Welcoming Matt Bell

“I am very rarely sexy or funny in my writing,” Matt Bell says, but his students seem to disagree. His student Maria Alverez introduced him by saying she had never laughed so hard while trying to interpret Gertrude Stein or discussing the complexities of The Sound and the Fury. Even though this is Matt’s first semester teaching here at Arizona State, it was apparent that he is already well loved by his colleagues and students. As Maria said, “In Matt’s class, we do not only read, we experience literature.”

Luckily, all of us at the reading last night had the same opportunity: we were able to experience Matt Bell’s words through his, very literal and real, voice as he read sections from his forthcoming fourth novel Scrapper, out Fall 2015 on Soho Press. I had a visceral reaction to his reading, feeling a sinking in my stomach as he described the process of force-feeding from the perspective of the one being fed or a heightened heartbeat as he described a harrowing fight in the dark of an abandoned school.

 We sat down with Matt to discuss his approach to writing, to education and how he’s been influenced by both his teachers and students:

How do the creative processes of teaching and writing interplay with each other in your experience? 

One thing that happens when you start teaching writing is that you really have to investigate your own process a little closer, in an attempt to find out what's teachable about it: What aspects of your own experience of a writer can be offered to your students? I think that self-reflection can be very valuable, and can be a way of not letting yourself get away with things, if you take it seriously. I also think that I very frequently find the solution in something I'm working on in the stories or books I'm teaching for class: The close attention to a text necessary to teach it almost always pays off in my writing, one way or another. And of course there's something energizing about being in a room with ten or twenty smart writers for a couple hours each week.

Who has been the teacher who has influenced you the most, either as a writer or as an educator? 

I've had a lot of good teachers, but one of the best was Michael Czyzniejewski, who was my MFA thesis advisor at Bowling Green State University. He gave me an incredible amount of his time, reading untold pages of my fiction for me, and in addition to the kind of smart and generous advice he gave me on those stories, he also helped teach me how to conduct myself as a writer, as an editor, and as a member of the literary community. I really felt like he was helping to bring me into the profession, and I feel very lucky to have him as a friend and a mentor.

On the flip side of the last question, has there been a student who has made a significant impact on your perspective? 

Maybe not in exactly the same way, but there are certainly students whose talent and drive make a serious impression on me. I've been lucky to have students at both the undergrad and the grad level who are serious writers, whose dedication to reading well and to the craft of writing inspires not just their classmates but me as well. It's also a good reminder that there are students coming through writing programs right now that are working harder and faster than many of the older writers I know, and if you want to keep up with the next generation coming up, you have to keep constantly moving forward.

If you could only teach your students one thing, what would it be and why? 

I'm proud of a number of things I teach, but one of the most important is how to read like a writer. Most of the training we get in literature classes isn't craft-based, and for most students that's the only formal reading training they've had. I'm constantly trying to teach students to ask two questions: First, what is it about the story that moved me intellectually, emotionally or morally? Second, how did the writer create that effect and how might I take that technique into my own work? Once you get in the habit of reading this way, the mechanics of books start to open up for you, and you're able to learn new techniques much more quickly than before. It can be hard to get under the hood of a story you love, but this is one way to get there.

We’re so excited for Matt to be teaching here at Arizona State, and even more excited to announce he is the new Faculty Advisor for Hayden’s Ferry Review.

- Philip LaMaster

ASU to host literary 'counterfeiter' in reading series Nov. 13!

Article/interview by Jake Adler

The writer Michael Martone is perhaps best recognized for his book titled … well: Michael Martone.

Not quite the same as a musical artist’s self-titled first album, this writer’s eighth book of fiction is comprised of a series of surreal and absurd contributor’s notes – false, mini-biographies.

“Rather than telling stories, I’m more interested in discovering how different kinds of prose can be fictive,” said Martone.

Martone will read selections from his work at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 13, in the Memorial Union room 202 on ASU’s Tempe campus. The reading is free of charge and open to the public. It is part of the Department of English’s MFA Reading Series, hosted by English’s creative writing program and co-sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, all units in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.

Martone's most recent books are Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. His stories and essays have appeared and been cited in the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Stories and The Best American Essays anthologies.

Martone has a talent for recontextualizing established forms and smashing them wide open, as seen in one of his earlier books, The Blue Guide to Indiana, a brilliantly disguised faux travel guide, which, to this day, finds its home on book store shelves in the travel section. “I’m more of a counterfeiter than a storyteller,” said Martone.

The author is bent on acting as a literary trickster, continually questioning conventional forms and blurring the boundaries between genres to shake up his audiences. “My job as an artist is to confuse categories,” said Martone, “to open states of wonder, surprise and bafflement for the reader. [We] don’t make something new out of nothing – [we] take things we already know and rearrange them to create a new perspective.”

Currently, Martone is working on several projects, one of which is titled Winesburg, Indiana, described by the author as a “hybrid of an anthology and a parody of the memoir.” Martone is branching out into science fiction as well, with another work set in Indiana, called Amish in Space. The author is also chipping away at two additional creative nonfiction projects: The Complete Writings of Art Smith: The Bird Boy of Indiana, Edited by Michael Martone, a work centering around the authentic pioneer of sky-writing, and Philo in Fort Wayne, which illustrates the bizarre career of the inventor of television, Philo T. Farnsworth. “I’ve never written a novel,” commented Martone, “but I have done books.”

Martone’s wry sense of humor and prolific prose characterize his trickster persona and aid him in reconfiguring conventional forms to continually offer readers something they’ve never seen before. He could be described as a sort of wizard of literature, but Martone says that it’s the up-and-coming generation of writers who really have the potential to change the game.

“[My generation] saw the computer as just a souped-up typewriter, but today’s students recognize its true potential and are chomping at the bit to see what it can really do,” said Martone. “In about 1980, students in universities were taught to write stories with narrative realism, modeled after authors like Hemingway. They were told, ‘This is the type of story all writers ought to be able to write,’ but recently I’ve noticed a change: students are saying, ‘No, no, no, it’s all up for grabs,’ and they’re figuring out how to use the computer artistically after 20 or 30 years of suppression.”

Martone is keenly aware of the way in which the industry of literature is changing in the 21st century, noting that in his fiction workshop courses at the University of Alabama, he instructs his students to compose using their iPhones, to begin thinking differently as a new generation of writers. “Reader, editor, writer and publisher all used to be static positions, but not anymore,” said Martone. “More and more, people are doing it all.” The boundaries of the literary world are starting to overlap in the same way Martone is working to blur the lines of genre in his own work.

“You never hear poets saying, ‘This is a fictional poem or a nonfictional poem,’” Martone said. “They’re all just poems. Literary criticism is only about sorting and division – it’s our duty as artists to attack that tendency; to mess things up.”

For more information about the MFA Reading Series, please visit: http://english.clas.asu.edu/mfareadingseries

Interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1970) is known as a poet and essayist,and as a critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. From 1986 until 2012, DuPlessis has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments from Wesleyan University Press and Salt Publishing. The newest book, Surge: Drafts 96-114 (Salt 2013), brings this 26-year long poem to a temporary fold. Another key critical book by DuPlessis is Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. DuPlessis was a Distinguished Visitor in the English Department at the University of Auckland, has held an appointment to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and was awarded a residency for poetry at Bellagio, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Our poetry editor Dorothy Chan talked with Rachel about her newest collection of poetry.

On October 23, DuPlessis will be reading for the MFA Reading Series on the Tempe campus of Arizona State University from 12-1 p.m. in SS109 and giving a lecture titled “Manifesting Literary Feminisms: A Conversation with Rachel Blau DuPlessis” at 4:30 p.m. in SS109.

Cynthia Hogue is hosting a masters class on DuPlessis on October 16. If you are interested, email Cynthia at Cynthia.Hogue@asu.edu.

Dorothy Chan: Surge: Drafts 96-114 is an interesting collection of poems. The poems are numbered and deemed as “drafts,” but a debate seems to exist: do you view this a grouping of 96-114 poems/drafts that becomes one collection yet still serve as individual poems or is it simply a long poem with 96-114 sections?

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Surge is a book that joins several other books of my work into one long poem with 114/115 poems in it. An individual book is a unit (meaning, a grouping with a specific basis), but it is not a “long poem” all by itself. It is a collection of poems called Surge. The long poem called Drafts is something I have written over the past 26 years, with each book being part of that project. Drafts goes from poem 1 to poem 114, and there is one extra, an unnumbered poem that makes the total of poems be 115. Surge is the last book of that long poem under the title Drafts. (Obviously, the title has meaning. I talk about that meaning in the Preface to Surge and elsewhere). My ideal would have been to have groups of 19 poems in each book. Things didnt’t turn out that way for a variety of reasons, but it did work out pretty much. Books belonging to this project are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001); DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004); Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007); Pitch: Drafts 77-95 (Salt Publishing, 2010). The Collage Poems of Drafts appeared early in 2011 from Salt Publishing, containing only the two poems that needed to be in color as visual texts. Surge: Drafts 96-114, was published by Salt in 2013.

As I have said many times, each poem of the whole project can be read individually as a separate work. Poems can also be read in any order. But they are joined together by all being “drafts.”

Citing from the Preface to Surge:

“The work can be read numerically, in the order of writing, or even chronologically in order of writing (these two not always exactly the same). But that order is not emphasized as contributing to structure or findings. The work as a whole is not a sequence but a modular series. It is an anti-patriarchal maze with many threads. One can begin anywhere and read in any desired direction.”

How are they joined? They are organized on a periodicity of 19. This number is an interesting number—it is a prime number, for instance, and there are other associations. But I did not know any of this when I began to do the books as 19 poems. This happened by chance. The mechanism of folding allowed me to “layer” the poems in relation to each other. This is a version of Stein’s “beginning again.” To cite once more from the Preface to Surge:

“Between Draft 19 and Draft 20, about seven years into the project, it occurred to me that I did not have to go endlessly one to one to one, like one of those spool-yarn projects that children sometimes take on—leaving them with a long strand of knitted length and the question what to do with it. Instead, I could begin again. Thus I decided to repeat some version of these themes and materials in the same general order every nineteen poems, folding one group over another, making new works but works evoking motifs and themes in the former one—and also, of course, generating new images, materials and themes as I went. The realization that I could make a recurrent but free structure via a fold happened in a sudden flash (like most of my structural insights), and the thought delivered a fantastic if then unsorted set of formal and intellectual implications all at once, like an avalanche of scree rushing down a mountain. 

The interplay between sameness and difference constructs a profound structure of feeling about memory and loss, about recurrence and the unique instance, about fresh experience and iterated insistence, and also about changing relationships over time and to time. That is, by beginning again, by constructing a fold or crease or pleat across the work, I was making all the poems arranged vertically in a column somehow touch other parallel poems.”

DC: How do you view your work’s relationship to lyric poetry?

RBD: Lyric poetry is often short. My poems are not short. However, some have short sections that make up one serial work.

Lyric poetry is sometimes narrative. My poems incorporate narrative moments without being narrative work.

Lyric poetry is often based on imagery. My poetry works with imagery—how could it not? It also works with other ways of describing things.

Lyric poetry is aphoristic and succinct (sometimes); sometimes my poetry is aphoristic and succinct.

Lyric poetry is said to be musical. My poetry is musical.

Lyric poetry is filled with feelings. My poetry is filled with feelings.

So I would say that I envelop and surround lyric poetry with something larger.

If your question involves genre—there are many kinds of poetry that are not “lyric,” even if “lyric” is (as so often) being used as a synonym for poetry and poems in general. There are odes, elegies, haibun, haiku, satire, doggerel, cento, renga, dialogues, proverbs, ballad, epistle, etc.

In Drafts, I am very interested in the genres (plural) of poetry, and use a number of the ones I just listed.

DC: You have mentioned in interviews that you reflect a lot on the female poet’s role in writing. You have also mentioned the feminist perspective/struggle in other works. On a first read, Surge: Drafts 96-114 doesnt’t seem to show this agenda, but on a second read, this female perspective seems to be cleverly hidden. Would you agree with this? How do you maintain this balance in writing?

RBD: I don’t write intentionally or narrowly focused feminist poetry to argue a point or to announce a position. I have taught work from “the women’s poetry movement,” as Alicia Ostriker accurately calls it, but that’s not quite where I am with my poetry. I am a feminist, interested in gender analyses of culture, and I write poems. So my poems are work written by me—and that “me” is a lot of social and political things (“identities”) all mixed up together, including gender information, gender feelings (sometimes passionate ones) and observations.

I have a negative reaction to the words “cleverly hidden”—which is not your fault—you are just trying to figure something out. One of the key elements in my poetics derives from objectivist thinking (I mean Oppen, Williams, etc.). The applicable ethos is “sincerity.” Thus I am not trying to conceal or to trick with my poetry.

It seems reasonable to me that since I am a woman writer, I would try to understand the dimension of that subject position historically (through literary history) and now.

DC: How do you view Surge: Drafts 96-114 relationship to contemporary critical theory? Can poetry be reduced to theory in any way?

RBD: The easy answer to this is no. Poetry cannot be reduced to theory. Poetry and poetics (a kind of theorizing) are in a dialogic relationship in general and in specific poets’ works.

ASU MFA Fall Reading Series!

The MFA Reading Series at Arizona State University is about to begin! Check out the schedule below. If you are in the Tempe/Phoenix area, join us this fall to hear these amazing writers read their work, starting this Thursday!

Pamela Uschuk, poet, political activist
William Pitt Root, former poet laureate of Tucson.
     Thursday, Sep. 5, 2013     |     7:30 p.m. Memorial Union Pima Auditorium (MU 230)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, essayist
     Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013    |     12–1 p.m.* Social Sciences Building Room 109 (SS 109)

Michael Martone, fiction/nonfiction writer
     Thursday, Nov. 14, 2013     |     7:30 p.m. Memorial Union Alumni Lounge (MU 202)

The MFA Reading Series, presented by the Creative Writing Program in the ASU Department of English, brings notable writers to the ASU community for readings and discussions about writing and their literary works. All readings are free of charge, open to the public, and take place on the Arizona State University campus in Tempe. Past readers include Ian McEwan, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Richard Garcia, and Jennifer Spiegel. The series is co-sponsored by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.

*In addition to the MFA Reading event, on Oct. 23 Blau DuPlessis will give a lecture at 4:30 p.m. in Social Sciences (SS) room 109. The lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Social Transformation, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Office of the Associate Dean of Faculty.

For more information:
Corey.Campbell@asu.edu
480-965-3528
http://english.clas.asu.edu/mfareadingseries

The Department of English, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, the School of Social Transformation, and the Institute for Humanities Research are units of ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.