recent posts

Friday, December 3, 2010

BOOK REVIEW- scott-patrick mitchell 'songs for the ordinary mass'



BOOK REVIEW- Scott-Patrick Mitchell ‘songs for the ordinary mass’. PressPress, Berry NSW, 2009, 36 pages.

Mitchell’s slender volume of experimental poetry won the PressPress Chapbook Award in 2009. www.presspress.com.au The book consists of sixteen cutting-edge, but tricky, enigmatic post-modern poems. ‘songs for the ordinary mass’ is the central focus of this short review. If you are more interested in Mitchell’s career as a poet in its many reincarnations, have a close read of his honest and entertaining comments in the extensive interview which follows.

Mitchell is one of the most diverse and original emerging poets working in Western Australia today. He is a ground-breaking poet from the street who uses highly inventive language tools and forms to express his evolving grand vision as an artist. ‘Poetry’, he says, ‘should make people gasp, their heart leap and the toes want to pirouette. It’s the scientific art of language as our fundamental technology. Good poetry should engulf but disappear leaving only the slightest echo of a vision glimpsed and momentarily comprehended in full. It should leave people wanting, hungry and slightly obsessed.’

‘songs for the ordinary mass’ is not about ordinary people. It is centered on Mitchell’s young adult haunt:  Northbridge, Perth’s entertainment area- the city’s ‘cesspool of sin’. The equivalent of Wollongong’s Kenny Street.  Apart from a few snatches of dialogue, the book also does not use the language of ordinary people but is embedded in the coded language of post-structural theorists like Derrida and Foucault.

The language is minimalistic. Hybrid with a pervading meta-tinge: Chucked in a blender then sprinkled on top with aberrant punctuation.

The chapbook begins with a prologue in two parts. Mitchell marks out the territory he is to explore- the rewriting of Northbridge from his own lense, using a mash of found or fragmentary phrases and words. The main section of the book consists of fourteen mostly short poems. These are typically snapshots from the street- about hookers, junkies, urban graffiti artists and drunken hoons written in a cut & paste style integrating pop references, direct speech from the gutter, social or philosophical observations and the like, with the writer and the reader hurtling in a chaotic rush towards  some unknown but inevitable confrontation.

Mitchell’s overall aim is ‘to capture the godlessness of the ghetto and fuse it with an almost liturgical quality’. As he explains in the interview, he adds a complex layer of structure to his work by developing the concept of neumes, or graphic pitches characteristic of traditional Gregorian chants, to evoke the dark resonances of Northbridge’s underworld. Each poem in the main section is a sampling of a different  Gregorian pitch and each title makes a specific allusion to the tone that the poem wishes to covey: caccia, climacus, stretto sone, porrectus & so on:

‘I had been reading, every Saturday, dictionaries in non-sequential ways. The Oxford I did backwards. A crossword dictionary I’d navigate using that Saturday’s crossword puzzle. Finally I hit a musical reference dictionary, which I read by reference notes (i.e. see also this or that). Here, an antiquity of musicality emerged. Words thick with accent and history and an architecture of precision.

And the archaic beauty emerged: antiphonary, a liturgical book containing chants for the office, comprising of The Mass Ordinary and The Mass Proper; fiato, breath; sone, a subjective unit of loudness; and neumes, graphic notational signs indicating a certain pitch to be obtained rather than a note to be carried, the obvious analogy Gregorian Chants. From here emerged the neumes themselves, with odd little names. Northbridge suddenly transformed too’.
  
These are clever, but obscure poems and I often had to refer back to Mitchell’s own explicit comments from our interview to make better sense of what he was attempting to achieve. Keep in mind that this chapbook represents only a small fraction of Mitchell’s work to date. As he outlines in considerable detail below, he has been involved in the spoken word, meta-narratives, break up letters, reality games, ‘spite of madness’ writing, slam, remix, parkour and other cutting-edge mediums. I urge you to follow up some of his links to his work and influences. The poet Michael Farrell, for example, is a leading exponent of 21st century experimental writing in Australia and certainly worth investigating.

All that said, ‘songs for the ordinary mass’ is the smallest sized chapbook I have ever purchased. It measures about 6 x 4 inches and cutely fits into its cover sleeve. Overall, the word count is small but the editing excellent and the quality high. The book costs $10 and makes a significant contribution to PressPress’s recent drive to publish innovative Australian poets. Find their latest chapbooks here: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~writerslink/PressPress/PressPress_Home.html



 

INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT-PATRICK MITCHELL  26 November 2010

 BIO:  Scott-Patrick Mitchell is a poet & writer who lives in Perth, Western Australia. He works as an arts and fashion journalist for OUTinPerth Newspaper and volunteers as a poetry editor for dotdotdash. His poems are typically intense experiments in sound & rhythm, of constraint and explosion, balanced with performative works which explore the resonance of an actual voice. He has been a guest of the National Young Writers’ Festival and the Emerging Writers’ Festival and in 2009 he won The PressPress Chapbook Award for songs for the ordinary mass, a collection which fuses urban sampling with Gregorian musical notations. He recently won the Perth Poetry Slam and was accepted as one of three emerging West Australian poets to appear in Fremantle Press’ latest release New Poets. Scott-Patrick has been accepted into WAAPA at Edith Cowan University where he will complete a Masters in Performance Poetry, upgrading to a PhD in 2011. He is the only person in the state currently studying this topic at this level. From this he will produce a full length collection of poetry plus a one-man show, which he hopes to tour New York and London with, showcasing it to the international performance poets he is currently interviewing as part of his thesis. In early 2011 he will release two e-books, one through Black Rider Press and the other as experiment in remixed experience written in collaboration with Matt Hall and Siobhan Hodge.  In his down time he blogs about street art and buys far too many clothes.

(1)When did you first discover that you had an interest in poetry?
I discovered the ease of poetry when I was in Year 8, so about 12 or 13. The keyword there is ‘ease’. I’ve always found poetry easy, even when it’s being difficult. I lack the discipline to write novels.
So anyway, we had to write an anthology, based on famous poems about dependency and red objects. I left it to the last minute, but knew I wanted my anthology to contain accompanying artwork. The poems knocked themselves out and my brother (4our years my senior) provided illustrations… a mouse here, a hand growing into a tree there. All my art direction. I got an A+. Miss Hull commended me quite openly in front of the class.
I had never particularly liked poetry before that (and sometimes still don’t) but loved the ease by which I could articulate myself through it. Then, when I was 14 I read American Psycho. Poems started to gush out of me from there, angular gangly things crammed with abstraction. It was as though Patrick Bateman himself had clipped an artery, a mess of words oozing out of me. One of the first poems I wrote – and ever got published – was called a simple psychopath, a homage to Patrick’s handiwork. From there the ease attracted me, and the sense of not being able to comprehend exactly what I was doing. I bummed out in high school completely – divorce, immigration, bogans and the supposed importance of a clique, even if they were the wrong crowd, took priority. That and my sexuality reluctantly aligned itself as bi, not queer, the disconnect difficult to manage, particularly as I crushed on male friend after male friend. Unrequited teen love. Maybe that’s to blame.
University was a liberation. I had wanted to study acting, but was told that actors never made any money, even though I had always been the heroic lead in primary school plays and the villain in every production throughout secondary. So psychology became the next logical choice. Coupled with religious studies. And then criminology. And finally writing. At the age of 19 all my hair fell out from stress – and boys – and Patrick’s old wound reopened. Poetry about the body began to bleed from me. I learnt the correlative of the objective versus the subjective. The polarity of thought manifested itself in my studies and I decided to take out a How To Write Poetry book from the library, secretly reading it in private. It helped immensely, although metric verse made my head wretch… and still does. I don’t know how to write in feet and metre at all. I quickly decided that if I couldn’t shake this thing, I’d set my own rules:
- I will only read poetry from the 20th Century, the emphasis on work being written in that moment. West Australian poetry in particular.
- Poetry should be taught backwards. The cannon is fantastic and all, but so is what’s happening right now. And yes it provides context, but the loss of context is far more exhilarating. I approached every work on instinct, not knowledge. The beauty was in the rhythm, not the technology.
- I will study singer songwriters like Bjork and Tori Amos with the same intensity as contemporary poets like Ginsberg and Hejinian. At current my obsession is hip hop and the new South African variant, Zef, which mashes together the cheesiness of consumer culture to accentuate irony.
- I make my own trends, even if I don’t know how to initially articulate them or envision what they will ultimately yield.
- Science is sexy and secretly wants to be art and poetry and vice versa. Everything is travelling between points of actuality and points of desire. Besides, science will make sense eventually. Art and poetry never will. But together they’ll map the world.
- Popular culture is not the enemy and never will be. Our own sense of self-importance and how it infects our art is the problem. The notion of high art was the biggest mistake of the Modernist era. That said, we’re paying the price of Warhol’s mass production of postmodern low art.
- We are at the beginning of a new paradigm of theoretical thought. We will articulate it in hindsight, but we are either travelling toward the Post Human or New Humanism. One sees us forgoing the fundamental sanctity of our body to imbue it with man made-isms, the other a renaissance of the tenacity of the human spirit and how it manifests in the world outside of ourselves. One model of dissection, one of reconnection. We won’t know until the next paradigm hits, in approximately 2050. By which point it’ll be too late.
- Poets don’t need to lack style or a sense of fashion.
- Poetry is for the mouth and ear but should align itself with the eye, and therefore incorporate visual elements where possible, even if that incorporation is the inclusion of codes and coding – anything to make language change itself in more interesting ways should be encouraged.
- Nothing would really matter until I was 30 anyway. That came from a friend, but was also a nod to how messed up divorce, immigration, bogans and the like had made me. Father issues rock. And true to form, it slotted into place post-30. Well… it had to really.
- If all else fails, read it out loud. Words grow wings when spoken. And the obvious analogy is always music.
- The line is a white hot thing, a line white hot, a hot white line. As such, the poem is a juxt of the economy the line brings to the luxury of the wide white space.
- Have faith. And never, ever lose it. This will do something, eventually. Hopefully you’ll surprise even yourself.
- Never just conduct the experiment – be it.
I had always wanted to draw. My brother could. I couldn’t. I adopted words, and how they were spoken. That said, having a mother who had grown up in colonial Indian from German parents meant that I was taught to pronounce words differently to the phonetics they had.
(2) Who were some of your early influences and who are you keenly interested today in the Arts world?
Ummmm. See below?
Early influences? Children book writers like Dahl. I had a book on animals that I treasured. It taught me the importance of symbols before I was 10. Dungeons & Dragons. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Final Fantasy works. // teens… Madonna. Bjork. Tori Amos. Robert Smith. Ride. Nirvana. The Breeders. P.J. Harvey. Prince. // Bret Easton Ellis. // Duchamp. Andy Warhol. Matisse. Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol. // Today? // John Kinsella. Lyn Hejinian. Allen Ginsberg. H.D.. Charles Olson. Dorothy Porter. Michael Farrell. Gertrude Stein. David Antin. Miles Merrill. Bob Hollman. Ellen Zweig. Tony Lopez. Peter Middleton. // Gabrielle Everall. Matt Hall (this guy is amazing – his work is so architectural and intelligent – he’s post-grad at UWA studying Prynne and speaks with such marked intelligence it often stumps me – yet, for some reason, he’s taken me under his wing and has the greatest patience when I send ranty emails about my life and studies – he’s honestly made my first year of postgrad so rewarding – if it hadn’t been for him I reckon my motivation would’ve waned months ago). Allan Boyd. Kevin Gillam. Rebecca Giggs. Deanne Leber. Amber Fresh. Jeremy Balius. K @ The Ponies. J.P. Quinton… all of them local poets. // Clive Barker. Jeff Noon. Jeanette Winterson. Christos Tsiolkas. // Alexander McQueen. Valentino. Gareth Pugh. Bernhard Willhelm. Jeremy Scott. Henrik Vibskov. KTZ. Margiela. Nick Knight… who work internationally in fashion. // Romance Was Born. Songs For The Mute. Zoe Trotman. Arj Selvam. S2. Lui Hon. Alistair Trung. Material Boy. A Label By. Of Cabbages & Kings. Alister Yiap. Dropstitch. For-Tomorrow. Milly Sleeping… who work nationally in fashion. // Vogue. Harpers. noi.se. Let Them Eat Cake… which are all glossy. // Lady Gaga. Robyn. David Bowie. Laurie Andersen. Die Antwoord. Antony & The Johnsons. Yoko Ono… who make noise and command attention. // Stormie Mils. Creepy. The Yok. Trevor6025. Timothy Rollin. Ryan Boserio. DaekOne & Kid Zoom. Bach. Dave Misled. Mandy. Deathbot. Beastman. Twenty Eleven. Monster. The Glomes. Aimee Johns. Mr Brainwash… but only as a theoretical construct of consumption… all of whom are street artists whose work I’ve followed for the last six years. // Janet Carter. Eric Mitchell. Matthew Barney. Cindy Sherman. James Franco. Gus Van Sant. Rose Skinner. The Giselle. Arlene Texta Queen. Orlan. Tess McNamara. Tobey Black. Chrissie Parrott. Matthew Sforcina. Ash Baroque. Sarah Colllins. Petrosexual. Tomas Ford. Sexy Galexy (my drag mother). Emma Sulley. Will Faulkner. The Krazy Krushgroove Kids. mOther… who are local or international artists of some capacity or another.
BAFTA Make-up artist Strykermeyer, who not only inspires, but to whom I owe my new life.
Leigh Bowrey, for changing the landscape of going out.
It’s funny that my two biggest inspirations are drag queens who acted more like men than women.
I believe music, art and most certainly fashion are critical to understanding the intricacies of modern life and how not to live it like everyone else. I don’t want to be modern. Ever. I just want to be unique. That comes from having and developing a vision… which I believe all these people have.
I sometimes think I should honestly read more though. Fashion magazines do not count do they?
(3)  ‘songs for the ordinary mass’ is centered on Northbridge in Perth’s downtown entertainment area. Can you explain how you originally came up with the idea for the chapbook and how you developed your sense of place and the poetics employed within? What are your overall intentions in writing the book?
 I was living in Northbridge at the time. It’s an amazing place. Magnetic. Consuming. A ghetto crammed full of approximately 85 different cultural groups.
I had been reading, every Saturday, dictionaries in non-sequential ways. The Oxford I did backwards. A crossword dictionary I’d navigate using that Saturday’s crossword puzzle. Finally I hit a musical reference dictionary, which I read by reference notes (i.e. see also this or that). Here, an antiquity of musicality emerged. Words thick with accent and history and an architecture of precision.
And the archaic beauty emerged: antiphonary, a liturgical book containing chants for the office, comprising of The Mass Ordinary and The Mass Proper; fiato, breath; sone, a subjective unit of loudness; and neumes, graphic notational signs indicating a certain pitch to be obtained rather than a note to be carried, the obvious analogy Gregorian Chants.
From here emerged the neumes themselves, with odd little names. Northbridge suddenly transformed too. Love Tester, a street based exhibition of artists, threaded together by a collection of hot pink symbols and a map, suddenly made the streets sing with imagery. There was a hum. A vibrancy. Someone stenciled Empty Men on to the pavement and I vandalised works by giving them thought bubbles filled with poems.
The neumes demanded attention, so I gathered soundbytes and supplied them with the appropriate pitch. What emerged were tight, dark, enigmatic poems, abstractions of the modern language. They were new. Awkward. Unknown. So I did what any responsible parent does when their children behave differently: I ignored them.
This was 2002. By 2006 a distinct style was emerging in my work. In 2007 and 2008 I had the clarity to understand the intricate sound of my poetry. This lead to a more efficient editing procedure, songs for the ordinary mass polished in one weekend in 2009. I included a juxt of ‘self’ and ‘city’ in two sprawling landscape poems.
The overall aim was to capture the godlessness of the ghetto and fuse it with an almost liturgical quality. It’s a cesspit of sin from which the most beautiful moments can arise. The chapbook reflects the hymn books of the church, the title itself referencing the chants contained in one part of the antiphonary. That’s why it opens with the hollow sound of a mechanised Japanese sho – the ultimate bastardisation of beauty – clunking out a subverted Lord’s Prayer.
And finally, an esclandre is a quest. And aerosol always made me think of dogs pissing their territory. The final tricky word, malaguetta, refers to healing seeds used in African rituals, also known as seeds of Paradise.
 (4)  I am particularly interested in the construction of your poems. Can you take me through some of the techniques you specifically used in your creative process? For example, can you describe what is happening in ‘re:WRITING the city’(anonymously…’? http://thesmokingpoet.tripod.com/id12.html

It’s doing a mash. The piece begins with a found text from the East Coast. It then bloats itself on the importance of achingly overwrought definition, juxting that with slogans – these 2wo segments attempt to define the nature of street art. What follows are musing’s on street artists. For example, The Yok is actually the successful Asian diffusion line of Hitchcock, implemented around 2003 or 2004. He’s now internationally recognised as The Yok. In part ii, a street artist called Victim would actually stencil a council worker painting the wall whenever the council painted over, or buffed, a piece of graffiti. They were the victims Victim was giving voice to. From there the piece examines the practice of ‘vandalising the vandal’, a reverse form of community service where you actually steal the graffiti from the street for your own collection. The community service is a double entrende: on one hand you cleaning up the streets, but on the other you are protecting the art with the intention of it having a future, either in a private collection or possible future public collection.
I have been ‘collecting’ street art for years. I’ve also been photographing it too since 2004 and have over 5000 photographs. I write a regular column about it plus blog the images at http://perthstreetart.tumblr.com with the hope of publishing a book on it in the future.
 The list of names are names of actual Perth street artists. 

The Yok: http://theyok.com/content/Outdoors/

(5)  Your aberrant use of punctuation was cleverly handled in an earlier discussion with the publisher Freemantle Press http://fremantlepress.blogspot.com/2010/06/interview-scott-patrick-mitchell.html  Similiarly, I was intrigued but mystified by the titles of your poems…’porrectus’, ‘torculus’, ‘scandicus’, ‘clivis’, ‘pes’, ‘punctum’ etc. Can you provide the reader with an insight as to what some of these titles mean, what you hoped to achieve and how they contribute to the overall unity of the poems?
Neumes were used by Gregorian Monks to denote a certain pitch to hit. Their music predated the formal notation of music we still currently use. As such their staves were littered with suggestions of resonance. The beauty of their sound came from an agreed inclination, not a form dotting out of instance to instance. The freedom of their form appealed to me, so I used the below neumes as reference points, going on long walks through Northbridge to capture appropriate samples from the streets, or snippets of overheard conversation. Each neume has a sample.
-       virga // twig; graft; rod; staff; wand. an aged local, who presumes he’s mystic, divines the weather.
-       punctum // point; dot; vote; moment. how an overdose can go unnoticed, even when someone is screaming for assistance.
-       pes // foot. hooker heels are hot... on hookers.
-       clivis // slope; hill. heroin addicts unable to score their next hit.
-       scandicus // climb. all prostitutes should wear stockings, the more lurid the better.
-       climacus // no definitions can be found for this word. I accentuate the climax of coming to a complete stop against your will. Traffic was the pedestrian’s enemy, red lights our friends.
-       torculus // press. used here ironically by a newspaper salesman. Our local rag is called The West Australian, or The West.
-       porrectus // long; protracted; dead. tweakers surviving on Salvation Army rations and by selling rock, or crystal meth.
The following aren’t actually neumes, but I utilised them in the same manner:
-       caccia // a 14th century part song, often portraying hunt scenes & including animal sounds or town cries. the hunt for money, the begging from the bruddah.
-       catch // a round at the unison for 3hree or more male voices, usually unaccompanied, or texts that were often racy. brothels and strip clubs make men holler.
-       stretto sone // used here to highlight the Northbridge phenomenon of the mobile hens night doing bog laps. Note the morphology of the phrase below.
o    stretto // a speeding up of the temp at a climatic section of a work, movement or section.
o    sone // a subjective unit of loudness.
 (6)  Your chapbook reveals only a limited aspect of your work. Can you briefly describe some of the other projects you have been working on over the last five years or so, especially to reach a wider audience?
I kicked off my poetry career proper in 1998 by collaborating with new music composer Sarah Collins. We formed a quirky minimal baroque ensemble called SpokenNewWordMusic. We wrote and toured our first full length show in 1999, reviewers calling the collaboration ‘an energetic integration of poetry and sound’ that ‘moved the audience’ and constrained ‘an Allen Ginsberg-like spontaneity and sophistication’. While on tour at Adelaide’s Feast Festival, we were approached by an artist collective to return the following year for a Fetish Micro-Festival. As a result we wrote a second show called [fucking] with your fetish, from which comes my slam piece the foot tango and the poem, which appears in New Poets (I performed this piece dressed as geisha who then strip into a barefoot boy who performed the foot tango). We rounded off our collaboration by writing a song cycle exploring the impact a HIV+ diagnosis has on a relationship, enlisting a male soprano to sing as back-up. The work, kissing red : kissing blue, also toured interstate. Unfortunately,  we only have cassette recordings of our work, although we plan to rectify this soon.
Setting off after that by myself I became fascinated with street art and in 2001 developed a poetic suite called plume which was a meta-narrative based on love and obsession – modeled around big brother reality TV, which debuted that year – and comprised of 3hree voices, each part of the story centered around a different flower. Joshua Fitzpatrick, a young local artist who is quite renowned for his painting now, drew the 9ine flowers which I watermarked and superimposed the poetry over. I then posted this in public spaces during the Pride Festival that year, doing 2wo store front window installations in Northbridge and Mt Lawley. The idea was people encountered poetry in the street, and could engage the story as they saw fit.
Being the ambitious soul that I am I then invited 8ight artists – Paul O’Connor, Eric Mitchell, Sam Willersdorf, Emma Sulley, Tess McNamara, Monique Powell, Josh Fitzpatrick, and myself – along with 4our composers – Petro Vouris, Rachel Dease, Nathan Fuller and Stuart Miles (aka DJ Scout) – to interpret a certain flower. The resulting exhibition, The Plumerian, appeared at The Breadbox Gallery and included art, sound, text and performance. The idea was to engage audiences further and ignite a connection between poetry and art and music.
Artrage then took the work and entered into an experimental electronic platform called reality games, a prototype to the Creative Commons of today, similar in theory to the meta-remix site that is ABC’s The Pool. It involved 3hree sets of artists who remixed each others work inside their own game and then were given a chunk of another game to remix. It was shortlived, but cutting edge.
plume is now known as The Plumerian. It’s still incomplete and has proven the hardest collection to write to date. Haikus from the first set of flowers appear at the beginning of my Fremantle Press publication, New Poets.
Then, in 2008, not satisfied with the model, I developed another street art collection called The Trickster’s Bible, based on The Tricking Bible of parkour, a manual that lists the most efficient ways to transverse the urban landscape using parkour. My collection became a narrative of want, unrequited love, loathing and break-up letters, The Trickster leaving readers a map to follow in an attempt to lure them back into the relationship they had supposedly left. It debuted at Newcastle’s National Young Writers Festival in 2008 as A0 posters and tiny A5 ones too. Interestingly, a sequence of break-up letters, where the opening had a blank after the word ‘Dear…’, were all filled in by readers, referring to a rogue gallery of men who had clearly broken somebody’s heart somewhere.
This collection then appeared again in WA at the Artrage Silver Festival. It was harder to install here. In fact, the model is still imperfect, and I am sometimes wonder at different ways of bringing poetry to the street.
This collection has now been edited to appear as . the tricking post . which has been submitted to Black Rider Press for possible consideration for an early 2011 e-book release. If not the whole collection, parts thereof.
At one point, I had an online blog as part of a year long live-in art experiment called The Chaochamber in which I adopted the persona of a sprite of madness. I used to write to street artists telling them how I had kidnapped their work from the streets, and that it said hi. As this sprite I was the living heart of a machine which was a touted as the Southern Hemisphere’s largest chaos attractor specialising in attracting lovely horror and horrific love. The house we conducted this in eventually began to collapse around us. I have material from this for a book and have used the poems to write a manuscript called . how to invoke daemonic possession . which explores how self destructive behaviour after the break up of a relationship can lead us to struggle with our inner daemons, sometimes apparently so. This collection is a prelude to my current post-grad collection, transparency, which examines how invisibility and emotional transparency – 2wo dichotomies of the same want for invisibility essentially – are enlisted in self-destructive and self-redemptive behaviours and how addiction can make us disappear.
(7)  Can you explicitly state your view of the role of the poet and of poetry in general?
The poet is a lightning thief. Their job is to steal from the gods to inspire the masses. Poetry runs a gamut of complexities, some of which are self-depreciating to the art form, but essentially it should make people gasp, their heart leap and the toes want to pirouette. It’s the scientific art of language as our fundamental technology. Good poetry should engulf but disappear leaving only the slightest echo of a vision glimpsed and momentarily comprehended in full. It should leave people wanting, hungry and slightly obsessed.
For myself, the ultimate intention is to inspire someone, somewhere in the world who will forever remain unknown. The moment I become aware of having inspired someone, the rule resets and I have to achieve it again.
For my poetry, I just hope it appeals and keeps me challenged.
(8)  Can you tell me briefly about your work in the new anthology New Poets published by Freemantle Press and how you attempt to break new ground? http://www.fremantlepress.com.au/books/1143
Have you noticed I rarely use short titles for my collections?
 Point in case this one, {where n equals} a determinancy of poetry. This was my first attempt at a sustained narrative of voice, the idea being of presenting readers with a Rorschach of human experience. The collection moves from nature, or _ature, and the love of the natural world into nurture, or _urture, which examines passion, love, sex and the complexity of emotion. At it’s heart this collection celebrates the beauty of life through scientific precision, accentuating and enjambing punctuation to highlight the often overlooked musicality of punctuation in an attempt to make the obvious analogy with music.
(9)  You are undertaking a post graduate degree in performance poetry at WAAPA. What aspects of the course have you found most relevant in your development as a poet?
The incorporation of performance theory and how the stage generates a set of performance symbols. In literature we have literary symbols. There are certain objects throughout stories of the canon that perform specific magical functions, such as invoking invisibility. We instinctively know at least 2wo that do this, and at the heart of these objects is the symbol of power, the symbol that is coveted and invokes. How then do you invoke invisibility on stage? Scrims, disembodied voices, movement, lighting, projection, bandages… these become the performance symbols of the work. How then do these 2wo sets of symbols communicate, inform and transform each other, and at what point does the poetry reading become a performance and back again. Also, how does poetry written for the page and then performed differ from poetry spontaneously performed, recorded and then edited for the page? This intersection of insight and information is the crux of the course, and it’s teaching me the dynamics of what performance is capable off, and how performance writing has its own set of distinct rules, which I’m keen to rework and reinvent.
(10) Can you briefly map out your upcoming projects and the direction your poetry is taking?
My post-grad collection is my major baby at current.
I am working on a remixed poetic text with Matthew Hall and Siobhan Hodge, a project inspired by a John Kinsella project from 1998.
And then transparency should yield a collection and a one-man show, which I hope to take to New York and London. That’s the plan at least.
I see the enjambed punctuation distincting at least another 2wo books. From there though the musicality will be reinvented. I am learning how to write meter and rhyme and also hip hop. I am developing a stronger sense of humour in my slam and performance pieces, and will allow the voices there to speak as they choose. On the page though I am constantly seeking new rhythms and use of the luxurious white space. I’d love to record SpokenNewWordMusic and a selection of pieces.
More so though I am learning the poetic canon – finally – albeit backwards. I believe that in order to understand the experiment, you must be it, and I feel that learning poetry and the greats backwards is the best way to reinvigorate a love of it in our children. I’d love to rework the educational model of poetry to fit this. Beyond that though and I want to write theory, but mainly psychological theory based on quantum psychology, which again inverts the models by which we deconstruct our personalities, to in effect reconstruct a psyche that is more aware of its place in the universe. 
I honestly don’t see myself as being a poet in the classical sense. I think I took to many interesting turns along the way to be a poster pin-up poet. A friend says I’m a rock star poet. That may be more accurate.
If anything I still feel like a kid. I do what I know I can do, because it constantly surprises me. And that’s the best thing about it.
  LINKS TO THINGS & SUCH:
I don’t have a writing blog. I write full-time as a journalist. Plus I see web publishing as being akin to actual publishing, and I’m afraid I’m far too economic with where my work appears. 
my street art photo blog
the newspaper I write arts, fashion, music and horror-scopes for
my poor neglected zine
a monthly spoken word performance night I help organise
a literary journal I co-edit poetry for
my etsy store from which I sell zines & vintage fashion
my poor neglected private set myspace


Monday, November 15, 2010

BOOK REVIEW- Peter Bakowski BENEATH OUR ARMOUR/ COMPLETE INTERVIEW


Peter Bakowski BENEATH OUR ARMOUR, Hunter Contemporary Australian Poets, Melbourne, 2009, 79 pages.

BENEATH OUR ARMOUR is Peter Bakowski’s sixth collection of poetry and was recently short-listed for the C.J. Dennis Prize for Poetry in the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. The book consists of thirty-one excellently crafted and remarkably varied portrait poems.

The portraits in this collection are of real and imagined people and many have been previously published in literary journals over several years. The poems cover a wide range of historical periods, perspectives and voices; as diverse as a gulag inmate (‘Portrait of Pavel Shalamov, Magadan Labour Camp, Siberia, April 1952), a sales executive (‘Portrait of Leonard Drysdale, district sales manager, Birmingham, England, 1946’) a thirteenth century aging warrior (‘Instructions to horsemen, Krakow, Poland’), and a traveling blues musso (‘Blues’).

These are deceptively simple, free verse portraits. In the book’s introduction Bakowski explicitly states his intentions as a writer, ‘My aim as a poet is to write clear and accessible poems, to use ordinary words to say extraordinary things.’ In a recent interview with Bakowski (which appears below), he emphasizes the point that clarity is of paramount importance in his work, ‘The apprenticeship is life-long. To choose, test, arrange words. To write clearly. To reveal without word fog what you have to reveal.’

On the question of style, Bakowski succinctly expressed to Ralph Wessman in an earlier interview what he hoped to achieve as a creative artist: ‘More than anything, I’m trying to be visual, attempting to be a painter with words. A very influential quote for me in a book of essays and memoirs to do with Charles Bukowski was along the lines of, there’s all these books analyzing, dissecting writing and literature, I don’t know what all the fuss is about, writing is painting. Those three words are a lighthouse effect for me, which I try to keep in view when I set sail upon the page’ (Famous Reporter #30 http://walleahpress.com.au/bakowski.html).

This striving for visual clarity is certainly reflected in ‘Bernard and Monique’, a third person narrative poem about a young French couple who specialize in robbing expensive villas. After a maid is killed during a botched burglary in Paris, Bernard undergoes plastic surgery to hide his identity and temporarily moves to Stockholm with his girlfriend. It is the lure of  money and Bernard’s love for Monique (he didn’t want her ‘to go back to whoring’) that spark their renewed surveillance of properties during their day trips between Monaco and Cannes.

Bernard had a new face in a new town
but the same old cravings.
Cars, clothes, restaurants,
a little cocaine sometimes.
They all cost money.

Although Bernard and Monique are criminals, as readers, we empathize rather than judge or condemn them. They share an emotional bond and an engaging back story which Bakowski creates in a few sparse fragments, in a matter-of-fact way.

As the title of the book BENEATH OUR ARMOUR suggests, Bakowski is attempting to get to the heart of what it means to be human, especially when people loosen their ‘armour’- their habits, their pretense and are revealed for what they truly are underneath-  in all their vulnerabilities and strengths. In the interview below, Bakowski explicitly states the central focus of his work, ‘No matter how many books I write in my life time they'll all be about what it's like to be a human being. This is my life's work. As a poet I remain enthralled by how human beings are a mixture of tenacity and vulnerability. It's tragic and heroic. I have empathy for the struggles of the human being.’

Some of the poems are written with a tone of regret and aimed at capturing strong-willed people at vulnerable points in their lives. In ‘Portrait of Cyril Connolly, critic, at 53 Bedford Square, London, June 1949’ the influential critic Connolly (1903-1974) reflects on his failure, not only as a writer, but also as a person:

The authority I bring to writing
I cannot bring to my life.
This leaves me poor,
staring inwards
at lovers who flee from my reach.

‘Albert Anthony Lee, Hong Kong architect’ traces the gulf which exists between Albert’s simple but rich childhood and the emptiness of his present job:

Years since you painted a watercolour
of carp and pond,
bridge and river.
Construction blueprints demand your scrutiny.
Contract for Asia’s tallest building.
Apartment with top shelf whiskey,
barren bed.
Skyline that rivals New York, Shanghai,
pills to help you sleep.

A bulk of the poems in this collection are about creative people: painters (‘Dougal Nunn, painter, as described by Dennis Arden, publican, Enniscrone, Ireland’), writers (‘Sylvia Plath writing in her journal, 23 Fitzroy Road, London, February 1963’), a sculptor (Arthur Marsden), a musician (‘Blues’), a portrait artist (‘Caspar Morton, portrait artist, talking about his life and work’) and so on.

Many poems dwell into the creative processes of artists to provide insights into how talent, inspiration and the experience of daily life all blend in the mix to create powerful and uplifting works of the imagination.  In ‘Arthur Marsden working on a sculpture of the writer Edgar Bowers’ the sculptor describes his process:

I love stone, working it,
the sound of the hammer against the chisel,
chipping away, the form appearing.
I forget the clock, forget to eat.
I’m a pair of eyes, looking, absorbing, deciding.

In ‘Portrait of Verna Yan, crime fiction writer’ the reader experiences Yan’s sense of detachment and how she is able to blur real events in her imagination to reveal how she shapes the storyline and characters of her latest novel:

Verna
moves towards her bedroom,
gets into bed,
thinking about the new chapter
who will appear in the next chapter.
She’s decided his name
and whom he’ll kill first.

Similarly in ‘Portrait of Elizabeth Smart, writing her novel By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept, Vancouver Island, Canada, July 1941’ is written from Smart’s perspective. She is pregnant and creates word portraits of her lover, the poet George Barker and his wife.  The poem focuses on the novelist reflecting on her domestic life and shows how an ordinary event can fuel the creative process:

I return indoors
to the writing desk,
the story of our triangle,
our love a lit fuse.

Some poems in this collection are auto-biographical which provide a more personalised perspective on Bakowski’s portraits and shows how his identity has been shaped through his experiences. He explores his early childhood (‘Of fathers, books and libraries’), his young adult life as a backpacker (‘Hand me my travelin’ shoes’) as well as his writing residencies in China as a mature and accomplished poet (‘Macau days’).

In ‘Scenes from childhood’ Bakowsi imaginatively recreates how he was first told by doctors that he had a hole in his heart. In ‘Macau days’ the speaker sits at his desk, presumably Bakowski, and contemplates the blue stapler on his desk, whilst ‘a rooftop crane hoists a girder’ from his window. In ‘Of fathers, books and libraries’ he provides the reader with a personal account of his reading history:

At the age of twenty-eight I went travelling for seven years.
In cheap rooms in San Diego, Paris, London and Khartoum,
I read books by John O’Hara, William Faulkner,
John Fante, George Orwell and Primo Levi.
In those books it was
What a character faced,
How they responded, viewed themselves and the world,
That kept me reading till dawn.

In reading this volume you get the impression that Bakowski has pain-stakingly crafted every single word in this book. His language is pared down and minimal in its use of metaphor. The clarity of the writing has an understated profundity.

Bakowski has a colossal imagination and each time he begins a poem he attempts to say something new.  His poetry is refreshingly egoless & its ongoing inventiveness delivers the longevity it seeks.


INTERVIEW WITH PETER BAKOWSKI (concluded 15 November 2010)

Q1: Peter can you briefly explain your first experiences with poetry and how you initially became interested in writing it?

Answer: I was an avid reader from the age of eight when my father took me to my first public library in Walpole Street, Kew. The library seemed a holy place, hushed and reverent. I didn't borrow any poetry titles. Poetry didn't enter my thinking. Adventure did. I loved any fiction to do with faraway places - distant planets, tropical islands, the exotic, the alien. I borrowed and read all the children's science fiction adventure stories of Angus MacVicar and Captain W.E. Johns. I was also an avid reader of comics. Everything from Richie Rich to Magnus, Robot Fighter. My first exposure to poetry was Walter De La Mare at primary school and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Elliot in high school. I didn't read ANY poetry out of school hours. In my late teens and early twenties I started reading The Beats. If we talk about reading a book changing one's life, for me it was reading Jack Kerouac's "On the Road". It made me want to go out of the road, which I did, extensively, in the 1980's. Thus I wrote my first poem in 1983, in response to receiving a Dear John letter from a Melbourne girl, while I was staying at a record collector friend's farmhouse in Waco, Texas. There was a manual typewriter at the farmhouse and using it, I wrote a cry-of-the-heart response to receiving that letter. I consider that poem, "Amelia", published in "The heart at 3 a.m.", my first serious/proper poem. Because of that Dear John letter I had no wish to return to Australia. I hitch-hiked across North America, caught a freight train across Montana, lived in a cave on the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres, walked, hitch-hiked and travelled by bus, lorry and train through Egypt, Sudan and Central African Republic. My own adventures, my own experiences, my own observation and thinking gave me
poems. In the early 1980's I began to read the poems of Charles Bukowski properly and extensively. His poetry taught me that you could write about the urban, the inside of your room,
the inside of your head and heart and you could do so directly and honestly with no obstacles or fog in your writing. I taught myself to write poetry by sitting down at a typewriter, feeding a blank sheet into it and trying out words on the page. A poet's material is what they experience, see, think, sift and can imagine. A poet is a observer, a thinker, an explorer. I consider that to be a creative person one must be alert to the world and remain so.


 Q2: On your blog BAKOWSKI POETRY NEWS
http://bakowskipoetrynews.blogspot.com/ you mention that you ‘served an eleven year period self-imposed apprenticeship in writing’ with your best work being included in your award winning book In the human night (1995). Can you sum up what you learnt about writing and people during this formative period?


Answer: I learnt the value of facing a completely blank page. I learnt the value of facing a completely blank page on a regular weekly basis, each Monday, where I allocated the whole Monday to writing. I really promote the idea of regular protected writing time. Keep the mind, the senses in training. Facing a blank page is a mixture of being focused but calm even if the subject matter is difficult/personal. It's about openness. Face the blank page. Be open and non-anxious. No negative voices saying "I have no ideas. I have no good ideas. All I've written recently is lame etc".

I learnt that each word has a hue, a power, may be used well or poorly. I always ask myself, "What am I trying to say in this poem and have I said it clearly and strongly?"
In my self-imposed apprenticeship I wrote poems about literary and artistic heroes - Charles Bukowski, Billie Holiday and Janet Frame. No matter how many books I write in my life time they'll all be about what it's like to be a human being. This is my life's work. As a poet I remain enthralled by how human beings are a mixture of tenacity and vulnerability. It's tragic and heroic. I have empathy for the struggles of the human being.

The apprenticeship is life-long. To choose, test, arrange words. To write clearly. To reveal without word fog what you have to reveal.

Question 3: Your book BENEATH OUR ARMOUR is focused on character studies of a wide variety of people. Some poems are auto-biographical, others are based on historical figures, others are based on your residencies in China. How did you decide which historical characters to write about? How extensive did you have to conduct your research?  At what point did you decide to collect your poems under this one volume?

Answer: The historical figures I decide to write about are individuals that I find intriguing, whose lives have been "tidal" - a lifelong cycle of creativity, alertness and self-awareness versus self-destructiveness, years/periods in fog, darkness, self-delusion. I try and reveal the epic, heroic, tenacious nature of this individual struggle while not losing sight of their vulnerability, human fears and anxieties. In revealing these individuals I do so without judging them.

I research a historical character properly. For example, in writing the portrait poem of Sylvia Plath, I read several biographies of Sylvia. In fact I read the biography, "Bitter Fame" twice. I also read a biography of Ted Hughes and a biography of Assia Wevill, the woman that lured Ted away from Sylvia.

I've been writing character-driven poems my whole writing life. I decided after the publication of "Days That We Couldn't Rehearse" to focus in my poems on what I call "the sacredness of the individual". What continues to fascinate me is the individual response to an event, personal or global.

The variety of human responses to crises, changes, ruts and life is what I try to reveal in portrait poems of individuals.

An individual is not one self. I believe a person is many selves. A person may surprise or dismay themselves constantly.

The best painters in painting a portrait seek to reveal the essence of that person. This is what I'm trying to do in portrait poems. Reveal a human being yet no label, no category, no assessment.

I spent five years writing BENEATH OUR ARMOUR.    

Q4: In your preface to BENEATH OUR ARMOUR  you state that your ‘aim as a poet is to write clear and accessible poems, to use ordinary words to say extraordinary things’. To what extent do you consider you have been successful? As a general guide for other readers, who else is achieving this odd combination of clarity and profundity today in Australia or elsewhere?

Answer:  My primary focus on clarity in my poems is something I believe in to my core.
I'm trying to reveal, to be visual without fog, cloud, obstacle or stumbling block.
I'm trying to communicate what I see, what a character in a poem sees, feels, thinks.
I want the poem to be direct, allow the reader entrance.

When I read a difficult or obscurist poem in a newspaper or a magazine I get fatigued,
walk away from the poem or I get angry at the poem. The result is that I don't finish reading the poem.

I feel my chosen path of clarity has been successful. My first book, "In the human night" won the 1996 Victorian Premiers Award for Poetry. My latest book, "Beneath Our Armour" was shortlisted for the 2010 Victorian Premiers Award for Poetry.
I continue to get positive feedback regarding my poems from the general public. If the general public, individuals between 16 to 88 appreciate my poems, then I consider I'm on the right track.

I'm trying to write poems that are worth reading, that the reader or listener may find truthful, thought-provoking or humorous.

Plain-speaking poets I read and re-read are Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Raymond Carver,
Charles Bukowski and Stephen Dunn. Interestingly, they are all North American poets.

Q5: In re-reading your first collection In the human night there appears to be a huge leap forward in the maturity and sophistication of your more recent work, yet it can be argued at the expense of the spontaneity and experiment of your word play. How do you respond to this statement?  How has the style and subject matter of your poetry evolved over the years?

Answer: I believe a creative person should move forward. As Robert Frost said, "Make your next poem different from your last."

Having now written poems exclusively for 27 years, I'm trying to be more visual in my poems without over-describing. I'm also writing more character-driven poems where the voice, the beliefs and perspective of the narrator belong to the narrator rather than myself. The character-driven poems allow me to get away from the "I, I, I, me, me, me" poems.
I'm trying to be tighter in poems, write seamless poems, where the reader can't see the stitching.

Having practiced writing poems for 27 years now I hope I'm more in control of the poem, no leaving the focused road of the poem, but at the same time I like to still briefly let go of the steering wheel.

My first book of poems, "In the human night" is peppered with abstractions. I'm now an-anti abstraction guy, saluting Ezra Pound's advice, "Go in fear of abstractions".

Similarly, since "In the human night" I now never use a simile. There aren't ANY similes in my last two collections, "Days that we couldn't rehearse" or "Beneath Our Armour".
My current thinking is that I want to write poems about individuals, real people I've researched or individuals I've created. The individual and their internal wars remain a key interest, also the drama of an individual's self-awareness versus their self-delusion.

Since the publication of "Beneath Our Armour", I've written several dozen two line poems,
influenced by my long held interest in aphorisms, quotations and proverbs. Concentrating on these aphoristic two line poems has been a way for me to wear another hat beside the portrait poem hat.

I only look back over my shoulder at past poems in that I don't want to repeat myself, fall back on "Bakowskisms". 

I'm focused on writing the best poem I can while allowing the poem to be the camera of the poem, where the reader sees what the camera of the poem sees, not the person using the camera.    

Q6: What general advice would you give to talented young writers of poetry?

Answer: 
1) My advice is to write clearly. When writing a poem always ask yourself "What am I trying to reveal/say in this poem and have I revealed/said it clearly and strongly?"
2) Read other poets, examine what they put in and leave out.
3) When you write a poem check that the poem has an engine, a momentum that keeps the poem moving forward.
4) Question the adjective. Ask yourself whether your adjective actually adds to the line, adds to the poem. The overused adjective will do the line and the poem more harm than good.
5) Remember you are trying to create pictures in the mind's eye of the reader/the listener.
6) Check that the world you've created in the poem is visible without over-describing.
7) Seek your whole writing life to widen your subject matter.
When you sit down to write a poem, don't go "Oh migod, I'm writing a poem with a huge capital P." Writing a poem is a mixture of focus and calm. Any anxiety/any negativity about your writing capabilities when facing the blank page will close your mind to writing that day.
8) Poetry is sculpture. Get rid of any/all non-essential words from each line. Give yourself a dollar for every word you can get rid of.
9) Continue. Persevere. Remember that no writing time is wasted. You may make huge piles of dirt and slag before you get to the gold.
10) Mine your life experience, the pivotal/significant moments in your life. They are not trivial. Don't cosmeticize or sentimentalize the past or a relationship or a person.
11) Write poems where the narrator/main character of the poem is of the opposite gender to your own.
12) Realize that you will remain a student of words and language your whole life.
13) Set up weekly protected writing time and stick to it. 

Thanks Peter for taking the time to explain your work in such detail.



Wednesday, November 3, 2010

BOOK REVIEW-Wolfgang Carstens-Crudely Mistaken For Life



















Wolfgang Carstens Crudely Mistaken For Life. Epic Rites Press, Sherwood Park, Alberta 2010, 93 pages.

This is the first collection by Epic Rites Press founder Wolf Carstens. The language of his poetry is clear, unembellished, and highly accessible. Like most contemporary underground poets, he writes narrative poems in free verse/ lower case from his own point of view. The main focus of this collection is on Carstens’ fascination with death. This review hopes to explain that death to Carstens is, what ironically, gives his life meaning.

Death is found everywhere in this book. Mice devour each other in a frenzy (‘mice and men’), a forestry worker is dragged off screaming by a bear and eaten (‘anniversary of your death’), a murdered eighteen year-old is directly addressed by the poet (‘blotting out the sun’), a prairie dog is shot with a BB gun and slowly bleeds to death (‘lapping blood from a small hole’), the poet describes his own botched suicide attempt as a young man (‘uttering of a curse’) and so on.

Death is seen as arbitrary, as ‘always one short step away’ (‘one step away’) and although we fear it and try to conquer it, death is the one certainty we must all face alone.

Many of the stronger poems often begin with Carstens plucking a memory from his past and through its retelling transforming the experience to make a metaphoric comment about humanity in general. In ‘deadbeat tenants’ while delivering an eviction notice, the tenant’s dog wanders onto the street and is killed by a speeding car. The speaker makes a terse, matter-of-fact statement about the inevitability of death in the poem’s concluding lines:

we are all dogs
with a steel bumper
moving towards us

This idea that death is headed unfailingly towards us, is furthered in ‘blotting out the sun’ in which the speaker relates the story of the senseless and random murder of his poet friend Steve, who at eighteen ‘had much living to do’:

make no mistake about it,
there is an Acme safe
falling through the sky –
waiting to crush all of us,
young or old.

He concludes didactically that we don’t know how long we have so we better make the most of it:

we’ll never know where,
or when, it will hit.
it matters not
where we choose to stand.
don’t take today for granted,
or tomorrow- say “yes”
and embrace everything –
even that shadow above you
blotting out the bright sun.

In ‘only the dead’ Carstens presses this point hyperbolically, that the living are unaware of the beauty and sensation of the moment as it unfolds, but the dead are:

the living complain
about aches and pains –
only the dead are thankful
to feel anything at all;   …

only the dead celebrate
every sunrise’
ever kiss,
ever hug,
every orgasm
above
blades
of
grass

The idea that we must not take life for granted is one of Carstens’ central messages in this collection. In a recent interview (which appears in full below) he states: ‘As soon as you start taking tomorrow for granted, you are, in a sense, already dead.  Most of us, sadly, live our lives like this. We take our friends for granted, our loved ones for granted, ourselves for granted; we take tomorrow for granted, today for granted, this hour, this minute – we take it all for granted!   We stumble through life like sleepwalkers!’

The title poem ‘crudely mistaken for life’ is explicit in giving the reader a helping hand job in understanding Carstens’ underlying intent. In the back room of a funeral home, the female mortician asks the speaker, presumably the poet, if he has seen corpses prepared for burial before. He responds:

the streets are full of sleepwalkers
with eyes stapled shut, lips sewn shut
to the magic and mystery of blood
and bone living; drained, emptied,
with no sign of a pulse, the stench
of death seeping from their mouths
sleepwalking from cradle to grave
with only brief dreams in between –
crudely mistaken for life.

Carstens expresses the view that most people ‘sleepwalk’ through life, wedded to a routine, they neither embrace nor challenge. He views his book as a wake-up call to those who plod through life: ‘The underlying theme of Crudely Mistaken For Life is about this death that happens long before our bodies decompose and the worms arrive.  My book, if it’s anything, is like Jim Morrison screaming “Wake up!” ’

The focus on death by Carstens is never excessively morbid, but is rather treated in a matter-of-fact, sometimes wry, & ultimately, in an uplifting manner for his reader. He believes that we should not fear death but rather to celebrate and embrace it as part of life. The knowledge that we are mortal beings with a limited life span evokes in the poet an understanding of his own limitations and frailties, and the realization that he himself has taken others for granted & can perhaps, as a consequence, restore and strengthen his bonds with the living. In the interview he says, Most people view death as something that negates life.  For me it’s the opposite – death is what gives life value.  It’s because we die that we should embrace life fully and completely.’

In ‘flowers that count for nothing’ the death of his grandmother Annie brings about a personal epiphany in the poet. As he empties the lint from his clothes dryer, he makes the painful realization that he has been driven by his own selfish desires and has not shown sufficient love, care or empathy for Annie during her lifetime; when it really mattered:

i did not love her hard enough, was not
patient enough, could not forgive her
in all ways that she forgave me.
desperately wanting to wish nothing
different forwards or backwards, i cannot –

so i weep by her grave-stone
offering stupid flowers that count for nothing.

In ‘lines for Betsy’ Carstens describes as a young teenager the cathartic experience of facing death on the back of a bolting hack:

as i remember this now
i’m reminded of those rare moments
when time stood still,
steeped in meaning
and i felt truly alive.

the fistfights,
the car crashes,
the drug overdoses,
the animal attacks,
my botched suicide attempt;
and that thirty minute terror gallop
through the strange trees.

In both of these representative examples, death, or the close encounter with it, is seen as a catalyst for a renewed exuberance for life.

On first reading of this collection, you get the impression that there is a pervading cynical and pessimistic stain in Carstens’ view of existence. In ‘poetry- a nihilistic question’ he states, ‘from the day we emerge/ stupid from the womb/ we are dead men and women walking.’ In ‘uttering of a curse’ the idea that the speaker has his ‘entire life ahead’ of him is seen as a ‘curse.’ In ‘do not resuscitate’ life is depicted as monotonous, where the old ‘welcome a swift/ and decisive end to our senseless existence.’ In ‘a wrecking ball to swing in our direction’ the speaker, sees humanity as a ‘sick joke’ who needs ‘a predator’, like dinosaurs or ‘aliens from outer space’ to knock him off his pedestal and force him to confront his illusions:

if only dinosaurs could return
and show us how flimsy our human constructs
really are –  how stupid we are,
thinking our ideas can conquer
our environment by improving upon its design,
only safe behind locked doors
until a Tyrannosaurus Rex walks
right through our living room walls.

i welcome aliens from outer space
appearing in the night sky
to disprove that bullshit book
the bible once and for all –

He welcomes the destruction of civilization as we know it because it will have a purifying force and human spirit will be renewed. In ‘poetry- a nihilist question’ Carstens plays the devil’s advocate by ironically stating:

the best existence is, in fact,
that of a brute animal;
casting off the shackles
of consciousness, ambition,
awareness –
indulging ourselves
in eating, shitting, fucking,
slumbering beside our latest kill
with dreams emptied
of the hopeless drama of flesh.

Despite the tough exterior of many of his poems, Carstens understands the power of language and memory in transforming people in a positive way.  In ‘tombstones’ his cynicism is stripped away to reveal a touching domestic scene of great sensitivity. To help his young children understand death, he and his wife visit a cemetery to make tombstone etchings. Before visiting their grandmother’s grave, the youngest daughter stays behind and places wild flowers upon the surrounding tombstones:

when we returned only one flower remained.

asked about it she said that she wasn’t here
to only celebrate Annie’s life – but that she was here
to celebrate the lives of everyone who had died.

Similarly, this youthful sense of transcendent joy is wonderfully expressed in ‘all the riches in the world’. After realizing he has destroyed a highly valuable Wayne Gretzky signed rookie hockey card by fixing it to his spokes, he concludes:

i would trade all the riches in the world
to be that poor boy again –
soaring down the street,
young and healthy and free,
with machine gun sound effects
heralding my approach.

A phrase which resonates in my mind from the collection is ‘her cunt stands truth upon its head’ from ‘because she is beautiful.’ Carstens is suggesting here perhaps, that rationality can only go so far in explaining things. Intuition, complex human emotions, & the physical act of fucking, can sometimes better explain who we are. Despite his keen interest in death, Carstens really wants his readers to focus on their sensations, the here and now, what it really feels to be alive in all its permutations. The concluding lines of ‘entry in the cosmic gag reel’ particularly strikes this home for me:

she turned him away
from the bones with her beauty –
instructed him that happiness
was not to be found in stripping everything away
but that happiness was found in her scent, curves,
clothes and baubles, in every trick she employed
to keep the bones so very well hidden.

This book grows on you. Enters your blood.  This is compassionate, carefully crafted poetry fascinating to read and worthy of detailed study. As a poetry publisher, Carstens is highly astute and an obsessively driven entrepreneur the underground press has long been looking for.


INTERVIEW WITH WOLFGANG CARSTENS 24 OCTOBER 2010

Biography:

“Wolfgang Carstens lives in Mittinhed, Alberta, with his wife, five children, two cats and a dog.  Mittinhed is a small village (population 37) situated in the heart of the Canadian prairies.  It does not exist on any map, is one of the earliest immigrant communities, and was named for ‘touque,’ which is for all intents and purposes, a mitten for one’s head.  The village is primarily a farming community and consists of a community center, a general store and gas station.  Mittinhed received international news coverage in the 1980’s when John Walsh (from America’s Most Wanted) tracked Sean O’Grady, the infamous “Butcher Of Boston” to a small trailer on the outskirts of the community.  By the time Walsh and the authorities arrived, however, O’Grady’s trailer was nothing more than a burned out, twisted husk of metal.  Nobody knows for certain how the fire started or what happened to Sean O’Grady.  He remains, until this day, still at large.  Wolfgang’s poetry and prose is printed on the backs of unpaid bills.  Wolfgang’s first book of poetry Crudely Mistaken For Life was released by Epic Rites Press earlier this year.”

Interview:


1         In ‘happy birthday Mr. Cool’ you mention that you used to show your poems to your father.  When did you first develop an interest in poetry and who were some of your early influences?

I started writing when I was a kid.  I remember my third grade teacher calling my parents in for a meeting and her showing my parents the poems and stories she had stolen from my desk.  I don’t remember the poems and stories but my teacher was convinced that there was something seriously wrong with me.  I was put into three years of psychiatric counselling after that meeting.  Another memorable incident happened in early 1980 – when I was nine years old.  The city of Edmonton wanted to annex my childhood home of Sherwood Park, Alberta.  In response our city launched the “Save Our Strathcona” (S.O.S.) campaign where residents were encouraged to write a letter to send to the premier of Alberta.  I figured “what the hell” so I wrote a letter of my own and threw it in with the thousands of others.  A few weeks later I received a letter from the premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed, and later from MLA for Sherwood Park, Henry Woo.  They wanted me to join them in a meeting to discuss the strategies outlined in my letter.  I was only a kid and I never accepted their invitation but the attention my writing received at a young age left an indelible impression on me.  In junior high I stumbled upon the music of “The Doors” and in tracing back the influences of Jim Morrison I happened upon “The Flowers Of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire and “A Season In Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud.  These two books were a tremendous influence on what I wanted to achieve with literature – not so much in content or style, but insofar as both books represented the honest blood and guts approach to writing poetry that is at the heart of my work.  Around that time I was introduced to “Notes From The Underground” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse, and “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemmingway – and I suppose those three books sealed my fate.

2.      How long have you been publishing in the small press and what are some of the more innovative magazines you admire and have been published in?  What qualities do these magazines have that interest you?

I have only been publishing in the “small” press since about 2008.  Most of the work that has been posted online and published in print has been by editor’s request.  To be perfectly honest, I loathe the submission process.  There’s something about dressing my work up in tight pink dresses and pretty tap shoes that disgusts me.  Occasionally I’ll submit work to friends/editors who have launched a new project, as well as encourage Epic Rites Press authors to support their project as well.  A great example is Ben Smith’s horrorsleazetrash.com.  HST has only been in operation a few months, but already it has surpassed the scope and vision of most “small” presses.  There is a HST magazine in the works, a quarterly anthology, merchandise, and original online material.  Ben has taken the bull by the horns here, and I have nothing but love and respect for Ben, and for men and women like Ben, who throw themselves into their press – like so many pieces of meat into the whirling blades of a great fan!  Somebody has to do it!  Somebody has to push the envelope, to be the freak in question, the criminal!  I have the same respect and admiration for Frankie Metro and Diana Rose, whose “Highdra Syndicate” on blogtalkradio.com, delivers bombs week in and week out.  Their radio shows, ranked in the top ten, achieve a very important end – they spread the word about underground literature!  Every week the “Highdra Syndicate” showcases underground literature, whether from magazines, chapbooks, books, or by something they pulled from someone’s blog!  These are the types of individuals/operations that I support:  the first Sunday of every month, for example, an Epic Rites Press author is featured on “The Sunday Brunch Invasion,” a Highdra Syndicate show.  The first show (September 2010) featured myself, the second show (October 2010) John Yamrus – in November they’ll host Rob Plath, then John Dorsey in December.  Next year will feature William Taylor Jr., Jason Hardung, Jack Henry, etc. 

The most innovative magazine has got to be Melissa Mann’s “Beat The Dust,” of which Epic Rites Press was recently featured.  The October issue was a “spoken-word” extravaganza, which featured videos by Rob Plath, John Yamrus, William Taylor Jr., Jason Hardung and myself; audio recordings by Pablo Vision and Casey Quinn; as well as a written interview with myself and the heads of various independent presses.  The October 2010 issue of “Beat The Dust” is a stellar example of the multi-media platform that I always envisioned the Epic Rites website as being!  It was a great opportunity for Epic Rites Press and I have nothing but love and respect for Melissa Mann for making it happen.  The issue is available for online viewing at beatthedust.com.

3.      As a poet, what is your overall intent?  Comment on your use of technique to convey your underlying concerns.

Writers, at bottom, want to be understood.  Inspiration, for me, involves having something important to say, knowing who (your audience) you are saying it to, and striving to say it well.  There is nothing else.  Just tell your story as honestly and as best you can.  Let nothing tyrannize you.

4.      In ‘crudely mistaken for life’ you focus largely on death.  Why the obsession?  What are you trying to say apart from what you explicitly state in the book that death will inevitably reach us all and that you shouldn’t take life for granted?

“Crudely Mistaken For Life” was a book written in 2009 – when DEATH started hunting down my family and friends and transforming them into memories.  2009, for me, was a year marred by death.  I don’t think death is an “obsession” with me, although it’s something that’s never far away in my thoughts.  Most people view death as something that negates life.  For me it’s the opposite – death is what gives life value.  It’s because we die that we should embrace life fully and completely – because after all, there is an Acme safe waiting for all of us; we never know when or where it will strike.  In my book I talk about Annie, who was ninety-one years old when she died.  I also mention Stephen, who was murdered when he was eighteen years old.  The mistake most people make is in taking tomorrow for granted, like the young poet in my poem “blotting out the sun.”  As soon as you start taking tomorrow for granted, you are, in a sense, already dead.  Most of us, sadly, live our lives like this.  We take our friends for granted, our loved ones for granted, ourselves for granted; we take tomorrow for granted, today for granted, this hour, this minute – we take it all for granted!   We stumble through life like sleepwalkers!  The underlying theme of “Crudely Mistaken For Life” is about this death that happens long before our bodies decompose and the worms arrive.  My book, if it’s anything, is like Jim Morrison screaming “Wake up!  You can’t remember when it was!  Had this dream stopped?”  A recent poem of mine states the book’s intent.  It’s called “life is.”

life is

too short
to waste on
the wrong jobs,
the wrong relationships,
the wrong ideas.

soon enough
you’ll be planted
on the wrong side
of grass.

if you’re looking
for a foundation stone
upon which to rebuild
here it is:
remember that you must die.

be ruthless
in the choices you make,
in the company you keep,
in the pursuit of happiness.

live to the point of tears.

(you haven’t much time)

5.      You are the owner of Epic Rites Press.  Can you briefly explain the events in the lead up to your decision to set up the publishing company.  What happened?  Who was involved?  What help did you receive?

Epic Rites Press was a glorious accident.  In 2008 I bought the chapbook “Tapping Ashes In The Dark” (Lummox Press 2008) by Rob Plath – and it blew my mind.  It was like reading a modern version of “A Season In Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud.  I have reviewed “Tapping Ashes In The Dark” already so I won’t go into the merits of the book here.  The review is posted at horrorsleazetrash.com for anyone who wants to read it.  Anyway, when I was finished reading that excellent chapbook I sent Rob Plath an email expressing my interest in putting out a full-length feature book of his work.  Rob was down with the idea.  I remember stumbling drunk into my bedroom that night and saying to my wife, “Honey, I did it.”  “Did what,” she asked.  “I just started Epic Rites Press.”  The crazy thing is that I had no idea how to make books, nor any idea where to start.  Nine months later Rob’s “A Bellyful Of Anarchy” was released by Epic Rites Press.

Another artist was initially commissioned to do the exterior for “A Bellyful Of Anarchy” – but when he couldn’t deliver the goods, I contacted Pablo Vision.  Getting hooked up with Pablo was probably the luckiest break that Rob and I could have gotten.  Pablo delivered the awesome exterior for “A Bellyful Of Anarchy” in twenty-four hours.  I was so floored by his work that I asked Pablo to continue doing every Epic Rites Press exterior.  To date Pablo has delivered thirteen exteriors, plus numerous press logos and banners.  Pablo’s work has become the face of Epic Rites Press.  Rob’s second full-length collection of poetry, “There’s A Fist Dunked In Blood Beating In My Chest,” was released by Epic Rites Press this month – and once again Pablo has delivered the incredible flesh wrapped around the skeleton! 

6.      What is the underlying philosophy behind Epic Rites Press?

The intent behind Epic Rites Press is summarized by a quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: “Write with blood and you will discover that blood is spirit.”  The kind of writing that Epic Rites Press strives to showcase is writing that is real and honest.  I want authors (to borrow a few lines from Rob Plath) to put “the right word next to the right word” and “the right line next to the right line” – to write “like an ogre is banging on the door.”  I want to publish writing that will pull a jumper from the ledge – or push him right the fuck off.  Ultimately, I suppose, it boils down to oxygen.  Print publication involves the murder of trees.  Trees produce oxygen.  Oxygen is required to breathe.  At bottom everything I publish should be as important and vital as oxygen. 

7.      What are some of the problems you have encountered so far in the operation of Epic Rites Press and how did you deal with these?  Any setbacks?

In the fifteen months that Epic Rites Press has been in operation I have been screwed over by printers, distributors, bookstore owners, editors, authors and illustrators.  The first major obstacle was my first printer, who was a local printer that would print anything and everything – from coffee cups to underwear to books.  She showed me some books her company had done and they looked really good.  Anyway, I asked her if there was any way to protect book exteriors from getting scratched.  She suggested lamination.  Of course, not knowing my ass from my elbow when it came to book production, I was unaware that you should never laminate book covers.  The reason is because they will curl.  The first printing of “A Bellyful Of Anarchy” was with laminated covers – and of course, the covers curled like potato chips!  The problem was corrected in the second (and third) printing of the book  – but, as the book printing “specialist” in question, she should have known better and talked me out of it.  I chalk it up to the school of “hard knocks” but yeah, my ignorance (and those whom I hired) was a definite problem in the beginning.  All printing now happens with my new printer, Pagemaster Publication Services – and I couldn’t be happier with their work.  The second major obstacle was securing distribution.  In 2009 I lost a major book deal with Foyles (a major bookstore chain in the UK) because they would only deal with a distributor!  I contacted Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, California, soon after that deal went South, and when they didn’t respond right away I kept sending emails week after week and month after month until they agreed to represent Epic Rites Press.  Soon after that I landed a major book deal with three New York universities, and with distribution in place, that deal happened.

The only setback worthy of note was the untimely death of Todd Moore earlier this year.  Todd was much, much more that an Epic Rites Press author – Todd Moore was a dear friend who embodied the energy and explosive power of Epic Rites Press!  Todd Moore was dynamite!  We had just released his “Dead Reckoning” and were about to release volume one of his “DILLINGER” in early 2011.  Todd Moore’s “DILLINGER” is one of the truly great poetic masterpieces of this (or any other) century – and when DEATH caught wind of our happiness, it moved right in and kicked us both in the balls!  We had so many books planned: his “DILLINGER,” a book of essays, a novel – but you see (just like those sleepwalkers in my “Crudely Mistaken For Life”) we got too fucking comfortable in our beds!  Here is a new poem (for Todd Moore) called “snapshots of life.”

snapshots of life

i found a digital camera
at the playground.
it had nine hundred
saved pictures on it:
a man and woman
holding hands on the beach,
a wedding,
a honeymoon,
a newborn.

a lifetime of memories.

i went through
one by one
deleting every photo
like death eating
their madly in love
with life.

Those Todd Moore books, so long as I’m breathing, will see the light of day in print, but it’ll never be the same – nothing could replace the day to day correspondence with Todd – or the amount of sheer energy that greeted me every single fucking day!  And ultimately, maybe DEATH will take me down before I have the chance to make good on my word.


8.      What have been some of the highlights so far with Epic Rites Press?

Highlights would include my friendship with Epic Rites Press authors and associates; publishing some of the best underground authors:  Rob Plath, John Yamrus, Todd Moore, William Taylor Jr., John Dorsey, Gerald Locklin, Dan Fante, A.D. Winans, Lyn Lifshin, Catfish McDaris, to name a few; watching John Yamrus reading from “Doing Cartwheels On Doomsday Afternoon” and promoting Epic Rites Press on BCTV.  Working with Rob Plath on the radio is always a highlight!  Rob has, since the accidental birth of Epic Rites Press, become a dear friend of mine – and whenever we get together on the radio, it’s a special time where you can let down your guard and embrace the frothing madman you are 24/7/365!  It’s like “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde” – only to come to the conclusion that Jekyll is dead, and there is nothing left but Hyde.

9.     What essential advice would you give to anyone thinking about setting up a small press publishing company?

Be prepared to invest lots of time, energy and money to promote and market your authors and publications.  Most “small” presses view print publication as the end of the journey, when in fact (as John Yamrus so perfectly put it) it’s only the beginning of the hard work that goes into selling a book.  You can put together the best magazine or book in the world, but if nobody knows about it, what have you achieved?  For a “small” press publisher, in the absence of a marketing staff and a large budget, you need to act like an agent for your authors.  I have invested thousands of hours writing promotions, press releases, emails, etc; not to mention the hours invested in posting online, pounding the pavement, and stuffing envelopes to spread the word about Epic Rites Press.  I’ve been doing this since day one.  In fifteen months over a thousand copies of Tree Killer Ink have been distributed across Canada and the United States, and over fifteen hundred books have been sold.  Whenever I mention these “small” press victories, people say “that’s awesome” like it’s some great achievement or something – but seriously, it’s only the tip of the iceberg!  I want to sell hundreds of thousands of books and magazines every year!  Also, in the absence of a big marketing budget, “small” press publishers need to use the many free online services at their disposal.  They can, for example, build a kick-ass free website with Weebly, put out press releases and announcements through places like Biblioscribe, Scribd, as well as market their products through free services like Youtube, Blogtalkradio, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  Any success in the “small” press will involve massive time, energy and commitment.  The numerous “small” presses that fold up their tents every single day is testament to the hard work and commitment required to make it in this business!  As Bon Scott put it, “It’s A Long Way To The Top If You Want To Rock And Roll.”

Thank you so much, George, for the interest, the excellent questions, and for the opportunity to further explain the madness that is Epic Rites Press!

– Wolfgang Carstens


--
Epic Rites Press: "because all our fingers are middle ones"™

Epic Rites Press
240-222 Baseline Road
Suite #206
Sherwood Park, Alberta
Canada T8H 1S8

Check out my blog here.