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UNCOVERAGE: asking after recent poetry interviews by H. L. HIX #45 CONTENTS ESSAY PRESS EP SERIES In the Essay Press EP Series, we give extended In Memoriam ix space and time to some of our favorite authors currently developing new book-length projects. Introduction xi Interviews Ali Alizadeh on Eyes in Times of War 1 Series Editors Maria Anderson Dan Beachy-Quick on This Nest, Swift Passerine 6 Andy Fitch Sherwin Bitsui on Shapeshift 11 Ellen Fogelman Aimee Harrison Rebecca Black on Cottonlandia 14 Courtney Mandryk Shane Book on Ceiling of Sticks 19 Victoria A. Sanz Jericho Bown on Please 29 Travis A. Sharp Julie Carr on 100 Notes on Violence 33 Ryan Spooner Jennifer Chang on The History of Anonymity 39 Randall Tyrone Justin Chin on Gutted 43 Don Mee Choi on Kim Hyesoon’s Series Assistants Cristiana Baik Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers 47 Ryan Ikeda Allison Adelle Hedge Coke on Effigies: An Anthology of Christopher Liek New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim, 2009 53 Mary Dalton on Merrybegot 56 Cover Design Courtney Mandryk Sesshu Foster on World Ball Notebook 63 Layout Aimee Harrison Santee Frazier on Dark Thirty 65 Asher Ghaffar on Wasps in a Golden Dream Hum a Strange Music 69 Ferial Ghazoul on Muhammad Afifi Matar’s Quartet of Joy 73 Johannes Göransson on Aase Berg’s Remainland 77 Noah Eli Gordon on A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow 82 Kimiko Hahn on The Narrow Road to the Interior 87 Jesse Nathan on Dinner 201 Sam Hamill on Avocations 90 Uche Nduka on eel on reef 207 Robert Hass on Time and Materials 94 Maggie Nelson on Jane: a Murder 210 Juan Felipe Herrera on 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Idra Novey & Paulo Henriques Britto on Britto’s Cross the Border 97 The Clean Shirt of It 215 Yunte Huang on Cribs 101 Mark Nowak on Shut Up Shut Down 219 Geof Huth on NTST 104 dg nanouk okpik on In The Time of Okvik 225 Gabriela Jauregui on Controlled Decay 114 Danielle Pafunda on This is What a Feminist [Poet] Andrew Joron on The Sound Mirror 117 Looks Like 230 Fady Joudah on The Earth in the Attic 120 Sarith Peou on Corpse Watching 239 Katia Kapovich on Gogol in Rome 123 Craig Santos Perez on from unincorporated territory [hacha] 247 David Keplinger on Carsten René Nielsen’s Mahealani Perez-Wendt on Papahanaumoku 251 The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors 125 Jessica Piazza on Interrobang 253 Emelihter Kihleng on My Urohs 128 Khadijah Queen on Conduit 260 Peter H. Lee on Echoing Song 132 Sina Queyras on Teethmarks 263 Raina J. León on Canticle of Idols 136 Mani Rao on 100 Poems: 1985-2005 266 Alexis Levitin on Astrid Cabral’s Cage 141 Jed Rasula on The American Poetry Wax Museum 270 Maurice Manning on Bucolics 145 Bino Realuyo on The Gods We Worship Live Next Door 277 Brandy Nālani McDougall on Return to the Kula House 149 Barbara Jane Reyes on Poeta en San Francisco 280 George Messo on İlhan Berk’s A Leaf About to Fall 152 Ed Roberson on City Eclogue 283 Philip Metres on Behind the Lines 156 F. Daniel Rzicznek on Neck of the World 288 Dunya Mikhail on The War Works Hard 167 Robyn Schiff on Revolver 292 Wayne Miller on Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts 170 Susan M. Schultz on Dementia Blog 296 Chelsey Minnis on Poemland 175 Ravi Shankar on Language for a New Century 299 Rachel Moritz on The Winchester Monologues Ravi Shankar on Instrumentality 308 and Night-Sea 177 Prageeta Sharma on Infamous Landscapes 316 Anna Moschovakis on I Have Not Been Able to Get Abraham Smith on Whim Man Mammon 319 Through to Everyone 183 Hazel Smith on The Erotics of Geography 326 Jennifer Moxley on Clampdown 185 Patricia Smith on Blood Dazzler 329 Jennifer Moxley on Jacqueline Risset’s Sleep’s Powers 190 Stephanie Strickland on Zone : Zero 332 Eileen Myles on Sorry, Tree 194 Susan Tichy on Gallowglass 340 Majid Naficy on Father & Son 197 Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon on ] Open Interval [ 344 Meg Withers on A Communion of Saints 349 Rita Wong on Forage 357 Carolyne Wright on Anuradha Mahapatra’s Another Spring, Darkness 362 Carolyne Wright on Taslima Nasrin’s This Game in Reverse 367 IN MEMORIAM Jake Adam York on A Murmuration of Starlings 377 Linda Stern Zisquit on Yona Wallach’s Let the Words: Selected Poems 380 Works Discussed 384 Jake Adam York, whose vision of a poetry and a Author Bio 394 polity built on justice lives on Acknowledgments 395 in his work. INTRODUCTION – H. L. Hix t seems fitting to let this introduction mimic what it Iintroduces, so: into this gathering of three-question interviews, I extend you welcome by means of a three-question interview. Q: Why conduct, and collect, so many interviews? A: My highfalutin rationale would appeal to “global” principles of sophos and civitas, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer’s assertion in Truth and Method that the posing of questions is a necessity of thought: “To understand a question means to ask it,” he says, and “to understand an opinion is to understand it as the answer to a question.” Or again, more recently, Chantal Mouffe proposes in Agonistics that the public space is not ultimately monological (not “the terrain where one aims at creating consensus”) but interrogative and dialogical (the place “where conflicting points of view are confronted without xi any possibility of a final reconciliation”). I wouldn’t whatever. I find more apt the model of the commons: pretend that conducting interviews is adequate to poetry, like water, belongs to us all. Which is to say realize such principles, but I do believe that it aligns that poetry is bigger than the conception that any with them. one of us has of it. I have tried not to let any one of those conceptions tell me who I can and can’t listen There is also, though, a more “local” and personal to. rationale. I think of poetry as not only an intensified form of speaking, but also an intensified form of That includes my own conception, which of course is listening. Poetry may result in a speaking, but it no less limited and limiting than others’ conceptions results from a listening. That’s enough to make are. It means I want to listen to those poets I already the alliance between poetry and the interview feel know how to listen to, and those I must learn how strong to me: I want to listen to the Listeners, and to listen to. I want to listen to poets who write I take interviewing poets as a form of listening that poetry that resembles my own, and poets who complements the form of listening we engage in by write otherwise. I want to listen to poets whose reading poems. ambitions and purposes for their poetry resembles the ambitions and purposes I embrace for my own Q: But these poets don’t all subscribe to one poetry, and poets whose ambitions and purposes I aesthetic or belong to one group: they don’t all look must learn to recognize. I know that makes even a alike, and they’re not all doing the same thing. What collection on this scale only a gesture: I can’t in fact makes these interviews belong together? listen to all poets. But I can (again following Sara Ahmed’s notion of alignment) point myself toward A: That they don’t all share some obvious common rather than away from doing so. feature is precisely why they are together here. I want to resist, rather than capitulate to, the tendency (so The personal and “local” version of that “global” aim strong, it appears to me, in “the poetry world”) to is that I am trying to rectify, or compensate for, a model poetry affiliations on the economic concept personal lack. My formal schooling in poetry was of property, which is a principle of exclusion: we (this is an understatement!) incomplete. I was taught and only we have a right to the designation “formal” how to listen to one poetic lineage, to poetry that or “new” or “experimental” or “avant-garde” or fulfilled one ideal and gave voice to one subject xii xiii position. I hope to teach myself how to listen also of stillness—to get to the source, not to be swayed to other lineages, to poetries that fulfill various anymore by appearances.” ideals and articulate various subject positions. Again, conducting a few interviews doesn’t magically Many of the insights offered by the interviewees accomplish that aim, but does, I hope, align with it. here have mattered a great deal to me. I hope that each reader of the book will find that many of them Q: We’ve talked about the book’s origins and matter to her. motivations. What about its results? A: Let me respond to that in two ways. One is to note that poetry is something to talk about. To read in solitude, yes, but also to talk about together. Interviews such as the ones gathered here are a talking-together. The other response is simply to celebrate the luminosity of what the interviewees say. They offer in these interviews insights to resonate with the wisdom and pleasures and challenges of the books about which they are interviewed. Those insights pervade the book, from the very first response in the very first interview, Ali Alizadeh’s reflection on the repressed Real “that undermines/subverts the ‘official,’ conscious layer of discourse, and…could have revolutionary implications,” to the very last, Linda Stern Zisquit’s observation of Yona Wallach’s shift near the end of her life from an earlier interest in swirling, almost manic language “towards a point xiv xv ALI ALIZADEH on EYES IN TIMES OF WAR H.