BLACK OCEAN | WELCOME TO OUR FLOATING PALACE
Ordinary Sun has made it to the semi-finals in the Goodreads Choice Awards. If you already voted (and especially if you haven't), you can cast your vote in the semi-final round and help send it on to the finals! There are plenty of other great books here as well, so take some time and vote. We'll love you for it (though we already do)!
Vote here. (Matthew's book is in the poetry section.)
Black Ocean & Walter Sickert present
PANDORA'S BOX: Two Nights of Art & Mayhem
Local award-winning publisher, Black Ocean, teams up with Boston’s musical king of weird, Walter Sickert, to bring you two nights of art and mayhem.
Friday, November 18th, kicks off with Outrageous Banjo, followed by a literary set of performances curated by Black Ocean, featuring local guerilla poet Alex Gang, and bests-selling Black Ocean author Joe Hall (from Maryland). Then the night heats up with an exclusive Slutcracker Sneak Preview courtesy of the Babes in Boinkland. Following their act, the Somerville Symphony Orkestar will get even more asses shaking as they put the “punk” back in “funk,” and turn the club into “equal parts mosh pit and horah.” To cap off the evening Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys present a very special event: The Chimpwork Orange Experience; art, music and stage show inspired by Anthony Burgess!
Saturday, November 19th, kicks off with James McAndrew (of Milquetoast & Co.) doing a solo set, followed by another Black Ocean curated literary set featuring Jasmine Dreame Wagner (of the Cabinet of Natural Curiosities). Then the the Babes in Boinkland return with ANOTHER exclusive Slutcracker Sneak Preview. Following the Babes, Bury Me Standing will elevate the night to new heights of consciousness with their own brand of “Gypsy Dirge-Core,” intertwining Balkan folksongs with art metal and psychedelia. To cap off the evening Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys present a very special event: Batman and the Chocolate Factory; a super-heroic sugar-fueled dream inspired by Roald Dahl!
Doors @ 8 / $10 in advance / $12 day of show / $16 both nights!
TWO NIGHT PACKAGE comes with a FREE exclusive
UNRELEASED song download card to be picked up at the venue
11/18: BUY HERE
11/19: BUY HERE
Two Day Pass: BUY HERE
Managing Editor A. Minetta Gould interviews three Creative Writing instructors about choosing Black Ocean books for their classrooms. All work at Boise State University where Minetta herself taught for three years.
Genevieve Kohlhardt was raised in Colorado but lives in Idaho, where she's getting her MFA in Poetry and teaching creative writing classes. You can find her work in H_NGM_N and Strange Machine.
Adrian Kien lives and teaches in Boise, ID. He is the author of Who is There (Blazevox), and the chapbooks An Anatomy Lesson (translations of Christian Prigent, Free Poetry) and The Caress Is a Letter of Instruction (Strange Machine).
Charles Gabel is the author of the chapbook Pastoral. He studied classics at Loyola University Chicago and currently studies poetry at Boise State University.
AMG: What Black Ocean titles have you taught? What was most successful? What posed the biggest challenge?
GK: I've taught Zachary Schomburg's Scary, No Scary and Julie Doxsee's Objects for a Fog Death. I'll be teaching Matthew Henrikson's Ordinary Sun later this semester. I'd say both were really successful, but my students were really quick to get into Schomburg. Doxsee's book took a little more discussion to get them into because the language is much less direct. But with a little bit of discussion they were really turned on by it.
AK: Scary, No Scary. The Man Suit. With Deer.
I will be teaching Destroyer of Man later in the semester.
Schomburg's work has been a joy to teach because it seems to open students up to the possibilities of being weird. It's a fairly safe level of weirdness and humor and sincerity. The students love it. They get it and feel confident that poetry is something they can do too. It's a lot like looking at a Mark Ryden painting. On the surface its cute, but then you see all the blood.
With Deer proves a bit more challenging for students. The imagery is disturbing. The language is strange, part foreign, part translated. With Deer seems to push the students who want to learn and scare away the students who are lazy or weak kneed. Aesthetically, I love With Deer. And it is probably my enthusiasm that helps carry the conversation. The book is terrific for conversations about the mutability of language, sound and translation. Harriet Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary is a nice complement to this book.
CG: I taught With Deer in Fall 2010, The Man Suit in Spring 2011, and Ordinary Sun just a few weeks ago in Fall 2011. All three have been successful, though With Deer posed a challenge, largely due to its brutal content. It's a book that, I think, scared some students. Through that, however, we were able to investigate an alternative view of nature and how it might appear in poetry. In class we applied more traditional versions of nature in poetry to the book, working with how Berg both demonstrated and pulled away from those conventions.
AMG: Do you think you were attracted to teaching these texts for a reason? Did your initial reasons become the reasons for the class?
GK: Really, I think my initial reason's for choosing those books is that I really enjoyed them, and wanted to talk about them. Although with Schomburg it also had to do with how easy/difficult that text is simultaneously. It's written in language they understand, they see the images no problem, so the language doesn't impede discussion on what the function of the image might be. Plus, it turned me on to write differently (as did Doxsee) so I was hoping it would have the same effect on them.
AK: To be honest, I can't remember how BO got on my radar. But yes, I would say that it's a general aesthetic. The only analogy I can think of is with music. There are certain labels that you like - Alternative Tentacles, Mute, Matador . . . . The press hosts a variety of authors and aesthetics but they seem unified in their vision. The titles seem fresh and young. I think it is this that I hope students take from the books. The books are smart but don't seem necessarily pretentious.
CG: I was originally drawn to With Deer because of its kind of intensity and imagery as well as being a work in translation. It was of a style that I thought would give a greater variety of language and image in the contemporary—it's an extreme that doesn't exist in American poetry. I wanted to give them a much broader picture of what was going on. I had expected the nature-oriented conversations to happen, but in the classroom that became the main focus somewhat unexpectedly.
I was drawn to teach The Man Suit for a lot of the reasons it was successful--to open up students to something that doesn't look like their original conception of poetry. It's accessible without being easily explained and it focuses students on what the poems' craft elements (language and image) largely because they're not available for a decoding.
I selected Ordinary Sun in order to present the students with a type of poetry that feels contemporary but in a lot of ways still looks like the typical conception of a poem and carries through an older tradition, particularly the Romantics. It was meant to be something of a bridge into the now. This carried through extremely well. Also, while the book has these very clear ambitions, it's simply a book of beautiful poems that do a lot of different things from poem to poem while all being essential to the overall work and retaining the voice of the book.
AMG: How did reading teaching these texts influence your student's writing/way of thinking about poetry?
GK: Schomburg is a good poet for "breaking" them—so to speak. Both times I've shown my students Schomburg poems, they are immediately willing to abandon their tendencies to write "deep" poetry, and actually start writing deep poetry using imagery and creating worlds within their poems. It has also helped them identify paradox—in the way the book is simultaneously funny and tragic.
Doxsee's effect has been more subtle, I think. When I taught her book, we worked on picking up repeated ideas and themes in a series of poems and looking at how those work in multiple poems. It definitely allowed my students to be okay with saying things that made "no sense" and see that there is a kind of sense developed in the difficult.
AK: My above comments kind of answer this, but I think Schomburg really helps students start writing with imagery instead of writing about their feelings or rehashing song lyrics.
CG: Both The Man Suit and Ordinary Sun turned out to be breakthrough moments for my students as writers and readers of poetry. Both books opened up a lot of what their conceptions of poetry could do while being inviting rather than confrontational to beginning students. The Man Suit gave them a sense that poetry didn't have to contain itself within that poetry box they seem to come in with—students don't feel the need to mean in a way that usually trips them up.
Ordinary Sun has been a little different. The book presented the students with something that looks and feels contemporary, but carries all the notions of what students expect from poetry. It seems to walk and talk like poems they've seen before, but there's something new going on; it nudges against a lot of notions of poetry's stuffiness. At the same time it took old concepts and poetics of the Romantics and brought them into an approachable context. The book carries with it a deep poetic tradition while sounding new, which I've found to be essential in opening up students to approaching poetry.
___________
There is also a personable atmosphere surrounding our authors—they actively work toward helping young readers find a space in their books. In Boise alone, Julie Doxsee skyped into Genevieve’s classroom (all the way from Turkey), Zachary gave a reading in Adrian’s back yard, and Matthew is about to give a Skype reading (four different introductory and intermediate classes have been working with Ordinary Sun). Being able to interact with a poet while reading their work inherently shapes a new, deeper understanding of how the poems are alive, how they came to live, and how someone new to poetry can begin to live with poetry inside themselves.
We at Black Ocean would love to hear about your interactions in the classroom with our titles—both as educators and as students. Write about your experiences in the comment field below.
If you’re interested in teaching a Black Ocean title please contact A. Minetta for a desk copy (minetta@blackocean.org).
This is the first in a series of Q&As we'll be posting with Black Ocean authors. We will try to do a mix of authors chatting with authors, staff members, and everything in between. Feng Chen's book is forthcoming in 2012. Keep reading to get as excited about it as we are! (Questions in bold.)
Nikki Cohoon (Web Editor, Black Ocean): First, I want to say that we’re excited to have you in the Black Ocean family. Would you mind giving us a little sneak peak from Hunger Transit? Do you have a favorite poem or line or section or bit that you could share, and maybe tell us a little about it?
Feng Chen: The editors and I are actually discussing a new title for it! Right now we're calling it BUTCHER'S TREE which is very different from the tone of Hunger Transit. I've had a lot of trouble titling this book, actually. I don't like titles.
My favorite line is :
I want to kill you with my glittering heart.
and my favorite poem would probably be this one:
Concerning Repetition
I am a good person with a bad heart.
The photographer takes a picture of a thousand open refrigerators.
Because refrigerators are inhabited more than bodies are.You are the soup that fills my skull.
You will be hanged because the world we’re guessing at doesn’t exist.Roads bend back into their own meatus.
Yesterday, I amputated it.
If only I could show you.It was the color of blanched skin with a little bit of pink and blue.
I put it in the fridge above the lettuce, next to the butter.
The photographer takes it out because it is too artificial.
What can I say?You can tell anyone anything if it happened in a dream.
~
I don't think this poem is very representative of the whole book because it's much less lyrical. I wrote most of the poems under lyrical influence, but I chose this poem because of the first line, and maybe because right now I'm just attached to non-lyrical more aphoristic poems and this was a pretty late revision... though the last poem I wrote was very image playful. I like this poem because it's honest. I think that the "good person with a bad heart" is more applicable to the typical of my demographic, which is the highly-educated humanities person, who often come out of their education with this self-reflexive, guilt ridden identity. When I wrote the book, though, I was more focused on personal evil and personal desire, not the larger kind of public relationship I was gesturing at just now.
What has the publishing process been like for you? Has there been much back and forth? Can we expect the finished book to be fairly close to the manuscript you originally submitted, or has it changed in any way?
It's changed quite a bit. I think I drove Janaka and Carrie crazy because I was doing so much editing, and I was kind of neurotic and didn't think to be systematic in tracking them. The biggest thing I've learned is that I shouldn't try to "improve" something that feels like it comes from a different self, and that I need to track changes like a machine, or else it's difficult to work with multiple people. Because I didn't relate to the poems as much when I was editing it (in contrast to when I submitted it), I kept feeling like I needed to change it into something "better", but all I was doing was making it more disjunctive. However, I do think that my retroactive injections to the poems and the editor's hard work and very useful comments gave it a coherency that wasn't there before. I still think it needs more editing. But Janaka made a rule: no more line editing. It's like when I can't stop picking at the bumps on my face. No one can tell the difference, but I still see bumps to pick at.
I actually haven’t seen your forthcoming book yet, but I have read some of your poems and writings online (I love your blog!). What I’ve read seems so aware, alive, responsive. How does the everyday feed into your poetry (or does it)?
The poems in this book are very personal, so the poems are completely everyday-fed, like special cows in a pasture of everyday-grass. This may seem strange because there are lots of mythical things in it, but the everyday is mythical, the way events and objects take on significance to us. I think they mythical tends to signify isolation now. It's difficult to relate to classical mythology or folklore (well, except vampires) even though they're still familiar. There isn't much room for that kind of storytelling perhaps because people don't relate to living in a world where gods care about humans, even if it's in a sadistic way. I don't relate to it. Maybe that's why they're in my poems. It's about alienation, trying to pull the dead back into the everyday.
What consumes you?
Worry and art. Most recently, the film The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky, which makes me want to think more about magic.
On your blog, you often share paintings you are working on. Do you distinguish much between words and paint? Do certain subjects find their way into paintings, others into poems? Does it matter what ends up where? (I am especially interested in this because I do visual art too, and sometimes feel torn about what to give my attention to, worry that I can’t feed both the writing and the art beast at once, but also that I can’t live without either.)
They can have very similar effects. Both language and painting can convey narrative and meaning directly, and on the more abstract side, both rely on how colors, images, or meaning-textures and sound produce feelings in the viewer/reader. They work in different dimensions, but overlap a lot. Sometimes I like to make drawings or paintings because it feels more natural. Thinking in words actually feels very unnatural to me. That's why I like poetry--it assumes that language is strange.
Five words you love?
Baby, Glitter, Ant, Pig, Nuance.
You often work in lists, windows, prose blocks, in addition to lines. How did you consider form when working on your book? Did it drive or shape the book in any way?
I like lists because they build meaning through accumulation and layering. Most of the poems in the book are free form without structure other than clumped stanzas. Nowadays I don't make lists as much as splatters.
What question would you like to ask yourself?
I want to ask myself to memorize a poem. I don't know why I am afraid of memorizing it. I feel like I am afraid of forgetting things, but I'm more afraid of remembering them. I don't know why. It's like I don't really want to exist.
Do you have a favorite Black Ocean book that you find yourself telling people about again and again? Or maybe you have something to say about it that doesn’t fit the confines of a traditional review? For the month of November, we will be accepting entries for our non-traditional review competition. Love one of our titles? Send us a review in any format of your choice—video,claymation, comic, antique parchment. The only thing we don’t want to see is the typical. Surprise and delight us! We’ll post our favorites on the blog, and the one our staff deems as most creative/knock-your-socks off/amazing will earn its creator a prize package containing
Send your reviews to nikkita@blackocean.org. Winner will be announced in December.
For a litte inspiration, check out the Horn! Reviews on The Rumpus, or this trailer by Luca Dipierro.
In case you didn't read it on our Facebook page or the Harriet blog, we have some news to share--a milestone for Black Ocean, and a good sign of vitality of poetry. Zachary Shomburg's Scary No Scary and The Man Suit have sold out, and are going into their second and third printings respectively. Read our press release below for full details about these books and others, and get fresh copies for yourself by clicking the catalog link at the top of the page!
10,000 Scary Man Suits and Counting
Who says poetry doesn’t sell? And who says no one wants to read tangible, physical books anymore? Not Black Ocean, that’s for sure, who this month are celebrating the 10,000th printed copy of a Zachary Schomburg book.
Schomburg’s The Man Suit has entered its third printing, and his Scary, No Scary has entered the second—making for a combined 10,000 copies in print.
At a time when very established university presses and other poetry publishers consider themselves incredibly lucky to sell-through a poetry print run of five hundred copies, Black Ocean’s success is not only rare, but it is a quantifiable testament to Black Ocean’s commitment to beautiful books and unique promotion.
Of course, it helps to have fantastic and unusual books to work with—Schomburg has been called by Publisher’s Weekly “one of the sincerest surrealists around,” and the Huffington Post boldly declared: “Schomburg is possibly the man who will save poetry for all of those readers who are about to give up on the genre.”
He is at once a poet’s poet and a people’s poet, and his work has found new audiences and unexpected readers and inspired everything from tattoos to full-scale theatrical adaptations (with shadow puppets no less!).
This penetration of unconventional spaces and forms with poetry is exemplary of the Black Ocean mission that encourages its poets to take poetry on the road and tour, while saturating the public with skilful and passionate forms of expression through a wide variety of mediums.
Schomburg isn’t the only title with above average sales either. With standard print runs at 2,000 copies, recent books by Matthew Henriksen, Brandon Shimoda, Joe Hall, Julie Doxsee—and translations of the Swedish poet Aase Berg by Johannes Göransson—all speak to the triumph of Black Ocean’s ideal. For those who say it can’t be done, that publishing poetry is a fool’s gamble, evidence of our recent successes are proving them wrong.
We are excited to welcome D.j. Dolack (forthcoming 2013) and Zach Savich (forthcoming 2014) to the Black Ocean family! Their manuscripts were selected from our recent open reading period. They join an already amazing crew, and we're so happy to have them.
In case you haven't seen it, here's our lineup for 2012. If that looks good to you, consider a subscription for only $50 (mad savings!). Click here to check it out.
Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012)
Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012)
Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012)
The Moon's Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)
You would not be remiss to start your morning watching the latest episode of Tourist Trap NYC (put out by Eye for an Iris Press and Coldfront Magazine) featuring Brandon Shimoda and Matthew Henriksen. These charming gents are sure to put a smile on your face like they did mine.
For bios, and the video in context, visit Coldfront here.
I'll be posting more updates this weekend, but in the meantime, I thought I'd share this mini documentary about artist Luca Dipierro, who also created this amazing trailer for Robert Lopez's Asunder (Dzanc). Enjoy!
I think it's important to know what you cannot do and use that to make art.
Luca Dipierro from McNair Evans on Vimeo.
Via HTMLGIANT.
Seth Abramson is running a monthly feature on Huffington Post of what he deems some of the best contemporary poetry, "to honor the unquantifiable diversity of the poetries now in evidence in the United States, without special preference for or dependence upon any one iteration or any one year of publication."
This month, Aase Berg's With Deer makes the list. Here's an excerpt from the write-up:
Berg's words are alive with the transformative processes of the organic: deterioration, deracination, alienation, compulsion. This stomach-churning work is not for the faint of heart; yet the faint of heart probably shouldn't be reading the best contemporary verse has to offer, anyway. Certainly not verse whose epic horrors are so deviously vivid, so preternaturally aware of the darknesses in lit places, and so visceral -- literally and figuratively -- that they cannot help but haunt their readers for many months after the collection has been read and put aside.
Check out the full article here.
What would you include on your list?
Hi everyone!
Our authors and their books have been popping up around the interwebs, and here are a few recent places:
Beyond the internet realm, Carrie went to Iceland this summer, and rocked it out in her Black Ocean t-shirt. We're all jealous!
We'll be rolling out a few new features on the blog in the next month or so--if there is something you want to see here, please let us know in the comments!
Four poems from Zachary Schomburg's Fjords, forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2012 are featured in the most recent issue of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry.
...Everyone looked
at me with a face that said let’s never speak of
this. Let’s not look directly at what is meant
to be loved in secret.
from "BUILDING OF UNSEEN CATS"
If you like what you see, you may be interested in a 2012 subscription. For $50 you'll receive Fjords, along with four other choice selections. August subscribers also receive Julie Doxsee's first two books, Undersleep (Octopus Books) and Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean).
In the most recent issue of Bookslut, Nick Sturm asks questions like: "How many bees does it take to eat Matthew Henriksen?"
We always enjoy hearing more from Matthew Henriksen, and this interview is no exception. Here, he reflects on Frank Stanford, his experience teaching in Harlem, and the "awe at the pervasive beauty that surrounds us all" in poetry, and especially in life. Be sure to check out the full interview here.
The best poems are apostrophes. Talk intensely and without irony to no one long enough and your start to see your own investments in other people's interests fall away. You can't fit much experience into a poem at all if you don't first break everything down. The line, of course, delivers everything in a poem by disrupting our usual habits of perception and processing. I could call the line the force that drives disfiguring music. I see both nature and society as disfigured, and in that flaw beauty becomes more readily apparent. The line attempts to force us to hear and to see.
July is hot, and so is Ordinary Sun, which was recently featured on Huffington Post in an article called " 20 of the Best Books from Independent Presses You Should Know About." So if you haven't checked it out already, well, do it! Don't miss the nod to The Girl Without Arms either.
And, if you want to bask in the heat a little more, purchase a 2012 Black Ocean subscription this month and recieve a free copy of Ordinary Sun. 75th subscriber also wins a free t-shirt, made fresh!
Everyone's talking about their summer reading lists lately, so what are you reading? If you're looking for something a bit more engaging than the next Harlequin, why not check out the latest issue of Fulcrum, which includes a feature on Frank Stanford written by Matthew Henriksen. Read more about it here.
To ensure your future reading list satisfaction, remember to get a 2012 Black Ocean subscription this month! Details here. We're still trying to reach 50 subscribers (with the ultimate goal of 200). Will you be one of them?
The speaker in Objects for a Fog Death is not afraid of being unheard, so doesn't need to turn to the reader. The speaker is so unafraid that she even addresses the poem itself....It's as if she is aware of the fourth wall and actually closes herself in it, becoming a part of it, looking for the poem in the liquid "legal pad of words".
Check out Robert Alan Wendeborn's review of Objects for a Fog Death in The Collagist by clicking here! Published by Dzanc, The Collagist is a well-curated magazine with a lot of great work. The review itself is fresh and interesting, and if you haven't read Objects for a Fog Death yet, you'll want to after this review.
Very excited to see this review over on Hazel & Wren. A sort of virtual community space, Hazel & Wren seems to have a lot to offer. Read the review and see for yourself!
... he’s searching for something real in all the muck that is this world, and attempting to find a way to be happy with that through his images. “What we don’t know is our only law” he writes in “Copse.” This is the governing theme throughout, exploring the unknown. The poems resonate with an honest, unflinching beauty. They border on disturbing, tragic, and even violent in places, yet they are full of natural grace and most of all, acceptance.
Our subscription drive continues! We've now met our goal of 25 subscribers and are moving upwards to 50. The 50th subscriber will recieve a Black Ocean t-shirt. And all June subscribers recieve a signed, limited-edition hardbound copy of Zachary Schomburg's Fjords. Subscribe here.
In conjunction with our open reading period, we are asking submitters and fans of Black Ocean alike to consider an advance subscription to all of our offerings in 2012. For the rest of June, we will be running a subscription drive, with a free (and awesome) Black Ocean t-shirt for our benchmark subscribers. Our goal is to get 150 new subscribers by 7/1.
We will keep you posted on the progress of our subscription drive, along with sharing sneak previews from the forthcoming books all this month!
Just under 25!
We are only a few away from 25 subscriptions. Be the 25th subscriber, and in addition to a hand-signed hard cover copy of Fjords by Zachary Shomburg, you will receive a Black Ocean t-shirt!
Subscriptions are only $50 (30% off the cover price!) and you will recieve these amazing books:
Hunger Transit by Feng Sun Chen (Spring 2012)
Fjords by Zachary Schomburg (Spring 2012)
Handsome Vol. 4 (Spring 2012)
Dark Matter by Aase Berg, trans. Johannes Göransson (Fall 2012)
The Moon's Jaw by Rauan Klassnik (Fall 2012)
In addition, subscriptions ordered before July 1st will receive A SIGNED, LIMITED EDITION HARDCOVER COPY OF FJORDS!
Though it's late making it to the blog, we posted about this on our Facebook page back in April... We have added another wonderful reader to our Lifetime Subscription list as a way of thanking her for the love and devotion she expressed for our books.
The above is a tattoo of a Lung and a Haircut, from a poem by the same title in Zachary Schomburg's Scary, No Scary, that Joy I. got on her forearm back in April.
Just a reminder: if anyone else out there wants to get a tattoo inspired by any of our books, our offer for a free lifetime subscrpition to future books still stands. See the original post about this for details.
Joe Hall (Pigafetta Is My Wife) and Brandon Shimoda (The Girl Without Arms) recently sat down for an interview with Rachelle of the Blood Jet Writing Hour. They beging by talking about the mighty Black Ocean itself and its aesthetic. Brandon mentions that he thinks our aesthetic is "encapsulated in the name" and:
To me it's a feeling; it's kind of a feeling that combines great empathy, a metallic taste--it's kind of a color. Thinking about the aesthetic, their books are so different, but I think one of the qualities they all share is a great empathy. There's a lot of deep investigations into the darker ends of love.
Joe adds that
I latch onto the black part of the black ocean. It's like a dark pulsing heart....there is a darkness there that is a luminous darkness.
They go on to read excerpts from their books and to reflect on their processes.
Some highlights:
Brandon on form in The Girl Without Arms:
The girl without arms was sort of a different world. It was more a matter of finding the right instrument with which I could scrape out the inside of my brain.
I like arranging things and I like the way things present themselves visually...I'm not sure I was thinking about anything formally--it's kind of like drawing.
Joe on the process of writing Pigafetta Is My Wife and the long poem form:
I had this journal and I realized I wanted to use it, and it just seemed impossible to not write in a long poem format given the scope of the journal itself. And because the book is about this circumnavigation of the world by Magellan, it just seemed like the right thing to do. How could you capture a journey in one poem?
Something that both engaged the reader and taxed the reader at the same time...seemed really important to me. At the same time it was about this relationship I was in with my partner that was occurring over long distance. That was this thing that was always starting and stopping. I wanted that idea of recurrence and that sort of grasping outwards that happened over and over.
You can listen to the interview here.
Joe and Brandon were both drawn to Black Ocean for its aesthetic, and the fit they felt with their own work. If you feel similiarly drawn, be sure to submit during our open reading period! There are no reading fees, but we do ask that you consider supporting us, perhaps by purchasing a subscription. More details here: /black-ocean-blog/2011/6/1/smooth-sailing-on-the-open-black-ocean.html
