Jessica Smith tagged me for this interview circular: “The Next Big Thing.” You can read her contribution here, where she describes her latest manuscript, mnemotechnics (finalist for the 2012 Nightboat Prize). I recommend a wander through her first book Organic Furniture Cellar. You might see a double rainbow...
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Che
(or Being Che or Unuiet Youth / Becoming Che /
Making the New Man or Honeymoon / Speech / Experiment w/ a Tin Grenade / Sensitivity
Training / Their Whole Whorehouse
Hemisphere / Channeling the Revolution / Photo Shoot / Machete Schedule / The
People’s Theater / General Chaos / The City of Cienfuegos / Mythology / Name
Change or). My
projects are usually constellations constructed upon titles: one and many.
Who
is the publisher of your book?
Stockport Flats. Editor Lori Anderson Moseman published my first book, B, as the inaugural book in the
Meander Scar series. The latest stunning books in that series are Belinda
Kremer’s decoherence
and Melanie Noel’s The Monarchs. As for Che, it is part of a new Stockport series called Oxbow Cutoff for
subsequent books by Meander Scar authors (see: Deborah Poe’s the last will be stone, too).
Lori is Stockport Flats, but she has many arms: Witness Post (ecopoetics), Wavefront (women writers),
Confluence (community poetics). Spend some time in her universe.
What
genre does your book fall under?
Poetry.
In the innards of B,
Lori labeled it “Poetry/Politics,” which, for some reason, we both thought was
funny. Che is
labeled: Poetry, but just here let’s add Politics. You know, to be funny.
What
is one sentence from your book?
Precipice
nondescript. pt.
What
inspired you to write this book/where did the idea for the book come from?
For
my birthday (2008), my friend Randall gave me a copy of the definitive Che bio,
by Jon Lee Anderson, a journalist I had been reading for many years (see: Guerillas,
The Lion's Grave, The Fall of Baghdad, all of which helped me to write The- Associated
Press and Secret Caves).
Instantly, I knew that I was going to write a poem on Che, those letters: C, h,
e.
In
the previous years, I had been thinking, re-thinking, in poetry, my politics: contextualizing, communing, being mixed up.
Feeling ineffectual (insecure re: my “unjustified” poetics), I turned to
investigating the lives of radical actors (another poem of mine, Sons and Followers, conjures
John Brown). There’s this fantasy, masculine fantasy, of entering a world
stage and changing things through force. Seizing power. Wrongs will be
righted. Particularly complicated, I think, for poets and artists who believe
in truth’s open space, the reader’s autonomy. Che inhabits this problem for a while.
How
long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Che took 2 years to ch-ch-chisel: 2008-2009.
Conceptually, the middle section “Che” came first. It’s a series of left-justified spine-tight columns with blank pages to the right. The opening,
“Unquiet Youth,” came next (previously published @ Harp & Altar), a flimsy li’l pamphlet, slipped into the front over, to fall on
your lap, to get trashed beneath your boots. The finishing touches of “Making
the New Man” (the synthesis! in 3D!) were applied throughout my first year in
Iowa City (some of these pagescapes were previously published in Mutha Fucka #2).
What
are your influences for this book?
Totem
poles, Aztec codices, Diego Rivera’s revolutionary murals, Zarathustra,
Marinetti, Mayakovsky, Lorca, papeluchos (dirty paper scraps).
Which
actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Steven
Soderbergh actually made the movie the same year as I was writing the poem –
unbeknownst to him! Sodebergh chose Benicio del Toro, an obvious choice! Besides he,
maybe me, or you.
What
else might pique the reader’s interest?
