The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 2) | Suzanne Frischkorn

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Suzanne Frischkorn.

BT: There are some poems I wish I had written or I feel I could've written. For instance, I wish I had written the poem "Mood Indigo" by William Matthews. Is there are poem you wish you had written or feel you could've written?

SUZANNE: The Matthews poems is breathtaking, thank you for sharing it, I hadn't read it before. One of the poems I wish I had written is "A Color of the Sky" by Tony Hoagland. You can read it here.

Hoagland makes it look so easy and it certainly seems like I could have written it, but I did not, and can only wish I had. I love that poem.

BT: I consider myself a logophile (a lover of words). Is there a word you're in love with at the moment?

SUZANNE: I’m in love with plateau and seeing clamor on the side.

BT: Novels get turned into movies; short stories do, too. Is there a poem that you could see as a movie or inspiration for a movie?

SUZANNE: I have always thought that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" has a cinematic quality. Hasn’t a movie already appeared that was inspired by Prufrock? It seems to me that it has, if not, then someone should really get started on that.

BT: When Sam Rasnake suggested I interview you next, he called you "very gifted" (and I agree!). Is there a poem you've written that you feel represents you best as a "very gifted" writer?

SUZANNE: Sam Rasnake is incredibly generous with his praise, and many thanks to you both. I don’t think artists are the best judge of their own work. It would be quite impossible for me to even consider myself ‘gifted’ let alone select a poem that I wrote that showcases a ‘gift’. The real gift is Rasnake’s reading and responding to my work.

I’m currently working on my third full-length manuscript and the poems from my chapbook American Flamingo (MiPO, 2008) will appear in it – these are the poems that I am excited about right now, isn’t that always the way? Publisher Didi Menendez released an online edition of American Flamingo yesterday and it can be read for free here.

I wish I could pick just one poem from the chapbook, but I am most excited about how they work as a whole, and the way my new poems converse with those poems.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

SUZANNE: Wendy Wisner.

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Girl on a Bridge (2010) and Lit Windowpane (2008), both from Main Street Rag, and five chapbooks, most recently American Flamingo (MiPO, 2008).

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 2) | Sam Rasnake

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Sam Rasnake.

BT: When poet Walter Bjorkman suggested I interview you next, he said your work "has inspired [him] with its art and sensibilites." How would you describe your poetry?

SAM: Imagine a stained glass window in a tall house. A rock is thrown, breaking the window into a thousand pieces which fall into the house covering a stairway. I pick up all the pieces I can find, take them to my desk, and begin piecing portions of the window back together– but not as one window, but as a hundred tiny windows. The whole window is there, but now reassembled into something new.

Actually, what’s new is me. I find myself in these many windows.

I’m sure this sounds a bit odd – and yesterday I wouldn’t have described it this way – but this is what came to mind with your question, Michelle. It’s how I feel about my work– at least the work that’s consumed me for the past several years. Most of what I write is connected to the arts in some manner– literature, music, art, photography, cinema. There’s a great filmmaker, Chris Marker, who has a similar approach in his marvelous film La Jetée– his approach to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I can connect with that: finding the self in art.

BT: Did you read a poem today? If so, which poem?

SAM: I’ve always enjoyed the poetry of Mary Ruefle, and I revisited her marvelous poem “Storm Window” – short and haunting:

She sat writing little poems of mist.
And he in an armchair, reading
blood-red leather novels.
Their three-legged white cat
wandering between them.
Twenty-four champagne glasses
sparkling on the shelf.
Never a one to be broken.
And two stone dogs on either side
of the driveway.
For these reasons
they have gone on precisely,
undetected, for centuries.

The imagery in this piece is so alive, and the ending makes me feel as though I’d been shot into deep space, and turning my head, could see the Earth growing smaller and smaller, but never being lost in my gaze. I feel a marvelous connection with time and literature at the end of Ruefle’s poem.

BT: One of my favorite poem-beginnings is: "That rusty zipper, the Pawcatuck river/fastens Rhode Island to Connecticut down/to the sea" from Leslie McGrath's poem Renewal. Is there a poem-beginning that you absolutely love?

SAM: Oh yes – As soon as I read your response, the first poem that rose into view was Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose” and its amazing opening stanzas that are as clear a visual of landscape as can be written – and she did this as one sentence that spans six stanzas:

From narrow provinces

of fish and bread and tea,

home of the long tides

where the bay leaves the sea

twice a day and takes

the herrings long rides,

where if the river

enters or retreats

in a wall of brown foam

depends on if it meets

the bay coming in,

the bay not at home;

where, silted red,

sometimes the sun sets

facing a red sea,

and others, veins the flats'

lavender, rich mud

in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,

down rows of sugar maples,

past clapboard farmhouses

and neat, clapboard churches,

bleached, ridged as clamshells,

past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon

a bus journeys west,

the windshield flashing pink,

pink glancing off of metal,

brushing the dented flank

of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,

and waits, patient, while

a lone traveller gives

kisses and embraces

to seven relatives

and a collie supervises.

I realize this passage is long, and I was going to list the first two stanzas, but I couldn’t stop. Bishop’s pen always created a landscape with language that was more than real.

BT: One of my favorite poems written by you is Strange Fruit. In it, you say: "...until the song is through/until the song does her in./She sounds like scars/that bleed over the moon's face..." What made you compare her voice to scars bleeding over the moon's face?

SAM: I’m pleased that you like the poem, Michelle. I wrote this piece some time ago, and I’m not certain of the writing process– but I do remember listening to Holiday sing that powerful song – which became a signature song for her – playing it over and over on my stereo. In my head, when I close my eyes, her voice is the moon.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

SAM: Suzanne Frischkorn is a wonderful writer. Very gifted.

Sam Rasnake’s poetry has appeared recently in RICK MAGAZINE, OCHO, Shampoo, FRiGG, Poets/Artists, and BluePrintReview, as well as the anthologies Best of the Web 2009 (Dzanc Books), Deep River Apartments (The Private Press), and BOXCAR Poetry Review Anthology 2. He is the author of one collection, Necessary Motions (Sow’s Ear Press) and two chapbooks – Religions of the Blood (Pudding House) andLessons in Morphology (GOSS183).

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 2) | Walter Bjorkman

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Walter Bjorkman.

BT: What triggered your interest in poetry?

WALTER: I would say at the earliest, it had to be the songs of early childhood that were sung by family, particularly mothers. The lyricism, meter and rhyme were intoned to us before we could understand or speak words. It’s the same thing that later triggered my interest in Rock ‘n Roll, R & B, Blues & Jazz. Most of us were fortunate to have had that upbringing in one form or another, so it is nothing unique, most of us have it. With me now it is a matter of keeping in touch with it. As to expressing myself in poetry, it had to be the first poem I ever wrote, Grave Fears, at age 14, about the death of my father five years earlier. I don’t remember writing the best parts, I was zoned out. It got raves in my soph. English class and stuck into the school literary publication. I put it on the shelf for a few years until I got serious about questioning everything, and a professor, Sally Sears, took interest in my poems as I was in the process of dropping out of science and taking up literature. I later met her on the boardwalk at Coney where she was then in a traveling troupe of the Bread & Puppet Theater, entertaining a July crowd, so I did get to thank her.

BT: Right now, do you have a favorite poem?

WALTER: It changes daily. Today I was taken again by Coleen Shin’s hello grace. It has a humanity to it expressed with images and sounds that stay with me, “gentle bird bon mots” to quote her. As for all time, no, I couldn’t pick one, but Keat’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci would always be in the top five. And Ferlinghetti’s Junkman’s Obbligato from the Oral Message’s section of A Coney Island of the Mind.

BT: You are the Co-founder and Editor of the online literary community Voices. What made you want to start an online literary community?

WALTER: “What” is correct – Michelle Elvy (laughter). It didn’t start out as such, we had started a “dueling poets” thing on Fictionaut and realized it was becoming an in sort of thing, so we decided to start a blog to accomodate it rather than subjecting unsuspecting and unexpecting readers to it. We wanted a place to have more freedom to just throw stuff out there without the scrutiny of a rating system, without the minutiae of a workshop. It was character driven, so we got the idea for the name "VOICES where characters (flawed or not) have their say." So we did it, and soon we got the idea to invite others through our contacts to join in. At around the same time, I was asked to assist at 52|250 A Year of Flash on design and editing, that Michelle had started up with John Wentworth Chapin. So that led to the smallish group we have there on Voices that drop in every now and then with some of their works. We quickly started with interviews, an Artist, a Poet, a mysterious Flasher and most recently a The New Yorker cartoonist.

More changes are soon to come on Voices (or . . maybe a little later). In a few weeks, thirteen, 52|250′s first quarterly will be coming out. It is the editor’s selection of the best of the flashes of the first quarter year, plus a few more treats. Working on both may have taken me away from writing a bit, but it has exposed me to such good work by so many writers, that it will serve my own writing well down the road.

BT: Pick a poet, any poet…

WALTER: Depends on what for. A day in the woods – Keats. A night runnin’ down the town – Ferlinghetti. And so on. Sometimes the experience leads me to the poet, other times the reverse. But most often these days it is what is before my eyes on the sites and blogs that I frequent.

BT: I’m trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

WALTER: Sam Rasnake, whose poetry has inspired me with its art and sensibilities since I first came across him about a year ago.

Walter Bjorkman is a woods walker, watcher and sometimes writer living in Maryland. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, and as such much of his work is rooted there. His work has been published in Poets & Artists, Metazen, BluePrint Review and OCHO.

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 1) | Jennifer Chang

THE POETRY CHAIN GANG (part 15 w/ Jennifer Chang)

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Jennifer Chang.

BT: I would love to write a poem about a poet. Have you ever written a poem about a poet? If not, what poet could you see writing a poem about?

JENNIFER: I recently put Frank O'Hara in a poem about looking at a field and thinking about the death of my friend's dog, Tammy. I was mad at myself for writing yet another poem about a field, even though it was about my friend's loss, but then it was about what draws artists to our subject matters and I started incorporating an exchange about art
between O'Hara and Motherwell. "Shut up, and just paint the pictures," Motherwell says at one point, frustrated with all their navel-gazing.

Anyway, I feel better when I think about Frank O'Hara and he's in there because he's a hero and a specific word like "Gauloise" and what's weirder than a nature poem with Frank O'Hara in it? I also have a poem with Andres Breton in it. It's about not wanting to leave the house. Clearly, neither of these are good poems, but other poets appear in my poems when I'm feeling the anxiety of influence, which is really the anxiety of self, in an especially keen way. I'd like to write a poem with Gertrude Stein in it, but Lynn Emanuel's already done that so exceptionally well. Her poem's kind of about anxiety, too.

BT: Pick a poem, any poem…

JENNIFER: "Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes

BT: I love your poem Pastoral where you say: "dirt and chant" and "roar and bloom." I love when poets throw together words that aren't usually thrown together. What made you put "dirt" and "chant" together?

JENNIFER: Thank you! I wrote that poem while I was staying with a flower farmer in Napa Valley. One morning I was watching her from the window working in her fields of flowers. Even though I couldn't see her face, I could tell she was so very happy out there in the dirt and in the wind. I hadn't known one could farm flowers. And there were so many flowers! Most of the poem's images and word play emerged from that experience. I liked the sound of "dirt" and "chant; they share a similar concluding consonance and yet have such different denotations.

BT: I am a logophile which is a lover of words. Do you have a favorite word at the moment?

JENNIFER: Lately, I've been thinking about, a little obsessed with, words whose roots don't quite match their current meanings, and because I just taught Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad was another logophile) I keep wondering about the repeated use of the words "absurd" and "unsound" at the end of the book. Neither word is about sound, even though both words' roots are related to hearing. So this week, I've thought about both "absurd" and "unsound" at least once a day and I know I'm going to eventually find a way to use them in a poem.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

JENNIFER: Jennifer Kronovet

Jennifer Chang’s first book, The History of Anonymity, was an inaugural selection of the VQR Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, and Northwest Review and she has received recent fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. A Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Virginia, she is writing a dissertation on race and pastoral modernism.

Jennifer Kronovet never got back to me, so this concludes The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 1). Stay tuned for Volume 2.

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 1) | Cecily Parks

THE POETRY CHAIN GANG (part 14 w/ Cecily Parks)

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Cecily Parks

BT: It’s 9 p.m., are you…
a.) just putting the finishing touches on a poem?
b.) just beginning a poem?
c.) reading a poem?
d.) not even thinking about poetry?

CECILY: d

BT: After I've read a really good poem, I always find myself in a writing mood. How do you feel after you've read a really good poem?

CECILY: A really good poem makes me feel like I might cry. I get that tingly feeling on the backs of my eyeballs.

BT: In a 1970 interview with poet Robert Graves, he had this to say: "…Writing a poem is…like finding the top of a statue buried in sand. You gradually take the sand away and you find the thing, whole— that is what poetry is, rather than building something up. It's rediscovering what you've known inside yourself the whole time, what you've foreseen." Would you agree or beg to differ?

CECILY: I agree that writing a poem allows you to rediscover something inside yourself, but I don't think that the process is as pristine as Graves suggests. Because I'm obsessed with swamps at the moment, I've come to think that writing a poem is a little bit like wading into a swamp. Maybe it's the swamp of the self, or the swamp of the mind— either way, it's messy and dark and fluid

BT: I love the idea of found poems ("Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and [turning] them [into] poetry by making changes in spacing and/or lines…"). That said— how do you feel about found poems?

CECILY: I think that in the game hide-and-go-seek, the hider secretly wants to be found. So, I like found poems because they remind us that poems want to be found, even though they may be elusive and elliptical, or hiding in a block of prose.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

CECILY: Jennifer Chang

Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collection Field Folly Snow, which was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Glasgow / Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. She is a PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and teaches in the undergraduate creative writing program at Columbia University.

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 1) | Leigh Anne Couch

THE POETRY CHAIN GANG (part 13 w/ Leigh Anne Couch)

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Leigh Anne Couch.

BT: What triggered your interest in poetry?

LEIGH ANNE: My inability to write a lucid essay in college and falling in love with an artist. Since there was no way I could paint, I tried to fake it with words, so we'd have dreamy things to talk about. When he left, I didn't want to fake it anymore and decided to read what living poets were writing. That was exciting to me and as humbling as it was, I wanted to try to be a part of that community.

BT: Is there a topic you haven't covered in your poetry that you would like to cover?

LEIGH ANNE: Mother-love, both ways. I can hear the deep sighs out there and I feel it, too. Poems about mothering are set-ups for sentimentality and kitsch. But raising a person from complete dependency to their successful abandonment of you is such a powerful thing and, handled in the right way, has deep roots in the body, the culture, the society, and of course the self.

BT: What poetry book are you currently reading?

LEIGH ANNE: I'm currently reading a fabulous manuscript of poems by April Naoko Heck. It's her first book and it's called "Shelter of Leaves." I've read it three times now just trying to figure out why and how it works the way it does for me.

BT: Is there a poetry book on your bookshelf that you think is a "must have" for poetry lovers?

LEIGH ANNE: This question, as simple as it is, is really giving me fits. I can't name just one. I have really enjoyed seeking out first books by poets I love— I'm going with "Summer Anniversaries" (Donald Justice), "Lies" (C.K. Williams), and "Colossus" (Sylvia Plath). In addition, anyone who loves poetry because it makes them feel weird must read "The Orchard" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

LEIGH ANNE: Cecily Parks

Leigh Anne Couch lives in Tennessee and is the managing editor of the Sewanee Review. Her poems have appeared in the Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Carolina Quarterly, and other journals. Her book, Houses Fly Away (2007), was the co-winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award.

The Poetry Chain Gang (Volume 1) | Erica Dawson

THE POETRY CHAIN GANG (part 12 w/ Erica Dawson)

The Black Telephone has five fast questions for poet Erica Dawson.

BT: I love the title of your book "Big-Eyed Afraid" (winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2006); I would have bought the book on the title alone. What made you ultimately stick with that title?

ERICA: First, thanks so much for the compliment. There were plenty of naysayers when I initially proposed the title. I stuck with it because I thought it provided a true trope for the entire book. Though there are moments where I seem quite sure of myself, some say, there's, to me, always an underlying current of self-consciousness and fear. And, my mom loved the title. Her opinion counts a lot.

BT: Did you ever buy a poetry book just because of its title?

ERICA: Definitely. Cate Marvin's "World's Tallest Disaster" was one of those buys. Barbara Ras' "Bite Every Sorrow" also caught my eye.

BT: When poet Juliana Gray suggested I interview you next, she said, "Erica…[writes] in meter and form…and she has a dexterity with these musty old forms that I really envy. She can handle something like a crown of sonnets…with such dexterity and sass." So what is it about these musty old forms that draws you to them?

ERICA: Ah, Juliana is so sweet. I'd say it's the "must." I love the fact that people consider the forms old and dusty. I have a little mission to prove that things from the 17th century and earlier were pretty damn sexy and sassy in their day, and still can be sassy today. I love any mix of old and new, anything from new songs that sample 60s music to an outfit that combines something vintage with something very contemporary. The poems work the same way for me. There's something unexpected about the combination of the older forms with modern language. I like catching people off guard.

BT: As an undergraduate, I didn’t care too much for the poet Sylvia Plath; now, I can’t get enough of her work. Is there a poet that you didn’t like too much at first, but enjoy now?

ERICA: I had that same relationship with Plath, actually. I think I was too caught up in her biography to give her poetry the attention and work it deserves. Also, my biggest love right now, the British Renaissance, was not a love of mine in undergrad. Not at all. It came later in graduate school. But now I can't get enough of "Paradise Lost," for example. No lie. It's amazing. Frightening, really sexy, and incredibly dense yet completely readable like a novel.

BT: I'm trying to start a chain, a chain of poets, sort of like a chain gang of poets. Can you please suggest a poet I should ask five fast questions to next?

ERICA: If you haven't already, ask Leigh Anne Couch. She's an amazing poet whose work has this kind of charm I've never seen before. You read or listen to Leigh Anne reading her work and you are utterly mesmerized by the sounds you hear, the words you digest, the rhythms and pictures she creates in your mind that stick with you, deliciously, long after you've closed the book or the reading has ended. Her voice, literal and figurative, is hard to shake, in a very good way. And, she's one of my favorite people in the world.

Erica Dawson’s book Big-Eyed Afraid (winner of the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize) was published by Waywiser Press in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Southwest Review, Harvard Review, Raintown Review and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Ohio where she’s completing her PhD in English and Comparative Literature at University of Cincinnati.