote Rilke on the matter, and I wonder if it’s still relevant. On the one hand, yes, write only if you must. If you can’t do anything else. But that’s not quite it, is it? I believe everyone can and should write in some way. The problem is the ever-shrinking space between writing and publication. The one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other does it? Should it?

To write, we seem to believe, is to publish. Okay, fair enough, particularly in our age when to publish is to click, but then to write, is to publish, is to have a career. Was it always the case? What happens to the way one approaches apprenticeship if one is not expected to have an apprenticeship? Worse, what happens to the writing when what is on one’s mind is a certain trajectory?

Maybe I’m just reacting to the overwhelming sense of frustration I get from so many writers who don’t feel they have achieved enough, or need some external marker of having arrived some place else. What is it that creates such a sense of unease? Of not having achieved enough? Or the right markers? Maybe it’s more a matter of simply shutting out the noise, but many of us, particularly those of us who do teach, who are in contact with many poets all the time, must engage with these questions, and these desires.

The reality of the writing world is few writers—even those who write more popular forms such as fiction—actually make a living from writing let alone find readers. So the question is how can one find a way to sustain oneself as a writer. It’s a big question, and it doesn’t only include financial concerns. The reality of time to write is a big reality, and the matter of how one uses one’s time, and one’s brain, impacts the quality of thought and the level of resources one brings to poetry. I’m not really arguing for much more than a little space around some of these formulas and assumptions. There is no perfect poet’s life. Why all this anxiety in search of it? And what does it look like? A major prize, a plush teaching job, perfectly intelligent students, half the year off?

What about the ability to live as a poet? That is one thing that makes me shake my head every time I say it. Who knew? One can be a poet. I have never come down from the high of that simple fact. The technician who came to give an estimate yesterday was fascinated too. I was the first poet he had ever met. What is it like?  What does the life of a poet consist of?

It’s easy to forget what a privilege being a poet is. We get to organize our lives around poetry? For real? To partake in readings, conferences, have publications, reading groups. We share a network of colleagues having read similarly. Now if we could just loosen up our thinking about the ways in which we can build our lives around that, about what constitutes “success.”

What configurations best suit the poet? The academy is one track, but surely there are other workable trajectories that might excite young poets? In an ongoing thread on Facebook I have heard from poet-librarians, poet-editors, a poet who is also the head of an NGO, poet college teachers, poet high school teachers, poet-arts administrators, poet-techies. Here are a few in more detail.

RON SILLIMAN says for the past decade he has “been a market analyst specializing on the hardware support marketplace in North America. The decade before that I worked in various organizations that sold & delivered PC support services in a variety of marketing positions. The decade before that I was the executive editor of The Socialist Review, a college administrator & briefly taught literature at the college level. The decade before that I worked in the prison and inner-city tenant movements as an organizer. The decade before that I was a kid.”

It was practical concerns that made him “shift from non-profit to for-profit labor.”  He “needed to pay for the mortgage on my house & my wife & I were trying to have children. The computer industry was (a)  local & (b) growing rapidly, absorbing the over-educated under-employed very rapidly.” Does his work feed his writing?  “I enjoy the analytical side of my work, the writing, the cross-sections of the world I get insight into. My work has brought me into contact with everyone from Charles Manson to the solicitor general of the United States. From my perspective, one real advantage of working in the technology sector has been that it changes quite rapidly. It’s hard to get stale in an industry that is completely different every four years.”

A role model? “Walter Benjamin without the whining, perhaps. I feel like I’m just getting started.”

Silliman studied creative writing at SF State in the late 1960s “because it put me in touch with other writers–it was never about a job.” He learned his craft “by reading voluminously & writing every day” and he means voluminously:

My first year at SF State, I was unable to get all the courses I wanted, so I used the extra time to read the entire library collection of American poetry, A through Z. Robin Blaser had just left his position as the poetry buyer for the library, so it was a terrific collection at that point. When I finished the collection, I started in on the hard-to-get magazines in the rare book room. SF State did not have the Black Mountain Review, but it did have the early series’ of Origin.

Is an MFA useful? “About as useful as polio, and about as crippling. Other than access to other writers at roughly the same level of development, it is mostly something that has to be overcome if one is to write seriously. I’m always impressed at how many do seem able to set that aside & become real writers.

The idea that the MFA will lead to a job is mostly a fraud.”

On the matter of being satisfied? “I don’t think I’m ever satisfied, and I think that’s inherently harder the older one gets. I do have a daily writing practice, but it evolves over time and turns out to be very different from one year to the next. I don’t have book currently scheduled, but am working on several projects. Right now the conclusion of the tenth & final volume of The Grand Piano, the collective autobiography I’ve been working on for over a decade with several other poets, is my darling.”

What is satisfying though, is community. On that score he is “absolutely” satisfied. “I have felt that way since I was 18 years old in 1964.”  What makes for a vital life as a poet?  “Pay attention. All the time.” Is all of this simply biding time until that teaching job comes along? “It would be interesting to teach again just for the students–they have so much to teach us.”

DON SHARE edits, but notes that in “ the past, that is to say, as an adult, I have worked as a van driver, busboy, library worker, curator, and Internet trainer for people from third-world countries.” He has a PhD (not in English), but no MFA:

You’re gonna thank I’m nuts, but until I saw it at first hand, I simply had no idea that people got MFAs in order to teach.  I learned my craft (if that’s the right word for it) from books, two mentors, shooting the shit with other people, and sorry-assed soul searching.  I don’t think that poets in academia are more ‘professional’ than those who aren’t, but that’s only because I don’t look at poetry as a profession.

Share does not have a “daily writing practice,” per se: “I write whilst taking public transportation to work and back; and I have a manuscript that I doubt anybody will undertake to publish.  It’s called In a Station of the Metro because Ray DiPalma convinced me not to use the more accurate title, In a Station of the Metra – a rail service I spend many hours of my life using when I’m not on Chicago’s famous El.”

Does he feel part of a community? “I do.  I feel that I ‘know’ lots of people I’ve never even met in person – you, for instance, and that’s a kind of community.”

What makes for a vital life as a poet? “I’m not sure that vitality has a lot to do with it.  I’m pretty enervated myself.”

Is he waiting for that perfect teaching job to come along? “What’s a perfect teaching job?!?  Look, teaching is an honorable thing to do; and you can’t blame anyone who’d dream of having the perks of a tenured position.  Maybe this is too Platonic a view (literally), but if people are good at teaching, then they should teach.  If they are not, on the other hand, then they shouldn’t. Some of the smartest people I’ve known, and some of the best poets, too, have no business teaching; and some of the best teacherly types I know can’t get a teaching job for anything in the world.

The key thing is: what are the credentials for being a poet?  There aren’t any.”

VANESSA PLACE represents indigent sex offenders and sexually violent predators on appeal. Does she find it feeds her? “Yes, incessantly.” Why did she become a lawyer? “I was good at it.” Were there poet role models?  “I don’t think there really are role models for me, save Pound’s radio broadcasts.” She did an MFA program to “meet other writers” and notes “a level of professionalism with poets as ballplayers.” She is “reasonably satisfied; writes daily, if not more” and publishes regularly.

In response to the question of what makes for a vital life as a poet in your mind, Place said, “yes.”

And on the matter of whether or not she is waiting for the perfect job?

JACOB McARTHUR MOONEY is a client-support manager for an online adult entertainment firm. “If that sounds sexy and/or devious, it’s really neither. Basically, I do math all day. In the service of things that may be sexy or devious.” His employment definitely feeds his poetic practice, though not in any direct way. “I like working with people who don’t know I’m a poet, and wouldn’t care if I told them. That knowledge shrinks you, in a really positive way. It gives context.”

Mooney did an MFA at the University of Guelph so he would “have an excuse to centre my life around poetry for a couple years, and as a means of working with people who cared about it as much as I did.” He says he didn’t consider teaching at the time, though “most people who did that program with me are now teachers.”

He would “argue that non-MFAers, if they are serious enough about their work, possess a greater professionalism than us coddled factory-produced poets. They’ve done the DIY thing, through self-made chapbooks and shows and whatever. Happily, my program had something of that spirit, perhaps because I came in with the first cohort and it was sort of developing around me as I progressed.”

On the other hand, he “fell into” his “first book deal by accident. A teacher told an editor who told a publisher, who called me to ask if I had a manuscript. Lucky boy.” His second collection is coming out in Spring 2011, from McClelland & Stewart. “It’ll be called Folk. It’s a book about communities and airplanes.”

Is he content? “I live in Parkdale, Toronto, which is one of the great writer-infested neighbourhoods in North America. I have a blog that keeps me in dialogue with poets from other cities. Basically, I want for nothing, I’m happy.”

Is he waiting for that teaching job?

Well….maybe. Though it’d have to be perfect. I’d take 60k a year to teach eager, well-read youngsters about writing poetry, sure. But I wouldn’t take 30k a year to teach their uninspired siblings about the basics of grammar, or how to write a paragraph. And there’s a lot more positions available for the latter than the former. I’d much rather stay where I am, for now, thanks.

In the interest of time I’m posting this now, but there are several more interviews to be added on here…and of course I’m hoping to hear from you. So, what about poet architects? Organic gardeners? Wind farm developers? How do you maintain yourself as a poet?

Where did the idea that to write poetry is to teach poetry arise?

Is a poet critic a hermetically sealed role or is there room for change?

What was TS Eliot’s relationship to the Academy? Or rather, the academies, because apparently his relationship to Cambridge was much different than his relationship to Oxford. Why did he not take that, by now mythical and much coveted teaching job? What difference would it have made in his career, to his poetry? To the poets of the early 20th century, and so on?

Is there a critic outside of poetry? Why do so many “innovative” women writers seem to have criticism embedded in their poetry? (Lisa Robertson, Erin Moure, Anne Carson…). Where are the critical women writers? Why are there so many non-poet women critical writers and so few women who are poets and critical writers? Or, is that a myth?

What do Wittgenstein, William Carlos Williams, Cotton Mather, Charlotte Mew, Fredric Jameson, French Theory, Fred Moten, Thylias Moss, and James Sherry have to do with each other, let alone the question of poet critic?

Greetings from Santa Cruz where I am attending a conference titled Re-imagining the Poet-Critic. Yesterday I listened to a dozen or more papers, several respondents, a lunch hour reading, responded to two papers myself, and then after a fabulous dinner listened to three poets, Kasey Mohammad, Craig Dworkin and Vanessa Place, read in the Felix Culpa gallery.

Kasey read some of his Shakespeare anagrams. He is making his way through the sonnets, using the jumbled letters of each to construct new poems. The remaining letters are used to make the titles which, as he notes, are usually the silliest part. Humour is the main note in Mohammed’s workings and later, over drinks, we found ourselves wondering what would happen if he explored different registers–he is a flarf poet so the dominant response is flarf. Here, by the way, is Virginia Woolf’s reading of flarf.

Dworkin read a write through of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty that was brilliant (you can find a review of that here). First time hearing him read, knowing his critical and editorial work more than his poetry. He also read a very funny and quite imaginative “translation” of Beowulf  that I would love to read.

Vanessa Place went last because as her introducer said, she tends to disturb. She read a reworking of Valerie Solinas SCUM Manifesto, her long piece comprised of the names for that place, you know, down there…and read a piece from her ongoing Statement of Facts project that did indeed disturb.

Today another dozen or so papers and respondents and tonight yours truly reads with David Lau and Juliana Spahr. I will try to add to this post tomorrow at some point when I can catch wireless in between San Francisco and Montreal. Until then, I’ll take notes…

That said, I cannot help but see the situation from a different perspective than Behrle (or at least the Behrle of “24/7 Relentless Careerism”; Behrle is, after all, a poet, as well a tireless community organizer and activist for poetry within the community around the St. Mark’s Poetry Project). Often, I feel frustrated by all that one cannot do as a poet, what one seemingly gives up through one’s devotion to poetry. And how far short of reality—of exigent political and social conditions—poetry would often seem to fall. Likewise, it is frustrating to feel as though one is at the mercy of an apparatus of contests, and editors, and prestigious academic appointments in order to be appreciated for one’s work. What Behrle expresses eloquently is a cynical perspective I have no doubt is shared by many. That one can only follow one road now, and that that road is paved by mediocrity and meticulous calculation.

When I went to Buffalo for graduate school in 2000, I was fresh out of college (I deferred for a year between college and graduate school). When I applied to Buffalo, I didn’t apply anywhere else. It was Buffalo or bust. I wanted to go because I admired Charles Bernstein’s and Susan Howe’s work and had grown up on the poetry of Robert Creeley and the poets of Creeley’s generation. Having met Howe when I was a college freshman, I had no doubt that Buffalo was a place where I could learn to be a poet. That’s all I wanted. And, if nothing else, that’s what I got from Buffalo. A practice as a poet. Common ground among other poets whose work I admired.

I am still grateful for this. Looking back on my time at Buffalo (Bernstein had three years left, Creeley would pass away in four, Howe was preparing to retire), it seems like a miracle I got there when I did. To work with Howe and Bernstein, and also with Myung Mi Kim and Tony Conrad at Buffalo has instilled me with an enormous sense of good fortune.

My decision to apply to Buffalo was a fairly hapless one. It was motivated by eagerness, and interest, and desire. When I attended Creeley’s memorial service at Buffalo I remember Robert J. Bertholf (at the time the curator of Poetry / Rare books at the university) thanking Creeley for inviting him to “come along for the ride.” When I get to host a reading, or correspond with a contemporary, or I am invited to give a reading I have a similar feeling of gratitude to simply be part of the conversation. If I become critical of something, I think it is in relation to and out of respect for this sense of conversation. Many of the poets who I feel closest to feel burdened by a sense of privilege and would try to conduct themselves counter to this privilege. Among these poets there is an ethical commitment to poetry—the writing of poetry as not just counter to “official verse culture” (which it is obviously always in relation to), but as the principal expression of the poet’s desire to be and act in specific ways within the world.

At its best, I think that poetry can make things seem possible again. Possible worlds, possible sensations, possible ideas, possible ways of being, possible relationships. I also think that poetry has its limits, and that a major limit of poetry (or most modes of aesthetic production for that matter) lies in its inability to effect immediately practical changes in reality. As Tillie Olsen reveals through her book Silences, there are “natural” hiatuses which occur throughout a writer’s life, and then, more often than not, there are hiatuses which occur as a result of economic and/or socio-political violence. For women and minorities such imposed hiatuses have obviously occurred more frequently than for any one else. There is also a hiatus that I believe occurs out of a sense that poetry does not suffice in the face of strife or emergency occurring in the world. George Oppen’s twenty-five year hiatus during which time the poet fought in World War II and organized for the Communist Party is a famous example of such a hiatus. Similarly, there is Robert Duncan’s hiatus during the 1970s during which time the poet did not write or publish. Laura Riding Jackson gave up poetry because she did not feel that it could represent “the real,” and spent the rest of her life writing text books which, in prose, extend many of the preoccupations of her renounced poetic practice. There is also the legendary case of Rimbaud, who became an arms trader; an act which Mallarmé likened to amputating one’s arm while still conscious.

Mainly, I want to suggest that there are counter-actions to the kind of careerism Behrle skillfully describes in his essay. And one is to imagine the poet acting beyond the boundaries of poetry both as a literary genre/medium and as it is embedded within a set of institutional practices and cultural locations. What happens when a poet works without words, in mediums not their ‘own’ (as so many poets have done)? What happens when a practicing poet produces something outside a culture or context of poets/poetry (as so many poets also have done)?

Thinking about poetry as a labor and a field of production is crucial here. Because I believe that part of the difficulty with contemporary poetry is that poetry, for many, has seemingly ossified as a field of production and now seeks its revivification in other cultural activities. Off-page poetries—performance and somatic poetry, conceptualist poetries, ecopoetries, and other poetries which redistribute themselves across multiple fields of production—are therefore of the hour. While many poets obviously still do write poetry for the page (and I am someone who personally believes in the power and potential of page poetry, not to mention poetries traditionally identified as ‘lyrical’ ones) many others are writing across disciplines, genres, and modes/fields of production. So while many of us are still wrapping our heads around late-modernist appropriation practices, we also have yet to adequately address the more complex problem of how off-page poetries redistribute poetic effort within a more expansive and extended field of cultural production.

Following Paolo Virno’s book, A Grammar of the Multitude, I would also like to take poetry, at bottom, as a labor. While this labor may not be easily quantifiable, there is nevertheless a finite energy that one can put towards the generation, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry (what, traditionally, has been considered the ‘work’ of poets to a large extent). What, I often wonder, if this effort was to be radically redistributed? If the poet is also defined by their having a practice of using language in ways considered to be poetic, what would it mean for those practices to be displaced and put to uses other than they were intended? What, in other words, if one was to voluntarily and tactically use the labor power they would normally afford to the writing, distribution, and/or critical reflection upon/of poetry towards another kind of labor? What if such a hiatus were organized? What would this experiment result in?….

so some say that poetry is dead because it stays within the academic classroom, overlooking how important the classroom is to creating lifelong poetry readers / writers, as well as how important course adoption is to keeping books alive and relevant and in print.

when i design a syllabus, i try to choose books that i think will engage and challenge my students. while at the native american literature symposium this past weekend, i began to think about this process more because i kept hearing an interesting word at many of the panels. this word was….

“teachable.” so my question to all the educators out there: what makes a book “teachable”? does this idea of “teachability” change whether you are teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, or graduate students? how do you choose texts for your courses?

my first book was published in 2008, and since then it has been taught in about 20 courses that i know of in universities throughout the pacific and the u.s. i’ve had the pleasure of visiting some of these classes in person, blogging with them, skyping, and engaging with students via email & facebook. (the pic above is a Native American Studies course at UC Berkeley that read my first book last fall; as you can see, only the two over-acheivers in the front row managed to stay awake during my class visit).

what’s been surprising to me is how many different contexts there are for poetry. so my first book has been taught in courses called “Literatures of Oceania,” “Asian American Studies,” “Native American Studies,” “Poetry and Politics,” “Writing in Place, Writing as Place,” and “Ecology and Poetry,” to name a few.

two really interesting courses teaching my first book this year are called “Decolonizing Narratives: Indigenous Literature and Culture in the Age of Sovereignty” (Kansas University) and “Discontiguous States of America” (St. Thomas University). Here are the descriptions of the courses:

1) Course Description: This course takes as its premise the decolonizing potential of indigenous literary and cultural productions. It seeks to both answer and explore such questions as: How can literary and cultural texts such as novels, poetry, music, and film from world indigenous communities function as decolonizing tools? Can decolonizing methodologies be applied to such texts?  How do such texts contribute to and strengthen indigenous political, intellectual, cultural, visual and rhetorical sovereignty?  These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer throughout the semester as we read indigenous literature and view films and documentaries from North America, the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand.

2) Course Description: This course examines ideas and examples of American literature in light of territories outside the forty-eight contiguous states. We will begin by considering more typical accounts of American literary history that rely on the relationships between geography, region, and cultural contact in creating a sense of American identity and literary production. Moving from historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of American character through westward continental expansion, we will consider writing by authors such as Willa Cather and Zitkala Sa that sketch out visions of an expanding America from the perspective of settlers as well as displaced indigenous peoples. We will then turn to explorations of American imperialism that leads to the incorporation of Alaska, Hawai’i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico through the literary imaginations of writers like Jack London, Haunani-Kay Trask, Craig Santos Perez, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Nuyorican Cafe poets.

In addition to reading literature about and from these spaces that lie outside the contiguous United States, we will study legal and cultural claims to the peculiar status of these lands and peoples to the American landscape and body politic. While these places are often effaced and the inhabitants forgotten in the national imaginary, their incorporation into the country has led the US Supreme Court to define some of these areas in a series of early twentieth-century rulings called the “Insular Cases” that turn on the question of whether citizenship and the protections of the Constitution necessarily follow the reach of American military might. We will read these legal discussions along with literary renderings of the complicated status of such people and places. This course fulfills the Diversity Literature distribution requirement for English majors.

this current semester is a bit strange as seven courses that i know of are teaching my first book and three courses are teaching my recently released second book. for my second book, those three courses are “Native American Studies: Reading and Composition” (UC Berkeley) “Pacific islander Studies” (San Francisco City College), and “Poets in Conversation” (UC Berkeley Extension)

i had the pleasure of visiting the creative writing course last week at UC berkeley extension (special thanks to laura walker). here’s the class reading my book:

the weekend before this past weekend, i was at UC Santa Cruz, where a course called “Visual Cultures of Africa, Oceania, and Native America” read my first book. i gave a lecture to the class titled “A Brilliant Lecture on the Themes of Mapping and Navigation in the Wondrous Poetry of Craig Santos Perez, whom is I.” Here is a picture of the class (note it was a friday 8 am course so i wasnt mad that all the students were sleeping:

that night, i also conducted a writing workshop with some of the graduate and an undergrad–but i forgot to take a picture. the next day (yes they worked my butt off at santa cruz)–i gave a poetry reading at a conference being held that weekend called “Spatial Imaginaries and Critical Geographies” sponsored by the Asia Pacific Americas Research Cluster. here is a pic of the rowdy academic crowd:

i must admit too that i was a bit starstruck because rob wilson, karen tei yamashita, and hsuan hsu were in the audience! eek. here was the flier for the events (with special thanks to stacy kamehiro & dina el dessouky):

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p.s. if you live in NYC, come to this exciting event:

2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (Between 124th and 125th Streets)