Please tell us about the making of “The Houses of Frankfurt.”
On the first day of my first trip to Germany, I went to the University of Frankfurt. I was travelling with the poet Richie Hofmann. Richie and I have similar yet inverted predicaments as Germany relates to our family histories and our own queerness. Richie’s family came from Germany and he spent a few years of his childhood living there. My family is Jewish and left Europe from various places before the Holocaust. This is the first poem I wrote from our time travelling together. As you walk through the university buildings, there are many small plaques hanging with historical notes about the chemical plant that was there before the war. Many Jews made up AG Farben’s board of directors, scientists, and employees — all of whom were stripped of their rights and humanity during the Holocaust. It was bizarre to be in a building responsible for creating magnetic tape — the film used in secret by the Nazis to record everything — and the gas used in the gas chambers now converted into an institution of learning. The poem’s last line dawned on me as I left the building and crossed the stunning pastoral campus. One repeated trope in my life is my lack of knowledge of names of things in nature — trees and flowers especially. I was drawn to this black tree with black leaves that appears and the poem. I thought I might take a photo of it and sit under it. A man walked by with his dog and was staring at me. Though in Hebrew school when playing out Holocaust situations, I was often told I could “pass” because of my blue eyes, I felt an overwhelming sense of otherness when looking around the campus and holding the building’s histories in my mind despite being alive in a new century.
Do you workshop drafts with other poets?
I love workshop. I thrive in it. The most valuable part of workshops for me is not when it is my poem’s turn, but rather when I read the work of others and have to keep my mind flexible to what those other poems seek to teach me. What does a poem’s form say? Where is the form still out of focus? Where is it most successful? What does it say about the speaker? About poems? About the moral spine leading the poem? Where does the poet get in the way of what the poem is doing? Hearing others answer these questions and trying to answer them on the poem’s terms really turns me on intellectually. And being turned on allows me to feel less bleak about the world and what some of us choose to give (to steal a phrase from Mary Oliver) our power and time to. I miss that formal workshop environment so much these days. While I’m blessed to have two generous readers (Richie Hofmann and Dan Kraines), I miss the grind of working toward that greater dialogue as a collective. I also miss my poetry parents these days. I’ve been really lucky to work with poets whose work has changed me, yes, but more importantly, whose life work has been to model excellence in teaching cohorts of us how poetry can be central to life by design.
Do you find yourself writing the same poem over and over again?
I hope not. And I try not to. But when I take a step back every few years and look at the burgeoning body of work, there are some recurring obsessions, questions, and liminalities that many of the poems seek to be in dialogue with. James Longenbach has famously described Louise Glück as the poet of change. I read that before I worked with her at BU and it helped me look at her work in a new way (especially as she was gearing up to release her collected). While her work possesses a moral tone across books, the books themselves occupy specific landscapes, voices, and moments in time. While all of them are interested in pain, consciousness, and myth in some way, the embodiment is always changed. I hope that over time, some parts of that analysis wear off on my own works. The manuscript for my first book deals with a belatedness in the world — in one’s sexuality, ethnicity, age, landscape, etc. The second manuscript is something else entirely — more of a mythic landscape with specific characters. And yet, both books are interested in violence, death, desire, and forgiveness. So I hope that both the similar centralities and different approaches to accessing answers eventually make, instead, one long poem out of a body of work. In that sense, I think that writers are after that theory of everything — that elegant single equation.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I am a filmmaker. I went to film school first. During my time in film school, I was only allowed to shoot on real film, no digital. The dogma necessary to be successful in that medium has absolutely impacted my writing poems. When you mislight a scene in film, you receive a destroyed roll of film back. That object of destroyed, lost, time is the closest thing to death I can imagine making in art. Poetry, similarly, requires attention to form. To break the form, you have to know it deeply and dogmatically. In both cases, the true medium is made of time and light. Frame by frame, line by line. There is an order. Further, the use of fictive spectacle in filmmaking is something I bring into my writing. Especially in my first book, the only way the speaker can re-enter the 21st century is not to bury the 20th, but rather to turn from it and use fictive spectacle as a way out. The way in which these two forms increasingly compete in my life is strictly in relation to vocation. It’s very hard to convince the fields of literature, the academe, and the Academy that you can be more than one specific thing. Otherwise, these two fields, for me, exercise the same habits of mind and heart.
Do you consider yourself a fast or slow writer?
I am a fast writer, but the time it takes for writing to be conjured is where I’m slow. Many writers connive routines which help them manage the neurosis of not writing — they write everyday at the same time, they use the same pen, they pour the same drink, they look out the same window. I’ve had phases where I try routinizing writing, but it doesn’t produce the kind of poems that tend to live. Exercise doesn’t hurt, of course, but the real poems come after spells of silence and/or personal numbness. And once I’m under the spell, I tend to stay under it as long as I can. My first two books happened fast (not that they’ve been taken for publication, but the writing itself). In the off time, I write prose. I wrote four primary source books for classrooms over just a few months time last year. But there is no rushing what you need to feel to be able to break the silence of a blank page.
On the first day of my first trip to Germany, I went to the University of Frankfurt. I was travelling with the poet Richie Hofmann. Richie and I have similar yet inverted predicaments as Germany relates to our family histories and our own queerness. Richie’s family came from Germany and he spent a few years of his childhood living there. My family is Jewish and left Europe from various places before the Holocaust. This is the first poem I wrote from our time travelling together. As you walk through the university buildings, there are many small plaques hanging with historical notes about the chemical plant that was there before the war. Many Jews made up AG Farben’s board of directors, scientists, and employees — all of whom were stripped of their rights and humanity during the Holocaust. It was bizarre to be in a building responsible for creating magnetic tape — the film used in secret by the Nazis to record everything — and the gas used in the gas chambers now converted into an institution of learning. The poem’s last line dawned on me as I left the building and crossed the stunning pastoral campus. One repeated trope in my life is my lack of knowledge of names of things in nature — trees and flowers especially. I was drawn to this black tree with black leaves that appears and the poem. I thought I might take a photo of it and sit under it. A man walked by with his dog and was staring at me. Though in Hebrew school when playing out Holocaust situations, I was often told I could “pass” because of my blue eyes, I felt an overwhelming sense of otherness when looking around the campus and holding the building’s histories in my mind despite being alive in a new century.
Do you workshop drafts with other poets?
I love workshop. I thrive in it. The most valuable part of workshops for me is not when it is my poem’s turn, but rather when I read the work of others and have to keep my mind flexible to what those other poems seek to teach me. What does a poem’s form say? Where is the form still out of focus? Where is it most successful? What does it say about the speaker? About poems? About the moral spine leading the poem? Where does the poet get in the way of what the poem is doing? Hearing others answer these questions and trying to answer them on the poem’s terms really turns me on intellectually. And being turned on allows me to feel less bleak about the world and what some of us choose to give (to steal a phrase from Mary Oliver) our power and time to. I miss that formal workshop environment so much these days. While I’m blessed to have two generous readers (Richie Hofmann and Dan Kraines), I miss the grind of working toward that greater dialogue as a collective. I also miss my poetry parents these days. I’ve been really lucky to work with poets whose work has changed me, yes, but more importantly, whose life work has been to model excellence in teaching cohorts of us how poetry can be central to life by design.
Do you find yourself writing the same poem over and over again?
I hope not. And I try not to. But when I take a step back every few years and look at the burgeoning body of work, there are some recurring obsessions, questions, and liminalities that many of the poems seek to be in dialogue with. James Longenbach has famously described Louise Glück as the poet of change. I read that before I worked with her at BU and it helped me look at her work in a new way (especially as she was gearing up to release her collected). While her work possesses a moral tone across books, the books themselves occupy specific landscapes, voices, and moments in time. While all of them are interested in pain, consciousness, and myth in some way, the embodiment is always changed. I hope that over time, some parts of that analysis wear off on my own works. The manuscript for my first book deals with a belatedness in the world — in one’s sexuality, ethnicity, age, landscape, etc. The second manuscript is something else entirely — more of a mythic landscape with specific characters. And yet, both books are interested in violence, death, desire, and forgiveness. So I hope that both the similar centralities and different approaches to accessing answers eventually make, instead, one long poem out of a body of work. In that sense, I think that writers are after that theory of everything — that elegant single equation.
Do you practice another form of art? If so, do you find that it competes with or complements your writing?
I am a filmmaker. I went to film school first. During my time in film school, I was only allowed to shoot on real film, no digital. The dogma necessary to be successful in that medium has absolutely impacted my writing poems. When you mislight a scene in film, you receive a destroyed roll of film back. That object of destroyed, lost, time is the closest thing to death I can imagine making in art. Poetry, similarly, requires attention to form. To break the form, you have to know it deeply and dogmatically. In both cases, the true medium is made of time and light. Frame by frame, line by line. There is an order. Further, the use of fictive spectacle in filmmaking is something I bring into my writing. Especially in my first book, the only way the speaker can re-enter the 21st century is not to bury the 20th, but rather to turn from it and use fictive spectacle as a way out. The way in which these two forms increasingly compete in my life is strictly in relation to vocation. It’s very hard to convince the fields of literature, the academe, and the Academy that you can be more than one specific thing. Otherwise, these two fields, for me, exercise the same habits of mind and heart.
Do you consider yourself a fast or slow writer?
I am a fast writer, but the time it takes for writing to be conjured is where I’m slow. Many writers connive routines which help them manage the neurosis of not writing — they write everyday at the same time, they use the same pen, they pour the same drink, they look out the same window. I’ve had phases where I try routinizing writing, but it doesn’t produce the kind of poems that tend to live. Exercise doesn’t hurt, of course, but the real poems come after spells of silence and/or personal numbness. And once I’m under the spell, I tend to stay under it as long as I can. My first two books happened fast (not that they’ve been taken for publication, but the writing itself). In the off time, I write prose. I wrote four primary source books for classrooms over just a few months time last year. But there is no rushing what you need to feel to be able to break the silence of a blank page.