Chapvelope Three, our translation Chapvelope, is now available, featuring a hand-bound chapbook (27# text, 65# cover, linen binding), a series of eight hand-cut flashcard broadsides (67# cardstock), and a postcard broadside. Each element draws attention to the translatability and transmutability of language through the combination of content and form. The offerings range from translations of contemporary Chinese poets to selections from an eye-rhyme translation of Homer’s Odyssey, to a material re-visioning of everyday English words and objects. We hope that readers will enjoy a new experience with language upon reading and a lasting delight in the unique artifact that is the Chapvelope, which includes the following:

MELANIE CROW: I would like to ask first about the first poem from your collection Memory Future. It is written in such a different style than the rest, and perhaps that is why it begins the book, on its own, but it does serve as an opening to the other poems. That last line is particularly grabbing: “Am I still that unworthy”? Can you talk a bit about the idea of the first poem, as a leaping-off point?

Heather Aimee O’Neill: Sure. The first poem, “Certainty,” is actually a reflection on uncertainty. The questions in the poem will never be answered—at least not in this lifetime, at least not honestly. And it’s about being okay with that, that doubt, with accepting it. The final question—“Am I that unworthy?”—is my or the narrator’s question—and, again, one that will never be answered. It’s an honest question and I think, I hope, one that sets up what I’m trying to explore in the rest of the collection.

MC: There is a kind of refuge in memory that happens in the collection. The comfort of memory is complicated, however, by the problems of memory. How does memory function in your collection, and are there authors that inspired this theme?

HAO: I am comforted by memory. I never thought about that, but it’s a great point. I’m intrigued by the specificity in memory—what we recall and why, what we don’t recall and why. It’s about narrative and so many things contribute to the construction of that narrative—nature and nurture, of course, but also trauma, luck, mistakes, the choices that we make or that people make for us. In terms of inspiration, I admire the way Elizabeth Bishop uses memory. “In the Waiting Room” is one of my favorite poems and it’s a brilliant use of a retrospective narrator. The language in that poem is simple and clear, but she is talking about, to me anyway, a complex shift in perspective: that moment in childhood when you realize that you are both an individual and a part of the world.

MC: Mortality, time passing—there is a consciousness of temporality that holds the poems together. Can you say something about your idea of time in the collection, or your (personal, philosophical) reasons for this theme?

HAO: Ever since I became a parent, I’ve thought more about my own past and how it’s brought me to this point in my life. I’ve thought about it, obviously, because for the first time I was shaping someone else’s future. The birth of my son has had a significant impact on the way I look back on my own childhood, on my relationship with my partner, my family, and even myself. Time no longer feels linear and I wanted to reflect that in the order of the collection.

MC: In the second section of the collection, the poems turn back in on themselves (repeating the last line or parts of the last line of one poem in the first line of the next). How did you come to this pattern? What does it mean for these poems, that seem so ruminative and centered on the “other” and the other’s culture? They remind me a bit of Robert Lowell’s ghost sonnets—trying to make sense of personal relationships in the midst of “time passing.”

HAO: The middle section of the collection is a sonnet corona or a crown of sonnets about living in Spain with my partner. I thought that the crown as a form was relevant to the narrative because it demands that kind of intense focus—on the “other,” in this case—and because the repetition of the final and first lines mirrors the intimacy and distance I was trying to capture in the different relationships: between the lovers, between the “other” and her cultural heritage, and between the speaker’s past and future.

MC: The poems in the second section also center around a trip with the other—and discoveries that happen on this trip. Leaving and experiencing this other place generates new kinds of realizations and awareness for the speaker. Would you say this is accurate? Another way to ask this might be: how important is this journey, or any journey, in terms of opening us up? What does travel do for us—as lovers, thinkers, writers?

HAO: My partner’s background is Spanish and she really fell in love with the people, culture and food in Spain. She fit in aesthetically and felt at home in a way that surprised and inspired her. I learned a lot about her on that trip and she learned a lot about herself. I wanted that section and that poem to be structured around the narrator as the witness to her lover’s transformation through culture and identity. I think travel is just a natural part of that experience. My friend Jessica Piazza, an amazing poet, was extremely helpful with this poem. She is a brilliant editor. She helped me see the journey of the poem more clearly.

MC: A poet friend of mine once said that she arrived at the order of her book through a dream. That always struck me as unusual, but it also made sense, since dreams are connected so inherently to our interior lives. It does seem as if the speaker is coming up out of a dream, or waking up to new “layers” of consciousness in each section. There does seem to be a kind of logic to it, but, like many good collections, a kind of dream-logic. How did the structure come to you for the collection?

HAO: I love your description of “waking up to new layers of consciousness.” I don’t know if that happened to me, but it sounds fantastic. The first part of the collection, “salted up in the memory of you,” is about finding the lover, the “other.” All of the poems there look back on relationships and moments in my life when I was really hungry—for love, trust, guidance, all that good stuff. The second section, “the spin of earth that allows us to observe time,” is about settling into a relationship that finally worked and where I could begin to focus on another person. The third section, “we think of our lives as linear,” is about my family and my childhood. I wanted that section to come last to play on that idea of memory and its impact on the future.

MC: Can you talk about your experience as a writer? More specifically: Do you remember a specific moment that shaped your life as a writer?

HAO: I remember standing on the beach as a kid and thinking that the rope used to tie the boat to the dock looked like a girl’s un-kept braid. It’s not a very original metaphor or anything, but it was a moment of realization for me. It changed the way I looked at the world and the way I searched for meaning in image. I used to take notes in my biology and chemistry classes in high school and try to find interesting metaphors or images to use in poems. All of that information was useful and interesting to me, but not in the way that I could apply it to science. I wanted to apply it to metaphor.

MC: What writers have inspired you most?

HAO: So, so many. George Orwell. Elizabeth Bishop. Jeanette Winterson. Virginia Woolf. Walt Whitman. Marilyn Hacker. Olena Kalytiak Davis. My friends. My students. I feel like teaching taught me how to write.

MC: I noticed in one interview that you are working on a novel. How different was the writing of the novel vs. writing poetry? Can you say something, too, about what the novel is about?

HAO: I just finished my novel—Hers to Hold. It’s about a woman struggling with her past as she prepares to become a mother. It’s about the mistakes she made and continues to make. It’s also a book about uncertainty, I suppose, and how that threatens the life that this character has worked so hard to build. In terms of writing and even reading, poetry is my first love. It comes more naturally to me. I have to work harder at writing fiction. But a background in poetry, I think, helps and influences any writing. It forces you to pay attention to your language.

MC: What are you reading now? Any recommendations?

HAO: I’ve actually been reading a lot of longer books lately. I’m rereading Moby Dick right now based on a friend’s suggestion. I last read it a decade ago for a class and I have to say it’s a completely different experience for me this time around. The first time, I just wanted to rush through the book, but now I can sit back and experience the story. It’s almost meditative. I’m about to have another kid in March so I figure I might as well get in the meditation while I can. I won’t be reading 500 plus page books then. I’ll go back to reading poetry.

Time, memory, language, history, the body: the weaving of these concerns in Heather Aimee O’Neill’s collection Memory Future would be enough to draw a reader into her collection; yet it is the surprising avenues in language and structure that keep one invested. O’Neill’s work turns in on itself; her poems offer no easy conclusions about the machinations of memory, time, and consciousness.

Many of the poems start at one seemingly simple point of departure but branch into elegant, complex ruminations. “Mars May Have Been a Land of Lakes,” begins in a proposition and assumption about the “other”:

we’re trying to define. You’re
impossible. That’s what I’ve decided,
that’s how I’ve defined you.

then quickly accelerates:

Mars may have been a land of lakes,
but the satellite orbits us, and the photos
can’t reveal such distant history.
And why should they? We can’t

even be honest with each other,
let alone believe the billion years
it took for us to happen: first water,
then body, voice, and faith.

The poem leads the reader through personal isolation, epistemology, space, evolution, history, image, and language. O’Neill makes these leaps seem easy and graceful. The connections are believable in large part because of the self-reflective, dialogic syntax. O’Neill’s poems turn back on themselves, as in “I’ll Cave In, Gently, as You Divide”:

Return to where you disappeared,
to where you disappeared again.
Is it terrible to keep inventing
ourselves?

O’Neill struggles with memory and connection. The first poem begins with a series of questions, introducing the self-reflective voice in the collection. Part I revolves around a search for connection. The second section follows the speaker on a journey with the “other.” Part III returns to the speaker’s past.

Much of Part I centers on the struggle to maintain connections within the strains of the modern world. This struggle is not an uncommon theme, but it is the speaker’s uncertain voice that makes the work believable and engaging. In “Restoration” the poet waits with her other in “morning traffic, ramps / and bridges crowded with the rush. The piles,/ of steel and tires, hours, tunnels full..” There is a fight and silence between the couple, and the speaker recovers—partially—through memory:

…Remember when our feet
Hung over planks of wood, the dock beneath
The green and gray pond water, clouded with
Our shadows, thick, the fall of darkness, rise
Of light. Our morning fight was nothing, just

A pocket of rare stolen air. There was
A moment there. Cicadas sing above
Our pond—surround me here, foretold, now gone.

Past becomes present here as the memory of the pond envelops the speaker. The speaker is in the present, but the past continually emerges, sometimes infringing on the “real” life (and sometimes illuminating it). This paradox of memory is the basis of the poem and this part of the collection.

Part II poses a similar question of transience and memory. In this part, however, O’Neill locates an answer in personal and cultural history. These ghost sonnets take the reader through the other’s past and culture. The use of repeated lines in this section create an echo and more direct “turning back” to previous scenes and stanzas. Section V ends with: “In sleep, we find a warmth beyond our growth.” In section VI, the line returns: “In sleep, we find a warmth. Beyond this growth…” The figure of Ouroboros comes to mind with both the concerns and structure of this section, the snake of time circling back and repeating, swallowing itself. A tenuous answer is given to the questions of temporality with this circular pattern. O’Neill’s ruminations on the other plant the speaker on more solid ground. The last poem ends, in part, with a sense of timelessness:

…One year
has no finality, her motion keeps
one season brushing up against the next.

The final third of the chapbook arrives at the poet’s childhood/past. The poet brings us to recollections of family and places that have their own presence. There is “The bay outside” that “remembers / me hours later, remembers to ghost itself through my hands…” and “The Queens that raised you…” There are, too, clear and distinct image-memories. At the end of the poem “Summer,” the speaker positions herself in the earth, solid: “My feet burrow into the peppered sand, planted.” The last poem of the collection ends with surprising images from the speaker’s childhood. The visceral details of another child with a “high brow and sunken eyes” and the last description of “gum balls sweating colors” suggest the surreal, Proustian nature of memory.

This may be the intent of the poet after all—to lead the reader through these questions of time, perception, and image. O’Neill suggests that some images hold their own answers and arrivals.

BRET SHEPARD: Climate Reply, to me, seems to investigate what it means to listen—to nature, to another person, to oneself. Certainly images and textures play an important part, but they, too, feel wrapped in the auditory. Can you talk about how you use these sensorial elements in your work?

TREY MOODY: It often feels like I’m writing from a memory, or at least a vague, remembered mood. Sometimes these are actual memories; sometimes I mistake something imagined for a memory. In both cases, sight and texture are very much present, but sound usually isn’t. But it’s the auditory, it seems, that can contain the most mystery. Hear that wind outside? Rather, hear those leaves rustling because of the wind? Or was it something else altogether rustling the leaves? And thinking of the chapbook, which seems to inhabit an eerie kind of space—where weather and ghosts (another manifestation of landscape) are being listened to—it seems that sound has the most potential to include both positive and negative affirmations, sometimes simultaneously. Was that the floor creaking, or the house shifting, or the heater? It isn’t until I see a sound’s source that I know for sure, but I like dwelling in that place of speculation.

BS: Yeah, you have a way of phrasing that is unique and mysterious. Yet, the syntax remains open, creating sense by surprising the mind into a new sense. Does this happen in revision? Do you compose with it in mind? This is, in part, a question about your process. But I’m also interested in your thoughts on language. What surprises/excites you about language?

TM: In Climate Reply, I remember wanting to overload and confuse sensory experience at times, which happened while composing and revising, though a little differently with each poem. I’m pretty sure the syntax and phrasing in “We Didn’t Believe” was mostly deliberate during the original composition, but the newer poems in the chapbook were made using revision as another opportunity to generate material. In “We Use Spoons Mostly,” for example, the sensory experience was built mostly while revising, through a sort of process of accumulation. I remember sitting down to work on an early draft of that poem and looked through the window, so that moment, included in the poem, ended up offering me another way into the draft even though it had nothing (or everything?) to do with the poem’s original impulse.

But these days, what excites me about language is when it’s simple and direct, on the one hand, while creating surprising juxtapositions as the poem builds, on the other. When I was younger I thought obscurity led to mystery and surprise, but there’s a lot to be said about the charged mythology in a straightforward neighborly conversation or looking at a cheese grater a little too long. Poems made of this kind of direct language seem to work so well, to my mind, because most readers can at least find a way in, making them comfortable enough to let their guard down, which creates a pretty good place for genuine surprise. Not that my grandma will be reading Mary Ruefle or Michael Earl Craig anytime soon, but their poems seem very friendly at first glance. Of course, like most neighbors, the longer you listen to them the weirder—and more interesting—they become.

I’m glad you asked about the compositional process because it’s a fascinating thing—I move from notebook to typewriter to computer, always in different orders, always at different times during the day. But I know some people work better with a more structured, streamlined process. How does the compositional process work for you? And what environmental/geographic factors, if any, alter this process?

BS: I do know people that have a streamlined process for writing. I’d even say a rigid process. But I’m not like that. You mention alternating where you write, which makes sense to me. I’m always walking around my apartment; sometimes after a few lines I find the need to leave the chair and throw a plastic basketball around or something. I’m very antsy when writing, even when I think it’s going well. But I mostly write on the computer. During my MFA, Saint Mary’s College (CA) was giving away old typewriters, just handing them out for free. The English grad students were stoked. But, as it turns out, I don’t prefer to write on a typewriter. That may be strange to some people, maybe even offensive to those who swear by the typewriter’s personality. But I enjoy the relationship I have with my laptop. What determines when you move from writing space to writing space, the computer to the typewriter, for example? Is it an impulse that comes quickly? It sounds like there is some time in between the moves. When do you combine material?

TM: Yeah, ignoring those needy typewriters is very offensive! But I like how you describe your compositional demeanor as being “antsy,” which I totally share with you—those fringes just before and after being completely focused have this weird energy, but you’ve described it perfectly.

These days (and by “these days” I mean the last few years or so) my writing practices are what they are because of my family. I’m married and recently became a father, both of which are awesome, but I don’t always have the luxury of making thought-out decisions as to where or how I write. That said, I like to keep a few notebooks and legal pads around the house for convenience. Almost everything I write begins by hand, but how the next drafts get written is determined by time, I guess. I do know that I really neglect my typewriter when I’m teaching (and when the baby’s sleeping, as it’s a manual—the typewriter, not the baby). So I type mostly in summers. But I try to make it as long as possible in a draft before going to the computer. No good reason, really, except not liking what I was generating on the computer.

But I do like to let things simmer, so something written in a notebook or legal pad may go a few days, weeks, or months before it’s rewritten.

BS: Certainly the poems in Climate Reply are well crafted with surprising language and turns. But what might surprise people about you when you’re not reading/writing/thinking poems?

TM: As you know, Bret, I do like playing basketball, preferably weekly, and watching basketball, preferably the Spurs. Though I’m certainly not reading/writing/thinking poems when doing these things, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a poem about our competitive on-court relationship.

I also enjoy the Twin Bing candy bar—not really a “bar,” per se, but it’s at least the best chocolate/peanut/cherry concoction out of Sioux City, Iowa. It puts a bounce in my step, that’s for sure. Steve Almond’s Candyfreak includes a chapter worth reading on the Twin Bing and its maker. If you’re brave enough to buy and then bite into one, the Midwestern gas station cashier who just sold it to you will observe many emotions on your face—mainly confusion.

Now let me ask you something about your poems, which often seem situated in rich, vivid, particular places—are these places real? Or are they imagined? Or both? And could you talk about how the negotiation between these elements relates to place in your writing?

BS: I suppose they begin as real places, though the imagination often filters that beginning and transforms it into something different, a poem. At least I hope that’s what’s happening. So both. The process of filtering fascinates me. It’s a process of obstruction that results in reconstruction. I often find myself re-obstructing places in poems. Your thoughts on sound seem to suggest something similar. What noise happens in the shadows? I’m reminded of Jack Spicer’s poem “Thing Language,” where he asserts the lack of singularity in listening to poetry (“No one listens to poetry”). In part, I take this to mean that there is an inner “hearing” that occurs when reading poetry. But it is not singular. Rather, a reader constructs the sound from the poem in relation to memories of hearing words and inflections, etc. Of course Spicer also declares that things don’t intend or depend on being listened to. Yet we do listen to the ocean and it means something sometimes to some people. When I read some of the poems in Climate Reply, for example, I feel invited into this process, this dynamic relationship. The mystery and possibility interest me. As you say about the rustling leaves, it could be anything causing the rustling.

Can you talk about putting the manuscript together? There are entire books dedicated to situating poetry manuscripts, so this process clearly intrigues writers. And you have a knack for it; another of your chapbooks was recently published (Once Was a Weather [Greying Ghost, 2011]). Climate Reply weaves the “Dear Ghost” poems throughout the book. Was this integral to shaping the whole?

TM: Although I’m not all that interested in narrative, I do like narrative echoes, which is probably why I decided to weave “Dear Ghosts” throughout Climate Reply. I also wove part of a longer sequence called “A Weather” throughout Once Was a Weather for similar reasons. It’s difficult for me to think of a collection as a consistent project; either that, or my nature is to write single, discrete poems or sequences. When I’m writing, I’m excited about the poem, not the book—otherwise I might’ve tried writing novels or something. But then the problem becomes how in the hell to organize these things with some kind of cohesion. Obviously, looking for ways poems resonate with one another in sequence helps—but like writing, this is largely an intuitive act, so there’s nothing quantifiable about it that reassures me I can do it again. So threading a longer sequence throughout, for me, seems to create a kind of anchor or refrain that assures the reader they aren’t lost. Or maybe it’s just a gimmick, like an advertising technique or something.

BS: What books are you reading currently? Any shout-outs you want to give other poets work?

TM: I’m teaching Simic and Strand’s Another Republic, so I’ve been re-reading some of my favorites like Ponge, Ritsos, Follain, Popa. Two newer books I’m teaching are Jeff Alessandrelli’s Erik Satie Watusies His Way into Sound and Joshua Ware’s Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley—both awesome and worth checking out. I just read Shannon Tharp’s The Cost of Walking, which was really good, as was Pam Rehm’s The Larger Nature. I’ll end with these soon-to-be published books that I’ve been looking forward to: Nick Courtright’s Punchline; Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick’s translations of Ernst Meister; and Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey.

How about you—what have you been reading lately?

BS: You mention some really good ones. I’m using Jeff Alessandrelli’s book in one my classes, so I’m reading that, too. I’ve also been reading Rebecca Farivar’s Correct Animal and Sarah Valentine’s translations of Gennady Aygi, called Into the Snow. And I’ve recently been into Kevin Goodan’s book Winter Tenor. Right in front of me I have Christopher Arigo’s In the Archives, which came out a couple of years ago, but is really great.

I have a few short questions to ask. I’m always curious as to how people answer things outside the scope of their work. Costume parties or cocktail parties?

TM: Pity parties?

BS: Worst advice you’ve ever received?

TM: “Shave your chest.”

BS: Favorite 90’s movie?

TM: It’s between The Big Lebowski and Fargo, but I don’t think those really count as “90’s movies,” do they? So then my first-tier nominees are Babe, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Home Alone. Second-tier are Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Cliffhanger, and Jurassic Park. So many good ones!

BS: Worst fashion choice you’ve ever made? (In sixth grade, I used to roll the bottom of my jeans up.)

TM: Around fifth and sixth grade, I wore a painted, metal yin yang pendant strung on a black leather necklace. Even worse, I’d wear it hanging outside of my then favorite T-shirt, featuring a Dennis Rodman caricature whose hair color changed with the temperature. Is this what catharsis feels like?

In Trey Moody’s Climate Reply, strange events become the everyday. The very first poem sets this stage: “The tiniest oak tree / in the tiniest room— / as we feel our eyes, our greedy joints / unhinge and root” (1). This image requires imagination to conceptualize what it means to unhinge and root ourselves. The relationship to place draws forth the invocation that our bodies feel what the eyes lack. It is strange and suggests that what we see (including in this book) will require an undoing of our eyes. Such a project as Climate Reply’s depends on flipping the everyday on its side and redirecting perspective to what goes unseen. The chapbook deepens the relationship between body and nature, while at the same time stripping away general conceptions. That is, the quotidian becomes squeezed tight until some new phrase or relationship develops.

Moody doesn’t stop at making the strange approachable; he flips that notion on its side and makes the everyday strange. In “Hum of the Fridge like Thought,” it is asserted that “when I open the fridge / in the middle of the night, I can hear / you thinking behind me” (7). The moments of understanding for this speaker rest in how the commonplace is perceived, the thinking we can hear. From the title poem, “Climate Reply”: “Ground warm with flesh, ears as if to watch” (3). Flesh merges with the world as sight is rendered useless; what’s left must be heard. The image of such a convergence, flesh and earth, grounds the imaginative and theoretical notion of ears watching. And that is what separates this chapbook from the many others that are pressed each year. Trey Moody strikes quick and deep with images and ideas that haunt long after.

Thematically the book is connected by Moody’s concern of the natural, though not exclusively for the natural—rather, the book travels the interplay between types of natural, which is to say the environment and humanity, or the human environment. Humanity claims levels of nature, be it naturalness in genetics, the nature of ourselves and who we are, or the Nature that exists outside our constructed worlds, as in the wilderness remaining undeveloped. Both situate a problem of knowledge. What can we predict and control about either? In “The Listener, The Land” Moody uses the rhythm of images to bring in this idea. A narrative of camping, of being in nature, rests underneath this poem. But the images suggest a taming. A “plastic bear” with “plastic claws” subdues what is formerly wild. It is the resultant image when you think you have everything under control. Reading these poems, one becomes aware that the speaker isn’t under control and has a sense that the world is not under control, either. The poem concludes: “this racket gets out of hand, and / in the quiet room I’ll stitch / your fabric name to the tops of trees” (2). Much like Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” this closing image places the human choice onto nature. There is a need to organize nature, but un-order belongs as much to humanity as to the wild itself. If there is a quiet room, it is one that the speaker is building.

This book differentiates itself from “nature poetry” with its interest in nature’s impact on the human. But using “impact” doesn’t give the full sense of what Moody creates in this book. The dialectic in these poems is one of influence. While the body is compared to a tree in “This Forest isn’t a Room,” in the poem “Birdsong” the human mind is numbed and memory becomes a “silent cloud of ash.” The natural world persists in providing possible guidance. The possibilities are what drive the dialectic between natural and unnatural. This happens in the series of connected poems “Dear Ghosts.” These poems lace domestic scenes with the fears lurking in the dark, which often become what is outside. In “Dear Ghosts” number 6, “Like Dust around the Light Fixture,” we get the space of these philosophical grounds. “So the morning came. The light bulb / didn’t matter. I unscrewed it, / something as warm as flesh, and put it in my pocket. / So you see, the days / were manageable. That is, the days / were when I missed you the most” (15). In order to see, we need light. That is how eyes work. But where does light come from? This poem asks that we turn off the lights when we can and take the flesh for what it is. Resolution of the dialectic is the noticing of the dialectic; really it’s about each other as much as where we are together.

These poems pull our eyes out of their sockets and it feels good.

ALISSA NUTTING: Your chapbook E! Entertainment is an excerpt from a full-length book. I’m curious about process–did the chapbook come first and then grow into a full-length, or did you take material from the full-length to create the chapbook?

KATE DURBIN: I read “Anna Nicole Show” at Royal T Gallery in Culver City, which has a giant Hello Kitty inside. Mathew Timmons, who runs Insert and Blanc Presses in L.A., was in the audience, heard the piece, and said he wanted to publish a chapbook of similar work. I then wrote the book with the chapbook format in mind. After it was finished, Matt and I talked about how it would be cool to have a full-length edition. The Diamond Edition, he called it.

The work in E! is new in that there isn’t a critical framework for it & for that reason it’s maybe good for people to be introduced to this text in short form first. On the flip, some people haven’t known how to read it. You could look at the chapbook as a short film and the full-length as a mini series. I think both enact similar effects upon a reader, but one experiences the effects more intensely and disturbingly by reading through pages and pages of our repetitive cultural scripts piled up. For example, spending time reading the entire episode of The Hills as opposed to just the first eight scenes is going to be pretty mind-blowing for people, I think. Also the sort of disintegration some critics have pointed out that takes place over the process of the book will be more intense in the full-length.

AN: Why did you decide on these four particular pieces to engage in conversation with one another?

KD: “The Hills” and “Dynasty” are both catfights; “Lindsay Lohan” and “Anna Nicole” are examples of “news” reportage of celebrity women in trouble. The genres vary from reality TV to scripted TV to online news reportage to CNN, yet they are all the same. I wanted to show that what we ask of our screen women and how we view them is always the same. I did this by simply putting the texts next to each other and pointing at them. It was no different than turning on every TV station at once.

AN: I wondered about what labels, if any, you give these four pieces individually–if in your mind you call them chapters, stories, poems, found poems, collage, pastiche, essays, criticism…or something else entirely, like glitterbabez?

KD: Well, now I am going to call them glitterbabez! While writing, I didn’t have a particular title for the sections in my mind other than the titles of the shows themselves. I’d classify this book as post-conceptual writing or poetry, yet I find it useful to think of this work, to myself, as conceptual art. While writing I also thought to myself: you are writing reality TV. Not about reality TV, but writing reality TV. Thinking along these lines, instead of in terms of poems, chapters, collages, etc., made me make more interesting work. It’s a matter of form—the forms of conceptual art and reality TV are at the cusp, risky.

AN: Do you find, in writing about video and reality TV, the pieces together take on a sort of episodic quality? In going to the next chapter, I often felt like I was changing a channel.

KD: I think that’s a wonderful way to look at it. Except with E! I’d say in changing the channel you will find the same thing on every channel.

AN: For you, how do you know a chapbook is ‘incomplete’ or when a chapbook is ‘finished’? Do you think it could still be a chapbook with only three of these? Could it still be a chapbook with a certain combination of three of these but not necessarily any combination? Why did you choose four and not five?

KD: I know when I’m done with something because it feels done “enough.”

I think the cultural disintegration E! enacts requires the precise ordering of the sections the book has now, and all four of them in that order, yes. You’ll notice the mirror image TVs on the books front and back covers, similar to the mirror image Es I wore on my face recently in Louisiana at the Delta Mouth Literary Festival to present this work. The catfights mirror each other as Lindsay and Anna Nicole mirror each other. In order that you, the reader, will look into the television screen, your mirror.

AN: In the full-length book, do the four pieces that make up your chapbook run one after the other chronologically? If not, what is the effect of putting other material in-between them?

KD: They will be in this order, but there will be texts in between and around them. The cultural disintegration will be more apparent and the work’s themes amplified by layering texts from the Kardashian wedding, The Girls Next Door, the Housewives shows, Amanda Knox’s trial, as connective tissue between the pieces already present.This is a book, though, that due to its concept has the potential to run endlessly, like cable TV with its infinite channels. There are so many, many shows with the same “scripts,” the same glitterbabez.

AN: I know that for filmed and public readings and pictures, performativity and costume are very important to you. I definitely sensed a relationship between that and your decision to include color photos/stills in the chapbook. Do you think the chapbook would be incomplete without a visual component?

KD: I am interested in taking text and visualizing it and in turning visual language into text, then seeing what that translation shows us about our cultural values and unconscious desires—especially in relation to our screen women. And yet that bleed-over—grainy cell phone images creeping into the text—creates a glitch in the system of my own strategy. Including stills in a book that is mostly devoid of images, even as it’s all about image culture, or wearing E’s on my face and dress like a disease when I present the book publicly, enacts a bleed-over that makes the work vital because it refuses purity of form.

AN: Related to that, as an author who infuses her readings with theater, do you ever feel stifled or limited by the written medium?

KD: I felt stifled as long as I believed I was limited by the written medium, but I don’t feel limited by medium anymore. Text is bigger than the written word. There are texts around us and in us if we are open to seeing them. Additionally, our negative limitations are generally self-and-culture inflicted. My work is, in part, about making negative narratives visible, like a scarlet A written upon a woman’s body in invisible ink, in order that we might no longer go around blindly bound to them. And then to create new texts we can later destroy when they no longer serve.

AN: I think it’s appropriate to end the interview with another question on limitations. Aside from (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) length, what do you feel like the other boundaries of the chapbook are? And let’s make this a double-header ending and engage that second part as well: is there a way a 400-page document would be more chapbook than not, could retain the essence-ness of a chapbook?

KD: I think a chapbook’s restrictions are mostly related to length, number, and distribution, as well as how seriously the form is taken (not as seriously as perfect bound books, which of course have their own hierarchy depending on publishers, etc). Writing something as ephemeral as a chapbook can give you enormous freedom to play and experiment. I think it’s possible to create a 400-page document that has the essence of playfulness in a chapbook. Forms are just things we made up to help us categorize the world, anyway. You really can do whatever you want.

The title of this chapbook references E! Entertainment Television, a channel devoted to “entertainment.” From its programming line-up, one can infer that it mainly defines “entertainment” as celebrity news and reality TV. From its popularity and influence on the program lineup of other cable and network channels, one can infer that a good many viewers (roughly 88 million in America, 600 million abroad) agree.

For those who do not agree, it’s easy to insist on a divorce-agreement-style cultural polarity: E! and reality TV and bubblegum-pop music can go live with rich executive dad; PBS and NPR and Nick Drake will stay at mom’s plus take on her shifts at the food co-op when needed so she can successfully finish her masters degree in social activism. It’s easy to let the crossovers that remind us we once lived in the same house (the English-version Steig Larsson movie, the Kanye West/Bon Iver collaboration, Jason Wu for Target clothing) be our only form of conversation with one another, and ignore the rest. To ensure all visitations are still supervised by commerce, our governing form of identity, for what we buy and like is given context by what we do not buy and like. David Sedaris is not Larry the Cable Guy. Taylor Swift is not Willie Nelson. And Downton Abbey is not Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

And yet. Things are also not that divided nor pure. Monsanto’s GE crops have crossbred with organic counterparts miles away, lo, for they are under the same sky and subject to the same pollinating winds, as are our cultural and artistic hierarchies: Angelina Jolie is a Louis Vuitton spokesmodel, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and her kids love Cheetos. Colson Whitehead writeth of zombies. One can visibly see the Philip Glass/Justin Bieber radio single and Happy Meal conductor baton/vibrating toothbrush toy on the smog-filled technicolor horizon.

In other words—and this is the fundamental truth that reality TV depends upon (and simultaneously depends upon denying)—no one is that special (except celebrities). We’re all pretty much the same on most of the levels that matter. Like a good cult leader, reality TV convinces viewers that it is the key to transformation and a higher realm. You are just like the people on this show, it says. Except for not being famous and rich. You laugh and cry and get in fights with your mom. But if you laughed and cried and got into fights with your mom on a reality TV show, you would be famous and rich.

Durbin’s text masterfully troubles these siren-song waters, engaging the allure and the artificiality of the celebrity women depicted. A quatrain of female personae, the chapbook has four sections, the first of which, “The Hills,” opens to a color picture of Lauren Conrad playing Lauren Conrad on The Hills. It’s a still from a computer screen, a clip excerpted in what appears to be a YouTube video, and a small reflection from real life, sunlight pouring through vertical blinds, appears in the left-hand corner of the photo. Lauren is crying, a single tear drawing mascara down her cheek in a cinematic way that one can look at and say definitively, “that moment was created for film.”

Durbin’s narrator begins the chapter describing a scene from The Hills in a befitting prose-poem style, blocks of uniform text that are not broken into paragraphs. This effect radically minimizes the impact of the dialogue between the characters: the quotes are part of a uniform mass, another detail, another prop like the “necklace with large gold balls” and “garment rack of designer dresses” that the narrator points out. We see Lauren and Whitney as talking and stylized mannequins. The narrator describes only their exterior and words, the things a camera can see and hear, and like a camera, does so without analysis, for the details being given to the reader—what is being included (looks, material items, status symbols) and what is being left out (critical thought, emotion, deeper meaning)—instead say it all. The women are characterized by their bodies and what they’re wearing. What’s important about Heidi is that “Her legs are tan and she has a French manicure”.

The numbered sections of this chapter correspond to the show’s commercial breaks, and we enter each one in true linear form: readers are told what song is playing when the action starts again, what shots establish the setting. The choices Durbin makes in relaying information highlight the scene being constructed on The Hills in a way the show does not: the narrator spends several lines talking about the Guess by Marciano billboard, the woman on the billboard (whose description is fittingly close to the women on the show), the backdrop of the billboard (whose setting is fittingly close to ocean-side California where The Hills is filmed). Since this is text and not a flash on the screen, the comparison is allowed to linger: we see the ways that these actresses are selling things and how photographers/camera men are instructing them, the proximity between the show and its commercial break.

Next we move to another chapter bearing the same title as the show it concerns, Dynasty. Here the text comes after seven color still-shots of character Alexis throwing a vase at Krystle. Contexualizing The Hills’s reality TV by juxtaposing it with what it supposedly isn’t (a scripted soap opera) allows the parallels to show: again, we have rich women in designer clothing fighting with one another. As with the billboard in The Hills, here the narrator zeroes in on a detail that adds poignancy: “On the wall is a gilded portrait. It shows two ladies in bustled green velvet dresses carrying parasols” (23). Just like The Hills, we have scenes of wealthy women doing what they’ve been taught to do: dress nicely and compete fiercely. The text’s details also illustrate the ways advertising is targeted to audience; she points out the “flat ass” and “granny flats” on the actresses (23), the “yellow” teeth that were acceptable to middle-aged female viewers in the 1980s but wouldn’t fly with ZOOM-whitening Pilates-crazed stiletto youth of The Hills.

Setting up these two shows in dialogue, Durbin engages the comparison between Joan Collins and Lauren Conrad. I think about the requirements of an idealized mainstream female TV character in the early 1980s (white, rich, thin, beautiful, fights with other women) and apply it to MTV’s LC: she’s all of the above, but is even younger, even thinner. More scantily clad and much tamer, further shaved of emotional nuance. Reading Durbin’s “The Hills” chapter, one finds oneself quickly skimming over the characters’ empty dialogue lines. What they’re saying doesn’t matter; it isn’t supposed to. The gossip is there to distract viewers from realizing what they’re really getting hooked on is the backdrop. Lauren and Whitney need to stay empty ciphers that young girls can imagine themselves filling, stepping into shoes and handbags that cost more than the operating budget lines of some of the Red Cross’s more vital activities. Going to work at Vogue or Epic Records and texting your friends, eating nondescript green leaves at fancy restaurants. I’m allured too: it all looks beautiful. Even (perhaps especially) when she’s crying, Lauren looks very beautiful. Her pain will be gone by commercial break. And have you seen her car?

The third chapter, “Lindsay Lohan Arrives At Court,” describes the narrative behind her court appearance amidst a description and photo montage of Lohan, then goes into “UPDATE” mode, giving readers seven obsessive updates on Lohan’s court appearance between the hours of 1:12 to 3:08 PT. Three of the seven include descriptions of her fashion. There is only one description of her emotional state, a quotation that she “looks stressed,” looks being the operative word—this is what the camera and the viewers can capture, guess at. We get a colorful still from Entertainment Tonight HD, an exclusive, depicting not the courtroom but Lindsay at the place of the alleged crime—a necklace theft.

There is also a “Breaking News” excerpt featuring Lohan’s posted statement. She talks about a time that she was on the phone with her sister and “heard my voice which was odd”; her sister was watching a movie, and in the movie a character was watching a movie with Lohan acting in it. Here again, we return to questions of representation and authenticity, and also the ways that women are set up to compete. My mind immediately remembers that the dress Lindsay wore to this court appearance, “her white dress” as the text calls it, sold out the same day she appeared in TV on it. I also have to think about how she wore white for a reason, and wonder. Would it have still sold out if it were another color? Would Lohan have gotten to leave on bail if she had worn red?

The last section is called “Anna Nicole Show.” The Anna Nicole Show was a reality TV sitcom that did in fact appear on E!, but that’s not what this chapter concerns. Instead we’re given a description of a video that was shown in a courtroom by prosecutors hoping to convince the jury that Anna’s partner at the time of her death, Howard K. Stern, “conspired to keep Anna Nicole Smith in a drug stupor”. There are four voices in the video: Howard, Anna, a 7 year-old-girl, and a mechanical baby. In this final section, Durbin separates out the lines of each person, removing them from conversational context. We get all of Howard’s lines, then all of the girl’s lines, then all of Anna’s, then all of the mechanical baby’s. Like separating a vocal track from its instrumentation, the essence of each one is distilled, and we see an exploitative Howard directing, a confused Anna embarrassing herself (she confuses her pregnancy for gas and the doll for the baby she’s pregnant with), and the seven-year-old child growing scared, all while the mechanical baby cries. In court, Stern claimed Anna was acting; the CNN article Durbin excerpts for the chapter’s introduction later asks, “Real or pretend?” and also wonders if Smith knew Stern’s seeming intentions to profit from the video.

This video seems lascivious to the extreme: a man directing a clearly impaired and drugged woman to make a fool of herself on camera so he’ll have profitable footage. But Durbin’s set-up in this chapbook—these four videos laid together in proximity, and their differences—also allows the similarities to come through. How Lauren and her friends often get drunk on The Hills (Wikiquote cites Lauren as saying to Whitney, “Tell me if you think he’s cute ‘cause I’m drunk” in Season 3, Episode 1). How these young women starring in The Hills aren’t the ones editing the footage or constructing the story. How none of these women are. How what’s sold as relevant is what they’re wearing, what they look like. How Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Smith became a celebrity and then an addict, and the whole world watched. How their behavior, their roles, their lives on or off drugs, was all used as entertainment.

Fittingly, the chapbook’s dedication is to Josie Stevens (wife of guitarist Steve Stevens), who is on the E! reality show Married to Rock—Josie also supplies the chapbook’s sole blurb:

“I think it’s really cool that you write books about pop culture. I read your chapters on Lindsay Lohan & Anna Nicole Smith—love them both.”

The ambiguous pronoun “them” makes it unclear if Josie is saying she loved the chapters or loves Lohan and Smith (probably both). But this incertitude makes for a fun surface parallel: here is a blurb that, in one interpretation, compliments not the text itself but simply the celebrities the text engages. Here is yet another example of Durbin flexing her directorial composition skills; like any episodic TV show on its best behavior, the text comes full-circle, the contrived end intentionally referencing the contrived beginning to give audiences a false sense of journey: we’ve come so far that we ended up right back where we began. But in this book, the journey is real. We move through the socially prized well-bathed young women on The Hills to competitive female rage to trouble with the law to death by overdose. If it seems like these events are connected—if it seems like there’s a link and a path between these tales, it’s because there is, and Durbin draws out these common threads of excess between representation and destruction. Much has been written about the superficiality of reality TV, but not enough is out there about its complexity. Durbin’s book is a welcome reminder of just how bottomless, nuanced, and entrenched all the elements of reality TV are in society; how we cannot ignore or escape them because they’re pervasive to the extreme. But in the words of Lauren Conrad, “It looks good though.”

ANDREW WESSELS: Your poetic series occasional landscapes is a wonderful way to kick off what we’re calling “Chapbook Week” here. The series we published is in that amorphous range of chapbook-length work. However, it doesn’t stop where we stopped-it is in fact a book-length work. When you are composing, do you think up-front or consciously about the final published form, as either a chapbook or a full-length book?

ANDREW K. PETERSON: I try to stay open to where each project wants to go, rather than impose a pre-conceived length (and therefore ‘appropriate’ form) that will dictate ‘what it is’ before writing. When composing occasional landscapes, for instance, I simply started out with a new notebook, and a spring day, and the intention to stay present with what was going on around, where I happened to be, where part 1 begins, incidentally the corner of Church and Brattle Streets in Cambridge, Mass, where something happens. I really had no idea where I was going, which, at that time, is where I wanted to go. Just let these moments acquaint and accumulate until that charge is gone or I’m on to something else. I’m actually unsure if this series is, in fact, a chapbook or ‘book-length’ work, and instead consider it simply as a piece or series of writing, rather than a work with a formal end-point. I wouldn’t call this or any poem something ‘purer’ than something in a chap or book form, so when you ask…

AW: When does the pure poem begin to coalesce itself into a poem object?

AKP: I don’t really know what a ‘pure’ poem is, or that this state of ‘pureness’ truly exists, or rather, any thing’s as ‘pure’ as any other. Or, maybe, the purest poem is the one that never gets written. But, trying to get to the second part of the question, maybe there’s a conscious gesture towards after the writing-stage feels ‘complete’ and the thought begins to evolve towards ‘something else’ ‘this’ work can be, or attempting to clear through these preconceptions to discover what elements of physicality or object-ness are embedded within the piece all along.

AW: Two years ago, we published online a chapbook-length work of yours, Bonjour Meriwether and the Rabid Maps. A few months ago, the work was published again by Fact-Simile as a handmade chapbook. How do you see the difference between these two forms of publication? Do the different forms in any way make the work itself different?

AKP: I think each format has more impact on an audience’s experience rather than on the work itself. Recently, I was considering format in relation to film viewing; how Casablanca is Casablanca, whether it’s viewed on 35mm film in a theater (perhaps a more ‘social’ scene?), or at home (with others or alone) on broadcast television, a VHS or DVD (rented at a store, or online, or purchased), or streamed. What changes is the viewer’s experience of that content, their place within that variability of connection. Perhaps there’s challenge or, rather, opportunity to make each experience unique, in whatever medium.

Bonjour Meriwether has been a blessed project for me because of the wonderful editors I’ve been involved with (including yourself and others at TOA, and JenMarie Davis & Travis Macdonald at Fact-Simile) whose attentions to their particular format of choice – online, in print – have allowed different (separate, but common) surfaces of this text to manifest…

The Offending Adam released Bonjour in four parts throughout the week, which emphasized the serial nature and non-linear narrativity. To me this recalled an earlier era and form, akin to an old radio serial drama, or story chapters appearing in periodicals, allowing the work’s lyric story to unfold over time. Also, more generally I find the weekly release of TOA a refreshing model, unique to the scene and feel of most online literary journals. This proximal frequency crosses physical distance and makes me feel an active part of a community of poet-citizens.

I think it’s interesting and valuable to try to work with that sense of continuity with the past and communal spirit. This is not merely as homage, or for sentimental reasons, per se. Rather, it emphasizes the unique materials and personal responsibilities within an historical continuum.

Fact-Simile’s treatment of Bonjour fit wonderfully with that sense of investigating place and distance I was interested in: each copy is unique, with a cover printed on an old gas-station road map. I appreciate your insight in consideration of how a reader might experience the content, with constant re-questioning of place. Here, I’d like to quote you back to you, I guess in thinking about how this might answer your own questions, above: How do you see the difference between these two forms of publication? Do the different forms in any way make the work itself different? You wrote:

“place refers to two things: geographical location and the observation of one’s surroundings. Though the coordinates are hyperspecific, they work to dis-locate the reader who likely is unable to, without seeking outside help, connect the coordinates to a known location. We keep asking Where are we? as each set of coordinates arises… [D]escriptions… prevent us from being grounded in a specific understanding that we are in a specific named place. We can only know exactly where we are if we stay in the same place and never move. Instead, to journey forth, echoing René Char: ‘How can we live without the unknown in front of us?’”

Almost by accident, we found this attention to place could also be brought to this chapbook’s distribution: the specificity of the covers’ locations allowed us to match readers with map covers that held personal meaning to them. It felt like giving a gift to a friend, and acknowledging each reader’s (and I mean a specific, not an abstract person) unique locale and personal history.

Also, I just want to say it’s been an honor working with Fact-Simile. I love how they use reclaimed/recycled products for their publishing projects, as a subtle ethical engagement towards material sustainability. Jen and Travis’ impulse is to “poeticize everything”, which you find in their books and curios, from baseball cards to cigarette packs.

AW: That locational aspect of Fact-Simile’s treatment of the chapbook was really remarkable. The cover chosen for my copy was from Texas, my home state, and did engage my re-reading of the series in a new way, in some sense by locating the series within my own past experiences. Your relationship to chapbooks and publishing is not just as a writer. You have also published books and chapbooks as one of the Livestock Editions collective, which last summer started publishing an online edition of the journal Summer Stock. I’d like to hear more about this ongoing publishing project.

AKP: Jared Hayes and I started Livestock in 2006. Starting a small press seemed like the natural progression of our poetry kinship. We’d just graduated with MFAs from Naropa’s Kerouac School, still living in Boulder. We envisioned producing a little handmade magazine that was quick, dirty, tactile. Hot Whiskey Press and the House Press collective were contemporary influences. We talked a lot about poetry, community and small press poetries mimeo revolution of the ‘60s/NY School while living together. I recently asked Jared about this period of our lives, and he responded:

what a place and moment…and so feel that those small press [conversations] were really as much about what we didn’t yet know about those magazines…they were our occult romanticism…these were writers we respected just deciding together to make these journals…we knew how they were mimeographed and distributed and by whom…but we were in the dark as to much of the actual writing inside … this isn’t to say we were ignorant of those writers actual writing… mayer/waldman/ sanders/berrigan…even the locus solus fellas before…we were reading or had read to greater or lesser extent…i was submerged in a deluge of so many of the joys and politics and spirit these authors held…so their early journals were like this huge presence of influence residing in the absence of content…a feeling of being linked to the mythos of lineage through trajectory and lack…

We decided on Summer Stock as a limited run weekly journal to correspond with the Summer Writing Program, where students and faculty are earnestly supportive and eager for creative conversation. We printed and collated issues in our living room on a printer Jared hauled from a dumpster. We formatted the first issue using scissors and tape, which made for a pretty gaudy look with those sensitive black photocopy bleed lines; we learned on the fly. The cover was a brown paper bag stock, with reference to a Ted Berrigan Sonnet: “I think I was thinking / when I was ahead I’d be somewhere like Perry Street / erudite dazzling slim and badly-loved / contemplating my new book of poetry / to be printed in simple type on old brown paper / feminine marvelous and tough” Summer Stock was intended to be local, ephemeral. We published what we liked from who was around; by and for present company.

When I suggested to remake Summer Stock online, my intention was to (re-)create that communal, open spirit of our journal in an organic, digital space; with poets and writers who we find kinship with, in their attention to mindful, social, performative experimental or experiential open (open field, open source, i.e. engaging with outside texts, as history; or conceptual, appropriative, collaborative) literature. But we have no agenda or thoughts of exclusivity, really. Just that we’re offering up our energies to the ever-expanding network of friends and collaborators.

Our chapbooks reflect these poetic attentions: periplum maps our star/less shores by Jennifer Rogers has a playful, surreal projective sensuousness; and .compilate. by j/j hastain wrings possibilities from new sentence-like sensual abstractions. Jared edited and designed these books with elegant minimalism – bright covers, hand-sewn bindings. Perhaps this is what I love about the personality of a chapbook: it’s modest, fragile, and intimate. Somehow, a chapbook is both ephemeral and timeless, more-so than a book, maybe more like a body.

AW: How does your position as a poet affect your approach to publishing? How has publishing affected your approach to writing?

AKP: I think Jared and I both believe writing is entwined with the act of reading; each is a conversation, with history and your local environment. I guess, as an editor, I’ve actually learned a lot reading query letters! I really love hearing writers describe their process. Notes, sources, methods: how a poet thinks about what gets thought, intergives with the page. This all inspires me to continue to become more attuned to my thoughts and physical actions as I conceptualize and my attempts at poetry. Even “no method” is a method, right? Also, it’s a very intimate thing to get into other writers’ Word docs, or words in progress. I feel tremendous responsibility and care in preparing these poets’ words and forms for publication. I want to make sure everything vessels across to the reader exactly how the writer intended; I don’t want editorial format to overshadow content. I think that’s given me a better appreciation for integrated subtleties in form and format.

AW: Let’s return full-circle to get back into your own work. What are you writing right now? I’m curious specifically to hear a bit more about the “physical actions” of your writing. I can’t help but think of Frank O’Hara’s interest in action painting…

AKP: Recently I’ve been thinking about collaborative writing and curation as poethical actions. Elizabeth Guthrie and I are beginning “Notes Toward a Practice Journal”, a collaboration about integrating meditation and poetry practices. I’m also writing an investigative series MAYFLOWER SUTRA that draws on Native American/Pilgrim relations, regional history of my home area, on South Shore of Massachusetts, and expanding that region outward by incorporating symbolism and language from Scandinavian mythology (Poetic Edda), The Diamond Sutra, and dreams of a somewhat forgotten American Surrealist, Pete Winslow.

AW: I remember vividly the first time I read your poems, when we were trading packets or work in Cambridge. Instead of handing me the standard 8.5×11 computer-printed-stapled-top-left-corner packet, you had made me an overflowing chapbook-thing of your poetry, filled with printed material, found material, and Xeroxed material. This remains one of my favorite book-objects. I’d love to hear more about your own relationship with making, printing-that physical relationship with the book-object.

AKP: Thanks, Andrew! I like bookmaking, though I’m not particularly good at it. I don’t have great dexterity so my cuts, holes, and knots are pretty imperfect. But I’m interested in the concept of wabi sabi, so let’s just call it an art of imperfection. From what I can remember, I made you a ‘Selected Poems’, and I experimented with multiple signatures and the side-stitch looks like a clumpy, waxed thread dreadlock. But, it was a joy to make that book for you. I think bookmaking is an exciting and intimate way to pass creative work along.

AW: As this is part of our chapbook special and as a way to conclude the interview, are any chapbooks or chapbook presses that you’ve found particularly interesting lately?

AKP: I’m currently in love with Little Red Leaves. I think they have a wonderful sense of material (in the work they choose to publish, and the physical aspects of their book-making). I like how they integrate and present their web-based content (e-books & journals), and also produce beautifully handmade, sewn chapbooks from recycled fabrics. Two particular favorites from the 2011 LRL Textile Series are Mairéad Byrne’s Lucky and Sarah Mangold’s An Antennae Called the Body.

I also feel such admiration and affinity with Susana Gardner’s Dusie Kollectiv. What attracts me is how Dusie’s annual poetry chapbook collective operates as a communal, free trade economy. The artists write and produce their own chapbooks and mail them to one another. In keeping the number of participants relatively small, the writer/book makers get to imagine and create these wonderfully conceptualized book-art objects. There’s such care and personality to each aspect of production. I think the Dusie project is the guiding post for this holistic production and design; there’s no hard line between poem-writing and object-making with these artists. Form and content are fully integrated, and distributed with a personal sense of locality and human connection. This is such a positive alternative to the current commodification and depersonalization of reading experience brought on by e-reader interface. Handmade, recycled, organic: island-binding.