Ed Skoog has one of those minds that always seem to be working, whether he is actively crafting a poem, talking poetry with a student or another writer, or simply reflecting on the place where he currently finds himself. I caught up with him on the day of his 38th birthday. He was back home in Topeka, Kansas, getting ready for his 20th high school reunion, taking it easy in his father’s house. He was kind enough to take a few hours out of his home coming to talk about his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight (© 2009, Copper Canyon Press), to discuss craft, and to talk about the way that place and imagination coalesce to create poetry. Part 1 of our interview is below.

DJ: How’s Topeka?

ES: It’s beautiful. They’ve had a really mild summer so things are still really green. Usually by this time of year everything’s been blasted by the heat and drought. It feels like the way I like to remember it.

DJ: What does the idea of Topeka usually bring up for you?

ES: It has four pretty distinctive seasons, and two of them can be pretty rough. Summer is usually very hot. Winter is usually very cold and miserable. The nice part is usually spring, and apparently it’s felt like spring all summer.

I grew up near the middle of the city in an old leafy neighborhood. It doesn’t look like it’s in the Plains. It looks very comfortable, especially compared to my more urban and country wanderings. It’s sort of like the Shire right now.

DJ: Let’s get to your urban and country wanderings. One of the things that sticks out in Mister Skylight is that the language seems really tied to place, though at times it seems to be a number of places. At other times it seems to be a place that may not truly exist. Maybe an amalgamation of different places where you’ve lived or traveled.

When you go back to place in your process, do you find yourself going back to one place more than the other, or do things turn into a bit of a stew?

ES: I think you’re right. Even when the places have names that are accurate details, the poetry takes place in the imagination. If I say, “Topeka”, it’s different than saying “Topeka” in an essay, or than taking a picture and saying, “This is Topeka.”

There are a lot of places in the book. Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some of them, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never been to. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. The people in the poems are real people, the family and friends, but they become imaginary through the process of poetry.

The places mean different things to me, and have a lot of associations that, once you put them into poems, become art associations. They become aestheticize Topeka, aestheticize New Orleans, aestheticize California.

One of the animating conflicts for me in putting the book together was the struggle between looking at the place as real vs. as the poetic. Then there was the very real need to try to say something meaningful and true and honest in a social and political way about what happened in New Orleans, about what happened to my friends and the city I love and very nearly me. That was not imaginary. People died, lives were changed.

DJ: You’re referring to Katrina?

ES: Yes. The flooding and the aftermath, which made me very angry because it wasn’t an act of nature or an act of God. The levees failed because they weren’t built to spec by the Corps of Engineers. And the rescue operation was botched because of human failings and lack of courage. Suddenly that doesn’t become just an imaginary thing to play with, like my memories of Topeka. Instead, it’s something that changed my life and my way of looking at the world. At the same time, I didn’t want the book to be…I didn’t know how to write just about that. What results in the New Orleans poems, even some of the ones that I wrote before the storm, is a sort of struggle between us and the media, which doesn’t have any answers but hopefully creates interesting lines.

DJ: You said a second ago that the botched efforts and the botched recovery related to human failings and lack of courage. There’s an underlying quality in a number of your poems where it seems to be an unwavering spirit in the face of things like despair or disaster. These are the exact opposites of human failings. What does that say about you, and is that itself a comment, without being a direct comment to things?

ES: That spirit is hopefully the heart breaking impulse, the storytelling impulse and the lyric impulse to respond internally and to want to communicate that to somebody. The alternative is silence, which may be the most proper response to things, but doesn’t capture that spirit of looking back and looking around at the present, and wanting to communicate to people you are around or you wish were around. Perhaps that’s the spirit you’re finding in these poems. The impulse to dance. The impulse to draw. The impulse to do whatever it is that poems do. Whatever you’re doing in poetry…that need to be reaching out, to be expressing the joy and anxiety and imagination, and wanting or needing to share that.

(more…)

Dana Guthrie Martin lives in the Seattle area and writes wherever writing will have her. She shares her home with her husband, her pet hamster and her robot, Feldman. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Blossombones, Blue Fifth Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, Coconut Poetry, Failbetter, Fence, Juked and Knockout Literary Magazine. In May, Martin will enter Converse College’s low residency MFA program, and in July, Blood Pudding Press will publish her chapbook, The Spare Room. You can read some of her collaborative work with poet Nathan Moore at Mutating the Signature.

ROBOT WORKERS
— after John Donne

For every robot that goes down fighting
   There are two or
     Three or legions who turn away, trying to
   Blend in with suits and satchels, going to
     Jobs they don’t want so they can feel useful.
They’ve learned this is what it means to be real —
To leave the fallen, as if each day were
   A war, the lawns

     Of their suburbs littered with mines:
   The dog catcher
     Who lets frothing dogs chase robots down streets
While driving alongside in his truck, laughing
   And bellowing “Bot!” in accusation;
The children who kick and spit and slap wads
   Of gum on their metal behinds so they can’t
     Sit on benches

Without sticking to them; the housewives who
   Draw their curtains
     Because they can’t stand the sight of one more
   Damn robot. Meanwhile in factories, work
     Drones on and the robots bemoan nothing.
They move just as they’ve been programmed to move,
   Fingers trilling like a dance, placing things
     In their places.

ROBOT LOVER
— after John Donne

Why not me? Why not my human-
   Like fingers and other hard parts? How would
     That differ from licking a fork
   Clean or having a mouth full of braces?
You know how I charge your skin when
   You come close, the hairs on your arms rising to
     Meet me: allegiant soldiers
Who listen to your body’s mute desires.
Your electrical wires, woven into

Every inch of who you are, brought
   You here. And the blood that moves inside me
Could warm you until your devices
   Soften, then melt, if only you’d give me
One free download. How easy that
   Would be. So slide over here like
     A well-lubricated cog, and add your
Piece to my machine. What I mean is this:

You complete my design; you’re what
   My creator had in mind. My circuits
     Are heavy with you every night.
If I had been built to dream, my dreams would
   Be viscous as crude oil, pungent
     As electrical fires. You would be there
With your flawless architecture —
Our world as small and flat as a diskette —
Calling me through caustic smoke and liquid.

HALLUCINATION #1

For weeks, ghosts
have made their way
down the long hall
that leads to your bedroom.
They handle the doorknob
of the closed door as
you lie in bed and watch
moonlight glint off
the knob’s imperfections.
More ghosts stand
in the middle of the lawn,
cast shadows onto the room’s
far walls. Once, you heard them
ease open the window
above your bed, felt their
dry breath on your forehead.
What was it they whispered
just before they disappeared like
invisible ink? Something akin to
talking in tongues, a message
that drives you to wait
for their return wearing
your best nightgown,
with your face made up,
the covers thrown clean
off your body.

NOTE: The poems ROBOT WORKERS and ROBOT LOVER are from a series that follows the line syllable count and overall structure of John Donne’s love poems.

David Horowitz, writer and head of Rose Alley Press was minding his booth at Wordstock when I stopped by and introduced myself. He was about to release his newest book, Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke, and we spoke briefly about Rose Alley as well as his work. During our interview a few weeks later, I learned that beyond the duties of the creating and publishing, Horowitz works full-time for a downtown Seattle law firm, and devotes additional hours to tending to the needs of his elderly mother. Only then does he sit down to handle the duties of publishing and the demands of the writing life. Part one of our interview focuses on the challenges of publishing, personal integrity and begins to get into his craft as a writer. Part two will appear later in the year. You can read his work on the Rose Alley author page.

(DJ): Between your work as a writer and managing Rose Alley, what struggles do you encounter trying to honor both, and where do you feel there may be some overlap?

(DH): There is overlapping – big time – for me. I’m not fundamentally a commercial publisher. I’m not somebody who’s going to publish something to make money, and then say, “OK, now I have to get to my serious art.” That’s not the way I work. What I publish is what I consider to be my serious art. I’ll take whatever losses come with trying to get it out there.

I don’t have a commercial line and an aesthetic line. The aesthetic line is it. So it’s a tough sell. But it does give me, personally, a lot of energy and sense of commitment to the press, because I’m publishing stuff I really want to sell. I’m not feeling half-hearted about selling it. There’s a strong sense of energized, sincere commitment that you gain by being a purely aesthetic publisher as opposed to publishing something you don’t particularly believe in just to make some money.

Now, there are ways in which the publishing impinges on my own creativity. Publishing is not glamorous. It is often very foolishly stereotyped as something that is glamorous or that entails activities performed by king-making, wealthy people and that kind of nonsense. I don’t make much money in terms of my overall intake, and I lose money as a publisher. But I’m very committed to it.

What impinges is the constant publicity that a small publisher has to do in order to promote the work sufficiently. That means readings, which includes producing fliers for each reading because you have to. People aren’t just going to go to a reading because it’s a reading. There might be 15 or 20 readings on a given night in Seattle. You have to get out there and promote. That’s time consuming. I’d rather spend my time doing research or writing poems. Sending out emails can get old, but it’s something you have to do if you want to sell books. You’ve got to commit to producing good looking work and promotional materials that make people believe this is solid stuff. The editing of brochures, the creation and distribution of email fliers…it’s not glamorous. I’d rather be doing other things sometimes, but it’s necessary. That’s probably the biggest conflict right there.

If there is overlapping, in an odd way, it’s that the socializing you do at a book fair or with your fellow writers can help create a sense of literary community that would otherwise not exist. You deepen your sense of commitment because you all understand you’re in a difficult marketplace. You get a deeper appreciation for one another’s struggles, which deepens your sense of community and commitment to one another. That’s a pleasure. It alleviates that sense of arduous loneliness that can often attend to the publisher’s responsibilities.

(DJ): I love that language…”arduous loneliness…”

(DH): It can be that way. You’re staying up till three or four in the morning sending out email messages and you have to be at work three hours later. It’s that kind of field.

(DJ): Jumping into some of your poems then . . . there’s the final line in the poem, “No Given”:

“Integrity must battle to survive,
In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.”

Could you jump into that line and flash it back toward your work? Especially having heard you say what you said, and visualizing this poem taking place as a scene, it’s as if we each encounter that moment when we’re thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if we were off doing this, but my integrity keeps me here.” How does that align with everything you just told me?

(DH): I value that poem highly. I don’t tend to write what you might call “statement poems” all that often, but this is kind of a statement poem.

“Integrity must battle to survive.” Yes. That epitomizes, really, the struggle of the principled artist in a corrupt word. The last line is an attempt to soften, a little bit, the potential for finger wagging sanctimony when one urges integrity as a moral ideal. In a sense, “Integrity must battle to survive.” Because, the line before it: “Day’s bribe, threat, and deceit still live–no, thrive.” That’s what you’re faced with.

Here’s an example. I never violate privacy in order to sell. In the world though, that stuff does go on. It’s amazing how much privacy is violated to find out people’s buying habits. Then stuff comes back through that data and now people think they have a better chance to sell to you. Sometimes it’s done above board and sometimes it’s not. I won’t do that. I’d rather starve than violate people’s privacy to find out their buying habits. I’ll take my chances on being an honest person. That’s not necessarily everybody’s approach. Some could care less about privacy. All kinds of databases and lists are gathered by questionable means.

The line, “In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.” Well the “shadowed lunar scene” is a kind of penumbral reality . . . the penumbral moral decision making we have to face. It’s tough sometimes to know what integrity means. It’s tough to make decisions. Sometimes people who might seem good aren’t good. Sometimes people are angry but they have a good reason for anger. Or they don’t have good reason. It’s difficult to know. It’s rarely absolutely clear just what integrity does entail. On one hand, I have a strong sense of integrity. By the same token, I want to emphasize with the last line that making decisions that inhere of integrity is often tough. It can be tricky.

There are two places I will never compromise on integrity, ever, in any shape or form. One being, the art itself. You’ve got to say what you’ve got to say. You can’t sit there and worry if something’s going to be popular. You can’t go there. I say what I really think needs to be said. Number two, the basic morality, as a publisher at least, of selling. Not cheating people, not manipulating people, no baiting and switching, spying on their computer habits…none of that garbage.

(DJ): Regarding your integrity to the art itself, I’m reminded of our first conversation when we discussed your adherence to form. I’m curious about your drafting process, since your final versions are so particular to the form that you hope to convey. As you explained, there’s something in the form that in a way creates more beauty. What do your first drafts look like?

(DH) A couple of points. First, I call myself a rhyme addict. I will frequently start poems with what I call “rhyme seeds.” A rhyme strikes me as being particularly strong, and I write it down. Then, some kind of, often, very metrical line hits me. And I have an epigram…a two-liner or a four-liner. Sometimes I feel it has everything I need to say. Sometimes I feel it doesn’t. Then I really work more with a kind of putty. I’ll have a couplet or quatrain that’s pretty strict or finished, but if I don’t feel it has everything that needs to be said, I work more with drafts that have less metrical lines, maybe have off-rhymes that are really more off than I wanted, or images that are a little too nascent. So I often start with a rhyme-originated couplet or quatrain that helps me generate another few quatrains or lines that are less well-formed.

I’m also kind of an artistic libertarian. I believe everyone should be writing what they really want to write. If they’re not comfortable in form, I’m not going to berate a person for being some kind of inferior poet. There are a lot of really good free verse writers and a lot of bad formalists. I hesitate to embrace form as a kind of adjunct to a political dogma. By the same token, I’m not afraid to announce my presence. I do love rhyme and meter, and I do so unabashedly. I hope not dogmatically, but unabashedly.

I think of poetry as the intersection of language and music. Form, specifically rhyme and meter, helps convey the musical sense to the words you’re using. Form can especially help with witty poetry. It helps sharpen the sense of atmosphere, mood, tone, resonance – obviously consonants, alliteration, lots of rhetorical devices help do that too, but rhyme and meter, especially when they’re used in particular cases and not just generically, give a lot to a poem.

Consider the most basic, elementary example, which is Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” It’s not iambic. It’s trochaic. Think about the Native American subject matter. If you go iambic, you’re going, “bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM.” Trochaic is the inverse. You’re going, “BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum.” It’s the perfect sound of an Indian drum. So the shift of the meter changes the mood and tone of how the language is conveyed. If it were iambic, you wouldn’t get much of a sense of Native American drumming or rhythm. Trochaic – that is so perfectly chosen. That’s just one example, but there are many of using form not just as a rational structure or generic default because you don’t have the creative energy to think individually, but instead to reflect the theme, tone and emotions in the writing. It’s a wonderful tool to do that.

David D. Horowitz founded and manages Rose Alley Press. His newest collection, Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke, was released in November of 2008, and his previous collections include Wildfire, Candleflame; Resin from the Rain; and Streetlamp, Treetop, Star. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals, and he gives frequent readings in and around Seattle, where he lives. In 2005, Horowitz won the PoetsWest Achievement Award. In 2007, he edited, as well as published, the Rose Alley Press anthology: Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range.

Cure

These headlines sear and spear and scald.
They spurt such bloody violence
His seasoned heart still feels appalled
To worried saddened silence.

He’s heard of panaceas, saviors,
The Prophet’s signs. They make him wince.
Not snide, yet not naive, he favors
A balance tuned from long experience.

Into Monday

Dusk’s saffron-ruby smoke above the mountain range
   Greys weekend into distance.
Pines print consistency on silhouetted change
   And blacken in persistence
Through night. Dawn blazes, then extinguishes, the lamps,
Lake’s silver silence beaming shaky scarlet lance
   And freshly lit existence.
Soon deadlines govern dreams, and sky turns plainly blue.
Most hurry to their job, ignore the window view.

Sparrow

I’m an ounce
Of flit and bounce,
An inch
Of hop and flinch.
I chirp and chatter,
Perch and scatter,
Alert, still.
The world can kill
And think it doesn’t matter.

No Given

Pine, spruce project on twilight’s ruby screen
As lamps define arterials and streets,
And freeways flow commuters home. Rose streaks
Stretch opal stratosphere to starry skein,

And data, deadlines, details fade to night.
Day’s bribe, threat, and deceit still live–no, thrive.
Integrity must battle to survive,
In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.

A.K. “Mimi” Allin holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from City College of New York. She produces poetry, journals, questionnaires, visual poetry, text-art and poetry-driven performances for public spaces. She takes the name for her project, Nostalgia, from an Andrei Tarkovsky film [Nostaghia]. It refers to that universal place, that homeland we seek, that place we long to come home to, the human spirit, which is something the poet embodies. Allin is seeking a publisher for her manuscripts, Soviet Poems and Roof of Air. The following poems are featured here with Allin’s permission. All peculiarities of capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. are by the poet’s design.

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
–Diane Arbus

and what do i know

images of the world
the ground &the sea
insistence &the resistance
what do i know
my surveillance never sensed
the camera blow
wasn’t even looking no
was focused on the channel
that battery of waves
those lies lives the motion of water
the notion of furor &foam
dominating the beach
that perverse idol work
jetty mine make me a jetty
of equal force &dimension
stour 4space
you don’t say
then you are the prisoner confiding
your face is the only document i need
with that i can hammer down walls
&ceilings rip up carpets &tacks
knock open the sills
mywrists ache4 labor
&myseeing &knowing
&truth &all that means
what do i know
inscriptions of war
philosophies of peace
lights &tunnels
hey you safe seeing suburbia
hey you stencil-a-boat
come on onthespot come
here lies the race
at the beachbreak
for the first time
you respond to the camera
that crashing wave
savoring the unchanging quality of you
like the fabrication of field &house
atop an aircraft hangar
like seeing what isn’t there
&not seeing what is
the cameras do things
like drop bombs &fly
&measure &attach windshields
&pick up &count dots on a die
oh luck &all those people
saying things in seats around you
clearing their throats in growls
like the curl of a surf thudding
some unseen beach

you are a moth&more&more

in all those museums
those miles
those cafés
the reemerging form
i throw myself in
the alley
&then
spillout on a backstreet
the next weeka new work
offers proof
of sunlight &prose
but prose i cannot do
i know that breaks a rulei want too mucha consort
i cannot dew a dropa schaft a ship
the well i’m instop cranking li
someone someday
will raise youwolves
i want to be your friend&
play footsies& thenthis is not good breeding romulus
become
becoming is all i ask

acurious collaborative combining

words wanting sentences
fragments wanting wholes
possibilities wanting meaning
progress is rapine now
the cubes are putting themselves back together
the grass has picked itself up
&put bits on bits
to make a meadow
there’s an augmentation going on
so press me further
ohplease do
it’s strange how our people path
how they bind &cleave
vanish somewhere
try not to bbinary
better to be tri
try &beyond

(previously published on The Argotist Online)

sin the sea wall

his sin, she saw,
given to the sea wall.
he, hers, clasped and blessed,
clasped and blessed.
some such, the sea saw.

he, her spool,
found strongly tall.
she did, his awl,
to unrest, draw.

the nip of her chin
tucked in
and nuzzled
the small of his back, this small,
as a chill wind
bristled her,
bristled her shawl.

when the waves rocked
causing her shawl to free,
all she, saw he,
but thought
her sins yet small,
yet grabbed for,
clasped for, blessed be.

his craving eyes
drained
and filled
with a vision, this lovely,
as the sea spray
wetted him,
wetted his cloak.

when the wild waves knocked,
causing his cloak to part,
his awl, she saw,
but thought the point yet dull,
yet clasped for, grasped for, blessed be.
there, within view of the wall,
the seas do rise and fall
in some such sumptuous way.

(previously published in the Crab Creek Review)

cabinetmaker

i want to make something
as beautiful as the table you are carving
or are planning to carve
i want to smooth something over time
to break the edges into worn soft light-attracting curves
i want to make something lasting and
as i wonder what
i come upon the thought
of you working with something
nature has already made beautiful
and see how you are just altering
a preexisting beauty
if only conceptually for the moment
shifting its focus
and i wish to do more than that
i wish to create
not tailor beauty
not to rework nature seam by seam
but to make the world perceive
and as i wonder how
i see you stop what you are doing
which stops me doing what i am doing
because as you tilt your head
and as your beard catches light
your chin goes into shadow
and i realize what it is that made you
that it is beauty you are working with
and i want to do something beautiful