From the Archives: Q & A with Roger Greenwald, Poet and Literary Translator of Gunnar Harding

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Q & A with Poet Barbara Crooker on the Magic of VCCA, Reading, and Her Poetry

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Q & A: Diana Anhalt on her Poetry Collection "Walking Backward"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

We have never met, but I feel as if we have. I think this is always true when one has read another’s such wonderful writing. But I did “meet” Diana Anhalt, in a matter of speaking, when years ago, she sent me a selection from her powerful and fascinating history / memoir of growing up in Mexico City, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. When, sometime later, I read the entirety of that beautifully written book itself–which I admiringly recommend to anyone with an interest in Mexico–I wrote to her, and we have kept in touch ever since. Apart from writing poetry and essay, we have this common: a lifetime, it seems, of living in Mexico City, and married to a Mexican. By the time we found each other’s work, however, Diana and her husband Mauricio had left “the endless city” for Atlanta, Georgia. (But ojalá, we will meet one day outside of cyberspace soon!)

Her latest, just out from Kelsay Books, is Walking Backward. From her publisher’s website, her author bio:


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Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on "The World As Is"

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com


This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

JOSEPH HUTCHISON, POET LAUREATE OF COLORADO

The World As Is: New and Selected Poems 1972-2015 by Joseph Hutchison. 

Photo by C.M. Mayo. 

(My own fave is “Poem to Be Kept Like a Candle, In Case of Emergencies.”)

One of the blogs I’ve been following for a good long time is poet Joseph Hutchison’s The Perpetual Bird. We have never met in person but I feel as if we have; moreover, we have friends in common, among them, poet, essayist and translator Patricia Dubrava– and if my memory serves, it was her blog, Holding the Light, that first sent me to The Perpetual Bird. Here on my desk I have Hutchison’s collection of his works of several decades, The World As Is. From publisher NYQ Books’ catalog copy:   >> CONTINUE READING THIS POST AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Q & A: W. Nick Hill on "Sleight Work" and Mucho Más

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This blog posts on Mondays. This year the fourth Monday of the month is devoted to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!


Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:

NOTICE

by W. Nick Hill

I live in a desert at the mouth of a mine.

The rocks and geodes I leave out on the sand.

If something fits your hand

Go ahead with it.

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"Silence" and "Poem" on the 1967 Hermes 3000

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

My writing assistant wonders…. um, why?

Truly, I am not intending to collect typewriters. All shelf space is spoken for by books!! Last week I brought home a 1967 Hermes 3000 because (long story zipped) my 1961 Hermes 3000 is temporarily inaccessible, and it was bugging me that my 1963 Hermes Baby types unevenly and sometimes muddily (which could be a problem with the ribbon, but anyway), and I had a deadline to type my short story “What Happened to the Dog?” for the anthology COLD HARD TYPE (about which more anon).

Well, obviously I had to buy another typewriter!

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I dare not buy anything but a Swiss Hermes. The one I could find in my local office supply shop was a refurbished 1967 Hermes 3000 with a Swiss-German QWERTZ keyboard. I’ve had to get used to the transposed Y and Z keys; otherwise, kein Problem, and es freut mich sehr to have the umlaut.

A QWERTZ Swiss German keyboard
(American keyboards are QWERTYs)

Of my three Hermes typewriters, this 1967 3000 is by far the smoothest, easiest to type on, and most consistent. I venture to use the word “buttery,” in fact. 

Herewith, typed on the 1967 Hermes 3000, “Silence” and “Poem,” from my forthcoming collection, Meteor:

Typed today but originally published in Muse Apprentice Guild in, ayy, 2002. I think it was.

www.givalpress.com

If you’re going to the Great American Writerly Hajj, I mean the Associated Writing Programs Conference, come on by my reading– it’s a free event– I’m on the lineup with Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Martinez-Gil, Tyler McMahon, Seth Brady Tucker, John Domini, Teri Cross Davis, Elaine Ray, William Orem, Jeff Walt, and Joan G. Gurfield for the Gival Press 20th Anniversary Celebration Reading on Friday March 29, 2019 @ 7 - 10 PM. Hotel Rose, 50 SW Morrison St, Portland OR. 

The following day, Saturday March 30, 2019 @ 10-11:30 AM, I’ll be signing copies of Meteor at the Gival Press table (Table #8063) in the AWP Conference book fair.

You can also find a copy of Meteor on amazon.com. And read more poems and whatnots apropos of Meteor on the book’s webpage here.

P.S. Tom Hanks on typing, in the NYT. And Richard Polt on typing in San Francisco. And David Rain on “Hermes of the Ways.”

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>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

“Round N Round” on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Marfa Mondays Podcast #19: Pitmaster Israel Campos in Pecos

"Round N Round" on the 1963 Hermes Baby

Uh oh (I can begin to see how this gets out of hand!) I just brought home a second vintage Swiss-made typewriter, a 1963 Hermes Baby, which is a sight lighter at 3.6 kilos (just under 8 pounds) and more compact than my 1961 Hermes 3000. It is in excellent working order, klak, klak!

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He has not expressed himself verbally on the matter,
but it would seem that my writing assistant would prefer
that I use the MacBook Pro.
Also, geesh, it was ten minutes past suppertime.

From Meteor, my collection which will be out from Gival Press later this month:

>More about Meteor on my webpage.

>More about the Hermes Baby at the Australian blog ozTypewriter and at the Swiss Hermes Baby Page by Georg Sommeregger (in German, but Google translation available).

# 

On the Hermes Baby I am also typing up my story (originally written on the laptop), “What Happened to the Dog?” for COLD HARD TYPE: Typewriter Tales from Post-Digtal Worlds. More about that anon.

Meanwhile, whilst strolling about the Rio Grande outside of Albuquerque, my fellow COLD HARD TYPE contributor Joe Van Cleave ponders the Typosphere, its relation to digital media, and the ultimately analog origins of the digital:

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>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Top 10 + Books Read 2018

Top 13 Trailers with Extra-Astral Texiness

Consider the Typewriter

(Am I Kidding? No, I Am Not Kidding)

Meteor (Gival Press Poetry Award) to Launch at AWP

My book Meteor, which won the Gival Press Award for Poetry, and was orginally scheduled to be published in late 2018, has been delayed slightly; it will be out in early 2019. 

I’m thrilled to see the cover, designed by Kenn Schellenberg, and to announce that Meteor which will launch at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Portland, Oregon this March. If you’re going to conference, come on by my reading which will be part of Gival Press’ 20th Anniversary Celebration, and also to my booksigning the following day in the AWP Bookfair (details below).

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Leslie Pietrzyk interviews me about Meteor on her excellent blog, Work-in-Progress. 

Visit Meteor’s webpage here. All of the poems in Meteor have been published, but only a few are online, among them: “In the Garden of Lope de Vega,” “Stay West” and “Bank.”

I’d be the first to say many of these poems could be considered flash fictions, and in fact, a number of them were originally published in literary magazines (e.g., Exquisite Corpse, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review), as fiction. But as I like to say, it’s all poetry– or at least, it should aspire to be.

March 29, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Oregon Convention Center
7 – 10 PM
C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor, to participate in Gival Press 20th Anniversray Celebration Reading. More details to be announced.

March 30, 2019 Portland, Oregon
Associated Writing Programs Conference
Oregon Convention Center
Book Fair, Gival Press, Table # 8063
10-11:30 AM
C.M. Mayo will be signing Meteor.

Yep, I am still at work on the book about Far West Texas. I aim to post a podcast apropos of that shortly, however next Monday’s post– the month’s fourth– is dedicated, as ever, to a Q & A with another writer: David A. Taylor, who will be talking about his intriguing Cork Wars.

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>Your comments are always welcome. Click here to send me an email.

Meteor, Ambiance, Influences

Typosphere, Ho! “Stay West” on My 1961 Hermes 3000

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

My book Meteor, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award for publication in 2018, should be out any day now. I'm working on a brief Q & A about it, and this got me to noodling. One of the standard questions for any poet, any writer, is about their influences. I wrote many of these poems an eon ago; indeed, some are more than 20 years old. The most recent poem in the collection is from 2010. (Why did it take so long to publish? That would be another blog post. Suffice to say, I didn't make much effort; I was more focused on writing an epic novel and a book about a book and the Mexican Revolution.)

Back when, I would have said that my main influences as a poet were, in alphabetical order, Raymond Carver, Harry Smith, Stevie Smith, Wallace Stevens, and W. B. Yeats. But I think that now, from this distant perspective of 2018, that in writing these poems I was perhaps equally influenced by James Howard Kunstler's razor-sharp nonfiction, in particular, his The Geography of Nowhere, and by certain musicians prominent in the '70 and '80s-- not only by their lyrics, but the physical ambiance they create, the trickster, shapeshifting way they pull down the astral by sound, rhythm, the masks of archetypes. In English, we lack vocabulary for this.

Two examples:

Laurie Anderson, "O Superman"



The Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"




> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here. 

P.S. If you'd like to sign up for my once-in-a-ridiculously-long-while newsletter, you'll get the news when Meteor is available.

Poetic Alliteration

Poetic Listing

Poetic Repetition

Q & A with Mary Mackey on THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS, Bearing Witness, and Women Writers' Archives

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

This year, 2018, I have been aiming to post a Q & A with a fellow writer, poet and/or translator on the fourth Monday of the month. This usually happens! This month however I am posting two Q & As-- this third Monday, and another for the fourth. 

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Mary Mackey's
The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams
Marsh Hawk Press, 2018
amazon
indiebound
Small Press Distribution

The Internet invites us be everywhere allwhen, so it seems, but in ye olde 3D meatspace, I have a habit of attempting to be in three places at the same time. (I leave all other impossible things for before breakfast!) One of those places is California, because that's where my mother was living, and in recent years I flew out there from Mexico City to see her more times than I can count. Initially, when I realized I needed to go more often, I imagined that I could attend literary gatherings while in California, so I joined the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association, an organization I warmly supported in the years I was living in Washington DC.  Alas --(those with elderly parents will smile sadly with understanding)-- I never could make it to a meeting. But I did read the SF WNBA newsletters and announcements, including news of Mary Mackey's books. Her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, a collection of her poetry from 1974 - 2018, promises to be an especially rich read.

Mary Mackey is the author of a multitude of award-winning poetry collections, novels and more. Read about her distinguished career, and the unusual and highly original nature of her works, here. Though we have yet to meet in California, here we are, at least, on the same page in cyberspace: via email, Mary Mackey graciously answered several of my questions about her work. May you, dear extra curious and adventurous writerly reader, find her answers as fascinating and inspiring as I did.

Here's the catalogue copy for her latest, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams:

Mary Mackey writes of life, death, love, and passion with intensity and grace. Her poems are hugely imaginative and multi-layered. Part One contains forty-eight new poems including twenty-one set in Western Kentucky from 1742 to 1975; and twenty-six unified by an exploration of the tropical jungle outside and within us, plus a surreal and sometimes hallucinatory appreciation of the visionary power of fever. Part Two offers the reader seventy-eight poems drawn from Mackey's seven previous collections including Sugar Zone, winner of the 2012 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. 

"Mary Mackey's poems are powerful, beautiful, and have extraordinary range. This is the poetry of a woman who has lived richly, and felt deeply. May her concern for the planet help save it."—Maxine Hong Kingston 

"Always Mackey's eye is drawn to the marginalized, the poor, the outcast, the trivialized. [In] THE JAGUARS THAT PROWL OUR DREAMS, she has created an oeuvre, wilder, more open to change with each passing year. Hers is a monumental achievement."—D. Nurkse

Read a selection of her poems, including "The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams," on her website.


C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams?

MARY MACKEY: As Maxine Hong Kingston observed, my poetry has “extraordinary range.” I write for readers who love the mystical, visionary poetry of  Mirabai, Blake, Pablo Neruda, and Saint John of the the Cross; for readers who want to step into the heart of our disappearing tropical jungles; for women struggling against sexual harassment. My ideal reader hates to be preached to and doesn’t like poems that are obscure—academic poems that read like puzzles. Instead, my ideal reader loves beautiful, well-crafted, complex, profound poetry that can be understood on many levels. My ideal reader also likes to laugh because some of my poems are very funny.

C.M.MAYO: What was the most important challenge for you in selecting poems from your now very substantial ouevre?

MARY MACKEY: When I started selecting, I came up with 280 poems which, when combined with the 48 new poems in Jaguars, would have resulted in a book the size of a cinder block. No poet writes 280 great poems, so I started culling. I ended up with 78 of my very best poems. Not one has a line I don’t like; not one is a second choice. Another challenge was to make sure the poems I picked had stood the test of time, since some were written as early as 1974. Some didn’t, but to my amazement several I wrote in the early seventies as part of the Second Wave women’s movement read as if they had been written today.

C.M. MAYO: In the process of selecting the poems, did you see your development as a poet in a new light? Are your poems very different now, and if so, how?

MARY MACKEY: I didn’t see my poetry in a new light as I went over my previous collections, and although my poems are different in content, they are not different in essence. My poetry has always had an inward and an outward stroke. That is to say, it has always been both highly personal and highly engaged with what is happening in the world. I don’t preach. I don’t tell people what to do. I think it’s the duty of a poet to bear witness to her times, and that’s what I have done for over 40 years: bear witness. Right now I am not writing for those of us who are alive in 2018. I am writing for future generations who will never see a live elephant, a tropical jungle, or a healthy coral reef. I am writing poems to tell them how beautiful our Earth was and what parts of it we are losing due to climate change.

That said, I did discover some changes in my poetry over the years. My lines grew longer, as if I were not as rushed. I married happily and so wrote fewer sad love poems. I fell in love with Portuguese and incorporated some Portuguese words in my last four collections. In 2011, I began to speak openly about the fact that I have run a number of life-threatening fevers (often near 107 degrees) and began to write poems about the visions and fever-induced hallucinations I had during these near-death experiences.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive poet and writer for many years. How has the digital revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? 

MARY MACKEY: I’ve been using computers since the early 80’s, so the Digital Revolution did not come as a surprise. It hasn’t affected my writing, but, like all writers these days, I have to spend time on social media that I would have otherwise spent writing, so I ration my online time carefully. To write poetry, to create anything, you need long periods of silence and intense concentration. You need to be able to hear your inner voice. You can’t do this if you are always checking your phone. My solution is rigorous compartmentalization. I set aside times to write and times to do social media.

When I am writing, my phone is off, my browser is closed, and I am completely and absolutely focused on my writing or on the essential daydreaming that precedes writing. When I am doing social media, I am absolutely focused on social media. The two don’t bleed over into one another. I also add a third element: time in the real world with physically present people. I write or do social media for about 5 hours a day beginning in the morning. Then I stop, turn off my computer, and see friends and family, take long walks, talk to strangers, look at the stars or watch an ant or a sparrow. In the evenings, I usually read instead of watching Netflix or something on cable, because I’ve had enough screen time for the day.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

MARY MACKEY: When I started writing, paper was the only option. I still write out the first drafts of my poems in cursive in a special journal because I don’t like to have any technical interface between me and my imagination, nor any temptation to look something up in the initial moments of inspiration. I write freely without thinking about quality or organization. I let my hand and my mind wander. Then I transfer the result to my laptop and begin a rigorous process of cutting, improving, altering, editing, and crafting the final poem. I have taken a 4 page poem, written out in almost unreadable script, and transformed it into a polished, poem of three lines.

I should mention here that I am also the author of fourteen novels. Paper figures big in this part of my writing life. I wrote my first novel out in cursive in a notebook in the Scandinavian statistics section of the University of Chicago Library (a place where you could be sure no one would appear to interrupt you). I wrote the second on a manual typewriter; the third on an IBM Correcting Selectric typewriter, and the fourth on a computer so primitive it didn’t have a hard drive. I’ve used computers ever since for my subsequent ten novels, but at the end of each day, I print out all additions and changes, because I like to have hard copies of my work. I find it easier to edit hard copy, because you can see an entire page and move back and forth more easily. Also you can actually see what you’ve crossed out in case you want to change your mind. You can’t do this with deleted text. Then too, if the Internet goes down, my backups get stolen, my hard drive goes up in smoke, my passwords are compromised, the cloud is hacked, or my computer gets invaded with ransom ware, I have hard copy.

C.M. MAYO: Your papers are archived in the Sophia Smith Special Collections Library, Smith College, Northampton, MA and your website offers a "Guide to Women Writers Archives."  https://marymackey.com/educators/guide-to-women-writers-archives/ . As a writer with an archive myself and as one who has made grateful use of many archives over the years  --and one also keenly aware of how many valuable collections of papers, alas, end up lost— I am especially interested to know: How did this come about?

MARY MACKEY: It took me fifteen years to get up the courage to try to place my literary papers, because like so many women, I thought no one would want them. Imagine my surprise when I finally sent out emails and got almost immediate replies from nine universities who not only wanted my work, but offered to pay me substantial sums for my archives. I ended turning down monetary offers and donating my archives to Smith College, because they are dedicated to preserving the archives of women writers and the history of women. I’m not an alumna of Smith. I went to Harvard, but I didn’t donate my papers to Harvard because the university wouldn’t let me use Lamont, the Harvard undergraduate library, when I was a student there. In fact, until 1967, no women could enter Lamont. The guards at the door even turned away Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

After my experience with archiving, I decided to help women writers and artists archive their work. I have also helped men, but my focus has been on women, because if you tell a women about archiving, she will invariably say: “No one will want my papers. There’s no use trying.” In contrast, a man will say: “No one will want my papers, but I might as well give it a try.” I tell women that I want our history to be written on stone, not on water. I don’t archive their work for them, but I give them a packet of instructions on how to do it, encourage them to give it a try, tell them my own story of being timid and uncertain, and remind them that they can only control what goes into their archives while they are still alive. When they have successfully placed their papers, I list them on my website in my Guide To Women Writers’ Archives, congratulate them on my Facebook Page, and congratulate them again in my quarterly newsletter.

C.M. MAYO: What's next for you as a poet and as a writer?

MARY MACKEY: Right now I’m working on a plot outline for the final book in a series of novels about the Goddess-worshiping peoples of Neolithic Europe and their struggle to fight off Sky-worshiping, patriarchal invaders from the steppes. These novels are based on the research of archaeologist and UCLA Professor Marija Gimbutas who helped me with the first two novels in the series.

I’m also working on a series of visionary poems with the working title “Cassandra.” I think Cassandra is the perfect spokeswoman for our era. She saw the future, but when she tried to warn people that disaster was coming, no one believed her.



>> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Q & A with Historian Lynn Downey: 

"Research Must Serve the Writer, Not the Other Way Around"

Q & A with Sara Mansfield Taber on

Chance Particulars: A Writer's Field Notebook

Q & A with Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyaho Ahron Taub on Translating

Blume Lempel's Oedipus in Brooklyn from the Yiddish