La Literati Interviews: Anthony Madrid

I first noticed Chicago-based poet Anthony Madrid in AGNI online. His poem "If I Am a Total Washout as a Lover (and I Am)" lured me in with its playfulness and tongue-and-cheek wit; but it was his latest manuscript, The 580 Strophes that set the hook deep in my throat.

Can I get an amen for trite-but-otherwise-apt fishing metaphors? Amen. Forget it. You'll amen me after you spend some time with his poetry. Read on, take notes:

Q: One of the things that initially struck me about your poems was this sense of highbrow finesse that was accessible to the "common" reader—a reader perhaps not initially aware of some of the allusions you incorporate. It seems to me that many poets pander to either academia or the plainspoken, whereas your poems have the potential to please both, aesthetically. Is this a conscience effort? Do you consider who will receive your poems when you write them?

You're talking about all those literary allusions. I'll tell you what that is. That's my having been fucked up for life by reading T.S. Eliot when I was a junior in high school. All those footnotes, back of The Wasteland—? That stuff looked to me like this great big heap of unbetterable awesomeness. And still pretty much does. I—don't really expect to recover.

So, no, I'm not conscious of any balancing act. I just write what I like. Like every other good little twit out there.

Q: You've got an impressive list of publication credits—snagging coveted spots in AGNI, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Copper Nickel among others. Do you have any wisdom to impart for poets attempting to break into the world of these competitive journals?

Ha. Copper Nickel looks funny in that list.

Do I have any wisdom to impart. I don't. Every one of those acceptances was a Slush Pile Special. Nobody had heard of me. I was nothing. Which I still pretty much am.

I can tell you what I did, though. It's stupid. I wrote the whole book first, and then sent all those poems out at once. Theory was that I would suddenly be everywhere. "Who is this guy?" and so on. Classic naive shit. That was 2008.

But then good things started happening. I got picked up at Web Conjunctions early. That's good visibility. It's how Robert and Mary found me. And then there was AGNI Online. I think Chris saw me there. Poetry was maybe a year later.

All this is irrelevant. There are gazillions of people who have been in all those places and it doesn't mean jack.

Q: Why poetry? Why you? And why do you refer to yourself in the 3rd person so frequently?

Ay ay ay.

Why poetry/why me. The real reason I got into poetry is 'cuz I was very, very vain about the expressiveness of my talk, all through my childhood. I liked that, and I liked my handwriting—but that's it. I had no other sources of satisfaction. I looked like shit; I didn't have an idea in my skull; I was perpetually excusing myself so I could go into the bathroom and cry with rage. Need I say more? Anyone answering this description would become a poet.

Now, why third person. Oh, that's just this good thing I got from the Urdu poetry I worship. All those guys with their ghazals, they end their poems with these sudden shifts into third person. Berryman of course does this too, and everybody goes into total bliss. I don't know why it's so good, but it is. And so I do it.

Q: You've said previously that poets should consider, if not rely on, being read and experienced aloud. Some people might disagree with this, as the majority of poetry's consumption happens between a solitary reader and the printed word. Why do you think it's important to construct a poem with oration in mind?

Oh, I don't want to insist on this point. There's all kinds of perfectly good stuff that would never in a million years work at a reading, and that's fine. All I'm saying is I know ALL THESE PEOPLE who are so fun and exciting in real life, and will write you emails crackling w/wit and drama and opinion and all the rest of it, and then you turn to their poetry and it's like this soup of evenly-distributed hydrogen atoms. No fun, no drama, no opinion, no one's talking, and nothing is being said. But I think if these poets would just take the presentation-before-a-live-audience thing seriously, and write as if the idea was that you have to get out there and kick the ball down the field and then fffooompf put it in the net, maybe this whole poetry operation wouldn't look like such a drag half the time.

Q: Your latest work is called The 580 Strophes. For the non-English majors, explain what a strophe is, and why you want to change modern poetic form with it?

Part 1. What is a strophe. Strophes are when the poem is made out of a buncha same-sized scoops of talk, all in a row. Think verses in a song. Verse, verse, chorus, verse—this kind of thing. The verses are strophes.

A strophe is not the same thing as a stanza, though. 'Cuz you can have a poem where the stanzas are all totally irregular in length. The point of "strophic structure" is you get a rhythm going:

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH?
blah blah blah blah blah blah BLAH!

and so on. The whole point is the rhythm. Once you get it going, it actually seems annoying to break with it. This is somehow the nature of rhythm.


Part 2. Why do I think strophic structure is going to save the world. Basically? because people secretly want poetry to be rhythmic. That is my sincere belief. I'm not saying metrical; I'm saying rhythmic. They want the poet to jump in the hole and start shoveling out same-sized scoops of neat talk. It's just good to do that. But people are ashamed of it. They think, Oh well that's boring, that's monotonous. Yeah, well, if it is, how come songs are all like that, and it's not a problem there?

Rhyme too! People love that shit; they just don't know it. And since they're all terrified that they might be doing something their MFA guru would sneer at, they write these poems that look like blackboards at MIT. Oh boy, aren't we all having fun being "interesting"—! Except it sucks.

(I hate every last one of the "New Formalists," by the way, so don't start getting ideas. My la-la here has nothing to do with "participating in a tradition" or "proving you're a disciplined craftsman" or any of that. It's all about rhythm and rhyme as drugs. That's their justification; that's their glory. Anything beyond that issues directly from the Devil's anus.)

Q: You get to take credit for having written one poem in history. What is it, and tell us why.

That's easy. I'd like to have written Ecclesiastes. King James Version, babe. There's stuff in there that causes me to squirt tears, virtually every time I look at it. And I look at it all the time. That and Revelation are like favorite CDs I take down and play whenever I need a lift.

(Better mention: I have no religion.)

Q: What should Madrid fans keep their eyes on, going forward? What's your next move/project/piece?

"Madrid fans." That's rich. (Hi, Mom! How did you find this blog?)

Actually, I'll tell ya, my "next project" is → I want that book out. The 580 Strophes. I need that thing published, and I need to get the hell out of grad school. If I could have those two wishes, I don't need a third.

Madrid, as I have come to call him, is quite modest considering what he is doing with his poetry. In a poetic climate where writers tend to either rebel from the perceived pompousness of the high-brow, or run to impress/outdo other career writers without pausing to welcome the unwashed masses, Madrid's poetry offers something savory to both the ultra-violet academic and the unschooled lover of words. Something that is exciting, fresh, and within the confines of a consistent poetic form. Something that is, at times, simultaneously campy and high art. My advice? Keep your eye on Madrid. You won't be disappointed.

Sometimes Reading Isn't Power

I never thought I'd say this, but...I think I need to stop reading. Well, at least for awhile.

Let me preface by saying that I have great reverence for reading. Nothing makes me happier than the smell of a new book, except maybe an acceptance letter from an editor. I take pride in the fact that I have more books than I can handle; I could probably make furniture pieces out of the more substantial volumes.

The problem is this: as a writer (or still a wannabe at this point), I find that the things I'm reading are starting to choke me out. I've been reading so much that I feel quietly paranoid about what I'm doing. Sure, the right piece of literature can awaken and inspire other literature, but lately, I feel like all the things I'm reading are trying to puke up on my page.

I've read so many great poets online recently (time for unsolicited plugs): Mathias Nelson, Justin Hyde, and Amanda Aucter among others. I've also gone the traditional route and raided the library for inspiration. Recently I devoured Sandra Cisneros' Loose Woman, and Natasha Tretheway's Bellocq's Ophelia is sitting on my nightstand in the cue just behind Bukowski's What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.

I think it's a fundamental thing to educate yourself by reading as promiscuously as possible...until it's time for you to speak. I've been a reader my entire life and now? Now I need some quiet. I need to blood-let all these other voices and talents that want to smother mine. They are screaming at me when I'm writing, especially the male poets. And they say: who wants to read about that? You are too sentimental, too clean, too Tampax to have any bite. Be a misanthrope. The academic poets tell me that I'm not pedigreed enough. The influential poets tell me to copy them. It's vicious I tell you.

So I think, just for awhile, I will be alone in my own room and see what sort of sounds I can make. I think the cruelest thing you can tell a writer is that they are a stillborn version of someone else. I don't want to be anyone else, and I think the most successful people are those who are willing to be a total failure for the sake of being themselves. And maybe I'm not a special snowflake, maybe my writing voice isn't avant-garde or powerful, but I'll never know if I can't tell the other writers to shut up and go away while I work.

The Wisdom of Others

I've always been a quote junkie.

As a teenager my diary was filled with them. As an English teacher, I'd put a new quote on the board every week that correlated with my lessons. As a dork, I list a quote of the week on my outgoing voicemail. As a poet so many of the things I write begin as a response to a quote I read, or a singular line that comes to me somewhere from the ether.

Here are a few favorites that I've gathered over the years:

"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which makes you lonely."
--Lorraine Hansberry

"The meeting of two personalities is like the meeting of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
--Carl Jung

"You do not have a soul. You ARE a soul. You have a body."
--C.S. Lewis

"There are years that question, and there are years that answer."
--Zora Neale Hurston

"The true genius shutters at incompleteness, and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
--Edgar Allen Poe

"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death."
--Oscar Wilde

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
-Leo Tolstoy

What are your favorites?

One Shot Wednesday Poetry

House Ghost



by Christeene Fraser


“He’s right there Mommy,” she says, “Behind you!”
I turn and see framed crayon pictures of yellow flowers,
stuffed rabbits nibbling carrots sewn to their paws.
“The man is sick,” she tells me, “He’s mean!”

My daughter, the clairvoyant—should have named
her Cassandra. I tell her it’s not nice to fib to her mama,
recalling the light left on in the basement, skin pimpling
from the rush of cold pulling the cord.

Maybe this house ghost of ours rocks in the
corner chair, remembering the heat of July when
he strangled his Dolores in the sewing room, before
he swallowed a barrel, whole, like a ripe banana.

Maybe in the dark he whispers his secret in
my daughter’s ear so that she cannot sleep,
or dreams of death. Perhaps he is angry that
we have painted his walls a shocking cobalt.

Or maybe this house ghost of ours, ‘the Man’ (we’ve named him),
is truly harmless and only watches in the shower while
I lather my hair, and maybe he slides the conditioner closer
to me when I’m blinded by soap and cannot see.

I tell her not to be afraid. I tell her to sleep,
that she is safe in my care; like all parents.
Like all lies.

For One Shot Wednesday

Impressions from a Book Fest

Recently I was asked by Emory University to be one of their featured authors signing/selling books for their "Authors Spotlight" at the Decatur Book Festival. I'm not really sure why. When I saw the caliber of writers also appearing on that featured author's list (Pulitzer Prize winning author Natasha Tretheway, National Book Award finalist Kevin Young, Emory University Vice President Gary Hauk) I felt sort of like the scraggly chicken patay passed around before the main entree.

These people are accomplished, well-known, hold copious degrees and important university titles, and I'm...well, I'm just Christeene. Christeene of 'Hey, go file this for me' notoriety.

The night before the festival, my husband and I stayed up until nearly 4am stapling and folding these beautiful little chapbooks stuffed with 32 pages of poems that I've lovingly tended to over the last month. As the books grew in number on our dining room table, and we laughed over the intimidating length of our Freudian inspired booklet stapler, I felt proud. I felt like a Writer (capital 'W').

The next day, alone, with my homemade volumes packed neatly in my book-bag I felt something very akin to the sinking dread I had on the first day of middle school. The prom scene from the cult movie Carrie replayed in my head ('They're all gonna laugh at you!') until I imagined that my hair was clumped in thick pig blood.

Luckily it turned out to be far less traumatic than all that.

Some Impressions:

1. When selling a chapbook, be sure that your 'FOR SALE' sign is large enough for little old ladies to see from at least 100 feet away. This will save you both from the ensuing embarrassment when a little old lady assumes that you're handing out pamphlets and takes one while you wave your hands and screech sheepishly, "Ma'am, those cost five dollars!"

2. Have no shame whatsoever when two friends show up unexpectedly and start snapping photos like you're Billy Collins or Stephen King descending from The New York Times bestseller's list to greet the plebeians. Embrace the free PR. Just pretend like you don't know who they are, and ask for their names as you sign their books with panache.

3. Don't be insulted when someone comes up to you and assumes you're the information person even though you are clearly sitting under a HUGE sign that says 'Author Spotlight.' Just smile and say, "Yes sir, Joseph Skibbell IS scheduled to sign at this booth later this afternoon!"

4. Have some enthusiasm when you're pimping your own wares. Apart from a tap-dance, people need to be convinced to pay ANY thing for poetry these days unless you've been thoroughly swabbed and vetted by The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly.

5. Never underestimate the little details. One woman bought my chapbook because she liked the Anais Nin quote on the back of my business cards; it spurred a whole conversation about writing, which ended in her perusing my first chapter and parting with two copies at $5 a piece (Hey, ten bucks is a big deal when a gallon of gas is nearly $3).

6. That lurky couple that talks to you for fifteen minutes and then stands awkwardly in the distance whispering and staring at you for another 20 mins after the husband has already asked 'So, what are you doing after this is over?' may be A) swingers looking for a friend, or B) just weird. Either way, exit from the back of the tent unseen.

7. Remember that every step, no matter how small or awkward, is still a step forward in your writing career. No one that ever wrote anything worth reading did so for money or recognition (even if they fantasized about both); it may be to your advantage as a living writer if you have neither. To be a real Writer, you need only a great big soul made of "empathy and intuition" (to quote a friend of mine).

I sold more books than I anticipated during my hour-that-felt-like-two-days. Surprisingly more books. I remembered that I was invited to sit at the same table as lauded authors even though no one knows my name. No one knows my name...yet.

La Literati Reviews: They May Try to Kill Me for This, by Mathias Nelson

I first discovered Wisconsin poet Mathias Nelson through the 2010 July/August issue of RATTLE. Before I could finish the last stanza of his poem "Dip My Pacifier in Whiskey," I was already flipping to the back of the magazine in search of his author profile. It should have come with a PSA.

Be warned kids. His poems are like crack.

Nelson's debut chapbook combines the effulgence of raging youth with the steadied craft of a mature, contemplative writer. His sense of voice, of self, is as constant as his subjects are variable. At once tender and terrifying, beautiful and brutal, nothing is spared from his acerbic observations. Consider these lines from his poem "Fish Food":

"I was pompous. Saw myself as special--
a suicide over an ice-fisherman's hole,
a stiff body floating beneath that ice
and clawing at it while growling bubbles
as the soles of big clown shoes
glided above
to where children made snowangels."

OR this passage describing the slow deterioration of a nursing home patient, in "Enamel Eyes":

"The faces of her family
don't know. Maybe she
doesn't completely know.
Maybe her mind is
like the photographs, gray
taken fifty years ago
blowing kisses.

The dentures won't go in
today. I begin to sweat,
to shake.

'Ah,' I say, 'Ah'
and begin to weep.

My tears fall
into her mouth."

In my opinion, it is in instances like these where Nelson shows his potential to be more than just a post-Bukowskian shock jock or mere peddler of images, but rather, a great observer of the human condition.

Certainly, many readers will find amusement, laughter, bewilderment, anger--lots of anger--in several of his poems and be satisfied traversing everything from the cannibalism and near-necrophilia of literary icons to fishing with his nephews. But it is his ability to weave past and present, American history and personal history, and transfigure them into something larger that haunts the psyche, leaving you hungry for much, much more.

Synopsis: this book makes me excited about contemporary poetry. Get your money together and head to the post office, now. Consider it an investment. I have no doubt whatsoever that somewhere in the future we will include Nelson in the lineage of great counter-culture poets before him.


Author Information:
They May Try to Kill Me For This, by Mathias Nelson. Self-published. 36 pages. $5.00. Contact and ordering information at:
http://www.nyqpoets.net/poet/mathiasnelson

When Does the Final Draft Actually Appear?

"True genius shudders at incompleteness"--Edgar Allan Poe

Writers: ever written something that you thought was absolutely GENIUS until you saw it again the next day and then hated yourself and were subsequently humiliated by your poor lapse of judgment?

I call that having a one-night-stand with your first draft. It's just ugly.

But what if it's not your first draft, but more like, an entire book? I had a mini-meltdown the other day before emailing my first book, Little Earthquakes, off to a friend to read. I reread almost 70 pages and nearly decided to torch it, blot it out of my memory like a victim of incest. There were only a few redeeming lines in what seemed like endless pages of amateur, uneducated, undisciplined, prose-posing-as-poetry pieces of narcissistic garbage. I emailed them to her but went home that day feeling sad and depleted like a middle-aged actress who has realized that she will not be getting calls to play the ingenue any longer.

I shared this feeling with my spouse and he just shook his head: "But, you won a prize for that book. A PUH-RIZE!" He articulated loud and slow, as though I didn't understand what the word 'prize' meant.

Writers are notorious for this, or really, creative people are notorious for this. The work is never done. The finished product is always as scary as first draft.

I remember reading an article once where Nicole Kidman said it was painful for her to watch herself acting: she was constantly critiquing herself, judging her every move. I thought to myself, this dumb broad, I'd LOVE to be sitting in a theater somewhere in a couture gown watching myself act in some movie where I was paid millions of dollars to play pretend and kiss some hot actor, give-me-a-break! Now I have a lot more sympathy for the botoxed Aussie.I understand her pain completely.

Being creative publicly means willingly placing some part of your body on the chopping block for others to decide whether or not that appendage is worth saving. It's pulling up your sweater for others to see the breast cancer scars and mawed tissue and deciding if it is profound statement of truth or just grotesque. But its a beautiful thing, this truth, this grotesqueness. Writing and creation and carnage and love and first-draft or Pulitzer Prize book, it's all the same. It all has its place and function. So what if people can my writing?

It helps me to remember that I am learning, that I am still new to it all.

I would never judge my daughter for not running after barely learning to walk. I'd tell her to take it slow: steady her gait, plant her heels, try the stairs, master the stroll, running's bad for the joints.

Why We Love What We Love

Writing love poems is harder than you'd think.

Let me clarify that: writing honest love poems that do NOT make me gag is harder than you'd think. I abhor sap. I dislike love poems that don't sting just a little. Anyone who writes those kind of love poems has failed to capture the astounding range of love. Their 'violets are blue' sentimentality does the reader a disservice.

I'm in the process of writing my second book of poetry, Desir, a volume of love poems based on the four loves as understood by the ancient Greeks, and later redefined for modernity by C.S. Lewis: storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (erotic love), and agape (unconditional, God-like love).

I find that writing about love is some of the most challenging writing I've done because of the amorphous nature of that emotion--the erotic melding into the platonic, or the platonic yielding to the erotic. Soaring, iridescent love as impressionism of the senses, fruition of memory, desire, and psychosis.

Why do we love the things and people that we love?

In writing about love, this question is almost more important, or certainly more interesting, than the expression of love itself. The apertures of erotic love, for instance--the yearning, the kiss, the embrace, the explosive desire--are universal. But why him or her? There is nothing more individual or singular than the trajectory to the beloved. How is it that two people with so much in common could find absolutely nothing to love in the other? How is it that two people with nothing in common can bind their lives together without much consideration?

I don't care about expressing how love makes an individual act, per se; I'm interested in reading and writing about how love melds the mind. I'm interested in exploring why we love the things and people we love in the first place. Is our choice of partner merely an expression of out "desire-mapping" through past experiences, media images, familial models, or is it more?

I don't know if I can believe in something as delicious as fate. I don't know that I can get behind something as idealistic as soul mates; and that really says something about me, doesn't it?

What I can believe in is this, at least: when we say 'I love you' or 'I love ___,' it says more about the person saying it than the object(s) of affection themselves. We are what we love. This can be both a wondrous and terrible revelation.

I won? Wait, I won! On the 2010 New York Book Festival

Last Wednesday was no ordinary day for me. I woke up and packed my trunk to the brim with popcorn and pottery and rubber ducks (a one-woman flea market), and made my way to work where I was on a committee planning a "county fair" honoring the good folks of the Emory University library.

If the rubber ducks and riku glazed coffee cups weren't bizarre enough, the news I received that afternoon certainly was:

I won the poetry prize for the 2010 New York Book Festival for my first chapbook, Little Earthquakes.

Maybe 'bizarre' is the wrong word, it was more like complete-and-utter-shock-my-throat-is-doing-the-lumpy-cry-of-a-beauty-queen-getting-her-tiara-after-6-months-of-nacho-deprivation. I had to read my name on the website two or three times to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating or developing cataracts from the inevitable diabetic coma washing over me from the cotton candy I'd downed earlier.

A note on the chapbook: it was completed in 2.5 months of solitary confinement with caffeine pressure-wash at my favorite table in the Pitts Theology library. It was completed with tears and prayer and irreverence and gratitude. It was completed with a I've-got-nothing-to-lose kind of laissez-faire. It was completed without expectation.

Life is like that, isn't it? When we truly drop all expectation, the most exciting things happen. I've prayed for months (years really) for God to open a door or slam it in my face when it comes to writing. I am not delusional. I know this prize is not a guarantee of anything; I am still unknown and unpublished and unrefined. I am still a nobody. But that's okay with me. Even more important to me than winning, is this: God's undeserved love, a prayer unambiguously answered, holding true gratitude in my hands. I don't care how cheeseball or backward that makes me sound. I don't care how my career flies or flops if I can carry that gratitude, this moment in my heart forever.