Day: April 30, 2025

Louise Akers | 12 to 20 questions (from rob mclennan’s blog)

(from ‘rob mclennan’s blog’, 17 April 2025)

5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love doing readings–because they are fun and social and ephemeral experiences, but also it is a hell of a way to edit a poem. When I know I am reading something out loud in front of strangers, I will be totally ruthless in a way that only vanity can inspire. Also sometimes while I’m reading it, and really hearing and feeling its living reception I will change little things to allow for clarity or rhythm or some other immediate and interpersonal effect.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Oh, it’s hard not to just quote Walter Benjamin on this one. I think critique is important; I think it is important to register the fact that throwing language at a problem (“problem” standing in here very broadly and clumsily for any of the myriad social-political-environmental-economic cataclysms we are enmeshed in currently), policing the language around a problem, or even diagnosing a problem discursively are all deeply incomplete projects, while also realizing that that is not an excuse or a reason not to do those things. Very clunky sentence, but hopefully you get the drift.

(More at rob mclennan’s blog)

Louise Akers is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She is a PhD student in English at NYU and is the co-organizer of the small press and working group, the Organism for Poetic Research. Akers is the author of two books of poetry, Alien Year (Oversound, 2020) and Elizabeth/The story of Drone (Propeller Books, 2022).

Dulcetly (Kristy Bowen): Adventures in self-publishing

(from a post on Kristy Bowen’s blog Dulcetly | notes on a bookish life – 03 March 2025))

I was moving some books around on my shelf and realized I have now published just as many books via self-publishing as I did traditional publishing….

After 2020, I felt a shift in my relationship toward po-biz and publishing, as well as a general backlog and build-up of unpublished work. In those intervening years, I’ve had fairly long routines of writing poems daily (or at least fragments)  By the time 2021 had rolled around,  was sitting on three full-length manuscripts that I genuinely had no idea what to do with. I submitted at least two of them during reading periods for my current press, but nothing was picked up those go-rounds. I am not really a contest person, especially if they have high entrance fees and the idea of finding an forging another relationship with an indie seemed an up-hill climb.  And no one publisher could possibly take on as many books as I had stuffed away in my hard drive.

(More at Dulcetly)

Rae Armantrout | ‘The absence of certainty’, a conversation with Kate Lilley

(Cordite Poetry Review, 4th February 2025)

Kate Lilley: … One of the things you said when we were having a bit of back and forth about how we might do this was when I asked you what often gets left out, because everybody writes about (for good reason) the markedly intelligent, propositional, ‘thinky’ character of your work, it’s markedly ‘intellectual.’ You said emotion and affect tend to get left out. Why don’t we start there with some of these poems?

Rae Armantrout: Ok, I like that question. It’s true. People often talk about the ambiguity of my work and how to make meaning out of it – how meaning might be problematised, which are all intellectual problems that are very interesting to me. I like your word ‘proposition,’ Kate. One thing I like to do is to throw out a proposition that may or may not be true, it could conceivably be true, and then pose examples of what it might mean and look like for it to actually be true. Often, the examples are problematic, somehow. It’s like they’re chunky, unwieldy pieces of the world, and how do they line up with these propositions that I’m trying to use to describe it?

So, having said that I want to get around to emotion since I don’t talk about it much. I may not be good at talking about it, but I can tell you that every poem of mine starts with a feeling. And usually with a feeling I can’t identify, maybe because it’s complicated, kind of a compound feeling of ironic yet wistful or a sad yet angry combination of feelings. But also, sometimes, I need help understanding the source of the feeling, and that’s where a poem starts – when I try to identify the source of a feeling.

(Edited transcript of the conversation at Cordite Poetry Review)

(Complete interview online on the Australian National University’s Art and Social Sciences YouTube channel)