Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990 to 2013. BJ Ward.
North Atlantic Books, 2014. 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1-58394-677-0

Jackleg Opera is the fourth collection by BJ Ward and is a collected poems gathering together over twenty years of amazing work. It was published at the end of 2013 by North Atlantic Books and should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Ward’s poetry is an incredible blend of wit, intelligence, playfulness and insight. He is a poet that not only loves language and craft but loves humanity, the adept phrasing that reflects the hidden emotional realities, charting what Emily Dickinson called the “internal difference where the meanings are.” His own words describe the accomplishment of his poetry, for his poems are

a net to capture the moment
but release the energy
–Suzuki Dance

This is appropriate for a poet who often writes about poetry, its power and purpose. That’s not to mistake his work for merely academic word wizardry. For his primary concern is with how we connect with other people, and language is one of the essential tools for that connection. So in a clever poem about the purpose of poetry called “Portrait of the Artist as Egg Salad,” the speaker is eating an egg salad sandwich which, of course, the reader can’t taste and in this context, he’s

. . . reminded of the thickest-

headed student I ever had—Debra—
who, when I told her her poem conveyed
nothing, said, “But I really feel this.”

So here we are,
Debra invoked yet long gone,
just writer and reader liaising
in the rectangular dining room of the page,
me still eating my egg salad sandwich,
you beginning to cross your arms and get upset

because I haven’t offered you anything yet
and you’re still hungry and it’s all my fault.

So poetry offers us or is supposed to offer us something that feeds us and nourishes us. In it, we often find the courage to face—or simple the ability to admit—the darker or wilder side of our own nature. It gives us a palatable way to assimilate the unavoidable darkness that is a part of our condition. These are what another poem calls “the molded hollows / in us worn from containing / and releasing, holding and letting be” (A Note to Karen). But those molded hollows are more than simply allowed to exist in the end; they are what make us who we are. Avoiding them is what a life of repression is built on and Blake’s specters are born of. But Ward is a wise poet and tries to guide us aright, for he tells us straight, as a Jersey poet would, “The more rocks we hit, / the louder we sing” (For Those Who Grew Up on a River). This embracing of the forces that wound us or are untamed within us, takes on many shapes in the poems. So in “The Noise I Make,” Ward declares, “I rejoice in my imperfections.” Or in “New Jersey,” it’s “the short, imperfect loveliness of groundhogs.” Or in “Spring Begins in Hinckley, Ohio,” it’s “a wrenching into tenderness.” That last phrase might contain the beautiful power of his poetry, for it is in understanding the deep wounds in us that we come to embrace the full extent of our humanity.

The poem “Compassion,” brings these elements together: that of the difficulty of intimacy in a modern metropolis and the compassion born of the deep wounding that defines a person. The poem opens

Out in this profane city,
sometimes sidewalks
seem the only cement that connects us

As the poem focuses in on a central figure living in this “profane city,” he is in his apartment “checking your scars / which spell your real name.” Later in the poem, the figure gives a dollar to a homeless man, and confronts the various voices that would condemn this compassion since the homeless man will simply “spend it on booze,” and “spend it on his / own death.” But in the end, though the central figure is a dollar poorer and isolated by his compassion from the callous voices that would deny the act,

. . . your inner
walls feel emblazoned by a song
rising from the fathomless depths,
a rosined bow rubbing
its awfully taut body
against catgut

to make music.

Here is one of the rocks that makes us sing from the inner depths. This is the point of it all, the sine qua non of poetry, music—art in general, that, as Stevens put it, makes it a “dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.” But, of course, at the other extreme, Ward also explores what separates us and, not surprisingly, it is often technology or symbolized by technology. Don’t presume he’s a Luddite for he does have a website. But, for instance, in the poem “No Job, No Money, No Girlfriend,” a person with an answering machine blinking to let them know he has a call, recites a litany of the various ways this means the world is reaching out to connect to him. But that expectation is destroyed when he presses the button and

a single electronic static train,
its boxcars full of emptiness,
departs from the speaker,
routes through my chest,
and out the front door—

. . . . . . . click

. . . giving me another hang-up.)

A wonderful double-entendre in which the language of our technology multiplies the emotional turmoil of the speaker. And technology has only accommodated this distancing with irony in something like Facebook, something Ward taps into with his poem “Upon Reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave on a Smart Phone,” which ends,

My friends are so thirsty with water in their eyes
so back to the well we’ll crawl:
Tell Plato to rise and rephilosophize—
Facebook is the new cave wall—

Our most popular social media for connecting with people is merely a shadow play of reality. Our connections are only phantoms of the truth as in Plato’s famous allegory. It’s also notable that here we find the relation of this disconnection to a thirst, that is, something primal in us that needs to be nourished since “my friends are so thirsty.” What poetry provides is lost in this network of virtual connections. Poetry, by using language in striking ways, reveals the hidden realities within us and provides a real, emotional connection to others across great distances and sometimes across impossible time. Most forms of social media, tethered and defined by the speed and rush of technology, often have a leveling influence on our language and interactions, and create connections that are as often fleeting and superficial as a single electrical spark. It is a problem Ward states with a kind of epigrammatic precision in “After Googling Myself, I Pour Myself Some Scotch and Step Out onto My Front Porch.” In it he says, “What a sum freedom plus apathy have equaled.”

But countering that apathy, that disconnection, is this collection of twenty-three years of great poetry and something to be deeply grateful for. It is among the best antidotes out there and should be marked by that peculiar phrase in his poem “Cross-Pollination,” which attaches to

. . . one of those rare moments in life
one would never get rid of.

These poems will strike you with their humor, their honesty, their emotional depth and their music. Like me, you may find yourself turning to someone and saying, “You have to hear this.”

Michael T. Young: Thank you, BJ, for agreeing to an interview.

Your newest collection, Jackleg Opera, is your fourth, and is a new and collected poems. Could you comment on putting it together: how and if you worked on the new poems to connect thematically in any way to the whole or just worked on the newer poems independently of any overall cohesion?

BJ Ward: I worked on the new poems as they came to me, not concerning myself with how or where they connected to the other work. Once I had about sixty poems that were publishable or had already been published somewhere, I chose and arranged the thirty-three new poems that make up the first part of the book. The thirty-fourth new poem I placed after my 2002 book, Gravedigger’s Birthday, as it serves as a coda for that manuscript. One of the best aspects of releasing a collected poems is the opportunity to revise some of the earlier work, an assiduity I have admired in poets such as Justice and WCW.

Michael T. Young: I love the title of this collection. Of course, “jackleg” means “unskilled or incompetent,” and yet your work is so wonderfully skillful. Also, much of the collection seems to be about embracing our imperfections. For instance, “The Noises I Make” declares “I rejoice in my imperfections.” Could you talk about that a bit: if you see this kind of embracing as important, or what its significance is in your poetry, or, perhaps even for one’s sanity?

BJ Ward: Although that line asserts that I rejoice in my imperfections, I actually have spent the better part of my life wrestling with them. I suppose I’ve come to live with them. Why did I write that line? I think of two things: Frost’s maxim that a poem is a momentary stay against confusion, and that final line in James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”: “I have wasted my life.” It’s reported that when Wright was later asked about that line, he said it was just how he felt in the moment of the poem. Supposedly he joked that after he had a sandwich he felt better.

Yet I hope there is also some kind of truth in my line, as your question seems to imply. I’ve always loved these James Joyce lines from Ulysses: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

Michael T. Young:  The poem “Filling in the New Address Book” ends saying, “why threaten any miraculous history,/any great testament, with knowledge/of how empty our current book of stories is?” The poem “And All the Peasants Cheered for the King. The End” which is a fatherly effort to preserve a child’s imagination against the harsher elements of reality and concludes, “The astronauts are still fastened in their flotation /The soldiers still guard the fairytales.” How important do you think it is for people (children and adults) to preserve some sense of mystery and wonder about life? In what way is it important?

BJ Ward: I don’t think we have to work too hard to preserve some sense of mystery and wonder about life. It’s always there. What we might have to do is learn to be comfortable with it. I question, even as I embrace technology, what we have lost in this age of information. I suppose my embrace is guarded. And somehow forced through my employment. Sure, the ready access of information is useful for many reasons, particularly in terms of a greater accountability of authority and the resultant effects on issues of social justice. But there is this thing in me that feels our urge to be connected through our devices might lead to an unquestioned, or at least implicitly sanctioned, “irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I know I am not alone in this. And because of this, I am very protective of the silences with which I’ve tried to surround myself. In a different age of industry, Whitman had it right: he loafed in order to “invite (his) soul.”

Michael T. Young: The poems “Bandages” and “Upon Being Asked Why I Dedicated My First Book To My Mother When There’s Not A Single Poem In It about Her” portray instances of breaking rules for a greater purpose, a kind of reaching out to others when it breaks with laws or social norms. This comes up in your other poems in different ways. I wondered if you might comment on this: do you see this as important in the greater context of our society and world? Why?

BJ Ward: So many heroes of mine were criminals in the eyes of those who were in power. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Mohandas Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela. When you live in an unjust system, it may be morally imperative of you to break the rules by using the artillery of resolute compassion.

Michael T. Young: In “After Googling Myself. . . “ you write, “I toast all the engines/I never controlled.” And “Development,” ends with “But the houses/were just fields then./And we were wild.” A number of other places in the collection seem to quietly suggest an embracing of a wildness in ourselves, the uncontrolled. Do you feel this is significant and if so, why?

BJ Ward: I love Donald Justice’s penchant: he wanted the maximum amount of wildness a poem could bear. An artist should be aware of this wildness. I don’t mean to speak for others’ creative processes, but perhaps someone reading this can relate to it: in the act of composition, I’m riding the wildest form of the poem, almost as if seeing where it takes me. A term for this is “transport.” In revision, I’m taming it. If I do it right, what I’ve produced still has wildness. If I do it wrong, it either remains all wilderness or becomes too civilized, too “broken” (in horse-trainers’ lingo). I aim to have just a little more body in the poem than brain—a little more beast than math.

Michael T. Young: The poem “Delaware Water Gap, NJ Side, Election Year, Rush Hour, Hungry Again,” opens with “The sun slips like a tongue/down the sky’s neck/and the flowers within me//open to it all.” This recalls to my mind a moment in Rilke—I can’t remember where—a flower opens so wide to the sky it’s unable to close at night. I wonder if you see opening or exposing our heart to the world, to the greater reality around us, as necessary and if so why. What is gained?

BJ Ward: We create in a time when new houses are more likely to have back decks than front porches. A time of intentional obfuscation, with language that is deliberately imprecise. (In Oxford, NJ, close to where I live, the garbage incinerator and landfill is called a “Resource Recovery Center.”) Greed no longer seems immoral to us, but something that makes one admirable. How revolutionary an act writing a poem in America seems. By doing something so earnest and so outside the expectations of Western culture’s sense of “industry,” you are deliberately engaging in a deeper economy. The first gesture toward engaging in it is what you point out: opening ourselves to the outside world, like Rilke’s flower. The second is to protect that heart you mention, for the world is acidic, and it is drawn toward your compassion and your imagination. It wants to extirpate them. And the third part is to commit to a deep happiness, much deeper than the exchange of money.

Michael T. Young: “Aubade” says, “I want to be as precise with my joy today/as all those poets are with their suffering.” Even in your poems that deal with suffering or difficulties (I think of many of your poems about your father), there seems an effort to find joy and beauty, to be precise about it more than the suffering. It is also evident in the linguistic playfulness of so many of your poems. I wondered if you feel seeking out joy in spite of suffering is important, looking for the beauty rather than the ugliness that is surely always there.

BJ Ward: Langston Hughes viewed his role as a poet as having three important aspects: celebrant, performer, and seer. Although Hughes approached them differently than I do, I aspire to these three myself. (The third one is by far the hardest.) I don’t have to look hard for misery. It’s always waiting for me when I open that door. The writing of a poem is what helps me step past it. I’m lucky in this way; I know a lot of people who get stopped by the misery, and they have my sympathy. I’ve come to look at joy as an act of creation. Experienced fighters know that, when your opponent has a terrific defense, a tight guard that is hard to slip past, you have to “make your own hole,” usually with a combination technique. I find myself almost every day making my own hole in the ugliness that’s out there.

Michael T. Young: Which is your favorite poem from Jackleg Opera and why is it significant for you?

BJ Ward: I don’t mean to be evasive, but I don’t have a consistently favorite poem from the book. Right now I suppose it’s “Wolverine The X-Man Kisses” because I just received a generous email from someone saying how much it meant to her. How it helped her understand her marriage. It was generous of her to thank me like that, and it was a powerful moment for me to receive her message.

Michael T. Young: Are there any prose works that you feel have significantly influenced you as a poet?

BJ Ward: My first inclination is to say, “Too many to name,” but I’m always disappointed when other authors say that to this kind of question. It seems like a cop-out. So I’ll just name the first ten works that come to my mind. I’ll limit the list to prose by writers who are no longer alive.

Shakespeare’s tragedies, particularly Hamlet when I was younger and King Lear now; the great plays of Tennessee Williams. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. The letters of both Emily Dickinson and John Keats. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. All of Hawthorne. The short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Zen and the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigel. The Bible. And the short stories of Raymond Carver. I am sure there are dozens of others I could have listed, but these came to me first, and even now I couldn’t limit the list to ten.

Michael T. Young: What are your favorite activities that have nothing to do with poetry or writing?

BJ Ward: I love baseball—watching it and playing it. Also, I’ve trained at a traditional karate dojo for 36 years now. But, given your question, I should say that the men and women I train with have absolutely influenced my poetry, although they wouldn’t know that unless they read this. Right now I train with a mechanic, two cops, a pharmaceutical executive, former junkies, a Shop-Rite cashier, a postal worker, two engineers, a church cantor, and a lumberyard worker, as well as hundreds of others over the last 36 years. The lessons I’ve learned from them have influenced not only my writing process but also many individual poems.

Michael T. Young: Thanks for your time, BJ. Let’s close with your favorite poem from Jackleg Opera.

BJ Ward: Thank you for the interesting questions, Michael. Here is the poem I mentioned earlier. A note about it: as far as I know, the Marvel superhero Wolverine only has one real superpower–the ability to heal instantly. That’s what allowed surgeons to line his skeleton with metal and place those retractable claws in the backs of his hands. The title notwithstanding, this poem is as much about loving someone who has (almost) stopped being vulnerable.

Wolverine the X-Man Kisses

His bones, lined with adamantium, are unbreakable,
. . . . . . . so his lover is just licorice and moth wings
in his careful palms.

And tucked within each open hand
. . . . . . . lie three knives, retracted,
but one thrust and snickt

(x, x, x)

whatever he holds could die.
. . . . . . . What delicacy is in his hug,
but is this a fair relationship?

Before you answer, know this:
. . . . . . . he is a mutant, able to heal
from the deepest of cuts,

and so to hurt him
. . . . . . . she must kiss him.
Look at his trembling lips

as he leans in to hers–see the nervous animal
. . . . . . . in his eyes, how it paces back and forth (x, x, x)
knowing there is no way out of love

but to suffer. He’s a mutant, but is he so different
. . . . . . . from you? Have you ever folded yourself
into someone’s arms, unsure of yourself,

knowing what you have learned in your life
. . . . . . . contradicted such tenderness, leaning in anyway,
lips separating, closing in,

the potential of blades
. . . . . . . running along your bones
just in case?

            (from Jackleg Opera, Collected Poems 1990-2013 [North Atlantic Books])

————————

You can learn more about BJ Ward and his poetry at his website: .

 

 

Sarasvati

Sarasvati at the river
in the gaze of a goose
foraging
like I am
at her banks
through gratitude and
fear willing that
some bridge appear
carry me down the middle
of this way mapped by
blood
and memory
she sees me
wraps me in her veil
shows me her name
everywhere
in river reeds
and starlings
honey mirror
at the bottom
of my tea
the billboard I see reads:
the path is clear
I am ready

 

Listen to the audio version of this poem .

 

 

GROW

Me…
Mine…
My…
You  will  all  expire
whether  your  spine
is  crushed
in  9  places
or  your  body  just
runs  out  of  breath
and  right  after  your  death
some  other
voice  talking  through
dirt  shaped
into  skin
will  walk  on  electric
currents
to  the  timer  ticking  down
the  days
while  singing  the  same  damn  song
you  sang
a  solo  called  ego
composed  in  a  state
of  amnesia

And  then  what?

Grass  will  still  grow
snow  will  still  fall
life  will  still  turn  itself  inside  out
through  the  mouths
of  every  creature
formed  from  a  similar  equation
to  yours
with  eyes
nose
fingers
gut

And  then
What?

Why  not  move    something?

Why  not  change  the  melody?

Tune  the  voices
to  the  thrashing  branches
bowing  in  March  breeze
train  them  to  sing  like
the  dots  of  green  bravely
stretching  skyward
into  the  unknown

There  is  nothing  to  own
there  is  only  to  see
and  to  understand
why  you  came
that  there  are  others  here
that  they  are  your  air
and  you  are  their  water
god  is  not  “out  there”
but  everywhere
in  each  other

 

Listen to the audio version of this poem .

 

is  a poet, screenwriter, and transmedia producer who was born in Kingston, Jamaica and raised in New York City. She received her MFA. from CUNY City College, and her first full-length collection of poetry, , was released from in 2014. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Keisha-Gaye Anderson is author of the poetry collection  (Jamii Publishing, 2014), which has been described as “a lyrical outpouring of kinship, heritage, and a woman’s transformation within the world that envelops her . . . a rich compendium of heartfelt poetic verse.” As both a writer & reader of mystical poetry, I found her work lovely and compelling, and invited her to the Infoxicated Corner for a conversation about her aesthetic, influences, process, and work overall.

Fox Frazier-Foley: I first learned about your work from your book, Gathering the Waters, which I was drawn to read because I thought the cover was so lovely and striking. Can you tell us a little bit about the genesis of that book? What was your process like in creating it? And how did you find this beautiful cover art, or was it created specifically for the book?
Keisha-Gaye Anderson: I’m constantly writing. I don’t remember a time I was ever not writing—on napkins, the backs of receipts. But as I was working on my MFA in fiction, I would give my brain a rest from that work and review or write poetry. When stepping back and looking at the work in totality, it dawned on my just how many poems I’d written over the years. I’d self-published a poetry chapbook back in 2002, and steadily published poems in journals and magazines since that time, but hadn’t put together a collection. So I began to organize some of the pieces into a body of work that spoke to themes I was most interested in at the time, like ancestral memory, the things we carry from generation to generation, and what it means to truly empower the self on a spiritual and emotional level. As a mother of two children, working full-time and attending graduate school, these were particularly resonant topics for me. I started to send the manuscript out to publishers and contests. I was so thrilled to learn that Jamii selected my manuscript from more than 100 entries! Elated is a better word, in fact.

The cover art is part of a series of water goddesses that were created especially for me by my beautifully talented friend Angelina. They were her idea. She created them out of felt and they are so very gorgeous. Oshun just emerged as the best choice for the cover.

F³: We’ve talked a little bit about spiritual and religious poetry — poetry that has tendencies towards the mystical, the metaphysical. Do you think of yourself as a spiritual or religious poet? How would you say spirituality informs your work?
KGA: I am just me. What results as poems are conversations with myself about the world outside of and inside of me. In that sense, I suppose I have always been more attuned to, or interested in, the more subtle realities of my lived experience—things you can’t see but which affect you in profound ways. I wouldn’t label myself as a spiritual or religious poet, though I am interested in learning about how people around the world engage in religious rites and spirituality, and how these things help them to create life experiences that are beneficial to them. It’s probably one of my obsessions. But I would say that spirituality informs my work through my ability to be a good listener. I allow the writing to flow through me and record what comes. Yes, poetry has rules and structure as an art form, and that’s where the editing comes in, but the initial process of allowing the words to take form without judging them or censoring what comes through is definitively an act of listening and, in a sense, faith. I know that what I’m writing is about me but can also resonate with many more people than just me. I like the way the writing process connects me to the larger human experience but also helps me celebrate my individual talent.

F³: I love that you used the word ‘rituals’ there. Rituals are so important and interesting to me, from the religious kind, to the more secular/cultural sorts, to even the idiosyncratic, personal rituals that we all have. Do you have any little daily rituals as a writer, or things you like to do that help your writing in some way — meditation, taking walks, listening to a certain type of music, etc.? What’s your writing life like?
KGA: My writing life is inextricable from my “life” life; Motherhood, 9-5 job, and creative writing are all entangled, and I have to make sure that each area is balanced or everything will fall apart. That being said, I take every spare moment I can to honor my writing above other social commitments because I understand it to be a very special gift that must be cultivated on a regular basis to be of any use to me or others. After dropping the children off at school, I give myself 20 minutes at a nearby bodega to get coffee and sketch out ideas. After walking the two miles to work—a kind of meditation and the only space in the day for exercise—I’ll often write for 30 minutes. I’m also up writing after the children have gone to sleep. When there’s a body of work I want to complete (a collection of poems, short story, screenplay), I will block out three hours every Sunday morning and go off to a coffee shop to write. I do not allow anyone to intrude upon this time, no matter who they are. After a particular project is complete, I’ll give myself a break. It’s important to break things up into small batches and take a breather, or you’ll just burn out.

F³: I think that’s such great advice to hear, especially for poets who are still figuring out their own pace and how to make time for their craft while doing other things in the world. For poets who are also interested in writing spiritual or mystical poems, what would you suggest they read? Are there any poets or authors who have been especially influential or inspiring for you as a writer?
KGA: While you can read about others’ spiritual and religious experiences in books, I don’t think you can’t find your own connection to spirit or the mystical in a book. By extension, I don’t know that one can set out to write ‘mystical poetry’ because these states of awareness are the manifestation of a certain life path that is marked by the destruction of dogma in the mind, surrender to the moment, and openness to learning every single day. It’s frightening but exhilarating to continually discard what you thought was indisputable fact and just stay open to the process of learning, taking things as they come and reflecting these realizations in your art. They physical eyes are pathological liars! lol…

Poetry like any other art form is just an extension of the artist; you have to be that which you wish to produce. Wisdom cannot be contrived or purchased, and the way that this level of awareness we’ll call ‘spirituality’ takes shape in the physical world, in the arts, is highly individual. So my advice is to follow your bliss. Read what inspires you. Read what you are naturally drawn too. All of your interests, if you approach them without fixation on a particular outcome, are like breadcrumbs that will lead you to the mystical revelations you seek. Free yourself of the idea that those revelations have to ‘look’ a particular way. A reggae dance hall can produce the same altered states as an ashram. Believe that! Never listen to anyone who tells you there only one way of getting closer to the mysteries of life; we are all equally capable, if we are willing to be disciplined and open, to broaden our understanding of ourselves and the wider world.

There are so many poets who inspire me. Lucille Clifton and Pablo Neruda come to mind immediately. Rumi, of course. There’s June Jordan, Sekou Sundiata, Audre Lorde. Novelists like Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Vladimir Nabakov, Octavia Butler…Too many to list.

F³: A ot of those are on my list, too, especially the first three. Is there anything else you think is integral to the writing life, or your creative process, that you’d like to share with us?
KGA: An important part of writing, apart from self-discipline, is to enjoy yourself. Get silly. Laugh at yourself. Talk to your characters out loud. You’ll surpass your own expectations if you’re creating from a place of joy.

F³: That’s so important to remember! This has been such a great conversation for me, and I hope for you too. I’ll close by asking whether you have any new projects on the horizon? What are you working on right now?
KGA: I’m thrilled to be curating two events in conjunction with the annual BEAT Festival in Brooklyn in September. One is an evening of poetry at Five Myles Art Gallery in Crown Heights, featuring talented poets JP Howard, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, and Ras Osagyfo. The other is a celebration of theater, dance and voice at Weeksville Heritage Center, also in September. It’s going to be so much fun!

I’m also working steadily on polishing my first novel, which explores what happens when an African ancestor interferes in the lives of a Jamaican family that is in pursuit of the American dream. That one soon come! ;-)

 

 

Montana Ray is a feminist poet, translator, and scholar. She is the author of five chapbooks and bookworks. Her first full-length poetry collection, (guns & butter), is now available from Argos Books. She’s a PhD student in comparative literature at Columbia University and the mom of budding zoologist, Amadeus.

Montana Ray is the author of , published this year by Argos Books. Intrigued by the poem she sent me for TheThe’s Infoxicated Corner (also appearing here today), I asked whether she’d be interested in doing a Q&A on the blog as well. Here’s the deeply enjoyable conversation that ensued:

 

Fox Frazier-Foley: Tell me a little bit more about the project of (guns & butter). Did you know from the start that you wanted to write a book of gun-shaped poems? How did that come together? What is your overall vision for the book? And, other than the beautiful sonic resonance between the two words — what’s butter got to do with it? (I mean, I guess butter has to do with everything for some of us. My family is mostly from the American South, and we cook with lots of butter, ha.)

Montana Ray: Thanks for your questions, Fox! I did not know I wanted to write a book of poems in any shape; I knew I wanted to work with ‘the breath.’ I took a workshop with Dara Wier in Western Mass, & someone brought in a bit of Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette, I like how ‘dissent’ is in there, too, sonically; and how quotes or speech marks, the punctuation Notley uses to create a unique breath in that book, create a collage of reports. And I asked, would it be redundant to write something in that style, using quotations to create the breath? Dara said, No way, and basically gave me the assignment to write a piece using quote marks as the principal punctuation. So, I thought, aha, and instead I used Dara’s parenthesis from Reverse Rapture.

Then the gun came together one day because of a series of appropriated texts & comments: a sitter’s text message saying, I’m going to be late a gunwar is on. A man in the street telling me, I could touch it. A boy who worked at the tattoo shop next door, and who I had a little feeling for, showing me his gun tattoo, and I was like, You like guns? And he said, I like Billy the Kid. So all of those textual and aural snipets became “lines” of the poem, but more like bullets, when I sewed them together into the shape of a gun.

I should also say that while I wasn’t searching for a shape, I wasn’t resistant to the idea of shape being something you could write a poem with. That was thanks to Mónica de la Torre, who introduced me to the Brazilian concrete poets and, by so doing, changed the way I think about language. Ask Mónica about concrete poetry or Joaquín Barriendos, and they will be able to tell you why my poems are not concrete, they are visual. But all poems are visual. And here’s what I took from the concrete poets, who also left us manifestos and essays on the global politics of language and on translation, things I’m interested in: these poems are mechanical. They appropriate the form of a machine to shoot back popular language.

I’m in the mountains right now at my sister’s place in Oaxaca, under like 15 wool blankets staring at these gorgeous mountains and being totally snobby and skeezed out by my sister’s living standards; you know sublime + expired Lala yogurt dumped into the garden and bed bugs meet tarantulas. And anyway last night my son, sister, and I were telling stories around her fireplace. And taking turns, and Ami was like I’m not really into telling stories, I more like to tell facts. So we pulled the story of Cupid and Psyche out of him, fact by fact. And I think that there’s a way that the poems in this book seek out language as fact. I’m interested in language as something concrete in the fact of its materiality.

“Guns & butter” is an economics term I learned in high school. But my family is, like your family, from the US South. And butter is a fact in my family narrative. There’s a lot more to say about the recipes, but I think it goes back to using language as fact to construct a narrative.

F³: I think a lot of writers and artists have certain preoccupations that they come back to again and again in their writing, directly or indirectly. I have a friend, for example, whom I used to tease about having a window show up somewhere in half his poems. I wonder if guns (or butter) are some kind of longer-standing preoccupation you have, as a person or writer? Is writing about guns (or, given their shape, just writing guns) a political choice for you?
MR: Yes, I think all the time about violence and about food.

F³: Do you have any writing rituals — places you like to go to write, things you like to do before getting into the focused-frenzied zone where writing comes from? Any music you like to listen to, meditations you do, things you try to eat or drink (or not eat or drink), etc.? This is something I’ve been thinking about, myself, lately. I used to go to Grand Central Station to write, back when I lived in New York, or write while on the train. There was an anonymous quality to the noise — a place you could experience a certain kind of immersion — that helped me get into the right part of my psyche. In Los Angeles, I now try to wake up really early or stay up really late — the noise is so different out here — so a certain kind of quiet happens that helps me. Since I’m becoming more aware of my rituals and their (d)evolutions lately, I’m interested in hearing what others use (or don’t use) to help them approach their work.
MR: Right now, I get it when I can! That doesn’t feel particularly comfortable, because when I was writing that book, I was writing all the time. Metabolizing my little joys and traumas so quickly, they didn’t accumulate because all went into my poems very therapeutically. I was also in an MFA program, and able to justify so many expenditures (mainly babysitters to write and not working to write) to myself and others, because I was a student at a great school. The struggle to write post-school is….. Hahaha and on that note my son is now awake and singing so if his Tía weren’t awake, too (and I hear her, she is) I’d need to go inside and stop writing this! Which is the kind of writing I’m getting this AM!! Gracias a Tía Amelie! You know Mónica and I were laughing about self-promotional writing and how if you do that during your peak hours and are really passionate about that kind of writing that makes you a special type of person, by which I was implying that I’m not that type of person… but really I’ll take almost anything where I get to play with language right now. So, thank you, to you too¡¡

F³: You’re surely most welcome! It sounds like you’re pretty busy, but are there any new projects you’re working on right now? What’s next on the horizon for you?
MR: I’m wrapping up an academic (ie meta) project “about” “the archive.” It’s a lot less annoying than that sounds! This winter, I archived my treasured documents, correspondence with my sisters and documents from my mom who passed away when I was five, etc., and then I burned this archive. This summer, I worked with the papermakers at Dieu Donné (http://www.dieudonne.org) to mix the archive’s ashes with cotton pulp to make new pages. Now, I’m working on getting those papers housed at an institution of cultural power, a university or museum library, and want to work with a library’s archivist to create a finding aid for what are now essentially blank pages. The idea is for the archive to be reconstituted, again, in the leap the researcher makes between the finding aid and the actual papers.

Also, I’d like to return to translating the non-fiction of Pedro Lemebel, and I think I can do that now without crying! Crying because this spring I broke up with my partner, who is Chilean and was my Spanish teacher, and basically I couldn’t read Spanish for a time, let alone Chilanese, without crying… making translation hard. Additionally, Pedro passed away early this year, the videos a friend sent me of the funeral party were incredible: a Latin American style second-line with people from all walks of life; he meant so much to that country by living freely and making art during an era of complete oppression. Loco Afán, the book I was translating is a series of chronicles about las locas, we might say transvestites or queens, but las locas, members of Lemebel’s community during Pinochet’s regime as well as the AIDs crisis. The book was published in the early ’90s, and the two crises are conflated: AIDs in that book becomes an over-arching metaphor for US neoimperialism, or vice versa. Working on the project helped me to grow as a translator especially via thinking through the intersection of translation, which occura across space & time, and queer culture: specifically, its (plural) nomenclatures. I really want to get back with that book. Not with the boyfriend but def with the book¡¡¡¡

Bury the Girls, Then Bury Their Babies

The face of a young girl stares out from the cover of Fiddle is Flood (Blood Pudding Press, 2015), Lauren Gordon’s stark and awe-inspiring chapbook. Her hair intermingles with a collage of sky, vines, bare legs. Another girl lies on her back along the bottom, looking up, wistful, white skin gleaming. Though a black-and-white ink drawing, the girls’ lips are plump, pouty even. A bursting red flower, scattered amongst the scrolling detail, is the only color. Gordon created this cover herself; the lush, rouge flower provides readers a visual, introductory cue for her explosive poems that circle sex and death. Through Gordon’s sparse words and lyrical lines such as:

I will
cut the bluestem grass
in the blazing sun

I will
walk through swarms
of white butterflies

to lug
the big brown jug

to lug
the wild cool creek
Gordon creates her own nursery rhyme and a darkness emerges, as dark as the black bird arching its neck in song on the cover.

As many readers may be aware, these poems were largely inspired by the Little House book series, first published in 1932 — a series that wove yarns around rural life in the American Midwest during the late 19th century; the stories were so quaint in setting and detail, so oddly clean in character and tale. The female characters of the books, for example, always wore long muslin dresses, but they never seemed to get very dirty — even though a regular chore (especially for characters Laura and Mary) was literally sweeping dirt floors. This cleanliness serves as a great metaphor for other types of physical and spiritual purity: sexuality is not discussed or displayed, even though Laura’s future husband, Almanzo, was a good ten years older than Laura. When the family suffers from fever and shaking (malaria) and don’t understand what it is, they look to God. Their prayers fall on deaf ears. When Mary goes blind from scarlet fever, rather than rail at God, or show anger, Ma says it was from eating bad watermelon.

Gordon enforces this theme of repression , discussing the ways in which all “unmentionable” coming-of-age themes (sex, menstruation, death, religion) in the Little House series seemed to be pushed deep down inside and tied off with bonnet ribbons. Gordon explores all that is taboo in this collection, frequently employing messy images drawn from the stories’ setting: milk, tears, blood, plasma, and The River.

The eroticism in these persona poems, for example, is frequently revealed through fluids.

From “Ellen’s Calf Bawls”:

I skim the milk
dip my fingers
let her rough lick
tonguing and suckling
milk

She’ll butt the pail
smell the
milk

dumb thing
unfettered udder, bottle balk
milk

Mary
milk

 

Gordon repeats “milk” in these sensory exploding lines. The readers taste and smell it. Even the “unfettered udder” is blatantly sexual and unapologetic. Gordon moves from the pure white milk to the mud and grime. Dirt lines the cracks and spine of this collection in such a delectable way. Gordon places her characters in the mud quite a bit, both literally and figuratively. A favorite set of lines are from “Be a Good Girl and Swallow the River” read:

 

silver fishes and all that swim in the darkness
like flicks of shine because good girls suck the mud

and this is what it is like to lose your blood
to make a body you drink it up and push the river…

 

The mud alludes to sexual fluid, bodily fluids, (the woman always a vessel to receive and then give and give), but the mud is also the final resting place for Laura’s miscarriage. The mud is where everyone goes to decompose.

In “Ma Scraps the Boiled Orange,” the Laura persona confides:

 

Mary and I eat the shavings
roughage for keen eyes of buffalo wallows
sharp to stalk wolves, cicadas still in skin
pocket pebbled breaking weight

I listen for the Indians
press a cold tongue
to the ceiling of my mouth

lay a hot hand
to myself under
the piecemeal quilt

 

In Gordon’s work, though anticipating danger from Indians, the allusion to masturbation smacks the reader across the face: this is not your mother’s Little House book.

These young women are raised to believe they are special treasures, but when they come of age, in Gordon’s poems, the true reality shines bright: they are objectified by a “traditional” culture that is under the impression that it cares for and nurtures them. All too soon, misogyny rears its ugly head. Laura is “pinned under the town drunk.” Laura and Mary are also sexually objectified as soon as possible. The men in these poems are not just fetching buckets of water or brushing hand against hand on a walk at twilight. In “Pa Sent me to Town,”

 

Ma sprinkled my calico
make it sweet, Ma
sweet prairie grass sweet, Ma
hit it with spittle
Ma hot striking stranger eyes
all over my body…

 

Gordon repeats the word “sweet” a word often used to describe little girls, but it is disturbing in a sense here. Other words like “hot” and “spittle” really deliver the tone home to an all-new way of thinking about this particular time period as well as punching us in our modern-age guts, conjuring up countless stories we’ve all heard about the street harassment of women (and even young girls).

Yet the poems are clearly arranged to show they have not forgotten their place as “women.” Laura and Mary go from hiding under a bedsheet to also getting their periods, are “tented” (an allusion to The Red Tent where females on their periods are sequestered, perhaps?) and then being married off. In the Little House world, as Gordon sees it, there isn’t time to enjoy the thrill of growing up. Laura persona says she wants to be Pa’s “bouncing baby boy” and how can we blame her when her path to her role as “mother” is so defined, the role as tight as any straitjacket? Laura fulfills her destiny only because she owns a working uterus. In the poem, “Then I’m a Woman, Full and Fleshed,” Gordon writes:

 

I will not vomit
in my very own pantry
where flour lies corn meal slides
into bucking waves awash I wonder
dizzing drawers

I’ll have this boy
this bouncing boy…
Sixteen-year-old Laura has a miscarriage. There are no “unmentionables” here, where the grasshoppers “fuck their way out west” and “Almanzo, all man, wants to know me…” Here is the line that describes Laura’s baby brother: “one terrible day he straightened out his little body and was dead.” The lines are powerful and awful in their straight forwardness. Death is just an event written on the calendar. Having a baby, even at age sixteen, is still painted as the clichéd woman’s work: Gordon illustrates Laura’s complete isolation:

 

…up parched tight grass
never seeing the soft prairie
never feeling the soft weight

of your son pressing
your ribs when I’m sixteen
my prayers sound like a woman

behind a sheet in the ink…
Laura is alone in her nightmares, or in this case, a sheet “with a knife, a knife renting air terrors…” even though Laura is still a girl, suffering in silence. Then she gets to bury her little baby in the river mud.

And where is God during all of this catastrophe? Everywhere. He is in the river. He is in the evil muskrats in the hay. He is in the harvest pick. He is in Pa’s songs. God is a presence here, but he probably “hates” and “scolds” more than Laura Ingalls Wilder would like. God is a popular trope when nothing else can be easily explained.

Gordon weaves a full-bodied tone with these poems; they capture a kind of modern-day fairy tale, where death steals so many lines and while we fiddle, the world burns… and floods.

 

 

went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently lives in the DC area with her family. She is the author of six chapbooks. The most recent ones are forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, Crisis Chronicles Press and Shirt Pocket Press. Her first full length poetry collection is forthcoming from Lucky Bastard Press. Recent work can be seen / is forthcoming at Pretty Owl Poetry, Yes, Poetry, Gargoyle Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, Glittermob, The Norfolk Review, Moss Trill, Pith, So to Speak, Apple Valley Review, Otis Nebula, Freezeray, and Hobart.

Phone Booth Parable

So much has gone missing where
are the words our parents read aloud
long storks on the bedroom wall

midflight I never got a good look
at what they carried all that way
to the window why

fly when the ground is so good
at pulling you down said the scarecrow
how’s the reception on your end is it

better to persuade or just
push your tongue into my mouth
a little taste of what wrong

numbers can do said the tin man
whose speech should be good for
another few miles already

the moon over bruise over stubble shorts
out when so many TVs
howl at once said the lion we’ll

come back as dogs to bury our own
bones but time is a limiting factor
I’ve stepped onto platforms only to be

told I missed the boat and my
beloved whistling out at sea
for years the tin man couldn’t describe

what he looked like counting his change
or the message on my phone he
left the cord swinging

 

 
Object Relations

Ours was a fine-tuned affair. I scrubbed the day’s soot
in my hair while you polished your feet,
your glass toe etched with a hummingbird’s beak.
Nights you kept it in a velvet box.

I wanted you to wear your toe
in faux fleece slippers, in bed. It would whisper
on the desk edge. When you put on your socks,
it whimpered. Cooped thing, bearing your weight

through the crushed pampas after a meal,
a dog at the fence, the filament above our rest
quavering like a trapped fly. Predawn,
I took your toe outside and held it up

to the moon. “What weighs on you
also weighs on me,” I said as the cold air
lapped my bare legs. “But how can I leave
our labors in the dark unfinished?”

It lowed in my palm, then grew quiet
under my gaze and warm. I saw the lines
on my hand crisscross beneath it
like a crumpled map, too faded now to read.

How troubling a conscience is
when it’s clear, my love, close to invisible.
Moles bored the night in half:
one for your fevered, chainless dream,

the other for my taking, my giving back.

 

 

Handsel

The fruit bat’s version of happy
is upside down and fitful
leather.

Give me that rapture
you think I deserve,
no less.

Once, at a fire sale, I optioned a knife
without its guide, chose
how the leaves would fall.
And yet they fall across my step.

I found the chapter you’d begun
to erase,
​​a yeoman weeping
onto his wife’s side of the bed.

More, an overboard bottle
among utensils,
message meticulous.

​​And more—

I’m still that hopeful, that herring
dark as a fool’s tongue on your plate.

Michael Simon is an editor in New York. His poetry and prose have appeared in Atlas Review, Best New Poets 2013, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He is currently obsessed with John Morris’s Londinium.

Editor’s Note: Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger are the artists whose collaborative graphic novel, Late Child (Fantagraphics Books, 2014), tells the intimate, autobiographical story of the struggles Van Cook and her mother faced during World War II and after, as Van Cook, a child born out of wedlock, came of age and learned how to seize her own voice and power in an aggressively sexist and classist society. Alex Dueben interviews them here about the stories ehind the book, and their processes and conversations in creating it.

 

 

Exploring the Personal and Political Landscape of The Late Child and Other Animals
by Alex Dueben

The new book The Late Child and Other Animals opens at the height of World War II with the co-author’s mother and aunt on top of Portsdown Hill, watching the city of Portsmouth burn. That haunting and beautiful image sets the tone for the book. The Nazi bombardment of the city and the war ended by 1945, but the scale of destruction and devastation that the city–and so much of England and Europe–endured would shape the decades that followed. This book is a very personal story of Marguerite Van Cook and her mother, but it is also a story of these societal changes and the shifts in consciousness that accompanied them.

Sitting in a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan over coffee, Van Cook is still a little overwhelmed reflecting on it all. “The war didn’t end in 1945,” she said.

“For years, nobody had anything to eat. When I was a kid, I played in bomb sites. There would be the remains of somebody’s kitchen which was half there. The pots and pans were still there. Over behind our house were giant chains from the ships’ anchors. A friend of mine lived right next to a junkyard and in the middle of it was a diving bell. You wouldn’t know there was a diving bell unless you climbed down over all this scrap metal to get in there. As little kids we would go and have a club in there.”

The book consists of five stories involving Van Cook or her mother and what’s striking about the book is the way that Van Cook and James Romberger have managed to tell a series of precise, personal stories, the subtext of which is the vast societal changes that happened during those years and would follow them. It’s a beautiful book, but at its heart is unease. Van Cook was born out of wedlock and the way that she and her mother were treated is a chilling and sad.

Work on the book began when Van Cook took a writing class while studying at Columbia. “I felt my mother’s story was important to tell and that the issue of ‘illegitimate’ birth doesn’t get much attention. When you start to read novels and look historically at plot lines and even now when you turn on the television, the murder is so often committed because someone is covering up an illegitimate birth. It falls onto the child. I thought it was important to start to work with that.

“My mother was upset a lot of the time,” Van Cook. “She would talk to me about these things when I was much too young to really understand what was going on. She would repeat her stories. I was still carrying around her voice in my head. When it came to writing down what she had to say, I could hear her. I was still hearing what she said. The dialogue is authentic to my mother and then to some degree having grown up in England and knowing the sorts of questions that they ask you in these weird different situations I was easily able to extrapolate and add to what she’d told me and fill in the blanks.”

Perhaps the most shocking story in the book is “Nature Lessons,” which features a young Van Cook walking home from ballet class at night and a man who followed her. The man’s voice is vivid, which for her was because she’s had that voice and his words in her memory for decades so clearly. At the very end of the story, she also writes about how as an adult she understands why her mother didn’t go to the police and try to find the man.

“At the time it was really difficult for me because I didn’t know what happened,” Van Cook said, “things went unsaid a lot of the time. I spent a lot of years trying to figure it out. It was traumatic for me. As I got older–and then when you have your own child–you start to understand little bits and pieces. As an adult, it was interesting to go back and look at my mother’s narrative.”

“I thought we could have ended the book on that chapter,” Romberger said. “The ending was the perfect set up for another book when she becomes a punk. ‘I’m going to sing as loud as I want and nobody’s going to tell me what to do.’

“When I first met Marguerite she was always talking about the issues that come up in this book,” Romberger said. “The way she was treated when she was in school for being illegitimate profoundly affected the way she approached everything in life. To me, if anything’s worth doing, this is an issue worth doing. This idea that people can be treated as less-than because their parents aren’t married.

“Look at the plot of every Jane Austen or Dickens novel,” Romberger said. “We were just watching ‘House of Cards.’ In almost every show there’s an illegitimate child that’s kept secret and still it’s the major plot point for every single goddamn story. It is continuing to be the major story. Why is this the one thing that is perfectly acceptable to be prejudiced against a child?”

“I was a bright kid. I had won a place to an English public school. The headmistress at my school called them and got my scholarship revoked. She used to hit me often. I was told ‘you’re a dirty filthy girl.’ It was taken out on me. Meanwhile, I was getting 100% on my tests,” Van Cook said. “It was not just sticks and stones.

“One of the things I say in the book–which I didn’t know until I wrote it–after that chap tried to take me away and I was still going to school, I started singing really loudly when I was by myself on the street. Fast forward twenty years or whatever and there I am singing on stage in a punk band opening for The Clash.”

“I’ve never read anybody writing about not just going to concerts, but about being right there in the room, being in that environment, touring with The Clash,” Romberger said.

“There was a lot of driving around in vans,” Van Cook said with a laugh.

Van Cook wasn’t just a punk. She was the singer and co-founder of the band The Innocents, which among other things, toured the UK in 1978 with The Clash and The Slits, where they performed 31 concerts in 32 days as part of The Clash’s Sort It Out Tour.

“At some point I will write about my time in the punk world,” Van Cook said. “Punk has its own energy and I suppose the book might benefit from the urgent approach that was the hallmark of that time. It was a truly exhilarating time.

“I did just get a studio tape of The Innocents which we had recorded with Dave Goodman, who recorded the Sex Pistols,” Van Cook said. The band recorded one album, which though it was never released, was produced and engineered by Goodman who worked on the Sex Pistols recordings. “Terry Smith, our last drummer saved it from oblivion. We had lost touch, he was in Australia and we only recently found each other.  I definitely plan to do something with it. It has some of the songs we did on The Clash tour.”

By tying the book’s stories together the way she does, opening with the devastation of World War II, and ending in the summer of 1968 in France, Van Cook makes the unspoken subject of the book the period of austerity that defined British life in the postwar era and played a significant role in shaping the punk movement and her generation.

“People don’t really get that we had no new clothes to speak of. They had to darn everything during the war. Everything was precious and when they decided to buy clothes in the postwar years, every piece was an acquisition. When I went home and  took a jacket–that was perfectly good–and cut it up with a pair of scissors, it was a slap in the face, far worse than swearing in public. That war generation valued what they had done for us differently.

“For me, the Paris cultural uprising of ’68 was pivotal, and I don’t say too much about it in this story. As I say in the book, we were too young. But I saw it. I was starting to become radicalized. It was the other way of being. The war and ’68 bookended things for me.

“Many writers want to create something beautiful, but they also want to present their difficulties. The challenge is to show something of yourself and to upend a set of paradigms about who you are or what that means. I wanted to show that I came into the world with a beautiful soul and hopefully I’ll leave the world with a beautiful soul–although it’s been a little corrupted,” Van Cook said laughing.

“I’m getting my PhD in French Lit at the moment and I thought, well, I’ll end this first narrative in France, where I had another lesson in growing up. I thought that people had done everything they could possibly do to me–I don’t just go through a litany in the book–but now they’re going to kill my rabbit and feed it to me?” she asked laughing and swearing. “My girlfriend wrote to me from England and said ‘I remember that you were really traumatized by that.’ Her mother was a very repressive figure and she represented that whole world to me so I was going to eat that rabbit. I would not give her the satisfaction of weakness. But truthfully, I didn’t really like the mean rabbit anyway.”
2.
“We were sitting at the bar and James said, ‘oh, I do comics.’ I said, ‘I really like Jack Kirby,’” Van Cook remembered, “and well, that was that.”

“We were talking about Jack Kirby and Vaughn Bode,” Romberger said.

“That was the first conversation we ever had,” Van Cook said.

The book that made their reputation was “7 Miles a Second” which they did in collaboration with their friend, the artist David Wojnarowicz. The book was originally published by Vertigo in 1996, but the two had been collaborating for many years before that. During the 1980’s, they were known for running the art gallery Ground Zero on the Lower East Side, and for their comic strip, also named “Ground Zero.”

“Ground Zero began as a semi-autobiographical, science fiction serial strip made with the specific intention of subverting and exposing as many tropes of comics as possible while still telling a story,” Van Cook said. “It is self-reflexive and irreverent. The characters often leave the frame and move around the page. We wanted the comic process to be a two-way street, where the reader has as much work to do as us the artists. My character, The Unit, gave us the chance to create a strong female character at a time when there were for the most part only vacuous depictions of women in comics.”

“We will eventually finish and collect it–it will make quite an interesting package, because so many of the strips were drawn to be printed in so many different formats: newsprint tabloids, small and large-format black and white alternative and literary zines, slick color magazines,” James said.

“We were so underground on our first thing that we did together–we decided that we wanted to be really deconstructive about it, so we decided it wouldn’t appear in a magazine consecutively,” Van Cook said.

“Before I met Marguerite I’d done a few things for Marvel, for Epic. Then I started working for ‘World War 3 Illustrated,’ which is much more alternative. I really wasn’t looking to be a commercial comics artist. I started ‘7 Miles a Second’ with David in 1986. It took me like ten years to finish that book.

“‘7 Miles a Second’ went through a bunch of rejections,” Romberger said. “I gave a dummy of it to [the late Vertigo editor] Lou Stathis and it kicked around the offices there. They said there’s no way in hell they were going to print this thing. After David died and we finished the book, we had a show of the originals at PPOW gallery. The people at Exit Art were friends with Jeanette Kahn who was the head of DC and they sent her over there. She said ‘this is awesome,’ went to Karen Berger and said, ‘do this book.’ Then we did a few other things for Vertigo. Axel Alonso was our editor there, but he left and went to Marvel.

“After that, we went through proposal hell up at Vertigo for five or six years,” Romberger said. “We put together a bunch of concepts and I, and we, did samples for all these books and nothing. None of it got published.”

“We did so much unseen stuff for them, it’s ridiculous,” Van Cook said.

“We also did a little fanzine called ‘Comic Art Forum.’ We did three issues. It was a really small scale thing but it was a nice thing. I interviewed Gene Colan. We did an article about Kirby and the CIA use of that Lord of Light proposal. I met Jim Steranko. I’d always liked his work since I was a kid. I still have this interview with him, it’s still unpublished, we went through every single thing he did. We got along really well and at a certain point he goes, ‘why haven’t I heard anything about you? I don’t understand why I don’t know your name.’ He said, ‘what you have to do is go in and do some mainstream work and be an artist-warrior and get your name out there.’ I was leaving the MoCCA convention around 2004 or so and I ran into Karen Berger, the head of Vertigo. She said, ‘oh, what are you doing?’ I said I just got accepted at Columbia University. She said, ‘you’ve got to give me a call, I might have work for you.’ Of course! Because if you’re busy as hell, let’s give you more to do.

“Next thing you know I’m drawing ‘The Bronx Kill’ which isn’t something I’d normally want to do. I’m the guy who drew cops beating the hell out of everybody in ‘World War 3!’ They figured out this to torture me? Then they sent me this script for ‘Aaron and Ahmed’ and I was like, I’ll do that. I did those two books but I was unhappy with the result. I was like, that’s it. No more corporate comics.

“I did a thing for the last issue of ‘Mome’ because I finally sent some stuff to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics. Then I sent him ‘7 Miles a Second’ and I said, maybe you guys would be interested in this? Apparently they’d never seen it. I always wondered why they never reviewed it. It was because nobody ever sent it to them. I did ‘Post York’ for Tom [Kaczynski’s Uncivilized Books]. He was interested to see it and this is how it came out. Now it’s like this downgrade. I mean Fantagraphics is great, but recently I did a comic for the ‘Study Group Magazine’ and then a minicomic. We’re reverse engineering our careers down to working for free,” Romberger laughed. “But I’m much happier because this stuff is coming out the way I want it. I’m working with people I like. I’m in the zone. I think this part of comics is much more vital, much more energized and much better work is coming out, because the companies with those corporate character/properties, it’s almost impossible to do anything of value in their formats. Image is also slick and commercial but they’re creator owned. That’s the difference. There are books there I like quite a lot.

“I think comics is a vital industry right now, but a lot of people aren’t getting paid. The readership is pretty small but they’re faithful. A lot of times the readership is your fellow artists. It’s a strange scene to be in, but it’s also the last bastion of book publishing in a sense. These books that are coming out are some of the most beautiful books ever made.”

“Back when we started, we had to go and pay somebody five dollars to typeset on a computer,” Van Cook said. “We did hand-cut color separations for some of our comics. It was a lot of work. Now people can do what they want digitally and it looks exactly how you want. I can’t imagine trying to get the production values we have on this book then. You couldn’t have what you wanted, so you would go make it yourself. So now finally we can have the work how we want it.

“There’s an impulse James and I have shared over the years of making art that is transient,” Van Cook said. “We’ll put in on the street, we’ll make it on newsprint so it’s not going to survive past its moment.”

“We did it deliberately,” Romberger said. “We kinda screwed ourselves doing it though. It made sure to limit our audience. It was a punk aesthetic. Forget posterity. We’re in this moment and that’s what you’re doing it for.”

“The idea of a daily comic was one of the starting points that we came from,” Van Cook said. “It comes out and is gone. It isn’t held in this weird reverential place. It was a radical thing that we’re not ready to give up, though certainly we love this book.”
3.
“I’ve been on the record ragging about the current treatment of writers as opposed to artists in collaboration,” Romberger said. A noted critic, Romberger is one of many people who have been critical of the contemporary tendency to look at comics through the lens of writers or with a literary eye that considers the art and the artist to be a secondary or incidental concern.

“A lot of times in alternative comics it’s about the auteur and I tend to think that it’s an extraordinary combination for someone to be able to write and draw well. It’s hard and it’s very time consuming. I think having writers work with artists expands the possibilities of content and so there are possibilities of interesting collaborations,” Romberger said. “People from outside must think cartoonists are all narcissistic. What are you going to do? You have to do what you know well. You know yourself with any luck–or at least that gives you something to work with. Unless you’re somebody like Joe Sacco doing actual journalism or somebody who’s actually going out and referencing this stuff so exactingly, because you have to impart this believability to the reader or it’s not going to resonate with them.”

“Going back to the point about collaboration and auteurs, I think it’s too much,” Van Cook said. “It’s too much to do everything and why would you? Because then you wind up with a book that’s about being in a coffeeshop as opposed to a book that’s about traveling the world, jumping out of airplanes, whatever else is interesting.”

“But whoever draws the book would have to know what the airplane is like, what’s the landscape from above look like,” Romberger said.

“Only one of us is jumping out of the airplane,” Van Cook said.

“You jumped out of the airplane, but I have to go and redo the damn jump in order to know how to draw it,” Romberger said. “It’s a very tangible thing. You have to know what it’s like.”

“It’s an interesting thing to work with somebody else and having the ego thing going on,” Van Cook said. “Kudos to him. He lets me go crazy on top of his inks.”

The two have a habit of bantering back and forth in the way that couples who have long been comfortable with each other often do. This back and forth also represents the way that they worked on this book, with Van Cook writing it, Romberger adapting and drawing it, and Van Cook coloring his inked pages.

“There were places where you went, ‘you got that wrong’ and I was resistant,” Romberger said. At the beginning of the France chapter in Paris, you were like ‘no, this is wrong.’ I fought because I’d already pencilled it and our time frame was really tight but she was right. It was a lot better. I went back and redid the pencils, but it was painful to redo because I liked those compositions.”

“I did those potboilers for DC, but I found that very frustrating. Even if it seemed like a good idea in proposal form, by the time it went through their editorial process with so many people weighing in, I lost control. I don’t particularly like digital coloring. I want my hand on the thing. It’s an illuminated document. This book here is perfect. It’s exactly the way we wanted it. With Fantagraphics we can get exactly what we want. They’re very attentive to what your needs and wants are. These other guys are paying you a page rate, which is great, but you have no control. I couldn’t say, I want to color the book myself. I had to audition for my own book and have someone say, ‘you’re not suitable.’ To me instead of getting the page rate I’d rather have something I’m proud of.”

Romberger has had a busy few years, and it’s clear that he sees his work from the past few years as the best of his career. He drew a comic for the final issue of “Mome” which Romberger also colored. He wrote and drew “Post York” which was published by Uncivilized Books. Fantagraphics released a new larger edition of “7 Miles a Second” in hardcover with Van Cook’s original colors. Last year Oily Comics released “Daddy” a short comic Romberger made with Josh Simmons (“The Furry Trap”) and the recent volume “World War 3 Illustrated: 1979-2014,” which collected some of the major highlights of the magazine’s 35 year run, includes Romberger’s early story “Jesus in Hell” which appears in full color for the first time.

Romberger mentioned that his current project is another “Post York” volume, a collection of “Ground Zero” and he hopes to draw another book with Van Cook, this time about her years as a punk. Van Cook made it clear that she wants to tell those stories of her youth, but this book is as much about her mother as it her, and she wanted to create a book that would in part serve as a tribute to her.

“My mother was a printer during the war. She won prizes for casting on hot metal type. Getting the letters on in speed for setting up newspapers. My mother won awards for that, which is this big union job, but after the war the guys came back and she was out of job. I have a deep respect for printing and media and newsprint,” Van Cook said with a smile. “It’s in the family, if you will.”