Thanks, Collagist!

Apparently I had a lot to say about lawns.

Interview With Kyle McCord and Jeannie Hoag!

Kyle McCord and Jeannie Hoag's collaborative collection, Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim, was released by Gold Wake Press in May 2011.  

James Haug says of Informal Letters: "Alternately spare and lavish, a ghost narrative emerges of correspondences, echoes, and distances-raising questions of travel and renewal, home and seasons, abandonment and flight. With charm and intelligence, Hoag's and McCord's poems speak to each other, at each other, with and without each other. They are lively, keen, restless."

I talked with Kyle and Jeannie via email about collaborative challenges, evil Iowa winters, Bert and Ernie, and what happens when your poems are narrated by a bird.

MM: Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to collaborate and how the project came to be?  Did you set out to write a book together?

Jeannie: Kyle came to me with the idea of the collaboration—basically an exchange of letter-poems between two characters. Not long before, I had collaborated on a play, but the circumstances were very different. I was really interested in the characters Kyle had proposed, and it seemed like a nice experiment.

Kyle:  Interestingly, I think even before we started writing, both of us were committed to the idea that the exchange was going to be book-length and that the book had to, for the most part, be written in order.  I’m not sure how you felt, Jeannie, but I’d never before come to writing with the knowledge that not only was the poem I was working on definitely part of a particular work, but also that it had a particular location within that work. 

Jeannie: For me the order was an aspect that, once we started, I tried to ignore.  It's a lot of pressure to put on each poem, and I tried to keep my focus on responding to Kyle's latest. I agree that responses tie the poems to one another, but in order for me to  write I couldn't think about the future.  How much was it a focus for you, Kyle?

Kyle: Coming into this, Jeannie and I talked a good bit about stretching the idea of what constituted a response in the mind of the reader.   That’s why many of the connections between        the poems are on a sonic or thematic level rather than just on a content level.  I’m in accord with Jeannie that it’s often hopeless to anticipate the shape of a book as you’re writing it, especially when another voice is often complicating and challenging your vision as you move.  Watching those spirals of action and reaction is a significant part of what Invitations is about.  

MM: Were the letters in conversation with one another throughout the process?   Or how did that work?

Jeannie: We had a work plan of sorts. Kyle and I decided we would take turns writing these poems, and we had an informal deadline of two weeks per poem. The idea was to send each poem to the other, who would in turn write a poem that somehow responded. Kyle was definitely far better at meeting the deadlines than me.

Kyle: It was a challenging year for both of us: Jeannie in an intensive academic program, me dredging through a particularly vicious Iowa winter.  One of the things the book doesn’t show is our personal exchanges as we went through the various stages of production.  The conversation often came to mirror the distress and delight you can find in the work.  

Jeannie: The topography of the poems changed—we started the project in Massachusetts and ended up in different states by the end, and you can see elements of those moves throughout. I wonder now if the short emails we sent along with the poems informed the responses—maybe they gave directions for how to read the poems.

Kyle:  I think topography is an insightful choice of words here.  In Greek, the word literally breaks down to “place” and “write.”  I think our respective environments directed some of the work.  I also feel like our email exchanges cast a vision of to how to read each piece.  It makes it a little tough to argue for “the death of the author” in the poetry when there are two voices capable of giving cues to the reader about how a poem should be read and related to the larger work.

MM: What was it like to write a book in this way?  How was it different from working alone?  What did you learn from each other?  Were there any challenges that came up?

Jeannie: Much of the time during this project, I was preoccupied with a library science program, but even under the best circumstances, I'm looking for ways to avoid deadlines. Comparatively, Kyle is much more productive, so we were a bit like Ernie and Bert in that respect.

Kyle: Bert and Ernie is somewhat apt, but I think of it more in terms of an approach to language.  Bert is a man of few words, while Ernie is sometimes unbearably loquacious.  My poetry tends to be dense and large on the page.  When Anne Waldman took a look at the book, she said, “I wouldn’t want to be on the page next to you, Kyle.  So many words!”  I feel like J.R.’s brevity and even zones of silence are a good match for Miss Kim, though.  Jeannie taught me a good bit about the boundaries of narrative in poetry.

Jeannie: That's funny, because from my perspective, I had so many possibilities to choose from. Some of my poems were a reaction to just one phrase of Miss Kim's, and the sparseness of J.R.'s poems must have been a challenge to respond to. My writing's not always so vacant, but I imagined that J.R.'s world had been mostly emptied, whereas Miss Kim's world was quite populated.

Kyle: Even writing this, I’m reminded how open the idea of response leaves the writer.  I actually did the same thing as Jeannie mentions: I would often attach to what I saw as the emotional or imagistic crux of her poem then respond to that.  I actually think that’s how most communication happens.  We tend to move in patterns where we gravitate toward what seems most imperative to our ear in a work no matter the brevity or lengthiness of a response.  This creates an interlacing of values and reactions that become the conversation.

MM: How did you work on revising it, or move from the initial draft to the later ones?

Jeannie: A few months after we finished exchanging poems, Kyle came out to Buffalo, and we spent a few days arranging the manuscript and editing the poems for cohesiveness. At that point, we each had poems we wanted to work on more, but I think that in-person meeting was crucial to getting the book together.

Kyle: I’ve heard of poets completing a collaborative work without ever meeting, but I have no idea how they could do an arrangement of the work unless one of them just laid out a road map.  Isn’t arrangement such an enigmatic art?  It’s tough with one person, but with two people who aren’t even sitting in the same room?  I’m not sure how any collaboration could fix on the best version of the work without a face-to-face meeting.

Jeannie: In a way, working on the order in person was a reward for all the distance work, too. It was sort of grueling—I'm not sure how many times we read the poems out loud—but it was necessary to really internalize all the poems. And by the end we had addressed our doubts and personal readings, and I don't think that could have been done from a distance. You can't be too polite over email.

Kyle: I don’t know about you, Jeannie, but I can still hear the end of each poem in Invitations as I begin reading it.  I must have read and re-read my first book aloud nearly forty times when I was  editing it for release, and I don’t know that I hear the rhythms from that book as clearly as I can hear the voices of Miss Kim or J.R.  It’s so strange and intriguing to know so fully two different voices, neither of which fully captures you as a speaker.

MM: One thing I love most about the book is how different the voice of each speaker is from the other: J.R.'s voice is so spare; the poems themselves are short and spare and he rarely asks a question. Meanwhile Miss Kim is much more verbose, lyrical and questioning.  Could you talk a little about either how these characters/voices emerged?  Are the voices in this book typical of how each of you usually writes, or did you find yourselves writing differently than usual? 

Jeannie: As J.R., I took to heart the original character idea—that J.R. was a bird—and tried to imagine how a bird might think about things. From the way they move, birds seem to have very short attention spans, which I think affected the length of the lines, and the poems in general.

Kyle: I don’t know about Jeannie, but I’m not sure I could recapture Miss Kim’s voice again.  It’s a bit of a sad thing, but the tone, density, and emotional conceits were very entwined with that space and time.  I very much became a student of what that voice could do.  I can still hear Miss Kim behind some of the lines I write, but some of that irony and winding density was unsustainable after Invitations.  Jeannie, I’m curious if there are parts of J.R. you feel you left behind after the book?   

Jeannie: I hear some of J.R. in my poems, too, and when I catch it I try to take the poem in a different direction, but for me it's more a matter of not wanting to bring back J.R. than not being able to. I think the sparseness of J.R.'s poems worked for the project because it was still engaged as a response, but on its own, a J.R. poem is too isolating. Still, it's hard to escape from.

Kyle: My interaction with Miss Kim very much mirrors Jeannie’s relationship with the J.R. voice:  I tend to turn away when I hear that voice creeping back in.  Maybe I feel like I gave the fullest expression to that voice I could in the book, and I’m ready to write something in a different palate than I utilized here.  I think as writers we tend to shed one set of filters and put on another whenever we write.  Miss Kim was just such a distinct set of filters that it would be tough to return to with a fresh lens.

MM:  How did you find Gold Wake Press?  Why did you decide to send there?

Kyle: I’m going to take this one solo since the connection started on my end.  I’m a big fan of Kristina Marie Darling’s work, and her first book Night Songs (and now her third book) came out with Gold Wake.  When she was in town, I mentioned that we were looking for a publisher for the book.  She mentioned that Jared Michael Wahlgren was a great editor (which proved to be true).  She put the two of us in touch, I sent the manuscript his way, and the rest was history.  It was really an ideal fit for the book.   We’ve both been really delighted with Gold Wake.

Jeannie Hoag is author of Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim. Jeannie was born in Wisconsin and is currently a librarian in Buffalo, New York. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her chapbook New Age of Ferociousness was published in 2010 by Agnes Fox Press.

Kyle McCord is the author of Informal Invitation to a Traveler: Letters between J.R. & Miss Kim. His first book, Galley of the Beloved in Torment, was the winner of the 2008 Orphic Prize and was released by Dream Horse Press.  He has work forthcoming or published from Boston Review, Columbia: a Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, Volt, and elsewhere.  He’s worked for The Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, and The Nation.  Kyle currently lives in Texas, but previously resided in Des Moines, Iowa where he coordinated The Younger American Poets Reading Series.


To order Informal Invitation, click here.

Some Readings in October + Kristi Maxwell Is Awesome

My friend Kristi Maxwell is awesome.  She invited me to go on a road trip/book tour with her and it's coming up in October!  Kristi's new book, Re-, is out from Ahsahta.  I am excited to read it aloud to her over and over again during our trip.  Here is a poem from it.    

The real point being: I am not an organized person, and am also a promotion-phobe; it would never occur to me to plan a book tour.  But Kristi is my literary guardian angel--actually, I hate that phrase.  GAs are something students and old people believe in and write about.  Let's just call Kristi my guardian poet, because she makes me read things out loud and attend things and promote things.  Thank Jesus for guardian poets - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't write at all if I didn't have a bunch of these.

This is our schedule in case you live in one of these cities:

Oct. 2, 2011: Literary Lounge @ Studio Roanoke, Roanoke, VA, w/ Kristi Maxwell, 8 p.m.

Oct. 3, 2011: Chop Suey Books, Richmond, VA, w/ Kristi Maxwell

Oct. 4, 2011: Yes, Reading! Series @ the Social Justice Center, Albany, NY, w/ Kristi Maxwell and Peter Edwards, 8 p.m.

Oct. 5, 2011: The Small Animal Project Reading Series @ Outpost 186, Boston, MA, w/ Rob MacDonald and Kristi Maxwell, 8 p.m.

Oct. 6, 2011: Moonstone Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA, w/ Kristi Maxwell and Natalie Lyalin

Dis- and Re- Appearing

Sending things out is hard and exhausting for me, which is true of every tiny thing in my life.  Like planning and making dinner, or playing "string" with my cats, or hanging art on the walls of a new apartment, or watering things in my apartment.  Sometimes even reading a whole book is hard and exhausting.  And putting away laundry.  Larger things are easy.  I'm pretty sure if I wanted to run a marathon I could do that more easily than any smaller thing in my day. 

That means I send out stories twice a year in bulk.  And then suddenly I have a million things in the universe!  And then for the next six months I disappear entirely like I've never written anything at all.  This is the same way I live, by dis- and re-appearing, answering my phone always and then never, inviting you to things always and then never.  I kind of want to throw up on writers who are published in every single place ever and put this in their bios.  Don't they do anything else with their days than write and send?  That seems boring to me.  Probably that's what makes me disappear.

Some things I've written will be appearing in a few places in the future.  I will be appearing in some Eastern places on a book tour with my friend Kristi Maxwell in October.  Here is a recent appearance in Hobart.  I love all of the things by the other writers in this issue - especially this story "The Cage" by Robert Hinderliter - because it reminds me of Georges Perec.

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Some New Stories

I have some new stories in the most recent issues of The Collagist and >kill author.  Whenever I have the option to record audio, I always do it but then refuse to ever listen to it. So I can't make any sort of recommendation on whether or not you should listen to the audio. 

Review at decomP

Thanks, Spencer Dew and decomP for your thoughtful review.

Sparrow & Other Eulogies

My first collection of hybrid things, Sparrow & Other Eulogies, was just released by Gold Wake Press.  You can find it on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.com.