June 17, 2013 At Work Poetry Must Still Dance: An Interview with Ange Mlinko By Tyler Bourgoise The Spring issue of The Paris Review includes a long poem by Ange Mlinko, “Wingandecoia.” It took me a few rereads, but, after a bout of Google searching, I saw this poem trace its arc in several directions—those of time, of place, and of musical imagination. Along the way to understanding, Mlinko treats the reader to lines that feel both alive and spectral. Some are even like incantatory but welcome earworms. Mlinko has also published three books of poetry—Matinees, Starred Wire, and Shoulder Season. And this fall her next book, Marvelous Things Overheard, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Between books, she writes on language and the arts for The Nation. Like the two poems you published in issue 199 of The Paris Review, “Wingandecoia” contains many unfamiliar words and names. How do you see these poems, and that idea, figuring into your forthcoming book, Marvelous Things Overheard? The book is partly an exploration of time. The sixth-century brigand poet, the Macedonian general, and the ineffectual managers of the lost colony at Roanoke are allowed a measure of strangeness through the language each poem invokes. It amounts to a kind of foreign language within our familiar one. I grew up listening to languages my immigrant parents didn’t want to teach me, so I get a regressive pleasure out of feeling my way through sounds to their possible meanings. Not “getting” a word, or a line, or a poem at first read was never an obstacle for me—in fact, it was a seduction. And then, obviously, these words are beautiful. Wingandecoia is a beautiful word. So is psittacines. So is pot pot chee. They suggest rhymes, anagrams, and puns. They make music, which I think is an indispensible pleasure. Read More
June 13, 2013 At Work Corps de Ballet: An Interview with Irina Kolpakova By Yona Zeldis McDonough Photo: Renata Pavam. Irina Kolpakova is a hummingbird of a woman, perfectly erect and poised as she walks into the cozy interview room tucked deep in the recesses of the Metropolitan Opera House. Her brown hair is kept off her face with a thin headband; she wears dark pants and a soft red sweater over which she wraps a leopard-print shawl. Voilà! Instant glamour. We shake hands and she sits, never wavering from that ballerina-perfect posture. Kolpakova is turning eighty the next day, but does not want a fuss to be made over her birthday. Still, the occasion demands some form of ceremony. As we speak, her expression is alert, her tone animated; her passion for her art emanates from her like a heady cloud of perfume. Her hands, as she talks, do a graceful little ballet of their own, and the geranium-pink nail polish only adds to their elegance. Tell me about the city of your youth. I was born in Leningrad. I was only there for three years. Then my mom and I moved to Molotov, which is now Perm. And when did you start taking ballet lessons? Nine years old. Where did you study when you were young? Molotov, because the Kirov Theatre—now the Mariinsky—was evacuated there. When my mom brought me to the first class, Vaganova was still alive. It was the time of Vaganova. I wanted to ask you about Vaganova because not too many people in this country know about her contribution to classical ballet. What can you say about her teaching method? What was distinctive or different or important? Vaganova told us to use all parts of our body together at the same time. Not only this movement for the leg, this movement for the arms, this movement you’re supposed to learn how to use for your head, neck. No, all together, all the time. And she was huge—in Paris they called her the Queen of the Variations. She was … amazing. And she was really smart. She combined French method with Danish. I think that’s unique. Her method was unique. Read More
June 5, 2013 At Work Pinning Down: A Conversation with Catrin Morgan By Daisy Atterbury Air dies elsewhere, graphite on paper, 10 cm x 10 cm. Catrin Morgan has a history of sticking pins through words. (Check out her ongoing project, Pinning, which was installed at the Bromley House Library.) Maybe this is her real attraction to Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String, which she just illustrated for Granta’s new edition: finally, a book with text she can’t easily pin down. In graphite drawings, Morgan builds disassembled—or, nonrationally assembled—architectural objects, maps, and containers, many of which seem to act as entry points to systems with unfamiliar parameters. The illustrations define and rely on their own language, complementing the language of The Age of Wire and String nicely, self-contained discourses with overlapping vocabularies. Your designs for The Age of Wire and String are almost all diagrams, fanciful maps or systems that have some kind of chronological or other organizational logic. Can you explain how the content and structure of the book informed your decisions here? It seemed to me that by attempting to illustrate The Age of Wire and String directly, by illustrating very faithfully the images suggested by the text, I would close it down. What I love about The Age of Wire and String is the space it opens up in my imagination and I didn’t want my images to take that space away from new readers. In the end, the images I created aimed to respond to the tone and construction of the text and to behave in a similar way. The text subverts our expectations of familiar patterns of language, and so I created images that appear familiar but in fact are always doing something that belies their appearance, so what appears to be a map is in fact composed of sleeping figures, and a circuit diagram is based on the floor plans of a building. The images also reference directly illustrations from manuals and encyclopedias, as I felt like the deadpan tone of this kind of illustration suited perfectly the tone of the novel. The set of illustrations I ended up with are a representation of the world that The Age of Wire and String projects within my mind, and some of them were created without planning exactly where they would go in the text. When placing them I looked for shared co-ordinates between an image and a piece of text, so that the image and text spoke to, but did not explain each other. Read More
May 23, 2013 At Work Poetry Gone to Pieces: Talking Civilization with Dana Crum By Dorian Rolston It’s early on Sunday morning, about five-thirty, and Dana Crum has awoken without meaning to. His apartment lights have been left on. Craning his neck from the couch, he observes that he never found the bedroom. Sloughing off the rude awakening, he decides to get an early start on the puzzle of his poetry. He bears down to write. He uncaps his fine-pointed roller ball pens—blue, black, red, and green—and confronts his notebook. And he sounds rather startled, some hours later, by my phone call. “Hello,” he groans, after the third ring. I ask how he’s doing. “All right,” he says, then interjects, “Actually, can I call you back?” Trying once again to get himself going, he puts on a pot of cinnamon stick tea (Lipton, for a change from Bigelow), while I begin to wonder whether he’s nursing another hangover (Scotch, single malt). As I look over his autobiographical poetry, the canon seems to divulge as much. “In my unlit apartment on Valentine’s Day, me on a soiled sofa above rotten piping, drinking / Macallan from the bottle. My cat’s tail curls into a question mark,” he writes in “Portraits of a Former Lover,” a zuihitsu of imagistic confessions published recently in Blackbird. When we resume talking, though, he explains that not even a single line had taken shape and so he had simply given up and gone back to sleep. “I really wish I could start a poem, and write the first line first, the second line second, and so on,” he insists. “But that doesn’t happen.” What does happen, as he described it, is something like a young boy emptying his collection of jigsaw puzzles into a heaping jumble then kneeling down to rummage through the pieces. Each piece, for Crum, is a “fragment” of poetry. Often, he has no sense of where a fragment belongs within a poem, no inking even of where within his entire body of work. Unbidden, fragments infuse his days with poetic potential: falling from a giant puzzle box in the sky as he walks to work, or turning up under a school paper he happens to be grading, or springing from the jostle and bounce of a subway ride. His craft is not so much writing a poem as it is cobbling together myriad lines and images and phrases—“a mélange,” he calls it—into the provocative, confessional free verse for which he is becoming known. “I’m receiving a piece of my vision of life,” he says. “These bursts of inspiration are me expressing myself all the time, something my imagination has been trying to get out all along.” Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind, the lights are always burning. Read More
May 8, 2013 At Work Narco-Fueled Micro Deconstructed Jam: An Interview with Harmony Korine By Christopher Higgs Harmony Korine’s name is usually paired with the word controversial. The writer and director of the films Trash Humpers, Mister Lonely, Julien Donkey-Boy, and Gummo, most recently he helmed Spring Breakers, which was nominated for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. A Crack Up at the Race Riots, his debut novel, was originally published by Mainstreet/Doubleday in 1998, and has recently been rereleased by Drag City. As unconventional as any of his films, the book presents a multimedia assemblage of text both printed and handwritten, drawings, photographs, news clippings, suicide notes, celebrity gossip, appropriated material, lists, diagrams, ideas for books and films, as well as stories and scenes that are at times humorous and at times disturbing, but always provocative and engaging. At the time of A Crack Up at the Race Riots’s initial publication, Korine explained the book to David Letterman as “the great American choose-your-own-adventure novel.” I recently sat down with Korine to discuss the rerelease of A Crack Up at the Race Riots. Since you wrote the book fifteen years ago, I wonder how you feel about it now. Do you still feel close to it, or does it seem like a distant memory? I think both. I was about twenty-three when I wrote it, but it’s still pretty close to how I think now. It sets up a lot of the themes and ideas that I would start to work on later. I definitely see some connections and through-lines to things I’ve been doing today. What do you remember about the process of composing it? I’m gonna be honest with you, I was doing a lot of drugs back then. So my memory is kind of spotty, but it was definitely a kind of narco-fueled micro-deconstructed jam I was trying to get out. Were you carrying around a composition book and jotting material down as it came to you? No. At that point in my life I had no idea how to contain my ideas. The creative process was more explosive for me. And I didn’t have a filter, and I didn’t try to filter anything, as much as just try to get stuff down. So, I would just write everywhere. I would wake up in the morning and hear a conversation on the street, like a guy on crutches—this is my own sense of humor—I’d hear a guy on crutches going down the streets and I’d hear him muttering something to himself, something observational, and then I’d write that down on a piece of paper and then I would change his name. I would think, What if Clint Eastwood said that? Or, What if Snoop said that same sentence? Or, What if it was a quote from Margaret Thatcher? I was so interested in how the humor would change or devolve into something else. So that’s how it would happen. I would write things and then I would change the authorship. I would appropriate things from certain places. Then within certain quotations, I would change words around inside it, or changes sentences, or break it down in some way, or add to it in some way. And a lot of them were ideas for other things, but in the end I just liked the titles better. Like, they would be titles for books I would want to write, but I would look at them and I would think, Wow, the titles in and of themselves are exciting. Read More
May 2, 2013 At Work We Are Made of Memories: A Conversation with Mia Couto By Scott Esposito Born in 1955 in Mozambique, to Portuguese immigrants, Mia Couto is widely considered one of the foremost wielders of the Portuguese language. He has written more than twenty books that have been translated into at least as many languages, and those translated into English since 1990 have garnered him a dedicated Anglophone following. Although Couto’s fiction varies widely, he frequently deals with Mozambique’s civil war, which erupted in 1977, two years after he turned twenty and his nation gained its independence from Portugal. His recurrent use in his work of surreal effects has led many critics to liken his fiction to Latin America’s magical realism, a label at which he bristles. The Tuner of Silences, brought into English by Couto’s longtime translator David Brookshaw and published this year by Biblioasis, tells the story of Vítalico, a father who has dragged his children to an abandoned Mozambican nature preserve after the horrifying death of his wife. As Couto explores the nature of Vítalico’s regime and its eventual collapse, he delves into frequent obsessions: the construction of identity and the role that memory and language play in that process. Recently, over e-mail, I discussed Tuner, influences, labels, and the curious provenance of Couto’s first name in our e-mail correspondence. You’ve mentioned the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira and the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa as two influences on your understanding of the Portuguese language. What sorts of cultural influences from within Mozambique have you drawn from? I usually refer to Luandino and Guimarães Rosa as those who inspired me most, but the most important influences on my writing come from those I can’t identify, persons that populated my childhood, my hometown in the Indian ocean, the neighborhood where I was born and where I started to dream about other places and other lives. So, ironically, the main source of inspiration of my writing came from the nonwriting world. Oral culture is still dominant in Mozambique, and the ability to convert reality into stories is still very alive here, even in the urban areas. Storytelling is not exclusively a skill of the griots—the common citizen shares this capacity, telling stories not just with words but with their whole body, using dance and songs and poetry as a unique language. Read More