"Bring You Back Paceless Paces": An Interview with Purvi Shah

Purvi Shah seeks to inspire change through her work as a non-profit consultant, anti-violence advocate, and writer. She won the inaugural SONY South Asian Social Services Award for her work fighting violence against women and recently directed Together We Are New York, an Asian American poetry project responding to the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. Her book, Terrain Tracks, was nominated for the Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award. Find her work at http://purvipoets.net, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/purvi-shah/, or @PurviPoets.

Her poem "Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again." appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Purvi Shah talks to interviewer Elizabeth Deanna Morris about the push and pull of lines, the process of paper to web page, and the many events that culminate to create one single poem.

1. What was the process behind writing “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”?

This poem begins in gates.

I first wrote it on July 25, 2012. Some of the gates of that time I unfasten here:

• A summer collaboration – with poets April Naoko Heck, Sahar Muradi & Zohra Saed – on gates as they relate to histories, passages, cities, and our own human transformations;
• My devouring of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, essays by Jane Hirshfield;
• My finishing the first pada and starting the second in The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali by Edwin F. Bryant –– accompanied by active asana practice that week;
• Planning a celebration for a pivotal birthday (think: excitement/vexations spectrum);
• An old flame, who after perfidy, connected with me on social media (WHAT?!? and forgive me my own net stalking/mixed messages to the universe); and,
• My restlessness of spirit and search for THE RIGHT ONE or as I wrote in my journal that day, “I have pulled down the gate & am…a young girl alight…towards my true destiny.”

In this swirl of the day’s gates, an image of Cerberus popped into my head.

“Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.” streamed forth as my solution for not only escaping the hellhound but for rebirth; enacting the rough work of closing and seeding new directions; and, moving beyond the space of regret, re-tracing errors, and enticing detours to the path you know you must take, the path that makes future. This movement from fear to active faith.

Perhaps on the subway to a Kundiman salon where I was reading that 25^thevening, I wrote the poem’s first draft as outpouring. Upon review in the next few days and weeks, I altered order and added a few lines. You can see the original and my elements of change (prior to the computer variations) here.

2. One of the things that I think poetry allows a writer to do is break open language that we are already familiar with, in this case, the phrase, “beating a dead dog,” which you’ve rejected. What about this phrase prompted its investigation?

For the reasons above, I had been thinking about how the past can dog you. How we allow the past to dog us. At that moment, I wanted to rise and see if there could be a way to make the future your dog. I sought to break the pattern of cause and effect, human binding through temporality – i.e. a future delinked from pasts. Envision fresh potential to actualize it. Given I sought a new view, the language too had to be a new vista on the familiar: perhaps a slight off-rhythm of sorts, a genesis leading to unexpected births, root bearing radical bloom. Poetry becomes palpable not only when you can see newly but rather when you can grasp that sight – as if it were a bird about to fly from your hand & you can watch and accompany this flight. With “Sometimes you need to shoot a dead dog. Again.”, I aimed to defamiliarize a phrase and the phrasings of our lives. To bring death alive. To live from the yes that arises from a no.

3. I love how you push and pull the density of your lines and stanzas throughout your poem. Could you talk about this poems form? Did it come organically or in the revisions?

Yay! I love the push & pull of the lines too: thank you! As you can see from my snapshot above, the form came through mainly as I transferred the poem from page to computer. But, for me, the form was embedded already, even though the first draft may look like a paragraph or prose poem. Through the shape of the poem, I sought to enact a sense of gates (long lines) as well as movement (shorter lines) & errors or possibilities (the drifted lines near the right margin). That risk of movement, chance knowings/outcomes.

The published poem is slightly different from my final version. Due to the form of the webpage and its line-length limits, I sliced my second and third lines into three lines (lines 2-4 as published). In my version of the poem, these three lines are two tracks that run across a standard size page. They enact a barrier and the poem enacts a departure from that barricade. Essentially, the push & pull is even more dramatic.

In the past few years, I’ve been working across the page with lines/right margins to embody movement, flight, freedom, departures. I hope the form encourages readers to feel less stable and yet more open – perceive their ability to forge new ground. Perhaps this is my yogic poetics. Though only you can know (and tell me) if such felt reality sparks true for you.

4. What books have been surprising you recently?

Most powerful to me recently have been books in the making. Through the Poets House Emerging Fellowship, I had the great privilege of reading and offering feedback on manuscripts by some poets in our group. The dynamic poems I encountered – so different in voice, form, and preoccupations than my own – continually broadened my sense of poetry, my sense of what is possible, my understanding of what matters. I hope these powerful works will reach you and the wider public soon!

In the arena of published works, lately I’ve been relishing the profound layerings of Srikanth Reddy, the threadings of Lee Ann Brown, the questionings/solutions of Evie Shockley, and the bold heart of Joy Harjo. And I’ve been raptured again by the work of Mirabai: I strive for my own work to have such fire, grace, grip, and soul-speech.

5. What else have you been writing?

Desire. In my writing, I return to desire – which encompasses longing, humor, joy, the world.

In addition to now & then tweeting poems @PurviPoets & my Monday Facebook poetry status updates, I have been writing towards my next collection – a series of poems focusing on women’s desire, social status, and being through re-imaginings from three figures of Indian iconography: Mira, Saraswati, and Maya. You can hear one of the early Mira poems I wrote – and another will be published in Quiddity later this year. I’m excited to be stitching the wisdom of “ancestors” in new terrains, to be writing in conversation with cosmos.

I’ve also been exploring writing poems with more humor and feisty attitude (bringing more of myself into the poems!). These recent poems explore the injury sustained by an Ecuadorian nanosatellite or near-lynched mannequins or unwittingly smiting a mosquito with my breast. These days, I’m generally working the line between the sacred and the profane, the reverent and irreverent, surrender and willing change. It is a fine line to walk.

"Intended Only for Sparrows": An Interview with Michael Stewart

Michael Stewart writes odd, short things that have been published in an array of journals and a couple of anthologies. He is the author of A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic (The Cupboard), Almost Perfect Forms (Ugly Duckling), Sebastian, an illustrated book for adults (Hello Martha Press) and The Hieroglyphics (Mud Luscious Press). Later this year, Mud Luscious will be printing his next book, Answers, a series of unhelpful, but hopefully interesting answers to questions submitted by strangers. Currently, he lectures at Brown University. More of his work can be found at: strangesympathies.com.

His story "A Humiliation of Sparrows" appears in Issue Forty-Five of The Collagist.

Here, Michael Stewart talks to interviewer Thomas Calder about the lonely life of hoarders, the art of trimming details and the class distinction between the sparrow and the martin. 

1. I’m always curious about the origin of a writer’s story. What was the seed for “A Humiliation of Sparrows”? There are a number of fantastic images throughout the piece. I’m curious if it started with say, “a lone downy feather falling like the first sign of snow” or the rewarding “smell of burning feathers”? Or did it begin somewhere else entirely?

My father tends to hoard things. He has binders of dead money, boxes of old trophies, rows of gutted pinball machines, more boxes stuffed with various magazines. This has always seemed to me a lonely way to live. Those boxes of newspapers or tools or board games start to make the walls of your house thicker, more impenetrable, and the rooms smaller, less livable. So, mostly this was an attempt to work through some of those ideas, and to imagine, really to delight in, the idea of tearing those walls down. 

Additionally, I was looking into the history of the nouns of venery—a murder of crows, an unkindness of ravens—and I came across a humiliation of sparrows. Sparrows have always had a particular place in my personal mythology, and something about that phrase opened the story for me. The rest was almost dictation. 

2. Kate is a character that we only catch glimpses of, but is essential to the story. As a first-person narrative that deals, in part, with loss, I wonder if you could talk about the process of writing Kate’s character. Did earlier drafts spend more time with her? Or did you know going in that her character would be one that the narrator could not linger on for any extended period of time? 

Aw, Kate! I spent a lot of time mapping out their relationship: how they met—on the bus, they talked for a week before he asked her out; their honeymoon in Alsace—his first and last trip out of the states, her third; and etc. Early drafts made more mention of her and hinted at her illness, the isolation is caused, but with each revision I trimmed back those details. It felt important that she only be represented by physical things, that any information we got about her should be sparked by objects in his collection. 

3. I couldn’t help but think of Poe’s “The Raven,” as I read your story. Did Poe’s poem inform your story at all? I also felt compelled to look up  information online about sparrows. One site states the sparrow calls on us “to keep our burdens as light as we can in order to avoid a heavy heart.” I thought that quite fitting for your story. At what stage in drafting did you start to consider the type of bird you would have your character deal with? 

I didn't have The Raven or The Tell-Tale Heart in mind when I wrote the piece, but when I reread the story it is obvious that they were influences. You can't—and I can't imagine why you would want too—escape anyone you read under the covers with a penlight anymore than you can escape where you are from.  

Sparrows, as I mentioned before, have a personal meaning for me. My mother was one of those backyard aviarists with a mania for purple martins. She bought books on attracting them, which lead her to putting up a tin birdhouse shaped like some Victorian manner in the center of our backyard. It had dozens of holes for the birds to crawl into, and it was so tall we had to sink it into the ground with a cylinder of concrete. Martins are impressive they dive a lot and the glimmer a bit, so everyone tried to cultivate them. She was, if I remember, pretty unsuccessful and inevitably sparrows would take over the cubbies intended for the martins, and my mother, just as inevitably, would lower the birdhouse and remove their nests. They were just balls of dried grass and a few eggs. For some reason I could never figure out, sparrows were pest; kids shot them with BB guns. This of course gave me an affection for them. I dreamt of littering a tree with birdhouses intended only for sparrows. 

As I grew older, I couldn't escape the idea that this was all about class. We lived in one of the more rundown, prefabricated houses at the time and there was something aristocratic about the martins, something selective and precious that you couldn't buy. A group of martins is aptly called a richness. Sparrows then were more like us. Numerous and capable of living in between places, places intended for others from which inevitably banks or circumstance would remove us. 

The story is about lack and the kind of pull, or orbit, lack creates. Just as Poe's narrator reads everything through the lens of Lenore, so does our narrator through his grubby altars to Kate. I mean, The Raven is really a mundane story. It's the lack of Lenore that turns an inconsequential event into a horror. The raven is no more than an echo, you have to supply the scream. 

4. What are you currently working on?

Well, I am finishing up The Answers, a three-year-old project where I have been soliciting questions from strangers online and answering them in unhelpful, but hopefully poetic ways. The questions have been surprisingly great: everything from, "How did you lose your virginity?" to, "How do I remove a mustard stain?" It's been a lot of fun to write. Everyday there is a fresh prompt sitting in front of you and at least one unknown reader interested in what you have to say. 

5. It’s summer time. What do you have on your reading list?

My reading list? What a wonderful question, here is what is on my nightstand: Wonderful Investigations by Dan Beachy-Quick; A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck (I love this bit on page 107: "The Germans say, 'That man has no ghost in him.' They say of a poor wine, 'This is an unghostly wine.' Thy say a person can be Rich in Ghostliness. That a person of wit possess ghost."); American Science Fiction edited by Gary Wolfe (a fantastic two book anthology of the early stuff); They Live by Lethem (I love this series); The Literary Conference by Aria; Kingdom Come; the most recentHawkeye comic (one of my favorite runs in years, but it's still no Hellboy); Remainder; The Lazarus Project by Hemon;The Giant O'Brien by Hilary Mantel; this seems a good of time as any to mention that the Japanese have a word,tsudoku, for people who collect books with no regard for finishing them; Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum; The Original Laura by Nabokov; Second Sex—de Beuvoir (should be required reading); Seamstress in the Wind, another by Aria;Red Doc by Carson (is Carson our greatest Canadian import?); The Lords of Salem, ghost written by Brian Evenson (I appear, briefly, on page 106); Intimate Memoirs, Simenon's memoir (he fascinates me, for example he claimed to have slept with 10,000women and he wrote nearly 400 books, if you count the novellas); But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer (recommend to me with such enthusiasm by Mona Awad); The Secret History by Donna Tarrt; Cinema Stories by Alexandra Kluge; All That Is by James Salter (I just interviewed Salter about this book, and he is, without reservation, my favorite sentence writer); and speaking of great sentences, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard; Memorable Days—Salter's memoir (rereading for the interview); Out of Sheer Rage, another by Dyer (who it should be said has take digression and made it an art form); The Devil by Maurice Garçon;  Awkward Age by Henry James; The Invincible Iron Man (I'm not sold on the images: too many photo references—it's odd to flip a page and see a Pepper Potts panel that is directly lifted from a cover of last season's Vogue—but the story is fantastic); Recipes for Sad Women by Héctor Abad (the first book of his I've read, it's pretty great); Case Closed; Forgery by Jonathan Keats; The Complete Claudineby Collette (I always seem to have a book of Collette's near me); Xelucha an Others by M. Shiel; Modern Life, N+1;Magritte and the Enigmatic Left, one of the Simenon novels (I often find myself rereading the Margrittes unintentionally—there are 75 novels and some 30 stories. I discovered I had read this one before about 20 pages in, but I can't bring myself to stop rereading it); The Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier; and Cleavage by Chris Tysh. 

There are usually a few more detective novels and a mound of comic books but I just cleared them out on an unexpected day off. 

"Faithful to the Feeling": An Interview with Eleanor Stanford

Eleanor Stanford is the author of História, História: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands (Chicago Center for Literature and Photography) and The Book of Sleep (Carnegie Mellon Press). Her poems and essays have also appeared in Poetry, The Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and many others.  She lives in the Philadelphia area. More at www.eleanorstanford.com

Her essay "Your Sweet Words, José: Translations from the Portuguese" appears in Issue Forty-Four of The Collagist.

Here, Eleanor Stanford talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about translations, socioeconomic divides, and the music of language. 

1. Could you please discuss the origins of “Your Sweet Words, José”?

It grew out of my experiences talking with my in-laws’ housekeeper, who is an undocumented worker from Brazil. My family and I lived with my in-laws (who also happen to be Brazilian) for a summer, after we ourselves had just moved back from a year in Brazil, and I spent a lot of time chatting with the housekeeper while she made the beds or mopped the floor. Kind of awkward and weird, but after living in Brazil, I was, for better and for worse, a bit more comfortable with the socioeconomic divide that is largely taken for granted in that culture.

2. What is your first priority when working in the medium of translating someone else’s words? Please explain.

My first priority is being faithful to the feeling and to the cadences of the speech, rather than the literal meaning of the words. Even in calling this piece “translations” rather than “a translation,” I was trying to suggest this sense of multiple possible versions, and the impossibility of a single definitive translation.

3. Have you found that lessons learned from your work as a poet have influenced the way you write translations (or creative nonfiction, in general)? How so?

Definitely. In any genre, it is a similar process for me: I am trying to find the music of the language.

4. What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a novel, set in Brazil in 1968, about a young medical student who gets involved in the guerrilla resistance to the dictatorship and is forced to flee her parents’ home in São Paulo.

5. What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?

I recently read and very much enjoyed Michael Pollan’s new book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Also Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas (which I reread, as I was teaching it for a class); Mumbai New York Scranton, a charming, quirky memoir by Tamara Shopsin that includes drawings and photos; the novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, by Mohsin Hamid; The Pharmacist’s Mate, by Amy Fusselman; and Matthew Dickman’s latest collection of poems, Mayakovsky’s Revolver.

"Seemingly Turned by the Sun": An Interview with B.L. Gentry

B. L. Gentry's poetry has appeared in The Cortland Review, Eclectica, Rhino: The Poetry Forum 2011, and is forthcoming in Rhino 2013. Gentry was born in Lawrenceburg, TN. She holds a BA from the University of New Mexico, and is an MFA student in the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. She lives in Oklahoma.

Her poem "Cedar Swing" appears in issue Forty-Three of The Collagist.

Here, B. L. Gentry talks with interviewer Elizabeth Morris about static swings, turns, and shifts in landscape.

1. What was the process behind “Cedar Swing”?

I wrote “Cedar Swing” over a year ago, in an effort to reconcile my home at the time with the home of my upbringing. My family and I had relocated months before from rural Oklahoma to a fairly suburban neighborhood just outside of Tulsa, and I hoped to use the plain experience and mild culture shock I experienced during the process as a lens for discussing my childhood in, and removal from, the rural south. 

2. This poem about a swing doesn’t actually have any swinging in it—except for perhaps implicitly at the end. How do you think the image of a static swing works compared to one in motion?

It’s telling that you bring up image in this poem, because, as the title suggests, the swing wants to be central to the poem’s meaning. A static swing may represent many things—the decisiveness of clear conviction, an end or a beginning, a pause in chronology—but for me, because it is an image and not discursive information, the static swing encompasses all of these, especially the speaker’s current state of mature perspective on her childhood. The swing in motion, however, belongs to the speaker’s young self, to a developing understanding of her surroundings as she navigates them.

3. At the end, the poem turns from the husband’s swing to the father’s.  Could you talk about getting to that point in the poem? Why the decision to turn to the past?

When Jane Kenyon was translating the poems of Anna Akhmatova, she discovered a word that encompassed her work method, that is, the preference for image that she gave Akhmatova’s poems over literal denotation. Because there is no word in English for the Russian word, rodnoi, (meaning “all that is dear to me, familiar, my own,” and because this was a concept dear to Akhmatova in many of her early poems), Kenyon and her translator prioritized image because it was capable of communicating overlapping ideas in one moment. I had rodnoi in mind when I used the image of the swing.

As you say, the poem turns to the past at its end, and the focus shifts from a romantic relationship to a paternal one. The images, the swing, but also the elm tree, help to make this transition formally, allowing the speaker to see an object in her current setting and to remember a past moment, moving from the tree’s leaves shining in the sun to the doomed, glittering minnows. Yet this meditation also works as an invitation to meditate on the speaker’s interaction with men in her culture, a culture as she experienced as a subservient, first as a daughter and then later as a wife. The decision to end the poem with thoughts of the father, however, has more to do with the speaker’s longing for her past culture, the developing mature perspective we discussed in your previous question.

I made the decision to turn to the past because the poem seemed to want to discuss, through image, the idea of homesickness for one’s birthplace and an appreciation for that heritage—rodnoi. As I said, I was living in a suburban area, surrounded by houses that were typically identical to one another, and this was a very different climate than that of my upbringing. The first two decades of my life were spent in southern Tennessee near the Cumberland Gap, an landscape of forests and creeks, deer and hunters, the poverty of failed farms set against a natural beauty of the foothills of Appalachia—a land of sharp contrasts. I also had a six-year-old daughter at the time, so my thoughts naturally turned to myself at that age.

4. What’s on your summer book list?

My booklist, in whatever season in which I consult it, always includes the poets and novelists that I turn to repeatedly for inspiration, the Russian Acmeists and the canon of Western writers known for their use of imagery like Kenyon, Plath, and Gluck, but also poets that employ aesthetics that I do not habitually employ. Jack Gilbert and Philip Levine are on there, as well as my standby formalists like Seamus Heaney and Richard Wilbur. I’m very drawn to the work of John Crowe Ransom right now, as well as the lesser-known novels of Robert Penn Warren, one such being The Wilderness. Charles Wright’s “Outtakes” is also on the list, as well as the biography of Gerard Manly Hopkins. Perhaps these aren’t helpful answers. I don’t usually plan my booklists. Mostly, I read whatever interests me at the time.

5. What else have you been writing recently?

Lately, I’ve turned from short, imagistic lyrics to poems that employ a narrative  structure while using image either sparsely or in a utilitarian manner. “Cedar Swing” is a good example. I’m also working on a first-book manuscript. The poems in the book attempt, so far, to deal with the past in several different locations, ranging from the rural south to the suburbs to the maritime zones of North America. My hope is that they propose the dialogue of a speaker struggling to understand place and the disappearance of local cultures, the effects of these things on people, the land, and on herself.