MARGENTO Poem Selected for NATIONAL POETRY MONTH--Angel House Press; English & Romanian Versions

Many thanks to Angel House Press and poet Amanda Earl for selecting this poem, published here.  I'm posting it here again followed by its Romanian version too.

MARGENTO 
  
After Ovid’s Elegy 9b 

Even if they said from heaven—“Wanna be lucky? Cut the fuckin’!”—

     I’d deny that god. Girls are such sweet damnation…

And even when my drive’s dead and don’t feel like doing stuff,

     some twist in my base nature goads me once again.

The goddamn stiff itch is worse than any other virus,

     even worse than Melissa, that messy missy

from Miami who, (forget about protection!) once in your lap

     top, legs sprawled, will screw all anti-bugs, and tug

at your best contacts, giving you away… It’s like a bad weather

     flight about to touch down, which suddenly no-

sezzz up again squeezing that lightness out of your chest—

     that’s how these loving fits keep seizing me…

But come on, flood me, you unconscious energy,

     I’ve blown my mind’s self control out like a candle,

and, lo, your brazen photons are more at home here

     in my heart than in any other black hole!

What a sucker he who night after night, dusk to dawn,

     withdraws to his room, happy log sawing logs—

Hey limpy, what’s sleep but just a glimpse of frozen death?

     What, won’t you have time for a nap when time’s up…?

Does my girl just lead me on with all her double-talk—

     so what, there’s still hope she’ll make my day:

now my smooth talker, now giving me a hard time,

     tonight she grants asylum, tomorrow I’m extradited…

Oh, come down, libidinal vibe, after all it’s you the aggressiveness

     hormone, your foster power block, learns inconsistency from,

you matter-wave lighter than the interstellar wind,

     to and fro that brings joy, steals joy,

can you hear me? Come sit with the cosmic attraction that begot you

     comfortably in my heart, take your time on the throne,

and the roaming girls shall come in swarms to stand in line,

     we’ll all, out of need, worship you big time.

MARGENTO

După Ovidiu, Elegia 9b

Și dacă-mi zice din rai – Ai trai doar fără futai! –

    Tot mă lepăd. Fetele-s iad așa dulce…

Chiar când mi-adoarme pofta și mi se ia de chestii,

    o suceală-n firea șuie îmi dă iar ghes.

A naibii zbârnă e mai rea ca orice virus,

    mai rea chiar decât Melissa din Miami,

ce odată strecurată-n laptop, oricât îi bagi

    anti, tanti, crăcită, te face de râs

la toate contactele… e ca un zbor pe vreme rea

    care tocmai când s-aterizeze, zmucind…

du-se, ’i dus sus pe cer iar, de-ți șuieră golul din piept –

    așa mă prind întruna năbădăile…

Dar, hai, inundă-mă, energie inconștientă,

    ca pe-o lumânare mi-am stins cenzura minții,

și iată, fotoni-ți obraznici sunt mai acasă la mine

    ’n inimă decât în orice gaură neagră!

Fraier e ăla care, noapte de noapte, noaptea-n

    treagă trage aghioase dus, ferice –

Băi tontule, ce-i somnul decât zărirea morții reci?

    Ori n-ai să dormi când o să-ți sune ceasul?…

Mă duce bine fata cu vorbe dus-întors –

     și ce, tot trag speranțe să mă bucur –

acum îmi dă binețe, acum mă dojenește,

     ades o prind, ades îmi dă cu tifla.

Hai, vibrație libidinală, doar de la tine-nvață

     hormonul furiei, care te-adoptă, inconstanța!,

materie-undă mai ușoară ca vântul interstelar,

     du-te-vino ce-aduci și furi bucurii,

m-auzi? – tu și atracția cosmică din care te tragi,

     instalați-vă în inima mea, comod, ca pe tron!

Și fetele, gloată zmucită, brusc s-or pune la coadă,

     cu toții, de nevoie, o să v-adorăm o grămadă.

ANDREI DOBOS--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Many thanks to poet Andrei Dósa for inviting me to participate in the “my writing process” blog tour. You can see his own response here.

1.  What am I working on?

I am a bit superstitious about the ‘working on’ topic. Until I’m 100 percent sure that the work is done, something keeps me from discussing it. That is also because I’m never quite sure what will come out at the other end. In a way, the unknown is the most compelling thing in writing poetry (reading also, in some cases). Not mystery, because mystery has this fantasy component in it, but surprise, like when you hear a first line – see a first image – and you keep on hearing them, keep on seeing without knowing where this will take you – until the very end of the process.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Difference is always a matter of preference: accidental creativity (spontaneous one might say – but this term is questionable), innocence, shamanic regression and memory. I don’t believe in the sanctity of narratives or in the exclusivity of human perspective. Technically, there is a continual search for rhythmical explosions, satori-like images; poetry that believes in its own revelatory power and has over time selected its proper mediums: confession, landscape, elegy, prophecy and love.

Why do I write what I do?

Passion, agony and a dependence of that surprising feeling when something good comes into light.

How does your writing process work?

Sometimes it’s striking. It just comes and I write the poem in one sitting. But most of the time it’s just a sort of indistinct noise and shapeless energy in the deeps of my consciousness. Then I have to listen, to put myself in the right situation (place, mood etc.) so that I can hear the poem.

_______________________

Andrei Doboş was born in 1984, in Turda. He published his first collection of poetry Mănăştur Story in 2007, followed by Inevitabil in 2011. 

a. urmanov--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Many thanks to poet Elena Vladareanu for inviting me to the writing process blog tour.  ou can see her own response here.


What am I working on?

I cannot say I’m working on anything; I’ve got one or two ideas I’ve been obsessing about even before writing ‘sushi’ in 2007, but I just cannot find the voice for them.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

It differs just by being my own, personal work. Art (not only poetry) should be the perfect expression of one’s inner being - that is my only worry, my only aim. If I attain that, everything is perfect; I know no other criterion for true art. I try to stay honest to this rule, and nothing else. We are all unique beings; if our art were honest expressions of ourselves, it would naturally be unique, as well.

Why do I write what I do?

I honestly don’t know. For some reason, I have a need to express things, to publicly affirm things about myself and the world. It’s part of who I am, but I try not to question why I have it or how it works. When the need to write take over, there simply is no option not to do so.

How does your writing process work?

The writing comes last; in many ways, I only start the writing process after I already have the whole thing on the page. The writing (that is, the cut & paste, rewrite & rethink etc) is the least important part. The vital element is life itself: composition doesn’t happen on paper, it happens as part of one’s real, daily life. There must be a moment when I feel an absolute, paralyzing need to write things down; when that happens, I just write continuously until I dry out. Only then, after a few days, I start editing the material. It took me one night to write all the material for ‘sushi’, but several months to edit the collection. It’s that feeling that I must write or I fail (in some big, mystical way) that is key: it’s for this feeling that I’ve been waiting to return for the last seven years.


a. urmanov (b. 1979) has published several collections: ‘canonical flesh’ (Pontica Publishing; 2001); ‘utilitarian poems’ (Pontica Publishing; 2003); ‘skeleton’ (Pontica Publishing; 2004); ‘sushi’ (Brumar Publishing; 2007). In 2006, Vinea Publishing House published his first author-anthology - ‘cheap literature’, including two previously unpublished collections: ‘up’ (2002) and‘hey, mr dj!’ (2003).

He studied in Bucharest and Moscow (BA in International Business; BA in Theology); Warwick University (MA in Creative Writing); Durham University (PhD in Modern Ecclesiology) and Washington DC (Library of Congress, Kluge Centre fellowship).

He currently lives on the Isle of Mull, Hebrides, Scotland.

G.C. WALDREP--Response to Margento WRITING PROCESS Questions

Photo (c) Sarah Heidt

Thanks to poet David Baker for inviting me to participate in the writing process blog tour.  You can read his own response here.

1.  What am I working on?

In December I finished two manuscripts I’d been working towards since 2006 and 2009, respectively.  There’s always a sort of trough or lull for me after completing a major cycle of work:  time for reading or sleeping or thinking (or editing; the last time this happened, I co-edited The Arcadia Project:  North American Postmodern Pastoral).  For me each cycle of work begins anew, or at least afresh; it’s not quite, but almost, a starting-over.  Doodles and feints, re-tuning the mind to the ghost.

That said, I do have a longer cycle of work I am periodically focusing on.  Tentatively entitled Glebelands, it’s a cycle that focuses on poetry as site-specific ecological practice.  The first movement, entitled Susquehanna, was released as a chapbook by Omnidawn last year; a second movement, “Amphitheater,” is complete.  There will be two or three more.

In May 2015 BOA Editions will release a long poem, Testament, that I composed in the summer of 2009 whilst a happy inmate in a Scottish castle.  It is about Mormonism, Chladni patterns, cloned sheep, and the question of whether gender can be a lyric form...among other things.  I keep it in a locked box, lest it move around in the night.

2.  How does my work differ from others of its genre?

As essentially an autodidact where poetry is concerned, I’ve never been either overly comfortable or overly concerned with thinking about how my work fits with or differs from my peers’.  It does seem that my focus on the external beauty of the poem-object, as well as my penchant for recondite vocabulary, is a problem for some innovative/avant-garde editors and publishers, while my work is much too formally demanding for those who prize lyric “accessibility.”  I’m somewhere else, or in between, and while this creates a few problems on the professional end here in the USA, it’s where I want to be.

3.  Why do I write the way I do?

The easiest way to answer this is to say that for me, writing is both a gift and a discipline.  I receive it gratefully as a gift, and I ply it is as a spiritual discipline because I feel I have a vocational calling to do so, whether or not anyone is interested in the results.  It is part and parcel with my spiritual life, with which it arrived, inextricably, nineteen years ago.

Recently I had an exchange with an old friend, the poet John Lane, on the twin subjects of voice and audience, which are also questions of community, actual or imagined.  We discussed some of the writing by younger poets we’d been reading:  the “I am trying to tell you” voice, earnest in one sense, inescapably ironic in others (liberal doses of Ashbery), a voice that communicates while suggesting true communication may be impossible.  The results can be haunting, beautiful, witty, delightful, or any or none of the above.  In my case, though, I find myself less and less interested in those terms of engagement.  As I told John, I am talking either to God, myself, an absent lover, or some combination.  You may listen in if you like.

And occasionally to a close friend.

It seems to me that there is little time left, either for me or more generally, and I want to expend that time and my remaining energies in the direction of what is possible.  God is still possible.  Love is still possible.  Poetry is still possible.  In the life of the spirit and the imagination, all three.

4.  How does your writing process work?

I’ve written about this elsewhere, and it hasn’t changed much over the years, although I like to keep myself exposed to all sorts of experiences, art, and music to keep the process stirring.  For me, most poems start with a fragment of language:  dreamt, overheard, smithed, acquired.  (A not inconsiderable number of my poems have started with misreadings of other texts, courtesy of my evolving keratoconus.)  I feel or intuit a sense of the possibility in such fragments:  they shine, a bit; they are iridescent in my mind.  I worry them in my mind, like smooth stones in the pocket, at least for awhile.  Eventually they either produce a poem, or else they do not.

I do write from specific images, but only rarely from narrative—from events as such, whether in waking life or from a dream.  It may take years for an overtly “poetic” experience (such as being struck in the chest by a live owl in downtown Philadelphia, while out walking with the poet Brian Teare a few years back) to find their way into a poem.

All my lyric poems have been written in one sitting, most of them in five minutes or less.  The only real exceptions have been the “Battery” poems in my second book—which were the product of a site-specific rubric of poetic investigation, designed in part to slow down my process—and the current Glebelands project, which has a similar praxis and goal.  Even Testament, the 120-page long poem coming out next spring, was initially drafted in just 12 trance-like days.

Revision is something else.  For me it’s mostly an extended period of trying to apprehend the poem, the poetic artifact, on a variety of levels:  image, sound, audience, theme, all the rest.  It’s more thoughtwork than editing, because the editing depends upon the thoughtwork.  That said, most of my lyric poems go through many drafts, from five or six to forty or more; a dozen is typical, over a period of months or years.

The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga wrote “Our duty, when faced with a true mystery, is not to explain it, but to deepen it, to transform it into a greater mystery.”  For many years now this has struck me as one of the best summaries of poetic process, purpose, and revision I have read.

                                                                                                                           --G.C. WALDREP

___________

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are The Arcadia Project:  North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012), co-edited with Joshua Corey; and a chapbook, Susquehanna (Omnidawn, 2013).  BOA Editions will release a long poem, Testament, in 2015.  Waldrep’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, New England Review, New American Writing, Harper’s, Tin House, Verse, and many other journals, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010 and the 2^nd edition of Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry.  Waldrep has received prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets as well as the Colorado Prize, the Dorset Prize, the Campbell Corner Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing, and a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature.  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

CAIUS DOBRESCU--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Many thanks to poet Iulia Militaru for inviting me to participate in the "my writing process" blog tour.  You can see her own response here.

1.     What am I working on?

I have an already long history of involvement with verse narrative. I’m in the process of learning from the experience of having written a quite fat free-verse novel – among other things, I’ve been brought to ponder on the necessity of more intuitive titles, since the one I coined, Euromorphotikon, seems to have twisted minds and tongues :).

I also consider navigating in rather different thematic bays. Euromorphotikon dealt with the contemporary state of play of 1960s utopianisms, in the form of an allegorical Congress of “abundant Love” held on an imaginary Mediterranean island. Currently I’m brooding on a combination between a verse novel and a dramatic oratory that would bring together and intertwine inner monologues (oscillating between self-apology and hot intimate fantasies) of some of the historical figures that politically imposed or ideologically sponsored the instauration of Stalinist dictatorship and terror in Romania, in the 1950s. Another tentative project would be a verse novel exploring the mind of Nicolae Ceauşescu during his visit to China and North Korea in the 1970s (in the aftermath of which Romanian domestic policies took on one of the most bizarre courses among the already bizarre Soviet Block countries).  

    

2.     How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I try to build on elements that are not ordinarily associated with poetry. Like, for instance, different clusters of the argumentative discourse – more precisely, on those moments when electric discharges of intuition get the better of logical-rhetorical patterns. This is what I experimented in my book Odes to the Free Enterprise [without mentioning that being at least half-way serious on such an object of lyrical praise should be mind-boggling for the vast majority of the poets of both hemispheres :) ].

As far as verse-narrative is concerned, what I think I’m doing is implying the expressive tension and concentration power of poetry in vividly telling a story, to a larger extent that it is usually done. I suppose that all narrative poets mean to prove their work more than a regular epic undertaking somehow arbitrarily written in uneven and discontinued instead of even and continuous lines. What I personally try to do in furthering this quest is putting the cohesive force of mythical imagination and the synthetic virtues of metaphorical expression to a better use, as far as the “imitation of action” is concerned.  

In plainer words, I look for a fine tuning and walk a fine line between, say, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, where the intensity of poetic vision actually pulverizes the epic unfolding, and Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, where the poetic aura of the narrative tends to succumb into mere rhythmical prose.  

 

 3.     Why do I write what I do?

For turning uncertainty and indeterminacy into ordering principles. The concept of emergence is poorly and mechanically understood. In psychological and mental terms, it implies letting an extended order (be it as distributed, flexible, polycentric as it may – but an order nevertheless) expand from a kernel of creative doubt. Replacing the centrality of hard belief with a core of reasonable [but also infra-, para- or meta-reasonable :) ] doubt. Searching for the ordering power (or rather: virtue) of doubt. Activating the expressive potential hidden in the age-long tradition of philosophical skepticism, a potential that has been only randomly, superficially and more often than not unconsciously tackled by poetry.

4.     How does your writing process work?

It starts with a sense of confronting the basic swarming of my consciousness – possibly the remote echo of the Big Bang :). With assuming consciousness as dispersed, self-conflicting and cacophonic, with experiencing the crude indeterminacy, the raw, inextricable osmosis between emotions, normally credited as rooted-in-the-flesh, and cerebral configurations conventionally and inertially labeled as non-corporeal. It starts from honestly accepting this state of opaque anarchy – and proceeds towards successive clarifications of what a comforting, to wit comfortable, anyway subtly-ballanced lack of closure might look like. Towards translucence, not transparency. Translucence being the transparency of informed optimists :).

                                                                                 --CAIUS DOBRESCU

 ________________________

Caius Dobrescu – born 1966, at a still young age, around 15, became part of the Romanian underground literary scene inspired by the free experimental spirit of the counterculture of the Sixties. As a poet, he should be a disappointment for the Western mind in search of ethnic-exotic thrills. Together with Andrei Bodiu, Marius Oprea, Simona Popescu, Sorin Matei, Marius Daniel Popescu, he was part of the so-called Braşov group, developed in the eraly 80s around the influential poet and cultural critic Alexandru Musina, which had no taste for exploring the deep roots of the native Romanian spirit. On the contrary, such an archaic etno mystique, rather encouraged by the national-communist cultural policies of the local dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, was felt as totally false and revulsive. In his earlier poetry, Dobrescu explored the ,,rythms and blueses‘‘ of everyday language, simultaneously paying attention to the moral conundrums of life under the ,,real existing socialism‘‘.  His work was published only after the fall of the Communist regime (Efebia/Efeby, 1994, Spălîndu-mi ciorapii/Washing my socks, 1994, Deadevă/‘ndeed, 1998). In a later phase, he tried to mingle poetry with the theoretical reflection on social change, emerging order and the complex functioning of our adaptive mind (Odă liberei întreprinderi/Ode to the free enterprise, 2009 – the German version of this volume received the Prise for European Poetry of the city of Münster, Germany, in 2009).

Caius's guest is Andrei Dosa who will be posting his response on his own blog:

Andrei Dósa was born in 1985, in Brașov. He graduated from the Faculty of Economic Sciences, followed by a Master's in Cultural Innovation (both from Transilvania University in Brașov). In 2010 he worked (and traveled) in the United States for four months. His literary activity started in 2007, when he joined the Lumina de Avarie creative writing workshop. In 2011, he published his first book of poems Când va veni ceea ce este desăvârșit, for which he received several prizes, including the 2012 Mihai Eminescu National Debut Prize. In 2013 he published his second book of poems, American Experience. His poems and short stories were included in several anthologies.

He’s into translating poetry, especially from Hungarian to Romanian. His translations include selections of poems of the following poets and writers: Petri György, Oravecz Imre, Kemény István, László Krasznahorkai, Pilinszki János, Ladik Katalin, Kukorelly Endre, and others.

 

ELENA VLADAREANU--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Thanks to Iulia MIlitaru for inviting me to participate in this blog tour.  Her own response is available here.

What am I working on?

In these days I work for a performance based on one of my recent texts called Habemus bebe. It’s a text about motherhood and early childhood, a very fragmented text, like a written instalation. It will be a real show on a stage and I work with a director (Robert Bălan) and three actresses (Dana Voicu, Carmen Florescu, Lala Mişosniki).  It will be shown for the first time this late April.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

It’s a difficult question with impossible answers. I think the difference it’s a common artistic obsession for a lot of artists, everybody wants his voice to be unique and to bring something new in a field where everything has been already done. And sometimes he really feels beeing an innovator and maybe he really is an innovator. But the whole process of innovating, the continuum of testing the new and the borderlines of what we call art (poetry in our case) transform him or her from an artist in a real artist. In conclusion, I can’t say how does my work differ from others of its genre, but I must confess that I always try to push the limits of what we use to call poetry.

Why do I write what I do?

It makes me feel free. It’s my playground.

How does your writing process work?

I start getting obsessed with a theme and with a structure. I work on these two elements days and days, without writing anything in fact, but reading, cutting up fragments and audio and video files, building a personal archive. Then I start writing. 

                                                                                                         --Elena Vladareanu
 _________________
Elena Vlădăreanu was born in 1981, in Medgidia (Constanţa). She studied Romanian and French Litterature at the University of Bucharest and Visual Studies at Image Studies Centre in Bucharest (CESI – Centrul de Excelenţă în Studiul Imaginii). She published her first collection in 2002, Pagini after an underground collection, din confesiunile distinsei doamne m. She published also: Fisuri (2003), Europa. Zece cântece funerare (2005), Spaţiu privat. A handbook (2009 with drawings by Dan Perjovschi). She published also poetry in several anthologies, like The Vanishing Point That Whistles. An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2011, USA) or No Longer Poetry. New Romanian Poetry (2007, UK). She works as a radio journalists and presents every week a very short contemporary poetry programme for Romanian Cultural Radio, named Poezie şi atât (Poetry and Nothing Else). Some poems in English on her website: http://www.elenavladareanu.ro/Multimedia--and--texts.php

T.R. HUMMER--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Thanks to poet David Baker for inviting me to participate in the writing process blog tour.  You can see his own response here.

1.       What am I working on?

I’m finishing up a trilogy of books of poetry (though my publisher refuses to acknowledge it is a trilogy, and will not even discuss the matter seriously: but I’m not letting that stop me). The first book is out; the second is forthcoming this year; the third is almost complete. After that I will assemble a New and Selected Poems. Meanwhile, I have a variety of prose projects under way. I always have a variety of prose projects under way. It is a cold day in hell when any of them comes to anything, but I persist. It keeps me off the street.

2.       How does my work differ from others of its genre?

This is a question that ought never to be asked, much less answered. It is in the category of metaphysical questions such as Why is there something rather than nothing and Why does god permit evil? However, since you ask (or, to take the question at face value, since I ask) I will say that my poems differ from other poems because I think of the consciousness projected by poems, their sentience, in a way that is unique to me (and so does every other poet who is any good). It is neither, fundamentally, a matter of subject or of style, but of sentience.

3.       Why do I write what I do?

Because if I wrote something else, I would be writing something else, and then that would be what I wrote. As it is, I write this. If I could think of something else to write, believe me, I would write it. And in fact I will think of something else to write, and I will write it, every day of my life until I can no longer do it. When that happens, I will write something else.

4.       How does your writing process work?

Not very well (see my answer re prose projects in progress at the end of question one).

Process is a fascinating subject: it is never the same twice. It cannot be taught, or learned, it can only be done. Technique can be taught; process, never. I write poems in clusters, hoping they are in some sense individually as well as collectively coherent (like postal employees). Hence books come about. When the clusters reach a certain critical mass they begin to make demands (like postal employees) and also to malinger (ditto).  I whip them into shape; they bring me strange messages and deposit them in my mailbox. As to prose, it is endless and unfinishable. 

                                                                                          --T.R. Hummer

_________
T.R. Hummer is a native of Mississippi. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Southern Mississippi and the Center for Writers and his PhD in 1980 from the University of Utah. He has served as editor of The Kenyon Review and The Georgia Review, among others, and is a professor of English at Arizona State University.
His publications include the poetry collections Ephemeron (LSU Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, The Infinity Sessions (LSU Press, 2005), Useless Virtues (LSU, 2001), Walt Whitman in Hell (LSU, 1996), The Angelic Orders (LSU, 1982), and The Passion of the Right–Angled Man (University of Illinois Press, 1984). He is also the author of two collections of essays, most recently Available Surfaces (The University of Michigan Press, 2012), which was a selection of the Poets on Poetry series.
Among his honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and an NEA Fellowship. Hummer has played saxophone in the Skinner Brothers Band and the Richmond-based jump blues band Little Ronnie and the Grand Dukes (Young and Evil, Planetary Records, 2001).

DAVID BAKER--MY WRITING PROCESS--BLOG TOUR

Thanks to poet Martin Woodside for inviting me to participate in this blog tour.  You can see his own response here.

What Are You Working On?

                       

1.     What am I working on?

I am currently working on many things.  I am putting the final touches and last-last revisions on a group of poems that are the final poems of my new manuscript, Scavenger Loop.  I just signed a contract with W. W. Norton for that book to appear in May or June of 2015.  It is a book of poems that range from fairly formal (syllabic, stanzaic) to fairly scattered (fragments, pieces, shards).  Some of the central crises of the poems are my mother’s death; the terrible destruction of our landscape and environment; the decay of Midwestern towns and villages; the persistence of human love and stupidity; despair; hope. 

      I am working on a few new poems, subsequent to this new book.  They are poems, so far, about the Caribbean, about popular songs, and about the subjects above—especially environmental and natural issues.

      I am also working on some new essays—about Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks.  I am drafting notes for a book on poetic form/s.  I am beginning to shape and reshape the first shadows for a new-and-selected gathering of poems from all my books of poems. 

            I am also working on my lawnmower, which needs an oil change and a sharpened blade.

2.     How does my work differ from others of its genre?

It is different because I wrote it, not someone else. 

But in another regard, how can my poems be notably different from the genre of poems

and poems in that genre?  They are poems, and so they share the characteristics and rhetorical promises—variable and contradictory as they may be—of poems. 

3.     Why do I write what I do?

I write out of many different causes and reasons and impulses.  Why?  Because on one

day I may be one David, on another another.

I write about obsessions of mine, the nature of memory and desire.  I write these days

about the environment, about “nature,” about farming and the “development” of land in the Midwest, about families, love and loss.  Witness and invention.

            I write poetry because of the intense musical nature of poetic language.  Because of the formal rigor.  Because of the obsessive compressive necessity of it all.

4.     How does your writing process work?

I notice that three of the four questions here use the word “work.”  That’s such a Western or American or capital virtue, isn’t it?  Toil, labor—the production of things by such toil and labor—and this gives our “work” its value, its commercial validity, the commodity of its meaning.

      I do not think much about process.  I do not want to have a process.  I want to write.  Sometimes I want to write, and sometimes, more often, I do not want to write or cannot write or do not have time or occasion to write.  People who aren’t writing often talk about the process of their writing.  People who are writing are writing. 

      I have written poems in this way:  I often start with an idea, or a musical tone or phrase or instrumentation, or a frustration or sense of awe or beauty, or a conundrum or a challenge.  I often take notes—from books, internet sources, experience, other poems, songs, menus, maps, museums.  Sometimes I take a lot of notes, and sometimes I take my lot of notes and figure I might write a single poem from all those separate notes for separate poems. 

I look for a sound, and a line, and a setting.  I often write early drafts in syllabic lines.  I often then take apart those syllabic lines and fracture them, or recompose them, or put them in quantities of syllables or fractal-like stanzas.  I write more drafts.  A typical poem (there are no typical poems) might be, say, 25-40 lines, but that short poem might have taken me 40 or 75 drafts over many days or weeks or months or years.  I proceed very slowly very quickly.  I mean that literally.

      Then I start over.  Then I start back.

___________

Among David Baker’s fourteen books are his most recent poetry collection, Never-Ending Birds (2009, W. W. Norton), winner of the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and Talk Poetry: Poems and Interviews with Nine American Poets (2012, Arkansas). This latest title is cosponsored by The Kenyon Review and gathers Baker’s KROnline interviews with a number of important poets. For his work, Baker has been awarded fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, Ohio Arts Council, Society of Midland Authors, and others. He currently serves as Professor of English at Denison University where he holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing.

IULIA MILITARU--MY WRITING PROCESS--BLOG TOUR

Thanks to Raluca Tanasescu for inviting me to the "my writing process" blog tour. You can read her own response here.

1) What am I working on?

I am currently working on a long and almost “boring” poem about nothing in particular but a stupid well-known political message; not a very profound one (stupidity can be quite profound sometimes, but my message is just a simple stupidity): “We all are capitalist bitches. So, face it and smile (if you can do it any longer)”. My poem consists of parts of discourses from different time periods, from XIXth century to nowadays. The blank page become a space, a homeland for all that different public and personal voices. A real war seems to burst out there; in fact, nothing happens and, in the end, everybody kisses everybody in the marketplace. That’s our daily dramas making us feel like tragic figures. 

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Now I have to get a little more serious, because I am to boast about my originality which consists in not being original at all. That’s why I try most of the time not to speak about that authorial I – the denial of the powerful/strong inner subject by getting out from my inside body and creating an extra-corporal network-like subject. In this respect, speaking of “I” is a self-delusion. Yes, of course, that’s a utopian attempt, but I try just to uncurtain that utopia and become aware of it. I don’t want a poetry of personal communication, I want a map-like poetry. The white paper sheet is nothing else, but the space of the poem, of coming into being for a large number of dead voices, powerless or powerful voices, dead and forgotten languages. The subject who writes must be a witness and a mark, an emptiness and a rhizome.

Most of my colleagues are still indebted to a specific type of personal discourse. The presence of a powerful I at the center of a poem is what I like to call: “return stroke”. In fact, that is a perpetuation of the old image of the dictator from communist era. In those times, those techniques worked like a mirror but also as a resistance attempt. Today such a discourse is useless and harmful. The distinction between aesthetical discourse and simple and everyday language is also misleading; the poems as such still promote the centered speech, built around that utopian I (more or less directly expressed).

In this respect, I admire a lot the works of Chris Tanasescu (MARGENTO) and Elena Vlădăreanu (her last collection of poetry: Spațiu privat). Both of them, although in different ways and using different techniques, succeed in atomizing personal discourse (I), making it marginal or drowned in an impersonal speech.

3) Why do I write what I do?

Why? Because I am suffering from Bartleby syndrome—a craving for writing and an impossibility to write. This impossibility stems from the absence of inner life. What we still have today are the remains of a socio-cultural constructed subconscious. It isn’t a mystery anymore. Bolaño put it to us quite right: “We are moving by in no time inputs… Something as such will destroy the subconscious and we’ll be free hanging. ”

4) How does your writing process work?

I am trying not be impressed by anything around. Not represent anything. Run and hide of what could express myself. 

I was born somewhere between the end of the twentieth century (a century of death and resentment) and the beginning of twenty-first, somewhere between the end of a dictatorship and the beginning of capitalism. The most suitable concept for this place where I live is the one of border or frontier. My whole poetry is an attempt to define that kind of existence, borderline existence. A border has its special meaning as closure or barbed wire, an inheritance from the death camps of the last century. But, this concept might become a crossing point to the other side. There will be always this space, this border, between you and the others and it has to be turned from a barbed wire into a median space or a war zone. On the formal level, the border as a barbed wire theory means to work with different kinds of speech, put them together and try to understand in-between relations. This meeting point of all those already written speeches is not a harmonious place, but under pressure. Poetry respects your right to being different.

All of the above have a major effect upon the act of writing. The concept of authorship, the anxiety of influence are out of date.

                                                                                                               --Iulia Militaru

Next week's blog tour participants are:

Caius Dobrescu – born 1966, at a still young age, around 15, became part of the Romanian underground literary scene inspired by the free experimental spirit of the counterculture of the Sixties. As a poet, he should be a disappointment for the Western mind in search of ethnic-exotic thrills. Together with Andrei Bodiu, Marius Oprea, Simona Popescu, Sorin Matei, Marius Daniel Popescu, he was part of the so-called Braşov group, developed in the eraly 80s around the influential poet and cultural critic Alexandru Musina, which had no taste for exploring the deep roots of the native Romanian spirit. On the contrary, such an archaic etno mystique, rather encouraged by the national-communist cultural policies of the local dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, was felt as totally false and revulsive. In his earlier poetry, Dobrescu explored the ,,rythms and blueses‘‘ of everyday language, simultaneously paying attention to the moral conundrums of life under the ,,real existing socialism‘‘.  His work was published only after the fall of the Communist regime (Efebia/Efeby, 1994, Spălîndu-mi ciorapii/Washing my socks, 1994, Deadevă/‘ndeed, 1998). In a later phase, he tried to mingle poetry with the theoretical reflection on social change, emerging order and the complex functioning of our adaptive mind (Odă liberei întreprinderi/Ode to the free enterprise, 2009 – the German version of this volume received the Prise for European Poetry of the city of Münster, Germany, in 2009).

Alberto García-Teresa (Madrid, 1980) is doctor in Hispanic Filology with Poesía de la conciencia crítica (1987-2011) (Tierradenadie, 2013). He has also published the study Para no ceder a la hipnosis. Crítica y revelación en la poesía de Jorge Riechmann (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2014). He has been coordinator of the magazine about speculative fiction Hélice, codirector of Jabberwock, annual anthology of essays of fantastic literature and editor-in-chef of Solaris. He writes critic of Literatura and Theatre in differents media: Diagonal newspaper –where he was coordinated the “Books” divison–, Culturamas –where he was directed the contents of poetry–, Espéculo, Castilla. Estudios de literatura, Verba Hispanica, Quimera, Artes Hoy, Literaturas.com, El Viejo Topo, Viento Sur, cnt, Rebelión, La República Cultural, Ariadna-RC, Bibliópolis, Gigamesh or Prospectiva.

He has published the poetry books: Hay que comerse el mundo a dentelladas (Baile del Sol, 2008), Oxígeno en lata (Baile del Sol, 2010), Peripecias de la Brigada Poética en el reino de los autómatas (Umbrales, 2012) and Abrazando vértebras (Baile del Sol, 2013), and the plaquette Las increíbles y suburbanas aventuras de la Brigada Poética (Umbrales, 2008). Also he has published the book of micro-tales Esa dulce sonrisa que te dejan los gusanos (Amargord, 2013). His poems has been translated into romanian, english, french, serb and macedonian.

Elena Vlădăreanu was born in 1981, in Medgidia (Constanţa). She studied Romanian and French Litterature at the University of Bucharest and Visual Studies at Image Studies Centre in Bucharest (CESI – Centrul de Excelenţă în Studiul Imaginii). She published her first collection in 2002, Pagini after an underground collection, din confesiunile distinsei doamne m. She published also: Fisuri (2003), Europa. Zece cântece funerare (2005), Spaţiu privat. A handbook (2009 with drawings by Dan Perjovschi). She published also poetry in several anthologies, like The Vanishing Point That Whistles. An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (2011, USA) or No Longer Poetry. New Romanian Poetry (2007, UK). She works as a radio journalists and presents every week a very short contemporary poetry programme for Romanian Cultural Radio, named Poezie şi atât (Poetry and Nothing Else). Some poems in English on her website: http://www.elenavladareanu.ro/Multimedia--and--texts.php