The Poet on the Poem: Chana Bloch

I'm delighted to have Chana Bloch as the featured poet for The Poet on the Poem.


Chana Bloch, the author of award-winning books of poetry, translation and scholarship, is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the Creative Writing Program. Her latest book is Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015 (Autumn House Press, 2015). Her earlier poetry collections are The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, and elsewhere, as well as in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Her book awards include the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey, selected by Jane Hirshfield, and the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mrs. Dumpty, selected by Donald Hall. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in poetry and in translation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Writers Exchange Award of Poets & Writers, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Discovery Award of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.

Today's poem comes from Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015.

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Happiness Research

Rain over Berkeley! The birds are all out
delivering the news.                                                                                   
The evening is wet and happy tonight.               
“Is there more to happiness than feeling happy?”
the moral philosophers inquire.

Research has shown                                                        
if you spot a dime on the sidewalk
you're more likely to tell the professor your life 
is fine, thank you. The effect                                             
generally lasts about twenty minutes.    
                                     
Scientists are closing in on                                                               
the crowded quarter of the brain                                                 
where happiness lives. They like to think                                              
it's hunkered down
in the left prefrontal cortex.

“Even in the slums of Calcutta
people on the street describe themselves
as reasonably happy.” Why not be
reasonable? why not in Berkeley? why not                     
right now, sweetheart, while the rain                                         
is stroking the roof?                                   

The split-leaf philodendron is happy            
to be watered and fed. 
The dress I unbuttoned is more than glad
to be draped on the chair. 


DL: Research is clearly an important motif in your poem. How much actual research went into the writing of the poem? Which came first, the science or the love poem?   



CB: Research on happiness by social scientists, neuroscientists and psycho-pharmacologists has grown at a phenomenal rate over the past two decades. I must admit that I can’t help reading the stuff. So it’s not by chance that I clipped and saved a review-article by Thomas Nagle in the New York Review of Books, “Who is Happy and When?” The moral philosopher Sissela Bok, who wrote the book under review, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale UP), wants to know: What is happiness? How much should we value it? Questions I’ve often thought about. 
  


I almost said that science came before love in writing this poem, but when I looked at the article again, I saw the illustration that first caught my attention—Rubens’ captivating portrait of himself and his young wife, “In the Honeysuckle Bower,” painted the year of their marriage. In both faces, the lineaments of gratified desire.  
 


DL: What do you see as the function of the two quotations you’ve woven into the poem?



CB: I hope the quotes will draw the reader into the poem, just as they drew me into the review. They made me ask myself: How am I doing “on a scale of one to ten”? Contented, elated, exhilarated? Which suggests that I was ready to appear in the poem long before I made my appearance.
 In the version of “Happiness Research” I'd drafted a few years earlier, the scientists and the dime were already present, though not the inquiring professor. Sharing the page was “a Norwegian philosopher, 82, who recommends / daily swigs of cod liver oil / for despair:/ ‘It’s almost as good as garlic.’” That draft of the poem remained parked in a desk drawer until science and love revved up its engine.



DL: In stanza 4 you suddenly switch from third person point of view to a first person direct address to “sweetheart.” This and the rain “stroking the roof” move the poem from scientific to personal and intimate. At what point in your drafting did this risky shift enter the poem? How did you know it would work?



CB: Once I disposed of the cod liver oil and added the two quotes, the direction of the poem became clear. I knew I had the setting and the dramatis personae—our house (rain on the roof, a chair, and a split-leaf philodendron) and the two of us. I even had a come-hither line, which turns on the two senses of “reasonable”: the people in Calcutta are passably happy; let’s you and I be sensible. “Why not be reasonable?” might conceivably sound irritated, even reproachful, but the context makes clear that it’s playful, teasing, inviting. At that point I was more than glad to work on the poem. I was elated, exhilarated.



DL: You end the poem with a stunning sensual image. Tell us about your use of personification there, the dress that is “more than glad.”



CB: The dress, c’est moi. The truth is, I usually wore pants in those days, but a poem needn’t be true to fact so long as it is true to experience. In The Cortland Review and two beautiful broadsides, framed on my wall—the poem ended with the philodendron “doing its new green thing.” Once something is in print, I often can’t help wanting to change it. Working on Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015 gave me my chance. I decided that the happy plant was too nature-club-wholesome an ending for a seduction scene, so I revised and changed the order of the lines in order to end with the dress.



DL: Your first three stanzas each have five lines. Then you alter this pattern and give stanza 4 six lines and stanza 5 four lines. Why not stick to the established pattern?



CB: My poems often have an irregular number of lines in each stanza. Although I do write in couplets, triplets, or quatrains, I like to break the form depending on the demands of the poem. In stanza 4 I lay out my argument, so I need a little more room. And there’s a reason, too, for the quick denouement in stanza 5: so the couple can get down to business.





Readers, please listen to Chana reading her poem.



  

Please also visit Chana's poem, "The Joins," featured on Verse Daily on Tuesday, January 27, 2015.

Making the Unknown Known

Georgia O'Keeffe created thousands of paintings. She did not write much about her work, nor did she make many public appearances.  She wrote this in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:  "Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you..."

She often worked in sets, and made sets of sets. One image sometimes occurred in twelve variations of paintings. Her explorations were long and deep. According to an O'Keeffe website:

She was not afraid to experiment with the patterns, sizes, design, and the intricacy to detail, which often took on the resemblance of the female form in many of her works. She took the discretion to make small parts large and vice-versa, she changed the color balances, and created disharmony, which would force those who looked at these pieces of art, to see the images as something else. In her work, she also stretched the visual edges, to design features which had metaphysical implications in many of her pieces. 

"I feel there is something unexplored about women that only a woman can explore" and "to create one's world in any of the arts takes courage. ” There is a similarity between painting and the images in poetry. Georgia O'Keeffe is an example of hardworking artist who continued to explore her landscape and unique set of images.  

matthew 11:28-30 by Hamish Petersen

28:



Job.
He wrote, “Why did I not perish at birth?”

“Why
is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter

of
soul?”

and
I ask why He gave me breath and life.

“But
man dies and is laid low”

“At
least there is hope for a tree”



29:



Tell
me about light and life.

The
same light that hides

That
light seen but not touched

and
like punching under water

leaves
a thirst.

Seasoning the Pan

"We were just a couple of short-order cooks
who kept trying to pass themselves off as poets."
~Charles Simic

Juan Sanchez Cortan, "Still Life With Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber," 1602-1603

In 2006, I attended a benefit dinner where Charles Simic was the guest of honor. Comparing notes with someone afterwards, we both noted that the man seemed preternaturally occupied by food: what could be on the menu, what was on the menu, and when the plates were going to be served. The observation might have been petty, had Simic's fixation not been so thoroughly entertaining. Of course, the symbolism of a metaphor paled in comparison to the ripe flesh of melon. Why talk about styles of line break, when one could be weighing the comparative geometries of pasta?

Little did we know, it was all part of a larger plan: 

"We started a new poetry movement that we hoped would make us famous. Every other poet was starting one forty years ago, so we thought, Why not us? Ours was to be called Gastronomic Poetry. Both Mark and I had noticed at poetry readings that whenever food was mentioned in a poem—and that didn’t happen very often—blissful smiles would break out on the faces of people in the audience. Thus, we reasoned, in a country where most people hate poetry and everyone is eating and snacking constantly, poems ought to mention food more frequently." 

If those in the poetry community weren't already missing Mark Strand, Simic's tribute to his friend, "Living Gorgeously," posted on January 24 at the New York Review of Books, would render us bereft all over again. You can read the full text here. 

Jan Davidszoon de Heem, "Still Life with Fruit and Ham," 1648-49

Simic assures us that it wasn't all prosciutto and pinot noir. "We talked about how writing a poem is no different from taking out a frying pan and concocting a dish out of the ingredients available in the house," he says. "[H]ow in poetry, as in cooking, it’s all a matter of subtle little touches that come from long experience or are the result of sudden inspiration." This is exactly right--there are things we know to do, on the page, using instincts that cannot be created through anything other than time. 

This is one of the absurdities embedded into teaching creative writing to graduate students. We can explain technical skills; we can edit or proof individual drafts; we can grant a degree; but we can't instill "long experience." We can sell you the wok, but only you can season the pan. 

I am just back from an eight-day residency at the University of Tampa. Every trip down there becomes a little more fun, as I get a little better organized. Every trip enriches my understanding of what I can do for these students. So far I attend everything that I can, which is my way of making it feel less like a job and more like a literary conference. 

Whenever possible, I bridge from the program-wide craft seminars to the close readings I lead with students in workshop. (I meet with my five students for two hours a day, eight days straight, to both talk craft and look at their drafts.) The frustration of surrendering a syllabus to the whim of other peoples' seminars is that I can't plan in advance. The gratifying thing is that I turn our attention to texts that aren't fully safe or familiar; I'm jolted from my teaching go-tos. One faculty member's discussion of vocabulary and word choice led to looking at this nimble, challenging poem by Harryette Mullen:

WIPE THAT SIMILE OFF YOUR APHASIA

as horses as for

as purple as we go

as heartbeat as if

as silverware as it were
as onion as I can

as cherries as feared
as combustion as want
as dog collar as expected
as oboes as anyone
as umbrella as catch can
as penmanship as it gets

as narcosis as could be

as hit parade as all that

as icebox as far as I know

as fax machine as one can imagine

as cyclones as hoped

as dictionary as you like

as shadow as promised

as drinking fountain as well

as grassfire as myself

as mirror as is

as never as this

~Harryette Mullin, from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) 

A poem like this is like cumin. It doesn't have to be your favorite taste, but you should be able to parse it out with your tongue. When you let it stew, the flavor intensifies. (If you're struggling to read it, take a step back. Enjoy the title's sly play on "Wipe that smile off your face," and consider the respective connotations of "simile" and "aphasia." Try reading each line as two syntactical halves, rather than one whole.)

Other readings I shared that I had never used before included Patricia Smith's "Prologue--and Then She Owns You" from Blood Dazzler, Mary Karr's "Obscenity Prayer," "Andrew Hudgins's "Air View of an Industrial Scene," Thomas Sayers Ellis's "Atomic Bride," excerpts from Maggie Nelson's Bluets, excerpts from Tarfia Faizullah's Seam, several of Mathias Svalina's "Creation Myths," "I Can't Swim" by Heather Christle, a section from Erin Belieu's "In the Red Dress I wear to Your Funeral," and Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." 

Oh, and I came down really hard on the art of shaping a critical thesis. Because I'm a stickler for that, and I have three poets who must write a 25-page paper by the end of the term. Poet Donald Morrill gave an eloquent, distilled explanation of all that the literary essay can do; if you want inspiration to experiment, he is your man. I am the potatoes to his vodka. I wanna see your outline. 

Every residency includes three gatherings according to genre. For the Genre Workshops we riffed on the theme of Contemporary Ambition. I opened things up by working with the assigned reading from Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense, sharing his essays about "The Elliptical Poets" and "How to Read Very New Poetry." (If I'd had time, I would have passed out his sestina, "Six Kinds of Noodles.") Then it was my turn to be in the audience, listening to Steve Kistulentz explain what makes  Ultra-talk a bright, necessary part of today's poetics. In the closing session, Alan Michael Parker elegantly explained how to read  both "Thrteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace Stevens, and Vasko Popa's "Little Box" sequence. 

Even on AMP's most fevered and flu-ish day (he actually flew home right after), I would pay good money to hear my colleague talk about poetry. I wasn't familiar with Popa's work. When I looked him up later, I was not surprised to find this appreciation from Charles Simic: "Encountering in Popa an exotic blend of avant-garde poetry and popular folklore, the foreign reader tends to think that this is what all poets from that part of the world must be like. In fact, no other Serbian poet sounds like Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world."

I'm offering notes on all of this here because I believe there is some mystery about what a "low-residency" MFA looks like, and I think it's important that we devote as much time to the mentorship of critical minds as we do to mending poems on the page. In an ideal world, immediately on the heels of being exposed to all these ideas, I would go hide away at a residency. I felt like that kid in The Far Side cartoon, "Can I be excused? My brain is full."  

One pleasure of teaching in Florida twice a year is the proximity to St. Petersburg, specifically The Dali Museum. Visit for the building alone--a phenomenal new space, all glass and concrete, with a rich backstory of the collection's assembly by Dali's devoted patrons A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse.  One of my favorite Salvador Dali paintings is a quiet still life from when he was only 22, determined to demonstrate his mastery of Old World technique in the style of Vermeer.  

Salvador Dali, "Basket of Bread," 1926

Later in life, Dali would paint bread charged with the energy of eros and thanatos. But sometimes a bread basket is just a bread basket. For a while now I have been working on poems that celebrate flavor and sustenance--a good way to turn from the focus of Count the Waves, which pays more attention to the heart than the belly. The next round will be in Gravy, the journal of the Southern Foodways Alliance, this spring.

Sara Pajunen - Teija Niku - Aallotar

I enjoyed reading poetry with Aallotar recently, at a house concert. We share a love of Finnish culture and a penchant for research.  Our work has remarkable confluences. Here's a sample of Sarah's exploration into the experience of Finnish immigrants. She and Teija provide a haunting and beautiful music. The video is 14 minutes - (archives from the Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota0

Sarah Pajunen and Teija Niku - Aallovar (translation: Daughter of the Waves)

http://www.sarapajunen.com/laatikko/

touring the Midwest January and February 2015
see dates/ places: http://www.aallotarmusic.com/shows.html#!shows/cihc

Tidbits of This and That

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I am very fortunate to have received two new reviews for The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop. Both reviews are beautiful. And both came in December, like gifts. The first is by Christine Swint, posted at her site, Balanced on the Edge. Included in the review is this lovely comment:
Because there are so many poems by innovative, contemporary poets, The Crafty Poet is more than a portable workshop; it is an anthology of poems written in the kind of fresh, rich, and lively language we writers want to emulate. . . Read the full review HERE.

I was also tickled to see that Christine subsequently made good on her vow to get using the prompts for her own poetry and posted about her experience with the Sonnenizio, a form covered in my book. Read about it HERE.

The second review is by Christina Veladota and is posted at her site, maybesopoetry. She says, among other things:
The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop is an essential text for any poet. Diane Lockward has curated for us an abundant collection of inspirations and advice, and together with her many noteworthy contributors she succeeds in “making the day with nothing to say a thing of the past.” Read the full review HERE.

In publication news I have a poem, “Shopping at the Short Hills Malls,” in the December issue of The Cortland Review, one of the oldest online poetry journals and I think the first to include audios of each poet reading the poems. I’m particularly pleased to be in this issue as each editor was invited to solicit work from one poet. Editors were each asked to invite a poet whose poems they liked and who they felt was making some kind of contribution to the larger poetry community. My appreciation goes to editor Amy MacLennan, the Managing Editor.

I also have a new poem in the current issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. While my publication in The Cortland Review was my debut there, VPR editor Ed Byrne has kindly included my work several times. The poem in the current issue is called “Sweet Images,” and is a form poem, a form I really liked working with.

Finally, I have a new poem, “And Life Goes On As It Has Always Gone On,” in the latest issue of the print journal, burntdistrict. Like most print journals, this one pays only with a contributor’s copy. But editor Jen Lambert also offered contributors with new books the opportunity to send a full-page ad. That was, to me, worth more than the minimal fee that a handful of journals are able to offer.

'Imagine a Woman Behind Razor Wire, Glimpsed' by James Owens, with art by Cheryl Dodds

Railroad Diary, Istanbul 2012 -- by Cheryl Dodds


1.

A long time ago, when we lived in the sky….

2.

But no, we never lived in the sky.We invented that because of pain,because desire tortures even the dirt and stones into division,into definition fracture power solitude wall razor wire.

3.

(But pleasure is also real. Joy is real. One autumn day, my wifeclimbed a fence and stole from a

Poetic Space

Can the unexplainable be explained?  Sometimes poetry is defined as the saying of the unsayable.  How? Poetry is powerful because of a union of image and sound and a strange combination of the seen and unseen. When we love a poem, it is because of its resonance or reverberation, a concept examined in The Poetics of Space.

 "A poem possesses us entirely," Gaston Bachelard says.  He says that the poetic image takes root in the reader.  His book is ostensibly about architecture but uses poetry as its metaphor, and in doing so, creates a wonderfully resonant approach to both.

Meena Alexander evokes this resonance. "Poetry and place—if poetry is the music of survival, place is the instrument on which that music is played, the gourd, the strings, the fret." I especially appreciate her thoughts about the importance of place or landscape.

Gaston Bachelard writes that poems awaken our being with their mysterious blend of knowing and not knowing.  A good poem is perpetually new. It has a quality that evokes new meaning every time it is read. "Forces are manifest in poems that do not pass through the circuits of knowledge."  (xxiii) He talks of the passions that perturb poetry, or disturb.

Similarly, Muriel Rukeyser identified poetry as an energy that passes from the writer to the reader. She also viewed a poem as a "theater."  A theatrical space is one that is open to and resonant with image, voice, and action.  The image and reverberation of a poem has the ability to "touch the depths before stirring the surface," according to Bachelard. This is the most poetic explanation of poetry that I've read, and it confirms my theory that poetry dissolves some sort of boundary, and in doing so, it is spirit speaking to spirit.

Literally, poetry has empty space. Lines break before the end of the page, and stanza breaks leave gaps between lines. Patterns are more apparent.  This empty space gestures toward another kind of empty space inside or beyond.  "As essential portion of any artist's labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that 'begging bowl' to which the gift is drawn," says Lewis Hyde in The Gift. Creating gaps or empty spaces in poetry can develop a dialectic or field of meaning.

Bachelard says, "poetry puts language into a state of emergence."  What are these forces? I'm not sure, but I do recognize them when they happen. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” asks Emily Dickinson.  I think she must be referring to the physicality, the five senses, and friction. It must be music, myth, memory, and deep patterns in the landscape. We resonate, reverberate, and emerge anew.

An Interview with Poet Greg Santos

      That feeling the executioner has

      when he hangs his mask at the end of the work day,

      I have that right now.

      Like a rabbit punch out of the blue.

      But I’m not complaining.

      I'm just singing a requiem for all decent centaurs everywhere.

       - from "The Prodigal Son" by Greg Santos

*   *   *

Greg Santos’ newest book is Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014). He is also the author of The Emperor’s Sofa (DC Books, 2010) and two poetry chapbooks. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (Minor Arcana, 2014), Daddy Cool (Artistically Declined Press, 2013), A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry(Akron, 2012), Mcsweeney’s, The Best American Poetry Blog, and The Feathertale Review. Greg is a graphic designer, teaches creative writing to at-risk youth, and is the poetry editor for carte blanche. He lives in Montreal with his wife and two children.

*   *   *

I first encountered Greg Santos’s poetry as part of The Found Poetry Review’s (FPR) Pulitzer Remix project and then again as part of FPR’s Ouilpo project. I admired Greg's keen interest in exploring and interrogating popular culture, which plays a prominent role in his poetry. I found myself especially drawn to the cleverness and humor in his poems. When he invited me to review his second book Rabbit Punch!, I suspected it would be a book filled with fast-paced and witty poems, some with a dose of irreverence, poems that were funny and sad, serious and playful, at the same time. And indeed, that it is. [You can find a review of the book here.] 

For those who are not familiar with Greg's poetry, to give you a better idea of his work before proceeding to the interview, here’s a poem titled "Zombies," which is an example of his work with popular culture, containing references to the Irish rock band The Cranberries and American musician Rob Zombie.  

—Nancy Chen Long

Zombies by Greg Santos

Zombies like listening to The Cranberries

Particularly their hit song, “Zombie.”

Zombies like the song because they can relate to it.

They nod their heads, mouths agape.

“Ughhhhhhhhhh,” they grunt affirmatively.

Zombies, however, do not like Rob Zombie.

He is not an authentic zombie.

He is a live human who has appropriated the zombie name.

There is no greater zombie taboo.

Look out, Rob Zombie! Behind you!

Just kidding.

Or am I?

first published in New Wave Vomit
© Greg Santos, Rabbit Punch! (DC Books , 2014)

---

[This interview was conducted via email in January 2015.]

Congratulations on publishing your second book! While getting a first book of poetry published is difficult, getting a second published is even more so. Please share with us how Rabbit Punch! came to be and how you got it published.

GS: Getting my first book, The Emperor's Sofa, published was really a dream come true. It was edited by poet and scholar, Jason Camlot, and published by the Punchy Poetry series, an imprint of Montreal-based DC Books. I'm very proud of my first book and if that had been all I had ever published, I would have been more than content to leave it at that. So I still have a hard time wrapping my head around having a second full-length collection of poetry out there in the world.

I approached Jason with a second manuscript comprised of confessional poems written while I was living in Paris, where my wife was pursuing a research fellowship for her PhD. My first book had just come out and I was a new father living in the City of Lights. It was an exciting time, everything was new and terrifying. I tend not to write confessional poetry, so these poems were also new and terrifying for me to share with the world.

After some discussion with Jason, we decided that the manuscript I sent him in its original incarnation did not quite fit with Punchy Poetry's mandate. That manuscript is still a work in progress that I'm hoping to publish elsewhere in the future. At the same time, he pointed out some poems that he felt we could work on together, in particular, "Reading Ou Yang Hsiu in a Café". He asked me if I had more similar pieces that we could compile into a separate project. Thankfully, I had been putting together a completely separate manuscript that I was planning on sending out to some poetry contests and that manuscript turned out to be Rabbit Punch!


Rabbit Punch! has a good dose of pop-culture references. In a post for the Poetry Society of America, Adrian Matejka writes “Every important idea that poetry interrogates has a corollary in popular culture, and when poetry and pop culture team up like those Marvel comics, good poems can happen.” Please share some of your thoughts on the union of popular culture and poetry, how you find pop culture impacts your writing or your relationship to poetry, etc. 

GS: When I include pop culture references in my writing, I do so knowing full well that I am potentially opening up poetry to people who might not normally be inclined to read poetry. At the same time, I am also interested in exploring the idea that everything and anything is fair game to be poetic fodder. Paris Hilton, Bugs Bunny, John McCain, Hooters, and Batman might on the surface seem like odd poetic bedfellows, but TV shows, celebrities, comics, movies, music, spending our time on Facebook, for example, these things are all part of our vocabulary and daily lives, so why not attempt to incorporate them into our poetry? I’m not really doing anything new, though. Poets like Frank O'Hara, David Trinidad, John Ashbery, David McGimpsey, Denise Duhamel, to name a few, have all made great use of pop culture in their writing. I'd like to think of myself as following in their footsteps and playing with poetry's potential to both entertain and enlighten.


Thinking back to your first full-length manuscript that was published, were there things you thought would happen, yet didn’t? unexpected things that did happen?

GS: I was expecting, perhaps naively, to get more reviews for The Emperor's Sofa, but as a relatively new writer at the time, I'm quite happy with the reviews that the book did receive. I was particularly tickled when I heard from one of my wife's relatives that they had read a review of it in the Telegraph-Journal newspaper from Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, which is near where they live. It was a really detailed and thorough review and I couldn't have asked for a better analysis. Reviews aren't everything, but for a new author like me, it was exciting to know that someone had actually taken the time to read and study my work.

I would have liked to have done more readings for the book in Montreal, which is my hometown, and where my publisher is based, but like I had mentioned earlier, I was living in Paris the year the book came out. That allowed for some unexpected and very cool opportunities to promote the book. In particular, doing readings in Paris, Berlin, and London. My good friend, Joshua Levy, who's a wonderful poet and short story writer, was living in London at the time and he organized a lovely event at Goodenough College where I read alongside Todd Swift, a poet I've long admired. That was a real thrill and an honor.


When do you remember first being interested in poetry? Was there a mentor who encouraged you?

GS: "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service was one of the first poems I remember reading when I was a child. I used to pore over my elementary school library’s edition of the poem that was paired with the colorful and haunting paintings by Ted Harrison. I recently found the book for my father-in-law after I found out it was his favorite poem. It wasn't until I was a teenager trying to write songs and lyrics to play on the guitar that I seriously started wanting to read and learn more about poetry. My songs were my first poems. It was around that time that I started reading e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, and my aunt's copy of Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen.

At a young age I knew I wanted a career in the arts but I was all over the place. I wanted to be a cartoonist, an animator, an actor, and the list goes on. I took my first poetry workshop as an undergrad at Concordia University in Montreal with poet, David McGimpsey, and it was an eye-opening experience. Until then, I had been trying my hand at both prose and poetry but there was something about that class that really clicked and made a tremendous impression on me. McGimpsey was a passionate teacher and he took poetry extremely seriously, despite his writing being some of the funniest stuff I had ever read. I really admired that. It was after McGimpsey’s class and because of him that I made the decision to buckle down and focus on learning as much as I could about poetry and I've never looked back.


When you write, do you imagine a reader? If so, what type of reader?

GS: There’s a quote from Gertrude Stein that I love: "I write for myself and strangers." I don’t normally imagine a reader. I’m usually too busy writing to exorcise an idea from my head or to make myself laugh. That said, if I were to imagine my ideal reader, I guess I would picture someone like me, only smarter.


We met online when we were both participants of a Found Poetry Review project. When did you first become interested in found poetry? What attracted you to it? What sort of response have you gotten from your readers regarding your found poems?

GS: I first became interested in found poetry when I started teaching poetry workshops. I was looking for more prompts that would force myself and students to think outside of the box and I discovered Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout. The book is made up of poems that Kleon created by taking a black sharpie and blacking out pages from The New York Times to create new texts. It's exciting and liberating to create something new out of existing works of art. In effect it’s a type of collaboration. Around that time I was also really interested in collage and remix culture. I started constructing poems using lyrics from pop stars like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, and Miley Cyrus and rearranging the words into poems that I would call “poetry remixes.” This led me to seek out other found poetry forms and writing exercises.

My chapbook, Tweet Tweet Tweet (Corrupt Press, 2011) contains more of my remixes and found poems, but I didn’t really include many of them in Rabbit Punch! except for “We Were Startled by the Sound of Fog”, which was an erasure poem using Out of the Fog by C.K. Ober (Associated Press, 1911) as a source text. I used the great Erasures website at Wave Books to create it and I was thrilled to find out that the poem was chosen to be the November 2014 Poem of the Month at The Montreal Review of Books. I was happy that an example of found poetry was being showcased, when it might not normally be seen by a mainstream audience.


Generally speaking, how do you approach revision? Do you use a checklist or have any tried-and-true practices?

GS: Revision is always an ongoing process for me. I have poems that I’ve been tinkering with for years. I don’t have a checklist but here are a few practices that I turn to regularly:

I - After writing out the first draft of a poem, I often eliminate the first line or two. I have a tendency to over explain myself and this helps cut out any superfluous words.

II - Reading the poem out loud is always a good idea. If I find myself regularly tripping over any words, then that’s a surefire sign that something’s gotta go.

III - Putting a fresh poem away and not looking at it for a while also helps when I return to it after giving myself a little distance.

IV - I took a great workshop with poet Matthew Zapruder when I was doing my MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. One of the exercises he had us do was taking our completed poems and rewriting them backwards, meaning writing the last stanza first and so on. It doesn't always work but sometimes an odd juxtaposition surprises you and makes the poem sound more interesting.

As an editor at carte blanche, what would you tell hopeful poets looking to find homes for their work?

GS: I share poetry editing duties with Patrick McDonagh at carte blanche. We both have pretty eclectic tastes. I’m not actively searching for poems that resemble my own writing style. I simply choose poems that move and surprise me. It’s hard to say what that might look like, but whatever makes me say, “Wow! I really need to help share this with the world.”


Who are you reading now? Do you have a favorite poet or poets? What poets influence you?

GS: I have way too many books on my to-read pile, and I am often reading more than one thing at the same time. I just finished two great novels, actually. Blind Spot  by Laurence Miall, who is carte blanche's fiction editor. The protagonist, Luke, is a great anti-hero. I found myself disliking him, but wanting to keep reading to see what he was going to do next. The book reminded me of Camus' The Stranger. It's a remarkable debut novel. The second is 10:04 by novelist and poet, Ben Lerner. The book really brought me back to my time spent in New York as a graduate student and aspiring writer.

The poets and writers that I often turn to for inspiration include James Tate, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Dean Young, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Mary Ruefle, Russell Edson, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Violi, Lydia Davis, Robert Hass, Linda Pastan, David Lehman, David McGimpsey, Stuart Ross, Gillian Sze, and Ben Mirov.


If you were a place, where or what type of a place would you be?:)

GS: Gee, I've never been asked that before! I would be a traveling carnival or a place like Coney Island. Complete with cotton candy, Cracker Jacks, haunted house, sticky floors, Ferris wheel, fun house mirrors, a sideshow, and clowns.

Thanks again for the opportunity to be interviewed! This was fun.

*   *   *

Greg’s website:http://about.me/greg.santos
Greg’s blog: http://moondoggy.blogspot.ca/

Rabbit Punch! Tumblr: http://rabbitpunchbygregsantos.tumblr.com/

A sampling of Greg’s poems on-line:

• “Hulk Smash!," Best American Poetry Blog
• “Siem Reap, Cambodia,” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal 
• “Out of the blue,” ditch 
• “Shell/Cave” and “Dear Dark”, Poets for Living Waters 

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Lemonstone Reading Series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Mason's Road, Sycamore Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, RHINO, and other journals. 

Rabbit Punch! by Greg Santos

Greg Santos 
Rabbit Punch! 

DC Books 
http://dcbooks.ca/index.html 


By the numbers 

ISBN 978-1-927599-22-8 
Publication: 2014 
Total pages: 76 
Number of poems: 61

Like Rabbit Punch on Facebook
Follow Rabbit Punch on tumblr

__________

Greg Santos, a Canadian poet and graphic designer who teaches creative writing to at-risk youth, is also the poetry editor for carte blanche. He lives in Montreal with his wife and two children. Greg and I know each other via social media, both of us having been active participants in a couple of projects sponsored by The Found Poetry Review (FPR). When Greg's second book of poetry, Rabbit Punch!, was released, he asked me to review it. The book's cover and title, as well as what I knew of his poetry, led me to suspect that the book would be an imaginative foray into pop culture, that it would be filled with humorous, witty—at times dark or surreal—poems. I accepted his invitation. As it turns out, the book is as I anticipated; it does not disappoint. You can read all about it in the review below.

Greg was also kind enough to do an interview. You can find out more about his thoughts on poetry and his books here.

—Nancy Chen Long

__________

Greg Santos' second book Rabbit Punch! is filled with lithe poems, quick on their feet, poems that are witty, whimsical, serious, sarcastic, celebratory, bittersweet. Some are entertaining, while others are deceptively so—poems layered with meaning that reward upon repeated readings. Santos has dedicated the book to the memory of his mentor Paul Violi and in some of the poems, it's evident that such mentors and favorite poets have exerted a heavy influence over Santos' work. 

Rabbit Punch! is divided into three sections. Each of the sections has a variety of different types of poems, from traditional to experimental. The majority of the poems are short, i.e., less than a page long. While the poems cover an array of subjects, the majority of them include some treatment or reference to Western popular culture. However, the first section, taken as a whole, has fewer references to pop culture than the other two sections. The poems here are a bit more personal and lyrical. One of my favorites is "Lullaby":

Lullaby

A little way ahead
winter is come

Do you remember
it ever being so cold?

Ash trees burn
above white paths

The sky goes on
with cool indifference

Wheels of the train
fall silent

We have arrived
at the junction

All creatures
don their coats

A little way ahead
winter is come

In addition, the first section has an international bent as well, with a good dose of things French, which can be seen based on the titles alone, e.g., “La Mue” and “It’s Snowing in Paris.” And Santos also gives a nod in this first section to fairy tale and myth. For example, in the poem “Cronus,” an intriguing poem that's only three lines long, Santos approaches the Cronus myth—the god of time that devours all—through the metaphor of a farmer: 

The farmer has a basket full of eggs.
He wonders if he should bring them back to their coop.
But they are his children and he is hungry.

And in “Hansel and Gretel,” Santos depicts a story different from the Grimm Brothers' version. Instead of victims, in Santos' world, Hansel and Gretel are instigators, defying their parents because they want to find the witch—they’re actively seeking “peppermint, floss, and doom.” The line “We were ready to die for love” and last line of the poem “At long last, love in all its glory” suggest that Hansel and Gretel believed the witch to be Love. There are a number of ways in which to read that sentiment. One of the more obvious ones is that Hansel and Gretel were evil like the witch. Another is that they were so unloved they would love anything that beckoned, so desperate that they grasped at evil, thinking that's what love looks like. While both readings are surprising and fresh, the second is punch in gut that left this reader thinking about it for days. 

The second section of Rabbit Punch! is prefaced with the first three lines of Dean Young's "Sean Penn Anti-Ode." It's an appropriate presage for this section filled with poems about Western public figures, cultural icons, and folklore: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, model/socialite Paris Hilton,  caped crusader Batman, the actor Charlie Sheen, American politician John McCain, the Tooth Fairy, aliens, and more, all find a home in this section. 

A number of these poems in the second section are dramatic monologues written in the persona of a famous figure. In "I May Be Macho but I'm no Genius" (another one of Santos' poems that appears to be humorous, but is not), professional wrestler Randy Savage tells us "I'm more Burger King than Macho King. ... I wouldn't wish Macho Madness on anyone, brother." The last line "I miss Elizabeth," transforms the poem from one of sarcasm or mockery to one of sadness. Elizabeth had been Savage's romantic interest, as well as his wrestling manager. When she left Savage for another wrestler (Hulk Hogan), it unsettled the world of professional wrestling. Elizabeth was stalked and even injured. She died of a drug overdose in 2003. If the last line of the poem refers to when she left Savage, then the poem is a wistful one about heartbreak. However, if it refers to when she died, then the poem is one of mourning, a poem of grief and regret, especially in light of the poem's epigraph: "Reincarnation doesn't have to be. You can concentrate and you can mental telepathy. Yeah!" The epigraph is a quote by Savage from a 1987 promotional. The quote might elicit ridicule from the reader when first read, but by the end of the poem, all one feels is pity.

It's not all famous figures in the second section. The poet-persona also makes an appearance, with the poet as a first person narrator. Even so, some pop-culture aspect is still prominently featured. For example, in "A Wild Night at Hooters," the narrator recounts a fictional evening at the American restaurant Hooters, an evening spent with famous dead poets and writers (e.g., "We'd get smashed drinking Coors, spot Whitman coming onto Frost, / we'd have to keep Yeats away from the dartboards.") And in the endearing poem "The Great Hoarder," which is the last poem of this section, Santos gifts us with a narrator who hoards in the spirit of Hoarders, that American television show about people who compulsively keep things forever. However, instead of hoarding material objects, the narrator hoards thoughts and questions while his family sleeps.

In the third and final section of the book, we find a collection of surreal and experimental poems. The opening poem "Imaginationland" (which is also the title of a series of episodes of the animated TV show South Park) takes us on a quick jaunt through the "the Tim Burton-ish forest" in the narrator's head, where "squirrels dance merrily with foxes" and "My family waits for me in a gingerbread house." In addition, this third section houses poems about a New York that is "left of the center of the universe" and advice poems about how to handle ghost hares ("Don't play dead. And whatever you do, don't act like a carrot. / Wearing orange around ghost hares is suicidal.") There are poems about poems, even a poem that wants "you to trust it," but not immediately. No, it "wants you to hold hands first for a while before getting serious." 

This final section is also a celebration of some of the poets who have influenced Santos: The poem "We're all Just Passing Strange" is dedicated to Santos' mentor Paul Violi and the line from that poem"Suffering from the morning of the poem" could be a reference to James Schuyler's epic poem "The Morning of the Poem." A number of poems are patterned after poets that Santos admires, notably "Meanwhile, What I'm Going To Do" and "We the Wild Bunch" (the link is to a video of Santos reading his poem) are written after John Ashberry and "Types of Silence" and "The Disease is Its Remedy" are written after Mark Strand. Indeed, in the the spirit of celebration, Santos openly confesses here his love of the art: "I have a unique condition. / I am prescribed to eat poetry for the rest of my days. / Do not cry for me; it is a happy ailment" ("The Disease is Its Remedy.")

In the last poem of the book, "A Vanishing Act," a magician pulls "rabbits out of a top hat," wields the tools of illusion "fog and mirrors," intones special words "to distract" the audience. Magician as conjurer; poet as conjurer. It reminded me of what Jane Hirshfield wrote in "Strange Reaches, Impossibility, and Big Hidden Drawers: Poetry and Paradox" (The Writers Chronicle, Feb 2015)—that in a good poem, sometimes one finds oneself "inside both the realm of the most common human truths and the realms of sequin and smoke, of scarf-trick and card-trick and mirrors that at once reveal and hide." One will find such poems in Rabbit Punch! From poem to poem, one can sense Santos' imagination hard at work to extend, as he says in his interview, "poetry's potential to both entertain and enlighten." Santos shared that he was interested "in exploring the idea that everything and anything is fair game to be poetic fodder." And in that, he has found success.

__________

Oblivion Avenue
- by Greg Santos

When you make the decision to leave
and your loved ones wave their handkerchiefs from the docks
like a million mad flappings of Daffy Duck's beak,
you can't help wondering if you've made the right choice.

We leave the shores and drift so all that is left of our past
is an infinitesimal speck on an ancient iceberg,
complaining about its arthritis and bad hips,
melting toward oblivion.

Where? Oblivion Avenue.
You make a left turn at Albuquerque.
Bugs Bunny always made a wrong toin at Albukoikee
but he somehow turned out fine. A wrong turn didn't stop him.

No. Even with Elmer Fudd at the end of the tunnel,
what didn't shoot Bugs made him stronger. He had the right idea.
Burrowing frantically through the dirt
toward a golden carrot that probably never has or ever will exist.

We all have an Elmer Fudd waiting for us at our final destination,
shotgun in hand, hiding among the welcoming throngs on the boardwalk.
Remember, fold your rabbit ears under your bowler hat.
He'll never suspect a thing.


"Lullaby," "Cronus," and “Oblivion Avenue,” © Greg Santos Rabbit Punch! (DC Books, 2014)

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Nancy Chen Long received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild at Bloomington, she coordinates the Lemonstone Reading Series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. Her chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (2013) was published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Mason's Road, Boxcar Poetry Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere.