In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Cathy Park Hong.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Cathy Park Hong 1. I read a lot, procrastinating from actually writing with “research.”

2. I go to the New York Public Library, fill out requests for books, retrieve books, read, and take copious notes in the Rose Room.

3. Sometimes, I force myself to write a sonnet a day, where I just empty my head.

4. I go to museums, films, galleries, where I steal images.

5. I unload most of this raw material into my unlined black notebook that I always buy at a tiny stationery store on 12th Street. The notebook may consist of information, data, “free writing,” stabs at stanzas, to do lists, directions to places (I don’t have an iPhone).

6. I transfer the mess to a computer and twiddle with it.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

CPH Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harryette Mullen, John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, Inger Christensen, Lyn Hejinian, Fernando Pessoa, John Ashbery (and to add some nonpoets who I like to return to: Hernandez Brothers, Roberto Bolaño, Susan Sontag, Mike Davis, David Mitchell, Paul Chan, Bong Joon-Ho).

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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San Francisco’s Litquake might be over, but the aftershocks keep rumbling. Novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell—the author of Where They Were Missed and The Meeting Point—participated in Litquake’s Young Ireland. She is a native of Belfast.

Litquake What is your favorite book?

Lucy Caldwell Oh my goodness! You do know this is impossible to answer, right? I’ll go for the books I loved most as a child—there are five of them, but they’re a quintet, so you’ll have to let me get away with it. I still re-read them almost every year, and one day I hope to write my own series like them. They are Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwich; The Grey King; and Silver on the Tree. A haunting, chilling and utterly compelling saga based on Arthurian legends and the age-old battle between good and evil, Light and Dark.

Litquake Who is your favorite writer?

LC Again: absolutely impossible. But I think I’ll go for Chekhov. Three Sisters is my all-time favorite play, ever.

Litquake If the answers to 1 and 2 are different, why?

LC I love Chekhov’s work as an adult, and as a writer. But the books you love as a child you love in a different way: all-consuming, obsessive. Their stories and characters become part of you. So it seems important to acknowledge both.

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Ilya Kaminsky.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Ilya Kaminsky I write in lines. So the lines find their way on paper whether I overhear two boys insulting each other at the gas station, or see a gull cleaning her feet, or two old men playing dominoes on a hood of a car, or two young women kissing at the fish market. They become lines on receipts, on my hands, on a water bottle, on other people’s poems. Lines collect for years, but once in a while they discover that other lines are sexy and, well, the poems may come from that sort of a relationship. If I am lucky. Which isn’t often. But one has to have faith.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

IK I am hopelessly in love with Shakespeare, mostly plays: The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, of course, but also less famous ones, King John, for instance. My wife and I used to have Shakespeare parties at our place, which was great fun. We would provide everyone with lots of wine, copies of the book, and pencils; they drank and underlined their favorite passages in plays. So, after the party there was this great harvest of other people’s Shakespeare, which was a hunter-gatherer’s paradise.

My first Shakespeare, though, was in Russian. The poets of my generation got quite lucky since Pasternak translated many of Shakespeare’s plays and also much of Goethe—and he did a supreme job. Because Russian literature is much younger than English (so we don’t have much of a sense of 17th century literary Russian), one gets the feeling that one isn’t reading a translation but instead reading Shakespeare as if he wrote in the 1950s, at the time Pasternak was translating him en masse.

Lyric poets I go back to a lot are Catullus, Dickinson, Mandelstam, Celan, Vallejo. I love these poets because they reinvented the language, the syntax, in a way that showed me their love/hate relationship with it. I love how Mandelstam isn’t always grammatically correct in Russian (of course he simply sees new grammar), how Dickinson wants to grasp from one line to another, skipping the politesse, using dashes as stairs to jump between floors, or how Celan combines words because German vocabulary didn’t make the right ones for the grasp of human despair. I love, too, the three dots in the middle of lines in Vallejo, who knew that language wasn’t enough—this is probably the case, at one moment in her or his life, with any lyric poet.

And, I go back to Herrick and Donne and Stevens and Crane because they are great teachers of English music. In recent years I went back to Whitman’s “The Sleepers” and his wartime poems quite a bit as well. Longer poems I like to go back to or teach are Herbert Mason’s “Gilgamesh” and Christopher Logue’s versions of Homer. Those are great fun.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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“You can never / persuade one person that another / is a liar. People prefer the liar.” Elsbeth Pancrazi on Fanny Howe’s Come and See.

Great films begin in chaos.
They are made in order to show the abyss emerging into laws.

These lines are not the beginning of Fanny Howe’s Come and See—they come in the middle of an eight-page long poem encountered after the point at which I’d broken the thin book’s spine—but to me, they seemed a possible beginning, a dangling thread that promised to guide me. The thread continues, “Like Pope John Paul, certain directors only want the splendor of truth.”

The splendor of truth! If this is merely one possibility, what are the alternatives? Following the voice that made these proclamations, I began to get my bearings in what had seemed a closed system of beliefs—certainly a cryptic system, one of riddling logic guided by sound, as when:

Certain gnostics achieve ecstasy through random and frantic sex
But love aches its way through the interstices.

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At the Romanian Institute of Culture, Ella Veres sat down with Mircea Cărtărescu to discuss the lineage of Romanian fiction, the effect of technology on writing, and Cărtărescu’s book Orbitor/Glaring, which he compares to “a huge aircraft carrier.”

At the end of April, 2011, I attended the opening night of the Pen World Voices Festival in preparation for my encounter with Mircea Cărtărescu. It was a lovely evening, at the Light House on Chelsea Pier. In the small harbor there were anchored several sail boats, as if it was centuries ago. One of them was sailing out of the harbor and blew the fog horn. I expected Johnny Depp to swing by the ropes and wink tipsily at any moment. Instead I ambled through the parking lot, past the lengthy line of attendees, straight to the press reserved seats.

I took my front row seat, ready to hear grand speeches about freedom and tyranny. I considered PEN sacred ground. On its podium Nobel Prize winners, Eastern European writers with names difficult to pronounce, had launched their statements that shook the world. Well, not tonight. It felt like an expensive open mic. Writers from all over the world were flown in, wined and dined, so we could hear them read ten minutes of their work on the theme of water. It was fun, but not invigorating.

The next day I had my 45 minutes with Mircea Cărtărescu. In preparation, I read the first part of his humongous 1,500 page novel,Orbitor/Glaring. I was stunned that he had pulled it off. Everyday I am admonished to keep my writing short and to-the-point. No one wants to read 1,500 pages!

Cărtărescu seemed a modest man, and his first name is Mircea, like my departed little brother’s.

Ella Veres How does it feel to be part of the PEN festival, in such prestigious writers’ company?

Mircea Cărtărescu From what I’ve understood this festival is one of the largest in New York and in the United States of America. Of course I was impressed that I was invited to participate, and even more so, that I was invited to participate at the festival opening night next to very few writers, amongst whom were Salman Rushdie and Amélie Nothomb, names very well known around the world.

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Evie Shockley.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Evie Shockley There is a fullness in my mind, a crowding and jostling and rumbling of ideas, outrages, phrases, and images, reaching as far as my mind’s eye can “see” in any direction, and I begin wading into the crowd and trying to make a space from which to think about what some (or all) of the things in it have in common or what they might have to say to each other— if I could only create an arena where that analysis or conversation could happen.

There is an emptiness on a page, a vacuum represented and magnified by the whiteness of the space, that goes until it ends but even in ending implies an endless continuation of that blank refusal of inscription, and I begin to muss it up, to get it dirty, to bring it into contact with the world in which it exists, to pollute it with laughter, injustice, loss, ambiguity, laundry, and any other thing that goes into the human experience of life.

Poets.org What books do you continually go back to?

ES Gwendolyn Brooks’s Blacks (which is to say her entire oeuvre, including her novel, Maud Martha); Hortense Spillers’s “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar,” (not a book but a mind-blowing essay); Toni Morrison’s Paradise; Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia and Sleeping With the Dictionary; Ed Roberson’s Atmosphere Conditions and City Eclogue, among others of his; Brenda Hillman’s Bright Existence and Cascadia, among others of hers; C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sowers and Wild Seed, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette; American Women Poets in the 21st Century, ed. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr; Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy; Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of my Name and Sister Outsider: Essays (especially “Uses of the Erotic”); Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette; and Sawako Nakayasu’s Texture Notes.

Despite the length of this list, by the time I see it in print (or possibly by time it has left my e-mailbox) I will be horrified by the absolutely essential books that I’ve forgotten to include—I just know it. This is one of the dangers of having had a lifelong love affair with reading. When it comes to books, I am wantonly and passionately polyamorous.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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Mauro Javier Cardenas discusses the freedom of delirium and the evolution of syntax in the novels of Antonio Lobo Antunes.

Because the syntax that undergirds the twenty-two torrential novels of Antonio Lobo Antunes has evolved so radically since his first novel was published in 1979, and because his novels haven’t been published in English in the order they have appeared in Portuguese, one’s reaction to his work might range from bafflement to wonderment depending on which novel from which period one happens to have read. Did early novels like An Explanation of the Birds (1980) lead to his Nobel Prize nomination? (No). Why aren’t there more shrines to The Inquisitor’s Manual (1996)? (You tell me). What’s with all the fragmentation in What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? (2001)? (I can explain).

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In part two of a two part interview, Howard Altmann talks to poet D. Nurkse about his ruthless youth, the astonishing nature of snails, and teaching at Riker’s Island.

Read part one here.

Howard Altmann Let’s go to “The Granite Coast”—a poem in the voice of a snail, a poem that ends your eighth book, Burnt Island. “We are like you/because we scrape/these boulders with sharp/coiled tongues/which we roll progressively/as our mouths wear out/when you open us/you find the cliff inside us/though we are tiny/as an eyelash.” Snails. What are you up to here?

D. Nurkse Well, I think it was amazing, post 9/11, to live in a world of fundamentalism and consumerism. They both seem so joyless yet nature is so utterly unbelievable. When I was writing Burnt Island I was reading all these books on nature and science, about all these amazing creatures like sentient slime molds, little snails that live in bubbles, spiders that orbit the earth, five miles above the earth, driven by the wind and never to return. Astonishing.

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BOMBlog teams up with San Francisco’s Litquake to bring you a series of interviews leading up to their annual festival. This week, Litquake talks to novelist and radio talk show host Tony DuShane in anticipation for his panel discussion on October 13.

Litquake What is your favorite book?

Tony DuShane Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

Litquake Who is your favorite writer?

TDS Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Litquake If the answers to 1 and 2 are different, why?

TDS Hunger touched me on a visceral level in a few different ways. My mother is from Norway and I grew up with all of these stubborn, funny talking, no-fun relatives. I hated them. And, it drives me absolutely nuts that I act like them and have the same genes running through half of my body.

Hunger is the book that told me I was a writer. I am as stubborn as the character. I put on the same act as the character, pretending things are okay when they’re not, and I’m self-loathing.

When I told Grandpa Tor that I read Knut Hamsun, I thought we’d have something in common to finally talk about. He only replied, “That Nazi.”

Grandpa Tor was in occupied Norway during WWII, so he saw a larger picture, and I only saw the work of a genius from 1890.

Celine hits me every time I read him. He’s awful and funny at the same time. From Journey to the End of the Night to Conversations with Professor Y, I cower and laugh and drop my jaw in awe of his genius…and how in many of his writings, they could be plunked down in 2011 and the commentary would still hold ground in our current world.

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event this month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the next interview in this series, a conversation with Matthew Dickman.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Matthew Dickman Most of the poems I write begin with a simple word or idea. I’ll be drinking coffee and think “I like coffee!” and then I’ll start writing about how much I like coffee. It sounds pretty basic, I know. I suppose it’s the “like” that moves me to begin writing a poem—some sort of celebration in my chest wanting some words to understand itself, some sort of grief needing a body.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

MD I am always returning to Diane Wakoski, Bob Kaufman, Barbara Ras, Aimé Césaire—poets that have big, messy, hearts.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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Elizabeth Clark Wessel interviews Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman, the translators of Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms. They discuss Western engagements with haiku, Andrade’s subtle gestures, and the challenges of collaborative translation.

In November Wave Books will release Micrograms by the now mostly forgotten Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade (1903-1976), in a new translation by Alejandro de Acosta and Joshua Beckman. Micrograms is simultaneously a work of literary criticism, a poetry collection, and a translation (or in English, a translation of a translation). The result is a meditation on form, with implications for how the creative process could be used as a mode of inquiry. The form in question, the microgram—a term coined by Andrade, though explicitly not invented—is “an epigram . . . reduced in volume, enriched by complex modernity, widened to every thing that makes up the vital chorus of the earth,” with forebears in forms as disparate as the classical epigram, the saeta, and the haiku. In three sections Andrade convinces us of the microgram’s heritage, illustrates the form with original work, and then ends, surprisingly, with translations of classic and modern haiku into Spanish (translated without the aid of the Japanese by Acosta and Beckman into English). The outlook is idiosyncratically international.

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BOMBlog teams up with San Francisco’s Litquake to bring you a series of interviews leading up to their annual festival. This week, Litquake talks to Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Litquake What is your favorite book?

Karen Russell This is an impossible question, guys. Can I give you two favorite books? The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. I’ve been rereading it and it’s incredibly beautiful. And this year I find myself yapping about Geek Love a lot, the masterpiece of carnie-freak-incendiary imagination literature by Katherine Dunn.

Litquake Who is your favorite writer?

KR Again, impossible! But I love Kafka, George Saunders, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers.

Litquake Different answers?

KR Ok, what a good challenge. How to reconcile the different answers? Well, those books I listed as favorites really felt revelatory to me at the time when I read them. I like assigning The Waves and Geek Love to students, or a book like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, because you can practically watch their pupils dilate as they read them—I think there are certain books that are so stylistically innovative or so wholly “other” that they detonate inside readers. It’s a grenade-lob, and when the smoke clears these books have transformed the landscape of what fiction can be and do.

Then there are authors whose entire body of work offers a reliably skewed way of seeing the world—Kafka, for example, his brand of comedy. I couldn’t choose one book or story of his as a “favorite,” but his vantage on things I find incredibly wonderful, and somehow deeply reassuring, familiar despite the ocean of time between his life and our lives; you know that tail-wagging sensation you can get, when you recognize a friend, or a person with a kindred way of looking at the world? You “get” their jokes, can relate to their sense of what’s funny, absurd, depressing, insane, terrific about life? So maybe the distinction is that my favorite books open up a particular new universe to me (the Binewski Fabulon, say, or Macondo), and my favorite authors, in every line of their prose, offer a unique vision of our world and our natures, an original way of seeing things.

Or maybe not. I better think on this one some more. It’s a great question.

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum next month, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event next month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the second interview in this series, a conversation with Cate Marvin.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Cate Marvin All poems, for me, are rooted in either a title or a line. I fall in love with a phrase I’ve read somewhere, overheard, or come up with on my own, and can’t let it go, ever, until I’ve done it justice by encrypting it into a poem as a title or a line.

I like to think of poets as moving through the world with their minds poised like nets, intent on capturing scraps of language, resonant images. Thinking as a poet means viewing the world as a poem; thus, the poet is prone to existing in real space and time in a most vulnerable manner. This means being super-observant wherever your physical self takes your mind, as it requires being terribly receptive to light, images, movement, conversations between others, oddities many might be inclined to overlook in newspaper headlines, heatedly intimate conflicts overheard in public places, disingenuous directions offered by advertisements and street signs, etc.

Sometimes a poem comes over me like weather, feels like an itch or impulse. It’s a near physical sensation. At that moment, there is nothing else to do but move to the typewriter or computer to pound the thing out.

More often, the poem has lived in my head for a long while, and I’ve battled with the entire idea of it. It insists on being made. I resist. I try to will it away. It won’t go away. This is the Real Poem. The poem not born simply out of anger, or from a fit of lyrical bliss—no, this kind of poem has a real agenda. And it happens to me. When I begin this poem, I must be humble. Because this kind of poem, which usually has a big idea in its back pocket, is prepared to duke it out with me for years until I get it right. (By which I mean, one has to write a great many very bad poems to get this kind of poem started.) This kind of poem takes a lot of time. Sitting down. Beginning it again and again. By the point you’ve started it, it’s taken so long to get there, you can’t honestly explain to anyone how you began it. It began with you. In you. And it won’t quit until you’ve got it right, by which point it bears no resemblance to the poem you “began.”

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

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In part one of a two part interview, Howard Altmann talks to poet D. Nurkse about growing up in Brooklyn, Oedipal fantasies, and working in a factory.

D. Nurkse is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently, The Border Kingdom (Knopf) and Burnt Island (Knopf). He’s been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA grants, a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, and is a finalist for this year’s United Kingdom’s Forward Prize. Upon meeting Dennis one becomes attuned to the fact that there are no false notes in the composition. And if his wise sage aura can be equal parts intimidating and alluring, his childlike sense of wonder quickly re-imagines the whole. Perhaps because there isn’t an ounce of self-promotion to the man, the time seemed ripe to weigh in with a few questions.

Howard Altmann Dennis, you’re a finalist for England’s prestigious prize in poetry, the Forward Prize. Can you talk a little about that?

D. Nurkse Well, it’s a piece of dumb luck. I really don’t know how it came about. My book Voices Over Water, which was originally published in this country in the ‘90s, was picked up by a heroic small press guy, Charles Boyle, in London and he published it. Then he entered it for the prize, which is for any book published in the UK in 2010. I think I’m very much the dark horse if you’re a betting person (laughter).

HA It’s your fourth book of the nine you’ve had published. Is it curious to you that that’s the one he chose to republish?

DN I’m fond of that book. I wrote it in a dark basement having a beer or two, channeling my grandmother’s voice, the speaker in the book.

HA Where was that basement?

DN That was in Brooklyn.

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E.C. Belli probes the wounds inscribed in Discipline, a volume of poetry by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin’s work, a searing chronicle of loss, leaves readers longing to escape the physicality of their bodies.

The I is
more relaxed
when it is hunted.

Discipline is wounding in the way only something wounded knows to be, and it wounds because that is the only thing wounded things know to do. “The I struggles to become a part of the reeking body,” Martin posits early in the book, a raw, visceral and fragmented collection with a knack for revolting, sometimes even appalling its reader: “They say, this/ is not a woman’s condition/ self-made/ victim/ hemmed-in/ whore.”

When we inherit Discipline, it is uneven, broken; expressions of loss of innocence, of cultural frustration embodied in prose poems, in isolated numerical sequences and in minimalist spurts.

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BOMBlog teams up with San Francisco’s Litquake to bring you a series of interviews leading up to their annual festival. This week, Litquake talks to fiction writer and poet Jesse Ball about books, wolf-back riding and the Vivian sisters. Jesse’s newly released novel The Curfew is in bookstores now!

Litquake What is your favorite book?

Jesse Ball This morning? Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. My favorite recent books: Caesar’s account of his campaign in Gaul, and H.R. Ellis Davidson’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. I love her to pieces. I wanted to write to her, but she was dead.

Litquake Who is your favorite writer?

JB Maybe Walser. Maybe that first Whitman (1855).

Litquake If the answers to 1 and 2 are different, why?

JB Walser is an embroiderer. I might have said Leaves of Grass for the first question, but I so often say that.

Litquake How old were you when you were first published?

JB 23 or 24.

Litquake What writing style do you most abhor?

JB Anything funny. I don’t like anything funny at all. Comedy makes me vomit and bleed from my eyes. Tragedy, too. Any drama. I like sober accounts of quiet, reasonable activity.

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In anticipation of the 2011 Poets Forum next month, our friends at the Academy of American Poets will conduct a series of six-question interviews featuring six different poets leading up to their event next month, October 20–22. BOMB is excited to be able to share the first interview in this series, a conversation with Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Poets.org How do you begin a poem?

Gabrielle Calvocoressi Often, I begin a poem with a walk, or a song I hear that begins a movie of the poem getting made in my head. That’s funny to write “out loud” but it’s true. I’m a daydreamer and a wanderer so a lot of my day is spent imagining the world of the poem before the words even come. Particularly for this new book that I’m working on—the poems are a real story so I spend a lot of time just imagining what the characters might do and how the light looks and the car radio sounds when they do it.

Poets.org What poets do you continually go back to?

GC Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Frost with a good dose of Randall Jarrell dreaming beside me. There are so many others but those three have been a real foundation for me, particularly Frost who I thought I hated for so much of my life until Marie Howe told me to go read him book by book. The realization that I hadn’t understood him at all, and how that actually changed my view of looking in general, changed my life. I love Bishop’s wonder at her own doubt when it comes to perception, “I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.” Perhaps that has to do with my own bad eyes and my mother’s mental illness (which mirrors Bishop’s experience with her mother in some ways). I love Jarrell for being Jarrell and no one else. I love that he wrote a poem in which he remembers being a child playing with the MGM lion. That’s a gift.

And Joan Didion. I love Joan Didion beyond reason.

Poets.org Has your idea of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?

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Katherine Sanders talks with genre-bending author Bhanu Kapil about her upcoming work Schizophrene, writing as a “hybrid body,” and the social and cultural history behind 2001’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

As rioting continues in the U.K., Bhanu Kapil’s first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, published ten years ago, feels as relevant as ever, giving us a chorus of voices talking about dismemberment and change. Vertical Interrogation is a series of prose poems based on interviews with Indian women living in India, England, and the United States. The book weaves in and out of these different voices, all answering a series of twelve questions that are the titles of each piece, like “What is the shape of your body?” and “What are the consequences of silence?” Since Vertical Interrogation was first published in 2001 it has become a favorite for writers like Jean Valentine as well as hosts of anonymous readers/writers who, whether they directly contributed to the book or not, have found their own voice within its pages.

Katherine Sanders What does it mean to be vertically interrogated?

Bhanu Kapil You are inverted, always, above the place at which you are: caught. Caught living.

KS Who/what is your personal interrogator?

BK The interrogator, in colloquial or contemporary life, is a torturer of some kind. This is a time in which torture is very real for so many people, and so it is difficult to answer the question casually. Perhaps I would not have used that word as part of the title for the book I wrote, the book your question is connected to. The title itself was invented. It was not well thought out. Patricia Dientsfrey called me from Kelsey Street Press in California, at 5 p.m. on January 5th, 2001. I was an hour or so into labour, twelve hours from giving birth to my son. I answered the phone in the kitchen, in Colorado. Patricia said: “Hello.” She said they were going to press the next morning, and that they needed a title. I can’t exactly recall, but perhaps there had been some difficulty with the title. Then it burst out of me: “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.” And I hung up. To go through the process of birth. At a certain point in that night, I thought: “This isn’t pain. It’s intensity.”

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What is unique about poetry? How has the definition and the poetic process altered as writers change tools from typewriters to keyboards? Read on as Susan Howe takes on all these questions—or even better, hear her speak at this year’s Poets Forum!

Poets.org Can you talk about your process of writing, specifically in regard to the use of collage in That This?

Susan Howe One day I chanced on a folder titled: Wetmore, Hannah Edwards, 1713–1773, that contains a copy of “the private writings” of Jonathan’s sister, in the hand of her daughter Lucy Wetmore Whittelsey. Lucy’s transcription (much easier to read than her uncle’s or her mother’s handwriting) begins in medias res with an excerpt from psalm 55.6 “Oh that I had wings like a dove! [for then] would I fly away, and be at rest.” Even if manuscripts can only lead to the limit of a voice, the acoustic shock of the first written word “Oh” on paper, brown with age, not written by the author herself, a copy of her mother’s narrative but also a copy of that ancient plea for comfort—had a telepathic force. At home, I printed out transcriptions I had made in the library, then using multi-purpose copy paper, scissors, “invisible” scotch tape, and a Canon copier PC170, I collaged fragments of her “private writing” with a mix of sources from other texts.

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Blake Butler and Lily Hoang put a score and a half of writing whiz kids in their new anthology, 30 Under 30. They talk about magic, maggots, and the lack of conflict between tradition and innovation.

Thirty black-and-white ‘50s-yearbook-style photos of groomed adolescents are posed on the cover of 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers. Someone scrawled hearts and fangs and silly hats all over them with magic marker. The joke’s on the youth of the writers, and possibly the put-it-up-on-the-fridge-with-a-magnet pride with which some publicize their work. It may also be a way for some people known in part for being writers on the Internet to poke fun at the old-fashioned thing they are doing by making a book. (The editors are Blake Butler and Lily Hoang, of HTML Giant, There Is No Year (Butler), and The Evolutionary Revolution (Hoang), among other accomplishments.)

The stories within this book, though they vary a great deal, seem to belong to a certain aesthetic, though it’s hard to pin down exactly what makes it so. Perhaps it’s an openness to letting new technological forms influence narrative structure: I wanted to make an Excel spreadsheet organized by attributes of the stories and then Adam Good had to go and write a story that was actually a spreadsheet. Brian Oliu’s thinking about the physicality of the Internet in a story of IP addresses and distance, and Matt Bell about video games and narrative, through the Sisyphean, repetitive story of a game about rescuing a girl from an ape. The story in here that I thought of as the best relatively formally straightforward and character-driven piece, by Rachel Glaser, gets much of its strength from the way it shows how a lot of very 21st-century specificity gets blended into the consciousness of a listless gay medical student. Cover artist Zach Dodson’s story, which is in faux handwriting in a faux composition book, seems very much a reaction to the omnipresence of the digital elsewhere. But then again, so many of the stories deal with the fantastic, sometimes in surreal or allegorical ways, Robin Hood and Hephaestus pop up, and that seems like a whole different trend.

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Matt Jakubowski talks with multi-talented writer Ismet Prcic about his new autobiographical novel, Shards, American theater, and the importance of experience and writing during and after wartime.

Bosnian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Ismet Prcic (per-sick), who prefers to go by Izzy, published the short stories “Curfew” in Identity Theory in 2004, and “Porcus Omnivorus, Part 1” in McSweeney’s in 2008. His various awards include a 2010 NEA grant for fiction, and a feature-length screenplay he co-wrote with Malik Vitthal was one of twelve projects selected for the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab. Prcic’s prose style is terse but agile. There’s a willingness to take linguistic risks and a habit of describing emotion and experience in surrealistic ways right before punching back to reality.

Matt Jakubowski You’ve worked in theater a long time, published short stories, and written screenplays. What was it like working on a novel?

Ismet Prcic I became a novelist by chance. I came to the US in 1996 and threw myself into studying theater. I did that for five years, had a lot of fun, but, at the end of the day, I was disillusioned by what was considered good theater in America. People spent so much time learning how to dance in unison, have a perfect pitch, good timing—to be good entertainers—and not that many people were concerned with making abstractions visceral, which is what the Eastern European theater I grew up with was all about. I started writing Shards in a beginning short fiction class taught by Eileen Myles. I discovered that I loved not having to collaborate, not having to tease crucial performances out of strangers. I was in charge of the complete product, and that, for the first time, freed me up to try and tackle some of the obsessive thoughts that plagued me since childhood, and try to capture them, pacify them, in my writing.

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BOMB Magazine is pleased to feature selections from ONandOnScreen’s summer issue. Each week BOMBlog will showcase poems and video pairings from the Summer 2011 issue of ONandOnScreen, an e-journal project matching poems and videos. This week’s pairing features poetry by Matthew Zapruder and a video by Simon Christen.

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In part two of a two part interview, Daniel Borzutzky talks to Kristin Dykstra about translation, Chilean writers, and his most recent collection The Book of Interfering Bodies. Read part one here.

Part two of this two-part interview extends our conversation about poet Daniel Borzutzky’s explorations of literary translation and its effects on his creative writing. Borzutzky reflects on atrocity and the power of horror in Raúl Zurita’s poetry, marking distances that inform his own perspective as a Chilean American. Turning to his latest collection, The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat Books), Borzutzky discusses a confluence of forces meeting in his poems: post-9/11 proposals to bureaucratize the imagination, rhythms of gentrification in Chicago, influences from world literature, and more.

KD You mentioned that you came to translation and the writing of poetry at the same time, and that translation challenged you to expand your skills. So how exactly has your ongoing work with translation affected your more recent poetry, such as The Book of Interfering Bodies? Is this a topic to which you’ve given much thought? Or where you sense any strong connections between projects? Has it ever been useful to you to think about this topic while you were writing?

DB I’d say the only time I was conscious of the connection between the work I was translating and my own writing was with Zurita and The Book of Interfering Bodies. I wrote a lot of The Book of Interfering Bodies while or shortly after I was translating Zurita. He is a writer whom I really learned a lot from. It’s not that I didn’t learn about writing from the other writers I translated, but I don’t think I had much interest in applying what I learned from those other translation projects to my own writing. With Zurita, however, there were definitely some things that stuck with me. What I mean when I say that I learn from a writer and am influenced by them, is that the writer in question has shown me an approach that I didn’t know I could take before, that they have given me permission, through their own practice, to try out a tactic, idea, or approach to subject matter.

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Levi Rubeck talks about Ben Pease’s poetry channeling new digital media, personal history and psyche, and science fiction movies in his latest book of poetry Wichman Cometh.

There’s a lot of talk about what poetry can do. The subtext being that poetry should do more. Hybrid poetry, multi-media adventures in verse, and of course the infinite mining of one’s personal psyche and history, these sorts of things will reverse this curse of marginalization, or so the shifting tides seem to indicate. As a participant and audience member at the release reading of Ben Pease’s Wichman Cometh, I witnessed the best uses of all exterior influences on poetry.

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In part one of a two part interview, Daniel Borzutzky talks to Kristin Dykstra about translation, how poetry inserts itself into history, and his most recent collection The Book of Interfering Bodies.

In April 2009 I was privileged to attend an event at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago featuring poet and translator Daniel Borzutzky alongside the renowned Chilean writer Raúl Zurita. The two had been working together on the translation of Zurita’s Canto a su amor desaparecido, which would be published in 2010 by Action Books as Song for His Disappeared Love. Well-summarized by Reginald Gibbons, the book offers “a surreal translation into both possible and also impossible imagery of unspeakable and nearly unsayable experiences of imprisonment, torture and murder . . . yet also of enduring and holding onto one’s humanity, during the brazen dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.”

Kristin Dykstra Your interview with Ray Bianchi names writers you admire, as do many epigraphs in The Book of Interfering Bodies. The work of literary translation demands particularly close readings, so I’m interested in the ways in which Juan Emar, Jaime Huenún, and now Raúl Zurita have or haven’t influenced you. As a starting point for that conversation: how did you first take up literary translation, and what initially attracted you to your first full-book project?

Daniel Borzutzky I started translating at the same time that I was really starting to write seriously. It began innocently, with the simple thought: it would be cool to translate, and then it became a challenge I set for myself which in some ways had to do with improving my language skills. Also, I think I understood that translation was an entryway into a writing world or writing discussion that I would not be able to enter solely by doing my own writing. My own writing and my translating “came of age” at the same time, I was learning how to do both simultaneously, and the translation work was helpful to have when the writing wasn’t going well.

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Kate Bernheimer talks to Vanessa Veselka, the author of Zazen, about realness, Tinker Bell, and the acoustics of writing.

J. R. R. Tolkien coined a phrase for the happy endings of fairy tales, eucatastrophe. These happy endings do not, despite prejudices against them, actually deny the sorrow that always precedes them; they are, for Tolkien, as for so many among us, “poignant as grief.” I even used his definition of eucatastrophe as the epigraph to my most recent novel. Together, tragic endings and happy endings make a literary flip doll of epic proportions. Strangely, it is the happy ending that is maligned today as literature’s ugly stepsister. Still, the happy ending lives blissfully on in fairy tales of all shapes and sizes. Without spoiling the plot—as intricate and precise as any map of terror and wonder must be—the whole of Zazen embraces Tolkien’s idea of the happy ending. It is a big, bad fairy tale.

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The volume Imaginary Syllabi “includes writings which dream up, concoct and explore utopian, fabulist, fantasy syllabi for potential imagined and real classroom endeavors.” Editor Jane Sprague discusses feral sites, mongrel schools, and the all-too-real labor conditions of American education.

Zack Friedman The project seems to have two sides: it has a utopian aspect, in the sense that it seeks to not be constricted by limitations on the possible and instead pictures different ways of learning (or parodies the “rules”), but also is relatively pragmatic—many practicing teachers could implement ideas influenced by many of the syllabi in the volume. How do you reconcile these strands?

Jane Sprague I’m not sure I intend the book to “reconcile these strands”: I hope to expand them. Their contradictions. The limits certain sites of labor place on our version of “what’s possible.” What’s possible in the increasingly assessment-driven curricula endemic to higher ed.? (At least in the public sector.) How creative can you be in the composition classroom at college X where you work as contingent faculty, though no one really knows what you’re doing since no one checks. . . . And yet there you are, in the face of every ‘ism’ or ‘phobia’ you can imagine. You may want to push. You may want to provoke thinking about the war(s) and war culture, though this doesn’t sit well with Dean X, or any of the people who shudder at the idea of “hot-button” topics. So what about those of us, legion, duking it out in the trenches of what we must transmit (often called “SLOs” or “SCOs,” translation: Student Learning Outcomes; Standard Course Outlines), not to mention those of us, legion, who must teach texts pre-selected for us. And sometimes these texts have been authored by the department chair. . . . Still, in the face of all this, we forge ahead hoping to establish a space where we can work on what we hope our students might become: critical thinkers, strong writers, or at least writers who are keenly aware of the work they need to do, inquisitive readers, citizens galvanized to think beyond that which they already know. Or art makers who think outside reproducing the real and risk activism, re-thinking genre-ism, re-thinking thinking.

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BOMB Magazine is pleased to feature selections from ONandOnScreen’s summer issue. Each week BOMBlog will showcase poems and video pairings from the Summer 2011 issue of ONandOnScreen, an e-journal project matching poems and videos. This week’s pairing features poetry by Joseph Massey and a video entitled Traveling Sunspots.

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B.C. Edwards read The Great Frustration, Seth Fried’s inaugural collection of short fiction, and now he’s depressed that it’s over.

Seth Fried’s The Great Frustration is the kind of collection that makes you seethe just a little bit over how well it’s conceived, constructed, and written. There are almost no sour notes throughout the eleven stories, and there are plenty of moments of sheer brilliance. Taking small quotients from the greats across every field of prose, Fried is at once channeling Carver, Kafka, Saunders, and Barthelme, while never fully embracing any of them. As debut collections go, The Great Frustration is on par with some of the very best.

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Jonathan Aprea speaks with author Alex Shakar about science, spirituality, and virtual reality in his forthcoming novel Luminarium.

Reading Alex Shakar’s new novel Luminarium is like running a marathon in a thunderstorm. It reads and flows with a certain exigency that won’t make you want to leave it for too long on your coffee table or on the floor space next to your bed. The novel follows Fred Brounian through various life troubles, girl troubles, technologically mind-blowing neuropsychological studies, and a personal quest to discover nothingness as a sort of self-actualization, all while struggling to keep alive the corporately-taken-over software company founded by he and his now-comatose twin brother. Luminarium is a crashing and rainy light-show that makes us vulnerable and scared, but also invigorated and, dare I say, hopeful.

Alex Shakar was gracious enough to field a few questions I had concerning his new novel.

Jonathan Aprea Technology in Luminarium seems to have two edges. While Sam’s computer program simulation of an attack on the Empire State Building is meant to train security personnel and save lives, at the same time it seems so eerie and invasive and kind of wrong. How do you feel about technology? Do you embrace it or are you more skeptical?

Alex Shakar Well, personally, both. As a storyteller, I find technology is a powerful lens for looking at our strengths and flaws. It amplifies our power, for good and ill alike, makes our decisions that much more consequential. You could say it’s our karma on steroids. With technology in general, and virtual reality in particular, we’re in a sense inhabiting our dreams. As for whether technology will be our heaven or our hell, I know where my money is. But we’re looking at a photo finish for sure.

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