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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello everyone and welcome to nbn. I'm your host, Holly Gattery, and I am delighted to be joined today by Concetta Principe to talk about her marvelous, stunning, one of my favorite collections of poetry, Disorder, which was published by the indomitable Gordon Hill Press. Welcome to the show, Conchita.
- [01:29]
C
Thank you so much. And thanks very much for having me. I'm honored.
- [01:33]
B
Yeah. And thank you and everybody, thank you for listening to my very scratchy voice. I didn't want to put off this interview with Conchata because I've been so looking forward to it for months. So everyone's going to be dealing with me sounding a little bit worse for the wear, but my heart's in it. My voice just wants to tap out. So I want to tell all of our listeners a little bit about Disorder, which is a poetry collection. Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concerta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be a place of sanctuary that can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Concetta's characteristic subtlety, intelligence and nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home. Concetta is an award winning poet and writer of Creative nonfiction, short fiction, as well as a scholarship that focuses on. On trauma literature. Concetta, welcome to the show. Again, I want to dive right in and ask what. Where this. Where this collection started? I understand with a collection of poetry, that can be a difficult question. If somebody asked me, I'd be like, I don't know. Some of these poems I've had. You're like, as long as I, you know, had some of the hair on my head. I don't know. You know, it's a. It's a tough question. But if you can think back to one of the original poems and the anuculus poem of this collection, then think, wow, this is when I thought, okay, I'm going to put all these together on this collection, and it's going to be a book about this. Can you remember, in that sense where this book started?
- [03:15]
C
Well, actually, the poem that probably started it isn't in the collection. It's not a good poem. And I had started something about blueberries and feeding myself son for breakfast. And what happens to a blueberry when you turn it into a milkshake? And it's. It's gross. It's just disgusting. So I was trying to get across this anger with what I had done to the food and this, the way I was behaving with my son, which was not nice, as I was ordering him to drink this horrible stuff. And then my relenting and realizing, no, this is. This is disgusting, and we're throwing it out. So, interestingly enough, it started with food. And what I wanted to do was try was convey the feeling of, well, confess in one way about my emotional dysregulation, which I didn't understand was emotional dysregulation at the time, my overreacting to this terrible stuff I had made for my son and thinking about how I could express that by making language slip from line to line. So in other words, never really trusting that the poem is going to actually get my emotions, it rambles and it slides. So when I say slide, it's like we come to the end of the line on a word that has one meaning, and then by the time we get to the next line, that word has taken on a different meaning. So there's kind of interference that goes on, which is actually, I think, the best way to describe emotional dysregulation. And it's not one emotion. It's all the emotions that are squashed into one. So I was trying to represent things I was going through at a certain time. I, you know, and I'M not really a line poet. I'm much more comfortable with the prose poem, but I wanted to try something with the line endings. And, you know, I wrote poems for like a couple of years, two or three years, and then I found out, and then I was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. And at that point, when I became aware of the symptoms of the disorder, I realized that all of my poetry is infused with this disorder. My grappling. My poetry, I have to admit, is autobiographical. And so I explore my crises, but when it comes to what ends up being read by audience, it's pretty displaced from the original experiences. So that's how the book came to be. It was kind of a retroactive assembly of these particular line ending poems, this lyric verse that I was writing after I was diagnosed.
- [06:58]
B
I think there should be a support group for children whose mothers have made, drink or eat horrendous things. And internally, I think there should be a support group for mothers, often in the best interests of our children. I'm saying this to you, Joe, my oldest son, who we're trying to get them to eat something healthy that was not appreciated. I remember my son, I tried to have him get him drink up a vegan protein shaken. He wasn't. It was his kindergarten. He wasn't eating. I was training him to eat before school. It was. He threw. He was so disgusting to him. The texture. He threw up. And I felt horrible. But when you were saying this, I was like, oh, yeah, I get that. And yeah, I felt all the emotions too. And I enjoyed hearing the term emotional dysregulation, because, yeah, I 100 got that. And I love how it's played out in your poems. Yes, the lines and the one line slipping to the other line, to the other line, to the other line. I had no idea this wasn't how you usually wrote because you're very good at it.
- [08:00]
C
That's good to hear.
- [08:01]
B
You are. You're incredible. I was going to ask you about the enjambment, about ending lines with in unexpected places. So how did you feel your way towards the ends of the lines? Because they're beautiful. There was one where I can remember very distinctly the word eyeball was broken up quite interestingly. Know that Once I was like, whoa, okay. And then I read it and there's like different ways to read it because of how you broke it up. So maybe this is just all intuitive and you're like, I don't know how I do these things, Holly, but if you can find your way towards an answer how do you feel your way towards the end of these lines, this line?
- [08:45]
C
Well, they all happened accidentally. Pretty well accidentally. Not accidentally. You know, I'm. I'm writing something and then I feel a word has significance, double significance. And that's when I end the line. Sometimes there are some poems and I think I'll read from the anorexia poems. Those poems have very short lines and like, I guess it's the modernist poets, and especially William Carlos Williams and his Red Wheelbarrow as an example of extreme enjambment that blew me away when I read it. And I think I was probably inspired by thinking about how breath can interrupt what's happening in a thought. And I really. I loved that feeling of interruption. And I'm not sure what I wanted with that interruption. I don't know if it was. I mean, I know that when it comes to emotional dysregulation, it's really hard to move through things. It's hard to move beyond the crisis. Sort of fixated on the crisis, and it's just. It's this big ball of horrible. And the line ending kind of was an intentional way of trying to move beyond or move into something else. I mean, I think I know that when I found. When I felt the word rumbling, as in resonating with more than one energy or meaning, I just went to the next line. I kind of let it take me intuitively as I went.
- [11:05]
B
I love that idea of the words rumbling. That's a great way to describe it. So I think we're going to pull a curvy sampler because I really want people to get a taste for your work now. And for those who've never listened to my poetry podcast here in MBM before, the Kirby sampler is named for the wonderful poet Kirby, who, when I was interviewing them, would just kind of break into poems throughout the interview rather than having the reading at one designated spot. And I really, when it comes to poetry, I enjoy that because it mimics the kind of cadence I like to enjoy poetry in my life, which is all over, everywhere, in the car, waiting for your kid to get a swimming lessons wherever you can. So, Concetta, please take the wheel and go.
- [11:52]
C
Okay, well, speaking of anorexia, this poem is titled Anorexia. Dirt this pitcher Dig this girth with debt Denching off excess the skirting, plodding dishrag worn chiffon or crepe saved social storms A pelvis, a cloak, a pose get under sleep in your angel food Give shame for free to the first bush growing treacle Fish cake upside down. A birthday cake, a patty cake. Lake and bread. L' in Lone naked Life. And I have another one.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah, I was gonna. I was gonna ask if you would read one more, and then I would love you to. I'll remind you, but I'd love you to talk a little bit about your process of distilling language, because I really feel in these poems that not a single syllable is out of place or unnecessary. And I love that, especially as someone who's just had a poetry book or a couple poems edited for a poetry book where entire sections were crossed out and read. Whoa, I've got to dial it back. I need to read. Fair enough. Granted. But I felt. I felt like your collection, for anyone who is looking to distill your poems down to their pearliest bits are distilled their poems down to their pearliest bits, you're going to want to read Conchata's book. It's a, in my opinion, a wee master class on how to do that. Concetta again, please. Go ahead.
- [13:26]
C
Okay. Thank you for that, by the way. The anorexic starch, the steak, pepper the park before you plate my daughter's footwear fluvag never tasted as good as those wedding bonbonieres. Rutty candy wrapped in ribbon tied with thanks for your money, put on your gold shoes, hour the minutes, then splice each second thin enough to paper cut your hand. Five seconds is all you need.
- [13:59]
B
That's another thing you're good at is, you know, what do you say? Hour the minutes. But then there's also. You play with verbs and nouns, so sometimes you. Noun or verb? A noun. Yeah. And. And I love that. It's so much fun. In this case, plate could be a verb, but there are other instances where it's definitely a noun. You are verbing. And I always love it when poets do that with great success. So if you would, though, just to circle back to that question. Talking. Talk about your process of distillation, because to me, poetry is life distilled. It is sentiment distilled. It is emotion distilled. And that can still happen in a prose poem, of course. But I really do feel like in. In these line poems that they. It really, really shines so beautifully. And you said this is your, you know, kind of your first attempt at doing this. And that makes me curious because my first attempt at doing something is irrevocably horrible. And this is not. I want to tap the brain.
- [15:04]
C
Right. It's not my first attempt. I've. I've written, I've published a line ending poetry book before. But I don't feel that I'm. I question my line ending poetry and I've worked with prose poetry more. So when it comes to process with line ending poetry, I have to say that I'm. It's kind of the energy behind anorexia is reductive and that's. And I have ruined some poems based on this cutting away that I do because you can tell that whatever's on the page just doesn't have energy. And trying to cut away to bring out the energy has meant that some poems just were reduced to nothing. Some pieces of poems were happy, wonderful accidents. Unfortunately, those happy accidents ended up becoming a benchmark that made it difficult. So as I, as I progressed through these experiments, I tried to get into the. Get in under the emotion or inside the emotion. And rage is one of those emotions that's totally centered on an inner violence. And so I think that, I think in some ways, especially these anorexic poems show that I am, am driven. And the thing about the inner violence is that, you know, my objective is to make something beautiful, not to make something ugly. But I do in retrospect think that there's probably a lot of violence there in these poems expressed in the rage. So my process is actually also very messy. You know, I start off with rambling and then. And then eventually, you know, a year later I might come upon something that a piece in this longer poem that stands out and that gets pulled out and then I start cutting some other poems. I knew I wanted to write like Sad Thighs. I really wanted to write that poem but I couldn't find the way. It was actually really hard finding the parts for this long poem. And it started out as a very long poem and it was reduced to these little portions. There's one, so I'm going to pull a Kirby and there's this one piece that was totally so difficult to write. Where is it? And I knew what I wanted to express in it and cries of don't desert me of herself. She cries at the atom of history Cries a four year old girl on the street fumbling after Mum striding away Cry the flowers. That to me that piece took a long time. It took about two years and it wasn't even in that poem. It became a part of this poem. But the. I think borderline personality disorder starts in childhood or I understand that that's where it starts. And it usually is inspired by the fact that your emotions are not recognized or are. Yeah, you're not being looked after emotionally and. Yeah. And so you tend to get riled up and then become too excited. And one day I was walking down the street and I saw a little girl freaking out, chasing her mother through an intersection. And the mother is striding, holding flowers in her hand. So she's going to a party, some kind of a party with her daughter, but her daughter is following behind her, barely able to catch up because the mother's trying to run away from the girl. It just, it shocked me to see that. And it also, it registered as a memory of something from my childhood. And that to me, that was part of that became a part of the poem only after I was able to put the poem together around bpd.
- [20:57]
B
I still remember reading the line cry the flowers and just singing. Oof.
- [21:01]
C
Yeah.
- [21:02]
B
Because again, this is what I love so much about poetry is that things don't have to make that crystal clear logical sense to make entirely clear intrinsic sense. And I, you know, talking about the mother skirt, I'm not saying my mom was trying to get away from me, but I do have a memory, it's story time with Holly now, of my mom just walking down the stairs at home. She wasn't on a street a little bit too far in front of me and just sitting down and bawling because my mom wouldn't wait for me. And, and that's that feeling it reminded me of is just wanting to be with her all the so badly and her being too busy and preoccupied to even notice.
- [21:45]
C
Yeah.
- [21:45]
B
That I was, I needed her. And again, I'm not comparing my instant to a mother running away from her child in the middle of an intersection. My mother was a stay at home mom with three kids and who had probably had enough of my BS for one day in case my mom listens to this. But I still remember that feeling.
- [22:04]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [22:06]
B
You captured it really just so beautifully. Which kind of leads to my next question, which is about. I'm always interested in the way people write about mental illness. And one thing that I really enjoy when I read well written poems about mental illness is it defies the need for people to put mental illness in a narrative framework, which I feel in my experience as someone who lives with mental illness can mess with it and it can feel inauthentic. And it can also, when you put something in a narrative framework, there's certain expectations of it, like it's going to have this kind of ending, it's going to have this kind of cadence. And that is not in my experience how mental Illness works. And when you write a poem, I don't believe that there's any of that framework that inhibits, or at least not as much framework that inhibits relaying the actual experience of what it's like to live within a mental illness. Does that make sense?
- [23:12]
C
Yeah, totally. And in fact, what's interesting is that I was dwelling on childhood memories before I found out, before I was diagnosed, I was going to this. These periods, like, there's always been a strong connection to a period in my life between the age of 6 and about 10 and 11 in this house I grew up in. And my. And the time I spent in the basement, which was the children's domain, it was a disaster down there in many ways, as far as our stuff was concerned. It was all over the place. But it was also kind of a, you know, a dank, thin layer of concrete on the floor and exposed, you know, exposed walls. It wasn't. It wasn't a nice place at all. But it seemed that there. That was when so many emotions started for me and I didn't understand what to do with those emotions. It had to do with school and to do with friends. It had to do with family. There was always something going on in my life at that time that was really. I could never grapple with. And in retro. Or when I was dwelling on this period, I thought, is this where things. My unhappiness started? Quote, unquote, my unhappiness. Is this where all of my anger started? And again, this was before I was diagnosed. So I. I wasn't looking for the narrative behind my depression. That's what the diagnosis had been before bpd depression and anxiety. It was more that I wanted to know if I had ever been. If there had ever been a time before that depression. And every time, the deeper I went into my past, the more I found these moments of grief or anger or just not right. I don't know how that. I don't even. I've never known how to explain this one. But the feeling that it's not right, the day is not right, the color of the sky is not right. I don't like the feeling. And those. Those feelings, I think those memories became the foundation for so much of my adult experiences. So I went, so the book starts in childhood, as if to say, you know, this is how. This is where it started. But it's not that. It's more that your life is a house and there's a foundation and there are. There are memories that you carry with you and that inform the way you are in the world around you. And that there was actually. Yeah. And so I agree that there's no way to create a narrative of your health. There's no way to say that these are the causes. But what interested me was to know that I knew the bad feelings a long time ago, and they were very private. And at the time, they were very private. I never shared the feelings with my. With anyone. Not with my. My mother, who was a psychiatric social worker, so she tended to be more available to talk. I could never really articulate these feelings. And that's what I wanted to get across in these poems when I first started them. And because I was inspired by watching my son grow and that. That was really transformative, actually, to help him grow and to consider my childhood and where. What was going on with me while I was growing up. Which is why I still feel guilty about that blueberry. Blueberry milkshake. Just gross.
- [28:16]
B
I. I feel guilty about the vegan shake, too. Don't. Don't worry. And they. They still bring it up. It's become something. A family legend now that because I have shown weakness in my remorse, it's. It's never. I don't think remorse is ever weak, by the way, but that's how a teenager internalizes it. At least my teenager internalizes it. It's become. Actually, I'm very grateful. It's become a bit of a joke. Which. Which makes it feel okay.
- [28:45]
C
Right.
- [28:46]
B
One that really just hit home is about how it was a feeling that you were familiar with. The reason that hit home for me is I've written about mental illness. And one of the things that helped me get sober after so many years of addiction was that I reminded myself that the really bad feelings that I was trying to waterboard with alcohol or pills, I actually knew them from the time I was very small, and I dealt with them then without this stuff. Doesn't make it easy, but I can. I can deal with it again without this stuff. And when I was reading your work, I. I felt like a sort of kindred spark of recognition. And in some of the ways that you're describing things, the language that I've said a couple times on this show that I think I have a biofilm brain. So biofilm is that, like, stuff that is on Lake rocks that makes it slippery. And that's how your language felt. Like you're like. And I'm off. Like I have a standing. Then I'm off. And it. Rather than feeling like this, the poems were loose or unruly. It felt like they were so perfectly captured and created together. They felt totally whole. And, I mean, I remember sitting down in bed thinking, I'm going to read a few poems tonight. And I finished the whole book in one setting, which never happens with poetry for me. I was like, what just happened there? I mean, I must have finished a book of poetry in one night before. But I can't think of the last time I did it. And I think it was that kind of kindred spark, a recognition of a feeling that you're talking about. Like the sky is not the right color that doesn't look right, even though it's something you've looked at a hundred times before, but just something about it is not right. Like, you say that and you're like, I don't know. I don't have the word. I'm like, yeah, I don't have the word either, but I know what you're talking about. I know the feeling exactly. I know exactly the feeling. And the feeling is familiar. Even if this thing that was familiar isn't anymore. The feeling is the recognition that something is off. Something has slipped the bounds or, you know, slipped the bond of the everyday. The normal is. Is there. And I. I mean, your poems are incredibly unusual, which I love. And I just want to add, like, a little asterisk for anyone that comes at me and says that you cannot write prose or a narrative about mental illness. I'm not saying you can't. I have. Many times. I have. I have written prose about mental illness. I'm just saying I don't think anything captures it. My opinion, as authentically and with as much versatility as one can muster when one is creating a work of art, which poetry is when it's done well, I don't think anything captures it as well as poetry. That is all I am saying.
- [31:43]
C
Yeah, I totally agree. Well, as they say, you know, poetry is where emotion is generated or emotion is housed. Whereas with prose or with fiction especially, there's too much psychology and there's too much plot and there's not enough of the. I mean, I call it weird. Weird in the way, as in it's off. I like your phrase there. It's off. The world kind of shifts slightly. That weirdness has a taste of flavor, an aura that, like you said, you can't name it and you can't even really bring it into prosecution. Or fiction in the way that it is. It actually is. All you can do is kind of set up the terms for it in a narrative of sorts. But Also, I. Also, I don't think there is another side to your disorder. There's only, you know, the continuation of it through your life and how you. You're engaging with it at a. At a given time. And crises come up all the time. Like there's never not going to be another crisis or crisis. There's. I want to. I'm going to pull another Kirby. This is a piece that started, that came out in one fell swoop, and I, you know, modified it only slightly. And this, to me felt like the moment in my childhood when I. Before I started tasting things that were bad, as in the. The bad taste or the bad color of the day or the. The badness of the day hadn't sort of descended or taken hold of me. Totally. Rot. Blue hand of a girl spread cool to a fault Running down cornflowers sequined along times highway Wrought by Queen Anne's lace With summer bangs in every corner of the quarry where mum's silver healing healed Slingbacks slipped from the basement of her reach. Sort of like a song.
- [34:40]
B
When you're talking about this, I'm in that poem, which, again, I remember reading. I. I wonder, like, it's so beautiful. And I think about even my son, my youngest son. Not the one who makes fun of me now, but they all do. But not the teenager. He's seven this summer, he said to me. I remember very distinctly, because I knew what he was saying, but I found it interesting how he articulated, which is something about how what you're articulating, I feel. He said, sometimes I feel like I'm the only human in the world and everyone else is a robot. And he's seven. And I talked to him a little bit more and it was that feeling, everything just being off, like this is how I usually see the world. And the frame in which I usually see the world has shifted and I'm not seeing what I used to see anymore. And every now and then he comes and he'll say the same thing. And I sit down and I talk to him about it, but maybe I just need to read him your poems. I'm laughing, but I'm serious, because I don't know if what I'm saying is getting through to him, because I'm trying to. I'm trying to fix it. And that's. I think when you have these shifts, you can't fix it.
- [35:49]
C
That's right. You can't. Yeah. My. I. I don't have the best relationship with my mother, but she has a background in psychology and psychiatry and the one. The advice that she gives me, which still never really. I can never really take it wholly, is just sit with it. Usually it's too painful or ugly to sit with, so I don't. And I Usually I have to do retroactive things. I have to move on, and then I can go back and look at it. But also, I realized that in my childhood, I would say that the feeling of wrongness started in a dream which I've never been able to represent anywhere in any way, not in poetry, not even in fiction. And a recurring dream that went that. That spanned from ages 6 to about 10. And in that dream, I'm looking at sand that looks perfectly, perfectly fine. White sand, untouched. And then from underneath the sand, there is this corruption of the sand, and it starts to cave and crater and become disgusting and dark and black. And then I'd wake up and that was my nightmare. I used to have that nightmare, recurring nightmare throughout that period. And that's. And that's. I think that that probably expresses that ugly. The ugly. Like, the thing is that the off part is also ugly. It's like. It's a little terrifying and a little. And it. It's just. It's like all. All the evil in the world is there. That's my feeling about the offness. It's like there's too much evil in the world this day, you know, at this time, right now.
- [38:02]
B
Yeah, no, I absolutely, sadly get that feeling. But of course, there. There is a certain kind of levity of the weight of it when at least you realize other people know about it too or experience it too. Before I ask the final question, I was wondering if you actually have two questions. Number one, if you would read again one more. But I also, perhaps before that, because I jumped. I jumped my own proverbial gun there. If you could talk about the shift in the last part of your book to prose poems. Right, because we're talking about the line poetry, but there are actually prose poems in the last part of the book.
- [38:42]
C
Yes, the prose poems. I think the prose poems kind of show the work I did to create or hold on to this ugliness and move through it. The. One of the prose poems which I will read is this experience that I had as a child that was always horrible. It was horrible when it happened. And it was a little story that no. 1. That still doesn't make any sense as a story. But the prose poems allowed me to pick up that ugliness and move around and not feel stuck. Because some. You know, the thing about the Poem is that if I'm sitting in the emotion, it's contaminated. But if with the prose poem, I can move through the contamination and explore it, I think. I think that's the way I would describe it. Like, I. I worry, you know, I do. I. At one point, I stopped writing because I worried that I was contaminating people with my. My stuff.
- [40:15]
B
I think. I think the world right now, poetry is the least of things, or any kind of prose, you know, literature. I don't think that's what's contaminating people right now. I think lack of it might be.
- [40:30]
C
Yeah. I mean, you know, like, when it's. When it's. When it's gross. When what you're feeling is gross. I hope that what I've done is shown. Shown it. Shown it for what it was. From a distance, I guess. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I listen to you and hear what you say about what I've written, and it's like, my God, did I write that? Really? I don't. I didn't. I wasn't doing that consciously. And I also am. I'm. And I'm still not aware of what I put down on paper. I just knew that I was going through something during this period, that I was writing these poems and they were governing the choices I was making on the page. But, yeah, I mean, it's interesting that what I worry is contamination is actually artistic expression. I think that's interesting.
- [41:38]
B
Yeah. And I do want to say, like, the. I truly believe that books are. Anytime you enter a book, you're entering a dance. And I'm not making up this metaphor for myself, the I slipping my mind. But the gentleman who wrote the introduction of Peter S. Beagle's most recent issue of the Last Unicorn has the best introduction of any book I've ever read in my entire life. Right. The whole thing is this continued soft, gorgeous exploration of how books are dances and that the author does part of it, but it's. The reader does the other part. And that. That's like what I'm seeing in the book. Yeah, sure. You know, it's. It's. It's not what. It may not be what you're seeing, or you're like, wow, did I do that? It's like, yes, you did. Whether you think it or I think it. And as the reader, I know I'm so happy, actually.
- [42:34]
C
Like, I'm overjoyed that it. These poems, you know, were received. They, you know, they spanned the bridge to the other Side. So using another metaphor, we're just.
- [42:49]
B
We're just crushing it with metaphors today. All over. What else would you expect on a poetry podcast? That's right.
- [42:58]
C
Oh, man. Was there another question or did you.
- [43:02]
B
Know I was just gonna ask you to read if you want to read the prose pro. And then I have one question to end off, which I will not volley at you before I ask you to read, which I have done a couple times, asked you multiple questions at once. So, yes, if you could just read, that would be wonderful.
- [43:17]
C
All right. Where are. Where are your lips as you read this? Do you follow me the way my father follows English in the Globe or any newspaper? Mouthing the words to slow the river of letters, quietly humming as if in prayer, each vowel and phoneme and muscular silent off like Nickel's daughter and slaughter. What about laughter, diphthongs and silent tease of listening list 10 to me or lately. Knife, knight, K'. Niket. The silent colors that collect around a field in winter. You need the horizon to know what I mean. Vast wintered field at Downsview hangar, rising up from where the boys are playing soccer on Saturday night. The op of sky and the thick overhang of cloud. Let me say about that. Let me say that this day. Day is everything. That world. That world has an up, up, and down. It has this. This, let me say, is the gravity of that matter. Do you follow me up the down and then under the great hole of this pomegranate.
- [44:27]
B
That's so beautiful. Rhythmically. It's beautiful. The cadence is beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think it's a perfect way to end the podcast, except for this last question, which is, what are you working on now?
- [44:39]
C
Right.
- [44:40]
B
Yeah.
- [44:42]
C
Well, I started something this morning, maybe lyric nonfiction titled My Mother's Memoir. And literally, I'm kind of pulling a Gertrude Stein. You know, Gertrude Stein wrote Alice B. Toklas autobiography. You know, her. Her lover's autobiography, but it was actually her story. So I'm writing my mother's story from my perspective as this memoir. I don't know if that's a longer piece, but the long piece that I'm working on right now is about age. Ageism in ageism around us, ageism at the workplace, ageism in culture, ageism in Hollywood. The idea that age is equivalent to death, which is a contradiction really, since death happens at any time of one's life. And Hollywood, like all of you know, the substance, the film substance that just came out, that came out a couple of years ago, just a disgusting Representation and reaffirmation of how ageist Hollywood is. Because the main Demi Moore is playing an older woman who, I swear to God does not look 62. She looks 40, you know, maybe 38. And. Yeah, so it's. That's. That's what I'm working on now. Oh, and I just finished a novella on depression and suicide.
- [46:44]
B
Actually, eight love novellas. They are perfect. I mean, I also fight for my life to write anything very long. Anyway. I think as the poet in me, I'm like, no, that's too long. Why say. Why take two pages to say something you can say in two sentences? I totally agree.
- [47:02]
C
I totally agree.
- [47:03]
B
You know, every now and then, I hear novelists on interviews saying, oh, my editor made me cut, you know, 50,000 words. Like, I fight for my life to get to 50,000 words, period. Forget about cutting 50,000 words. Really, it's.
- [47:16]
C
No, Yeah, I think the shorter novel is the way to go. I think it holds us in a way that there's something intimate and immediate about it that you don't find in the. Not like a novel, a thick novel is great for getting inside a world, but sometimes what you really want to do is just get inside a character. And that's a novella. I just finished reading Tama Vongsa's Pick a Color. Oh, yes, another novella. And it's the ultimate expression of a character driving narrative that. Oh, like, it just. It drives the narrative. The character drives the narrative. I don't know how else to describe it. There's no plot, which you don't notice. I mean, I'm at page 50. You know, when I get to page 50, that's when I'm looking for the plot. In most novels, I was at page 50, and I didn't miss the plot moment. It's like the voice of this character. Anyway, I. I think the novella is. Is our speed. Is the speed of our contemporary culture. Really.
- [48:51]
B
Yeah, I just. I just love them, and I just made it sound like I only like them because they're what I'm capable of writing. That is not true. I like them because I read Wide Sarah Goss of Sea when I was a teenager. I like them as I read Heart of Darkness. And as a teenager, I, you know, I mean, I like them because I like them, that's all. And they're just so beautiful when. And when they're done. Well, they're just beautiful. So. Thank you so much, concierge, for talking to me, everyone. You can Get Disorder, which was published by Gordon Hill anywhere. Books are bought or borrowed. And concerta. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day, and I look forward to having you back to talk about whatever miraculous and disturbingly kindred book you write next.
- [49:30]
C
Okay, thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful. Beautiful questions, by the way. I really enjoyed myself.
- [49:38]
B
Well, thank you for being so gracious about my. My questions.
- [49:41]
C
Yeah, those are great. They were wonderful.
- [49:44]
B
Wonderful. I'll talk to you soon.
- [49:45]
C
Okay. Take care.
- [49:46]
B
You too. Bye.
- [49:47]
C
Bye.
- [50:01]
B
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