J.I. Kleinberg : my writing day

Each writing day, I start here, or sometimes there, follow my own rules, or break them, sometimes end up with something to show for myself and sometimes not. Beside my “regular” work, which is also writing (for businesses), I make poems. In two places.

Most days, before the disruption of email, social media, or paying work, with coffee at hand, I sit at my computer in the corner, read poems out of several books, then draft at least a short poem. This is my desk:

Then (or sometimes first) I go into “my room” and work on found poems, first perusing magazines cadged from the library’s free bin for phrases that fit my requirements (no single words; physically attached to one another with no trickery; completely disengaged from the original sense and syntax; no attributable phrases). I find a lot (a LOT) of words before I find a poem. Here’s my work table:

All those little pieces of paper are found words. All those little drawers contain words on a variety of recurring topics. I typically have about twenty in process, but it can be months before I find the phrase that ties the words together.

In the center foreground is a small green sheet on top of a pink sheet with this poem in progress (words from one of the little drawers labeled meta):

Once composed into something poemy, the chunks of text are glued onto the green paper, then scanned and posted on chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com. Almost every day. Like all writing, some of these work, some don’t, and a few are good. This is admittedly obsessive, but the words and the process continue to interest me, even after 1,745 of them.

A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, J.I. Kleinberg is co-editor of 56 Days of August (Five Oaks Press 2017) and Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington (Other Mind Press 2015). Her poetry has appeared recently in One, Diagram, WA129, Otoliths, Raven Chronicles, Calamus Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and posts most days at chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com and thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com.

My (Small Press) Writing Day – Henk Rossouw

My (small press) writing day begins with words and the questions each word offers. The first book I wrote emerged from a single word, “Xamissa,” which newly liberated South Africans used in the 1990s to speak of the springs and streams running underneath the city of Cape Town, from Table Mountain to the sea. The initial question “Xamissa” raised: Was the version of the sea-mountain city I grew up in—with its history of colonial dispossession, enslavement, apartheid—simply inevitable, or could there have been another city, a just city, an open city?

The writing day begins with writing toward a poetics. “Begin and begin again,” Gertrude Stein writes, both a statement of poetics and its enactment. In order to begin I begin with the ways of beginning. This could be a writing surface I like, a bit of light, a chair. But it is also the larger questions that bring me to the chair in the first place: Is it possible to speak? In what form? Who is listening? Day-to-day, each day I write, by asking here on the page what it is that I am doing in poetry—and why—I ask for further space for the doing thereof. In the first place.

I am an investigative poet. A relational poet, in the sense of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. This is contingent; it will change. For now, I ask questions through the words I begin with: to proceed, to listen, to stop short. To proceed or give myself permission to write. To listen to the materials that obsess me, whether those materials are a page from the archives of the Dutch East India Company, a mountain stream above Cape Town, or a silence—the material of the night. To stop short, acknowledge limit, be with the ground from which poetry springs.

The first word I wrote today: “My”. One of the questions that I return to when I sit down to write: Is this an act of isolation, of my poem above all else, or is this an act toward an “our,” even if of no more than an imagined “us”? At the upper limit, the sociality Fred Moten sings of?

What I am saying is: Often I used to sit down to write, in order to write nothing. I used to sit and not write. In my head, in the way, the isolation of growing up under apartheid, and also in the way the (male) myth: The writer, to be a writer, must be alone. Alone and somewhat mad. The male writer must cultivate isolation, in order to procure (via self-inflicted social wounds) “genius.” This fallacy is a misreading of the Romantics, a misreading of John Clare especially, but it is a misreading that has become a cultural headstone that encourages an early death.

Questioning the lyric prevalence of “I”—the “I” of the poem, its relation to others, its subject position—helped move this “I”: not exactly out of the poem but out of the way, out of the way of the writing. Days of writing began. In other words, once I began a praxis, through the help of many teachers, of poetry as a unique way toward others, to be in the “human circle” (Kafka’s phrase), to be with and among others, I began to sit down and write. Often, in the morning.

In parentheses, “small press.” I need the small press in parentheses for my writing day to begin. To say this another way: The presence of multiple small presses in my social environment fosters the sense of community on which my writing day depends. The small press: my red wheelbarrow? I have just started teaching creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where Marthe Reed was based for many years. Marthe Reed of Black Radish Books. I did not know Marthe Reed, I did not get a chance to know her before she died, but there is a community of writers and readers here—here is Louisiana but also Hawaii, upstate New York, Ontario, your place also—a community gathered around small presses, a community that she not only participated in but also activated. Right now, my (small press) writing day begins with reading her work. I read to begin? Or, the asynchronous conversation of reading asks: begin?

At the same time, the parentheses around “small press” let the writing day begin: they let my desire for the publication of the day’s writing become quieter, a background desire. Publication is not so much the auction of the mind—the (small press) circumvents the auction, somewhat—as an afterthought, an afterglow. Tomorrow, my (small press) writing day will begin again with teaching Emily Dickinson. Her fascicles, hand-sewn: The smallest of presses, perhaps the most powerful? Kept in a drawer until her readers could catch up with her. What would Dickinson have said of small presses? At a guess, that there are plural suns in the poetics multiverse:

The Poets light but Lamps —

Themselves — go out —

The Wicks they stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns —

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference —

At the root of my (small press) writing day, though, is the tension between the words “writing” and “day”. How can writing fit in the day when the day has to fit in other requests: meetings, students, classes, traffic, sleep. Some of those requests are welcome—from students, for instance—but so often the day and the writing stand in opposition to each other. It becomes not so much writing day as writing minutes? At the same time, when I read to begin, Glissant reminds me: “We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments.” In other words—among many ways to interpret this—the poem no longer has to fit within a day, a moment, a flash. Glissant perhaps also meant Walter Benjamin’s lightning, his dialectical image. Here on the ground, though, where both Glissant and Benjamin liked to look, it means that a long poem can accumulate itself over time, across the days.

Or, more simply, Kristin Prevallet interprets Glissant’s sentences in this way: “How do poems get written? Where does that flash of creativity come from? What is inspiration? The Relational poet simplifies the first question by discarding the last, and rather than sitting on mountaintops waiting for genius to strike, looks around and begins collecting, accreting, gathering.” In this schema, is the sea language itself? If so, even the tiniest granule we begin and begin again in the writing day, in the writing minute, may accumulate into sediment, the seabed, of the new.

Henk Rossouw's book-length poem Xamissa, published by Fordham University Press in 2018, won the Poets Out Loud Editor's Prize. Wesleyan University Press's Best American Experimental Writing 2018 featured an excerpt. The African Poetry Book Fund and Akashic Books included his chapbook The Water Archives in the 2018 boxed set New-Generation African Poets. Poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, Henk received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD from the University of Houston. He is an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly. An assistant professor, Henk teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

My Writing Day | Joe Hall

Well

I work six days a week now. It’s a precarious writing environment.

My writing days are determined by shifting factors.

And sometimes during my writing days I don’t write at all. I need to be idle. I am not a machine.

Nerve Rhythm

I can’t write when my hand can’t feel.

In my twenties, there was a year I would wake up with my hands numb or tingling. Eventually and expensively, I discovered herniated discs in my neck were pinching down on nerves. The channel of writing opens when my muscles are stretched, either after exercise and stretching. Or first thing, before breakfast, coffee, or anything, before the tightness of sleep becomes a clench.

I stretch on a mat in front of two windows while listening to podcasts. Or shoot a hundred baskets at an outdoor court.

Half of my writing happens on my back on a couch or a half-made bed. This is essential writing equipment.

My first book was drafted almost entirely in bed. In dishabille.

Social Energy

When my body is good and I have time in the morning before I work at the bookshop, or labor library, or before some article or paper or whatever is too close to being due that it eclipses everything, I write poetry. This might be on the bus, or on the red benches of the Gimme! Coffee on Cayuga St., or in the quiet room of the labor library. I tell myself I am trying to write good poems, but really I’m practicing putting language into motion, accessing a vocabulary and rhythm, touching a thought I think is surfacing.

Writing that might have atmosphere oxygen often happens later in the day, after being among people, some new or deepening or fraying social being.

A text from Marty, an email from Carra, a card from Jennifer, 3 black hearts from Ellis, the little hierarchy-establishing gambits of overwrought neoliberals at the bookstore, the floods and multiply dividing streams of talk, complaint, consideration, chatter, cooing, dissection between Cheryl and I as we make dinner.

I write this walking up a steep hill in Ithaca on the back of drafts of poems I cut from a reading after driving into town with Cheryl, talking, talking. 

I remember playing guitar and hanging out with my friends E & J on Utica Street, going home to my kitchen table, opening my notebook and drafting a poem straight off with the conversation of guitars in my head, the chord changes of E’s song.

I remember sitting in on conversations and confrontational meetings between student reps and administrators (and cops!) as part of Living Stipend campaign, going to bed upset, waking up, processing It through writing. I have recently been trolled by far right fucks on a post asking for translation assistance for someone. Fuck you troll! I’m turning it into writing. I am eating your energy. Give it to me.

I am ambivalent that this is what it takes to have a writing day. I want to be more than a witness to my local social and political world. Raquel Salas Rivera wrote this year about their poems as solidarities: “There are poems like solidarities. This is the most ideal case.” I sat a long time, thinking about what this meant as a horizon for writing. I’ve also returned to Nathaniel Mackey’s discussion of Cante Moro and the idea of “the cultivation of another voice, a voice that is other than that proposed by one’s intentions, tangential to one’s intentions, angular, oblique—the obliquity of an unbound reference.” Cultivating this voice can mean listening to the dead, sure, but also listening intently to conversations with the living, making one’s poetry in dialogue with those. Anyway, I don’t think my life or writing achieves these things at all, solidarity, unbound reference. I’d like it to. It’s certainly not on par with the work of these writers.

Conversations with other people and witnessing civic acts of discourse makes me remember the heft of language, that breathes life and change into my usual isolated language calisthenics and gives writing days a certain energy. I mean, my first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, was a book-length love poem for my partner Cheryl. My second book, The Container Store, I wrote with Chad Hardy. It came alive during furious, dialogical editing sessions where I would see his edits in real time and respond, the cursor gobbling up entire stanzas, moving pieces across pages.

Then Loneliness

There are writing days where the writing has piled up across months and years and must leave me. It must go. Then I find a way to be with the mass for whole days. I figure out a way to be alone. These are risky days, with the work obsessively, to not let it go, to walk with it, to sleep with it, to wake with it. To finish it, to salvage something from it, to decide if it’s worth the world at all.

Draining puss, removing green digits, knitting strange organs into the mass to mediate its energies. I might print the MS, put it in a clipboard and crouch into a hot bath, the end of the clipboard balanced at the top of my belly. I might take each page and tile the floor, think I’ve got it, gather the pages, then an hour later start again, convinced it is worse than before. This takes space.

There’s no hiding from writing at the end of these days, the absurdity and smallness of it in the eyes of others, the untruths, slips, mistakes in my own eyes.

No matter how it’s gone, at the end of my writing day I go to bed feeling like I’ve just stolen something from someone I love, or I feel like a spider who has extruded a very beautiful web.

Wake up, do it again. Face the whole mineral accretion touching one’s ability to know and realize intention in and through language. Kocik, Robert: “When words mean only what they say, we die” (293). Splashing in the tub. Fun with words.

Last time, for Someone’s Utopia, I was in a timeshare, using my brother’s days—by a lake in winter, off-season.

I wrote at a tiny desk,

read lots of poetry in the bath,

took a lovely slushy walk

kept putting hot sauce in my food resulting in stomach ache

watched Aronofsky’s terrible genocide-porn Aronofsky Noah

felt a day and a half before it was time to go that that MS wasn’t going to get better, that I’d made unfixable errors at the beginning, and sat in front of my laptop for who knows how long, some dangling disassociated moment, before I clicked send, whipped laptop off desk and ran around the house.

A Materialist, Aren’t I?

I’ve been trying to describe writing with a certain kind of energy.

Aluminum processed at the Taishan City Kam Kiu Aluminium Extrusion company

raw Aluminum from the body of Taiwan.

Steel from Unisteel Technology Ltd in China.

Neodymium

Europium

Cerium

Pulpwood logs

Carbon black

Polystyrene

Polypropylene

Tungsten Carbide       

Etc

Etc       

All the human labor to extract, produce, ship, vend, maintain

For first drafts, a notebook, strong binding, small enough to carry for two to four years, my laptop, a socket, copy paper, a hot drink, my phone in another room, the book I am reading or a book as a model at hand, sometimes a book (why am I embarrassed to write that?) that I write principles in.

A desk at a window facing South or West for light. This might seem banal but was a point of contention between Cheryl and I. The desk in our previous home was against a North facing window in a room painted brown in grey Buffalo. I kept relocating to an east facing chair at the kitchen table. In a small apartment this meant I was everywhere.

Joe Hall is the author of Someone's Utopia, three other books, and articles on poetry in the 17th and 21st centuries. He has a PhD in literature and works in a labor library and bookstore in Ithaca, NY. Judge his extrusions: joehalljoehall.com, @joehalljoehall.