Interview with Kelly Ford About Her Chapbook The Witness

[trigger warning: child abuse]

The Witness
Author: Kelly Fordon
Publisher: Kattywompus Press

Publication date: 2016











The Witness #2

The Witness is just like you and me.
Most days he doesn�t feel like saying
anything antagonistic. Most days
he�s happy with toast and tea, a little
bit of television, a stroll, but every
now and then The Witness is struck
down mid-jaunt. Every now and then,
The Witness tumbles down the stairs.
The water in the shower comes out
scalding hot. The Witness�s hair
falls out in clumps. The Witness
can�t remember his name, he can�t
even get out of bed. Shake it
off? There is nothing he would like
more. If you run into The Witness
at a dinner party, he will not bring
it up. He�ll listen to your suburban saga
politely. He�s been known to suck
down a shot of vodka, a snort or two.
In other words, he could be you.
If you had witnessed it. If you
were on your merry way one day
when you were very small and everyone
around you was very very tall.
The Witness can not talk about this
like a normal person, which is why
they sometimes lock him up,
they keep him under observation.
Like a faucet that�s lost a clot,
he can�t seem to make the images stop.

originally appeared in Mudlark

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Prior to writing fiction and poetry, Kelly Fordon worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Florida Review, Flashquake, The Kenyon Review (KRO), The Montreal Review, Rattle, Red Wheelbarrow, The Windsor Review and various other journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, On The Street Where We Live, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, Tell Me When it Starts to Hurt, which was published by Kattywompus Press in May 2013 and The Witness, released by Kattywompus Press in January 2016. Her short story collection, Garden for the Blind, was published by Wayne State University Press in April 2015 and has been chosen as a Michigan Notable Book. She works for the Inside Out Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.

Author website: http://www.kellyfordon.com/

Author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/kellyfordonAuthor/

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-fordon-aa095a10

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kfor24

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kfor2260/

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[This interview was first published on Nancy Chen Long's blog.]

Interview conducted by Nancy Chen Long. 

Please tell us a little bit about The Witness.

KF: This book was written in response to my personal experiences as well as the 10,000 pages of testimony provided by survivor�s of sexual abuse at the SNAP  network (http://www.snapnetwork.org/) , as well as the Center for Constitutional Rights (http://www.ccrjustice.org/category/project/snap).



As the title suggests, these poems, written in response to the testimony of those abused by Catholic priests, bear a lyrical witness. Please tell us a bit about your process of creating poetry out of another person�s story or testimony. In her essay �Reading the Living Archives: The Witness of Literary Art� (Poetry, May 2011), Carolyn Forch� wrote �In the poetry of witness, the poem makes present to us the experience of the other, the poem is the experience, rather than a symbolic representation.� Is that the case for you?

KF: Generally speaking I would think twice about co-opting another person�s experience, even if I felt I was doing it with the best intentions. In this case, I am very close to the material because I was raised in the Catholic Church and I was an altar girl. However, this chapbook is not about �me� in particular or my personal experiences, and I don�t want my personal experiences to cloud anyone�s reading of this work. Anyone who wants to read about the genesis for these poems should refer to the snapnetwork.org website and the Center for Constitutional Rights website.



You also mentioned that a good number of the poems are written in the voice of a �witness,� and it got me to thinking about persona poems. In a March 2015 Girls Write Now post �Challenges & Rewards In Persona Poetry: A Mentee-Mentor Perspective,� Cindy Chu, in an interview with Katie Zanecchia, writes: 

At its core, persona poetry forces poets to better identify themselves in order to take on another�s perspective. After all, how do you become someone else without defining who you are, in addition to who they are? While poets construct poems from the view of their chosen characters, the resulting poetry is their own. Whether through use of vocabulary, syntax, or punctuation, poets shape others� voices into wholly unique works of art. Therefore, persona poetry says as much about the poet as it does her subject. The way that personas are presented on paper provides great insight into poets� sense of self. 

 Did you find the above true for you? Please tell us a bit about voice and persona in your poems.

KF: I wrote an earlier chapbook called On the Street Where We Live which includes persona poems in the voices of imagined women on �my� street. They were not, in reality, the women I knew, but an amalgamation of all of our experiences�divorce, abuse, loss, career aspirations, motherhood, etc. In those poems I had the sense that I was writing someone else�s story and trying to ascertain what it felt like to be going through the experience of domestic abuse or estrangement etc.

In this new chapbook, I was overtaken by the witness; I felt completely merged with the witness, and the voice materialized out of that rage. I hired Laura Van Prooyan as a manuscript consultant (she is excellent by the way!) and she said �Did you mean to mention the white robes and the penitent�s belt so many times?�

I did.

If I had been writing the poems with my poet hat on I would have looked for different images, but it is true to this witness that the white robe and the penitent�s belt come up over and over again. The witness is obsessed and the repetition is organic to the voice.



What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

KF: I have not had a problem publishing the poems. Both William Slaughter at Mudlark and Sammy Greenspan at Kattywompus Press have been very supportive. I have only read the poems once at a conference in Windsor. Several people who were affected by the scandal came up to me afterwards, including Mary Ann Mulhern, a former nun and poet, who published When Angels Weep, a poetry collection about the Father Charles Sylvester sexual-abuse case in Canada.

That being said, I feel tentative about presenting this work in public and if/when I do readings, I always begin with a content warning in order to allow people to leave the room if they need to�it can be very hard to hear. It�s also difficult to broach this material with my Catholic friends and family some of whom may see these poems as an attack on the church. There�s nothing I can do about that, unfortunately.



What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?

KF: I like "The Victim�s Testimony." It�s one of the more graphic poems, but it illustrates how I feel about the whole debacle�angry, frustrated, violated, and dismissed. The image of the filing cabinet door closing on all of the 10,000 pages of victim testimony (some estimates are now at over 100,000 victims worldwide) felt like an apt metaphor.

The Victim�s Testimony

I�m stuck in this file cabinet.
Who wants to finger me?

My words are onion paper thin.
Easily crumpled, easily tossed.

In French class I say,
�S'il vous pla�t ne faites pas �a.�

Shower me with holy water
and I scream like Asmodeus.

The first robe is always white
but the outer one changes

like his performance. It was purple
that day to remind us of our sins.

As if I could forget.
As if God could. The light

above my box is always red,
which means stop, a word

I use more than any other.

(published in The New Poet and Mudlark)



Please discuss the choice for a chapbook. For example, why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?

KF: I wrote these poems in a very short period of time when I was immersed in reading the SNAP testimony. When I was finished, I had around twenty poems. I have published with Kattywompus before and so I naturally sent the work to Sammy. She said yes right away and I was happy they found a home and an advocate. I am still working on the full-length collection, but I have had to take some breaks along the way because the material is hard to face day in and day out. There have been periods when I can�t do it and then I come back to it a month or two later.



What else would you like readers to know about you or your chapbook?

KF: I would like the survivors who have given testimony to know that they have made a real difference in people�s lives. I for one, will keep advocating. The film Spotlight highlights how many people were complicit in the cover-up�no one wanted to challenge the Catholic Church, even though there were children�s lives at stake. How scary is that? Hopefully now people realize silence is reprehensible.



What are you working on now?

KF: I�m working on a full-length poetry collection and a novel.

---

Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow and author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in Third Coast, The Adroit Journal, Third Coast, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She  works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division.

Interview with Trish Hopkinson About Her Chapbook Footnote

Footnote

Author: Trish Hopkinson

Publisher: Lithic Press
Publication date: 2017














Waiting Around by Trish Hopkinson
                         after "Walking Around" by Pablo Neruda

It so happens, I am tired of being a woman.
And it happens while I wait for my children to grow
into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks
of summer sun have gone,

drained between gaps into gutters,
and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes
cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied
if I could draw from language
the banquet of poets.

If I could salvage the space in time
for thought and collect it
like a souvenir. I can no longer
be timid and quiet, breathless

and withdrawn.
I can�t salve the silence.
I can�t be this vineyard
to be bottled, corked,
cellared, and shelved.

That�s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth,
growls at my crow�s feet, and gravels into my throat.
It claws its way through the edges of an age
I never planned to reach

and diffuses my life into dullness�
workout rooms and nail salons,
bleach-white sheets on clotheslines,
and treacherous photographs of younger me
at barbecues and birthday parties.

I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage.
I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick
and I gamble on what�s expected.
And what to become. And how
to behave: mother, wife, brave.


originally appeared in Voicemail Poems

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photo credit: Bonnie Shiffler-Olsen

Trish Hopkinson has always loved words�in fact, her mother tells everyone she was born with a pen in her hand. A Pushcart nominated poet, she has been published in several anthologies and journals, including Stirring, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Chagrin River Review; and her third chapbook is forthcoming from Lithic Press in 2017. Hopkinson is co-founder of a regional poetry group, Rock Canyon Poets, and Editor-in-Chief of the group�s annual poetry anthology entitled Orogeny. She is a product director by profession and resides in Utah with her handsome husband and their two outstanding children. You can follow Hopkinson on her blog where she shares information on how to write, publish, and participate in the greater poetry community at http://trishhopkinson.com/.

Author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/trishhopkinsonpoet/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/trishhopkinson

Author blog: http://trishhopkinson.com/

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While Trish Hopkinson and I have not met in real life, we are involved in a number online communities together. I'm glad I had the chance to interview her about her most recent collection.

�Nancy Chen Long

[This interview was originally published on my blog.]

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Please tell us a little bit about Footnote.

TH: Footnote is my first official chapbook published by a real press! It�s a collection of response poems as homage to some of my favorite artists. Most of the poems have been published in literary magazines over the last few years, and I�m honored to have them all put together in such a striking way by Lithic Press.



How did you arrive at the title?

TH: Originally, the title was the same as the final poem �Footnote to a Footnote.� When Lithic began working on a design for the cover, they suggested simply Footnote, which was perfect, since each poem in the collection indeed includes a footnote in reference to the original artwork that inspired the poem.



You mentioned that your chapbook contains response poems�poems inspired by other artists, whether poets, writers, or filmmakers. When you brought up �by other artists,� the first thing I thought of was ekphrastic poetry. While the common understanding of ekphrasis is poetry in response to visual art, in a 2008 essay �Notes on Ekphrasis� by Alfred Corn, he mentions that poetry in response to �works of music, cinema, or choreography might also qualify as instances of ekphrasis.� Do you consider some of the poems in Footnote to be ekphrastic?

TH: While I think that most of these poems are closer to the tradition of response poetry or found poetry, in which poems are written to respond to another text or artist�s work, I do think some of these poems are ekphrastic, specifically the poems in response to films. For example, �From Her to Eternity� is a poem that encompasses not only the story of the Win Wenders and Peter Handke�s film Wings of Desire but its origins in Rilke�s Duino Elegies�and even the soundtrack, with lyrics from Nick Cave and the Bad Seed�s song as the title of the poem. There�s definitely some gray area within all of these definitions.



Tell us a bit about your writing process in forming a response. What techniques did you use? For example, did you write replies to a poem in a call and response sort of way, use a part of the poem as an epigraph, imitate or echo the forms of a poem, etc. �Waiting Around,� the poem at the beginning of this interview, is after Pablo Neruda. Tell us a bit about how the poem is �after� Neruda.

TH: �Waiting Around� is a great example of one way to approach response poetry. One way to respond to a poem is to write your own version from a different perspective, line by line or stanza by stanza. For �Waiting Around,� I responded line by line to Neruda�s poem �Walking Around� using a female speaker, rather than the original male speaker. Another one of my favorite approaches to found poems is to take the original poem, reverse the order of the lines (the last line first, the first line last), and then do an erasure. This technique has a tendency to reverse the meaning from the original to something opposing within the newly created poem. I used this technique in �Reconstructed Happiness,� which is in response to �I am Waiting� by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His original poem is quite somber, while the result of the erasure in reverse has an uplifting, empowering feel.



In a 2011 essay �Thinking Like an Editor: How to Order Your Poetry Manuscript,� April Ossmann writes �[T]he biggest mystery to emerging and sometimes even established poets is how to effectively order a poetry manuscript.� How did you order Footnote? Was it something you had in mind early in the writing process, for example or did you write the poems with a strategy in mind? What were some of your considerations?

TH: Honestly, I think selecting and ordering poems for a poetry book manuscript is the most challenging part of the process. These poems were written over a few years, and after teaching a community poetry writing workshop on response poetry, I realized I had quite a few response poems. So in this case, the collection was a surprise waiting for me in already completed work. I gathered them together, printed them out, and tried to order them in such a way that each poem connected in some way to the one that followed, while also paying attention to starting and ending with one of my favorite pieces. It never hurts to start strong and end strong. Once the collection was accepted by Lithic Press, there was some tweaking to the order to flow smoothly page wise (two-page poems on facing pages, etc.) and I swapped out a couple of the poems for stronger poems during the editing. It�s hardly an exact science, and the order of any collection will often be affected by the theme, style, variety of format, white space, and physical limitations of the book itself. I�ve ordered the poems for a few anthologies as Editor-in-Chief for Orogeny, and it�s interesting to see how poems from several different poets often connect into a final collection. That said, it�s never easy, but can be fun and surprising.



What is one of your favorite poems in the book, or one that is important to you? Why is it a favorite (or important)? How did it come to be?

TH: There are several poems in this collection that I love, mostly because they are a reflection of some other artwork that is important to me, but there is one that stands out and has a more personal meaning. �In a Room Made of Poetry� is a found poem based on the tradition of cento poetry and consists of several complete lines from Laura Hamblin�s book The Eyes of a Flounder. Hamblin is a dear friend and was one of my poetry professors during my undergrad at Utah Valley University. She introduced me to many of the poets featured in my book, including Neruda and Rilke, and her classes were where I learned so much about how to deeply appreciate not only the poetry of others, but other art as well. I was thrilled when Lithic chose a portion of this same poem as part of the cover design, which to me, became a dedication to her. The timing couldn�t have been better; she is retiring and teaching her last poetry class this summer when Footnote is being released.

In a Room Made of Poetry

Think how loss pulls language from us until
it swallows everything,
like undiagnosed cancer,
the accumulated past�
less eye, less mouth, less heart.
We had, not much�
thin coffee, thin socks. Here you can
wait, with desire, with
roots exposed
for an open womb. That heart-balm
as hope. The raw
bent�a bowl of fruit
in a language I never knew . . .
without tails, crosses of ts. The autonomous dot of a
blackness answers, There are only ifs.


Source: Hamblin, Laura. The Eyes of a Flounder.
(originally published in The Found Poetry Review: Issue 8)



Please tell us a bit about your use of found poetry in the chapbook.

TH: As a lover of all things words, found poetry is not just a way to respond to another text but it�s often word play as well. There are many different techniques that can be used to �find� a new poem in an existing text. I mentioned one above, erasure, which is also often referred to as �blackout poetry,� and even when doing an erasure, I often like to apply other methods to change it up a bit. Another fun approach is to sort the words by length and then create what�s called a �snowball� poem by ordering specifically selected words from shortest to longest. My poem �Strange Verses� employs this technique to create a set of reverse snowball poems from Alice�s Adventures in Wonderland. The result was pretty cool�I ended up with four columns/stanzas that can be read in many different directions and angles.



The Found Poetry Review has this quote by Anne Dillard about found poetry:

By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles. The poet adds, or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts, or interrupted fragments of texts.

 In the found poems in the chapbook, did you find yourself �doubling� the original text�s context in one or more of them? If so how? If not, what relationship do you see between the original text and the poem(s)?

TH: I think so. The way I often describe this to others is as a �palimpsest,� in which the original text is erased/removed and a new text is written in its place while still leaving remnants of the original. In this sense, I think it is a form of doubling, or a way to contribute to the larger conversation in which we as writers participate. Response poetry is my way of communicating with both the original texts and the reader.

Sometimes, I nerd out on this whole poetry/writing thing a bit much and well, thinking through these responses resulted in my creation of this Venn diagram:

I imagine the topics that you responded to varied widely. Even so, did you find yourself coming back to the same handful of themes, despite what it was you were responding to? I�m thinking of writer obsessions, perhaps in grand themes like love or death, or even images or words. For example, I�ve discovered, to my surprise, that dust, particles, dots, and related sorts of things pop up frequently in my writing. Tony Hoagland, in his book Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (p82), wrote �In the work of a good poet, it is usually possible to discern one or two characteristic emotional zones in which he thrives: melancholy, rage, pity, vengeful rationality, seduction.� How did those obsessions reveal themselves to you? Did you find yourself surrendering to it? 

TH: Since this book was sort of a surprise collection based on the discovery that I tend to respond to other poets/art in my writing, the only other theme I think often emerges is one of feminism. I think that most of these poems reflect my feminist slant to poetry in general.

What was the final poem you wrote or significantly revised for the chapbook, and how did that affect your sense that the chapbook was complete?

Most of the poems were previously published and felt finished. One that still felt incomplete was a Plath response poem entitled �Daddies.� I have reworked and reformatted the poem several times and toward the end of the editing process, I dug in hard and finally was able to revise the poem into what I feel is a finished state. (At least for now.) Once I sent that poem off, it did feel like the final edits were complete and the book was ready to be sent to print


What are you working on now?

TH: I�m aiming toward a full-length collection someday, but I feel like I need much more material before pulling together a new collection. I�ve tried piecing a few different projects together with poems I�ve written in the last couple of years, and there�s just not a nice, organic set making itself visible to me. Ultimately, I need to write many more poems to help my next collection materialize. Other than that, I�m always working on my poetry blog, which has become such an important part of my interaction with the larger poetry community. My blog was also a surprise and started as just a way to keep track of poetry resources, submission calls, etc. I started sharing it on social media and found there was definitely a need. Since October of 2014, my blog following has continued to grow and I�ve been honored by the turn out! It�s been a pleasure to interact with fellow poets, writers, editors, artists, etc. who are all looking for an easy way to access and share information. Sometimes, the things we never intend to create become the greatest of gifts.

---

Nancy Chen Long is a National Endowment of the Arts creative-writing fellow. She is the author of Light Into Bodies (Tampa University Press), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and Clouds as Inkblots for the Warprone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). You'll find her recent and forthcoming work in The Adroit Journal, Third Coast, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Zone 3, and elsewhere. Nancy received a BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently earned her MFA. As a volunteer for the local Writers Guild, she coordinates a reading series and works with other poets to offer poetry workshops. She lives in south-central Indiana and works at Indiana University.

Tucked Away: Dual Lives in David R. Altman�s �Death in the Foyer�

by JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp

For me, summers are for regrouping and re-reading favorite books.  One such work by David R. Altman, �Death in the Foyer,� continues to sink the plumb line of my appreciation for his attention to instinct and motive each time I read it.  �Death in the Foyer,� published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, is Altman�s debut chapbook. His website can be found at http://www.davidraltman.com.

�Death in the Foyer� contains a series of vignettes that convey the message nature may contain mysteries, but people keep secrets.

 The first of these is the book�s titular poem about a man who suddenly, and without resistance, succumbs to an aneurism in his home�s foyer. Altman�s use of an omniscient voice places the reader in an awkward position of knowing more than the dying man�s devoted wife whose �warm fingers [protect] now what no longer needs protecting.� 

Suddenly, the reader knows perhaps more than they should. Without warning, we�re in on it as the speaker divulges how, �his final thoughts were of wives and children;/and secret friends who knew him well,/thoughts that he will share now only with himself.�

And we know her, don�t we? This woman of �soft pleas� who emerges from �a living room landscape of family photos and dusty Bibles.� She is the hearth keeper; albeit, possibly not the first one as �wives� is unmistakably plural. 

I love this poem because every time I read the last stanza, I have to ask myself if I am obligated to care more about this man than the clearly ambivalent speaker. Altman writes,

            He was to die upon a rug he used to vacuum

            and had admired from a distance.

            Now moving toward a new life,

            less worldly than the one which at that instant he was leaving,

            but a new life, just the same.

We have to ask ourselves, what type of man (or woman, for that matter) sinks so comfortably into an �unexpected� death? Could it be one with �secret friends� suddenly offered a clean slate?  This negative capability allows the question to linger as long as we wish, as the dying man only �[moves] toward a new life� when we are ready.

More dramatic but equally compelling is the poem, �2:17 a.m.� Here, Altman carefully attends to setting, mood, and plot. We exist in both space and time, and the speaker uses the poem�s title and first line to create a sense of tension that does not dissipate even when the danger has passed.

Awakening to the sounds of destruction,

            the family presses one another to the hardwood

Unable to move or see or understand

            in one final act of unity they pray silently, hands touching.

Bullets fill the room, shattering photos and jewelry and bed posts

            While small children, life faceless rag dolls, curl beside their mother

Each family member pinned down like a spider beneath a jar

            waiting for the inevitable.

                                                Suddenly, things stop.

The crackling glass still rings as tires screech beyond shattered blinds.

            Quiet sobs fill the void

                        where gunfire had been.

The father sighs, his family safe, his home destroyed,

            His secrets so rudely revealed.

He peeks outside, in the dim light,

                   thinking only of how badly his grass needs cutting

                            and whether his house will ever be sold.

Here, the poem�s story is mirrored in its visual rhetoric. The first stanza consists of alternating but uniformly indented, end-stopped lines connoting order even in the midst of disaster.  It almost does not matter that a solitary line interrupts the terror in the night because the second stanza, with its craggy indents, betrays a father�s secret life.

While I personally find �Death in the Foyer� and �2:17 a.m.� two of the most intriguing poems in Altman�s first collection, this chapbook�s scope is far reaching.  He explores the lethal neutrality of animal instinct in the poems �Wake Up Call� and �Her Woods� in the same proportion as the will to live and love in �The Groom�s Mother Has Cancer.�

�Death in the Foyer� can be found on the Finishing Line Press website at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/death-in-the-foyer-by-david-r-altman/.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer in the English department at Kennesaw State University. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Replublic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems. 

Interview with Poet Robert Walicki about his chapbook The Almost Sound of Snow Falling

The Almost Sound of Snow Falling

Author: Robert Walicki

Publisher: Night Ballet Press

Publication date: 2015









First Snow by Robert Walicki

Even when it came and afterwards, it hits me like a surprise wind.
The last clothes of the summer on a line:

Transparent flowers on my sister�s spring dress still wet and swinging,
or the long threadbare robe of my fathers� that finally tore itself free,

hung there in the air is if weightless
held by something I couldn�t see.

A waiting, something slow like that.
Pausing and stopping, like music gone quiet

and starting again. Cool as a fridge door opening,
a breeze when a car is moving. Watching children run in a soccer game.

And cheering. Pizza so hot it burns the roof of my mouth, that walk over frozen mud
to get a bottle of water

to cool it and I am suddenly alone with what I�ve taken, what I can�t leave behind.
Not even that small boy covering his ears outside, the woolen hands

that hold the wind back to stare at something so large and black above his head,
while the pieces of something keep falling as if torn,

pages from a book that sat open by his parents� bed:
In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth

was formless and void�
Words I never got close enough to read or understand,

only that whiteness.
That miracle of 2 am when the roads have no memory.

Sidewalks, unbroken by footsteps.
And no one awake at this hour to sweep it away.

from The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015)

*   *   *   *   *

Robert Walicki is the curator of VERSIFY, a monthly reading series in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has appeared in HEArt, Stone Highway Review, Grasslimb, and on the radio show Prosody. He won 1st runner up in the 2013 Finishing Line Open Chapbook Competition and was awarded finalist in the 2013 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Competition. He currently has two chapbooks published: A Room Full of Trees (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and The Almost Sound of Snow Falling (Night Ballet Press, 2015).

Author Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Robert-Walicki-1961568937400784/

*   *   *   *   *

Robert Walicki and I first met several years ago in a now-defunct Facebook poetry workshop group. I wrote a blurb for the cover of his chapbook The Almost Sound of Snow Falling. It was a delight interview him about the chapbook and poetry.

�Nancy Chen Long 

[This interview was originally published on my blog.]

*   *   *   *   *

Please tell us a little bit about your chapbook.

RW: The Almost Sound of Snow Falling follows my last collection, A Room Full of Trees, in a fairly chronological way, moving from the inevitable acceptance of loss as a state of existence, but then moving past that aftermath to explore identity and self. I think more so than anything, it's about growth, a trial by fire so to speak and the transformation that occurs as a result of these experiences.



Some of the poems in The Almost Sound of Snow Falling touch on issues of masculinity and gender identification. Could you speak a little to this aspect of the book?

RW:  I had been interested in challenging stereotypical roles of masculinity after working for years in the construction trades industries. Society in general, can be very judgmental to individuals that don't fit into the expected or preconceived gender roles.When one is ostracized for their personality and make up, or even what they look like, it can be a very painful experience. This applies to many people and in many different fields and walks of life. The makeup of identity was something important to me and something that I wanted to understand to a deeper degree. Combing through hurt feelings and taking a candid look at what it means to be a man, and that being sensitive and caring didn't make you less masculine, was something that appealed to me a great deal.



The poems in this collection read as explorations of memories. Here are two considerations of memory in poetry:

• In an April 2015 article �The substance of memory,� poet Chloe Garcia Roberts makes the comment that �[Homero] Aridjis highlights the inseparability of the self and its past in his poem, �Autoretrato a los seis a�os (Self-portrait at age six)�, by asserting that the past is the substance of the self.�
   
• In a March 2013 article �Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part IV: The Function of Memory,� Leslie Heywood writes:

[M]emory is unstable and idiosyncratic, and follows a structure and procedure much like narrative � [E]motion is the basis of long-term memory, and our reactions to the world around us are a complicated concatenation of the narratives we�ve written and continue to write in our brains in conjunction with reactions to new stimuli, which is often interpreted according to old patterns. Everything we 'know' is a narrative construction based on sometimes idiosyncratic interpretation.

What is the role of personal memory in your poems? When you�re writing your poetry, do you find memory to be something more solid, like Roberts examined the first quote�an inseparability between self-identity and the past? Or is it more permeable, as discussed by Heywood?

RW: I think for me, it's a combination. It really depends on the poem and the voice that leads me. I'm very much a believer of letting the poem determine what it's going to be, so in that sense, I feel memory is a very fluid thing. For example, there are poems like "First Snow" or "Ostaria" that attempt to capture the uncapturable or indescribable. Memory, when layered with emotion, often gets very complicated. There can be a lot to unpack and equally, so much of what I remember is colored by emotion and shaped by it. Truth, or what really happened, changes when I write, because what is more important to me, is whether a poem is "emotionally true" and not necessarily 100 percent factual. I'm fascinated most of all by concrete imagery as a doorway into memory and emotion. It's almost involuntary for me, like Proust. It's a very serendipitous thing. A shirt ripping on a nail reminding me of the loose buttons on a mother's coat in a photograph and suddenly, I'm writing the poem "In The Years Before Color," and everything a simple black and white photograph evokes from the past, and the future.



Why did you choose the chapbook as the vehicle for your poems rather than a book-length manuscript or a section in a book? When you started, did you intend to create a chapbook? How long did it take to write this chapbook (or, alternatively, how did you know it was time to stop writing)?

RW: In general, I find it easier to focus on a chapbook length collection. I'm very attracted to shorter length formats in terms of a sharper, thematic focus, although I'm currently working on a full-length. I don't think I ever sit down consciously and say "I'm ready to write a chapbook." It happens organically and I think the best ideas come from that aesthetic. I never stopped writing after my first chapbook came out and in a very fertile period for me, I suddenly had a lot of poems that I felt were speaking to each other. My style was, and still is, evolving, especially from A Room Full of Trees, my first chapbook. I felt I was loosening up, was more frank in my language and was moving on from many of the things that I was obsessed about in the first book, namely my father's death and how that changed me as a person. However, one could make the argument that a few of the early poems in this collection could fit right in thematically with that first book.



What is one of the more crucial poems in the book for you? Why is it important to you? How did it come to be?

RW: That's difficult,but for me, the most crucial poems in this book are the work poems, because they were the hardest to write and the most important. As I've said before, I feel this book is about growth and I think these poems illustrate that process in a profound way for me. Those experiences changed me and forged me into the person I am, worlds away from the person I was before these events happened.

It took years to write this one in particular (it's not quite a year old), mostly because it was extremely difficult for me to find the poetry or "music" in these hard experiences. I also needed some emotional distance from what happened and perspective so I could write with the clarity and the restraint necessary to do justice to the material. I finally came to the conclusion that a simple frank and matter of fact tone was the best approach in writing about this kind of work. This poem is called "Rain Leader."

Rain Leader
(on running storm pipe under a bridge near Akron, OH, 1997)

When the only heat is from the coffee
at 5am, and less than 4 degrees outside,
you'll learn to wear enough layers,
or better yet, keep moving.

Some biker dude will laugh, blow frost,
Marlboro smoke in your face.
First day, it's "Hey rookie" and "Don't look down"
It's lift this 8 inch, cast iron pipe.

First day, It's " Go down to my truck and get
my pipe stretcher" ,and then you'll realize
there's no such thing 4 stories down.
First day, men will want to break you,

Like they've been broken, their riverbed faces,
grizzled beards twisted like dry rotted wire.
Last night's whiskey, sweating from dirty skin.
You will nearly lose your finger, when the ice forms

on the pipe, straps loosening, metal slamming flesh.
If you can make it past this, there's a Miller Genuine Draft
There's a welder sitting next to you, buys the first round,
lays his steel hands on your shoulder

Like the father who couldn't bear it.
If you can make it past tomorrow,
you'll have to trust the pig iron,
this foot width of rust,
and walk this I-beam,50 feet of cross cut steel
falling into nothing. There's a strap that holds
your waist, a broken man who leads you.
he'll walk like a free man across 4 inches of steel.
He'll never look back.

originally appeared in The Kentucky Review



You curate a monthly reading series for poets. How do you feel about spoken-word or performance poetry versus poetry on the page?

RW: I have learned from personal experience that when preparing to do a reading, I choose work based on readability and my audience. Knowing one's audience as well as having a balanced set list of poems is a real key to a successful reading. There are beautiful poems that I've never read for example, because I feel that they are either too "quiet" or "contemplative" or better on the page than ones that either have more movement in them, or are more accessible to a wider audience.

Regarding performing, I've had a few poets who qualify as performance poets in my series and I am always in awe of the energy that's brought to a poem by a gifted performance poet. It's a different aesthetic than more traditional poetry,but I often think that traditional poets could learn from performance poets in terms of being better presenters of their work, and performance poets could learn from the traditional poets as well. However, everyone has a unique gift to share with the world, and my goal is to celebrate that, give them a platform.



What difficulties or challenges did you encounter in writing some of the poems? in publishing the collection?

RW: There's always a fear that certain poems can be misinterpreted or something may offend someone, but I made a decision while writing my first book: Do I want to be a truth teller, or I do I want to play it safe and write pretty, lyrical poems for the whole family? Being a "tell all" kind of poet can be very difficult and a sometimes painful road to go down. It's something I continue to struggle with, although I've made peace with who I am as a poet.



Have you given a public reading of the work? What was the audience response? Did you encounter anything you were not expecting?

RW: I recently gave my first reading from the chapbook in Cleveland for my press, Night Ballet, at the wonderful Max Backs Books. I love to do readings in general, but this was a special night and the crowd was warm, attentive and engaging. I'm looking forward to going back!



What are you working on now?

RW: I have several projects that I'm working on currently, a full length manuscript, as well as another chapbook which is going to be a big departure. All of the poems will have or be inspired by pop culture references, so that's going to be a fun project when it's finished.