EAR EATER

1) Give us a sentence or two about your work. Or give us as many as you need.

1. for me, this question is made of more metal than i would like it to be. or at least, lately i’m having blur feelings about my poems. i know i want to leave behind plenty of layers. i know i want to find skyscraper skin ruptured and tied around my ankles. i want flamingo shards in between my hair oils. i want to fucking love and know someone/people in the good way. by trying to do this, i see the worlds wash up. sometimes in pieces. now, i’m going to force wallace stevens to say something about what my writing might be trying to do. “catches tigers/in red weather.” - disillusionment at 10 o’clock.

2) What’s the last thing you read that got you truly excited?

2. i participate in a reading group with the poets i go to school with called, “gristle day.” we read and discuss books we won’t get assigned in class. bhanu khapli. peter richards. we read this book called, I LOVE DICK, by chris kraus that knocked my chest out of me. people who know me are rolling their eyes right now. i’ve been talking about it. i just. i hadn’t read anything quite this modern/present day that i felt articulated what it was like to be a female artist/intellectual in academia. i’m also a female who has often dated and fallen in love with male artists/intellectuals, which is something else the book deals heavily with. is it stupid that it’s that simple? it forced me to consider, in what i found to be a really productive and critical manner, the gender dynamics of this place where many of us primarily earn a living while trying to be living. how do we love here sincerely and with complexity? how do we work here sincerely and with complexity? also RICHARD BRAUTIGAN’s The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster. i want to sleep whatever gator jerky he’s comes up with those titles on. what a glob of magic mayo that man is! i’m leaning back on my computer chair and clutching my chest right now thinking about those small poems perching.

3) Before this, what were you thinking about?

3. ha. the band actually? i was just watching that documentary about the band’s album the band while drinking a beer i bought on a trip to wisconsin this past weekend. i couldn’t find the new episode of Girls to pirate. man oh man, though, i love watching garth hudson play and yelp. one of them says he asked garth how he got to be the way he is. the guy says garth replied, “well, i played at my uncle’s funeral parlor,” and then the documentary cuts to this fantastic shot of present-day garth muscling and crawling over his keyboards. he’s wearing a white hat that has one of those cheap braided strings across the bill. it’s almost pulled all the way down to the end of his big, white beard, but the way he’s lurching and vomiting on those keys makes it seem like he’s looking you in the eye holes. some kind of silver chain is shaking on his neck. i just like it when people are so in love with what they do, when it’s this huge and lovely tree growth in them. it’s weird and heartening and the kind of beyond you crouch towards.

4) What are your hopes for the evening?

4. this will be the first time i read a group of poems from the manuscript i’m working on together. i’m excited to feel those big blocks come out of my mouth one after the other. i’m excited to destroy a room with a bunch of other female poets. my cattle are standing all together. they are ready to move, and it almost hits you like purring.

5) Why would anyone ever go to a reading?

5. i’m going to sound too general and clench fist again. the act of performing a reading is not a simple one. however, poetry doesn’t live without readings. without voices making actual noise here and there. poetry is always slipping (at least!) one toe off the page, yeah? i think that every poem that has a little blood in it struggles to stand. that’s part of the mist we grasp at when we try to explain out of our split navels why poetry why. poems fight their sound, lift their sounds over them, toy with their sounds, die in their sounds, and without some voice giving them balloon, i think there’s a risk of that power being lost. also, to see and hear a poet grip a room…that’s tearing the moon to rags and watching em wave.