Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Empire Wasted
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://beccaklaver.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://beccaklaver.com/bio * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/becca-klaver
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.:
no2011018502
LCCN Permalink:
https://lccn.loc.gov/no2011018502
HEADING:
Klaver, Becca
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1_ |a Klaver, Becca
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__ |a La Liminal, 2010: |b t.p. (Becca Klaver)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Southern California, B.A.; Columbia College Chicago, M.F.A.; Rutgers University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, educator, and publisher. Switchback Books, Chicago, IL, cofounder, 2006—; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, instructor; Bowling Green State University, OH, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Writer, 2017. Has taught at middle schools; has served as an elementary school poet-in-residence. Cohost of the Real Housewives of Bohemia podcast.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poems to publications, including American Poetry Review, Jubilat, Eleven Eleven, GlitterMOB, Sink Review, Court Green, and Fence. Contributor of essays, reviews, and articles to publications, including Spoon River Poetry Review, College Literature, Sink Review, Open Letters Monthly, Denver Quarterly, and CutBank. Contributor of poems to anthologies, including The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing. Coeditor of Electric Gurlesque, 2017.
SIDELIGHTS
Becca Klaver is a poet, educator, and publisher. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, an M.F.A. from Columbia College Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. Klaver is the cofounder of Switchback Books, a publishing house based in Chicago, IL. She has taught at middle schools and at Rutgers University. In 2017, Klaver served as the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Writer at Bowling Green State University. She has also been a poet-in-residence at an elementary school. Klaver and Lauren Besser are the cohosts of a podcast called The Real Housewives of Bohemia. She has contributed poems, reviews, essays, and articles to publications, including American Poetry Review, Jubilat, Eleven Eleven, GlitterMOB, Sink Review, Court Green, Fence, Spoon River Poetry Review, College Literature, Open Letters Monthly, Denver Quarterly, and CutBank. Klaver has also released the chapbooks, Inside a Red Corvette, Seer/Sucka, Nonstop Pop, Merrily, Merrily, and Girl Talk Triptych. In an interview with Eva Heisler, writer on the Cold Front website, Klaver explained how she came to choose poetry. She stated: “In college, in LA, I realized that poetry was the form that could accommodate experience in a way that didn’t require oversimplification, or a search for higher truths and master narratives. When I was young I wanted everything to make sense, and that demanded autobiographical prose narrative writing; when I got a little older, I abandoned adages like ‘everything happens for a reason’ and allowed myself to accept the unpredictable and the illogical. That new worldview required a form, and that form was poetry.”
LA Liminal
In 2010, Klaver released her first poetry collection, LA Liminal. In an interview with Elizabeth Hildreth, contributor to the Bookslut website, Klaver stated: “First, the book takes LA as a symbol of a lot of things: of paradise; of (manifest) destiny on a national and individual level; of hyperreality, postmodern reality, or something other than reality (my movie pun on this is reel/real); and, of course, of liminality. I could give you a top-ten list of LA’s liminal qualities, but this paradox pretty much sums it up: people go there to follow their dreams, but it’s also a place at risk of sliding into the sea. When you live there, you feel that tension.” Klaver added: “LA Liminal is also a book about being young and homesick and losing trust in master narratives and trying to make sense of your own gloominess in a place where the sun’s always shining.”
In the same interview with Heisler, writer on the Cold Front website, Klaver discussed the book’s structure. Referring to the title poem, Klaver suggested: “‘Los Angeles Liminal’ arrives at the end of the first section of the book, a section of ‘myths,’ because it’s both the beginning and the end: it’s the end of self-mythologizing and the launch pad for what comes next. The following two sections try to explore other ways of organizing experience. The second section of ‘dream-scripts’ tries to mash dream logic with film logic, logics that rely heavily on sequences of images.” Klaver continued: “And then, the final section of ‘poems’ is the inevitable place to land in my first book of poems, I guess! It’s not as if I’m saying that the earlier sections aren’t poems, but they aren’t poems in the same way the ones in the final section are. The poems in the final section are the ones that I feel trust the alternative logics and narratives of poetry; they’re the poems that no longer require the neat closure of story.”
Empire Wasted
Klaver released Empire Wasted in 2016. In this volume, she focuses on New York City, though other locations do appeal, as well. She describes the juxtaposition of the smells of street food with the sights of designer clothing boutiques. Klaver, who is based in Brooklyn, also makes general descriptions of striving New Yorkers. In one poem, she uses a sarcastic tone to discuss the lives of privileged millennial. Klaver includes discussions of recent world events, including the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and the derailment of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia. She criticizes the jaded media’s responses to human tragedy.
A Publishers Weekly critic commented: “Attuned to and critical of pop culture spectacle, Klaver charms and skewers with a sense of audience-conscious magnanimity.” Gina Myers, reviewer on the Hyperallergic website, suggested: “Becca Klaver‘s second full-length collection of poetry, Empire Wasted (a pun on empire waist dresses) taps into the current zeitgeist, capturing the mood of a lost generation of thirty-somethings as they drift through the American landscape guided by an anchorless yearning for something they’ve never experienced, for something that has yet to be invented.” Myers added: “Her voice has a greater maturity in Empire Wasted, a greater sense of the knowledge gained from life experience. And while there is still a sense of directionless and longing, there’s also a commitment to the present.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, November 21, 2016, review of Empire Wasted, p. 87.
ONLINE
American Poetry Review Online, http://aprweb.org/ (August 28, 2017), author profile.
Becca Klaver Website, http://beccaklaver.com/ (August 28, 2017).
Bloof Books Website, http://news.bloofbooks.com/ (August 28, 2017), synopsis of Empire Wasted.
Bookslut, http://www.bookslut.com/ (July, 2011), Elizabeth Hildreth, author interview with Brandi Homan.
Cold Front, http://coldfrontmag.com/ (February 4, 2013), Eva Heisler, author interview.
Hyperallergic, https://hyperallergic.com (December 3, 2016), Gina Myers, review of Empire Wasted.
Large-Hearted Boy, http://www.largeheartedboy.com/ (January 27, 2011), author interview.
Poetry Foundation Website, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ (August 28, 2017), author profile.
Poets.org, https://www.poets.org/ (August 28, 2017), author profile.*
becca klaver
BECCA KLAVER
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and several chapbooks, including Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, 2013).
Work by Becca Klaver
"EVERYTHING'S BEEN RECRUITED"
VOLUME 45 ISSUE 02 / MARCH / APRIL 2016
Becca Klaver
Bio Books Poetry Prose Projects Readings
Bio
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, forthcoming 2016) as well as several chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in APR, Fence, jubilat, and The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she attended the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD). Her dissertation, “Include Everything: Contemporary American Poetry and the Feminist Everyday,” investigates how women poets across post-1945 U.S. poetry movements—Diane di Prima, Sonia Sanchez, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley—shared an investment in creating new poetic forms and processes rooted in, and sometimes resisting, the gendered conditions of everyday life. With Hanna Andrews and Brandi Homan, Becca co-founded the feminist poetry press Switchback Books in Chicago in 2006, and she is currently co-editing, with Arielle Greenberg, the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2016). She has taught as an AmeriCorps*VISTA worker, middle school teacher, elementary school poet-in-residence, academic staff member at an arts and media college, and lecturer at a large state university. Currently, she teaches multimedia writing to doctoral social work students at Rutgers. In Spring 2017, she will be the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University.
Contact: beccavista at yahoo dot com
===books===
Becca Klaver
Bio Books Poetry Prose Projects Readings
Books
Poetry Collections
Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016)
LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010)
Chapbooks
Girl Talk Triptych (coauthor; dancing girl press, 2016)
Merrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, 2013)
Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, 2013)
Seer / Sucka (coauthor; Dusie Press, 2011)
Inside a Red Corvette (greying ghost press, 2009)
Reviews, Interviews, and Essays
Gina Myers on Empire Wasted in Hyperallergic
Publishers Weekly review of Empire Wasted
Rosebud Ben-Oni on Empire Wasted in The Kenyon Review
Amanda Montei on Nonstop Pop in HTMLGIANT
Stephen Burt on LA Liminal in Michigan Quarterly Review
Lauren Eggert-Crowe on LA Liminal at The Rumpus
Gina Myers on LA Liminal at NewPages
Elizabeth Hildreth interview (with Brandi Homan) at Bookslut
Eva Heisler interview at Coldfront (featured on Harriet)
Nina Puro-curated roundtable (with Marisa Crawford, Krystal Languell, Monica McClure, Jennifer Tamayo) at Cosmonauts Avenue
“On Gender and Publishing”: VIDA online panel moderated by Carmen Giménez Smith (with Tracy Bowling, Jane Ciabratti, Danielle Dutton, Elizabeth McCracken, Don Share, Stephanie G’Schwind, and Maria Melendez)
===poems===
Poetry
Recent poems appear in:
The American Poetry Review
Fence
Eleven Eleven
glitterMOB
Academy of American Poets
Sink Review
jubilat
Court Green
===prose===
Prose
Articles and Review Essays
“Bridging the Distance: Documentation and Disappearance in Performatic Poetry.” Review Essay of intermedia books by Anne Carson, Kaia Sand, and Cecilia Vicuña. Spoon River Poetry Review 37.1 (Spring 2012): 95-121.
“Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Suicide, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence.” Co-author with Arielle Greenberg. College Literature 36.4 (Fall 2009): 179-207. Reprinted in Critical Insights: The Bell Jar. Ed. Janet McCann. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2012.
Reviews, Essays, and Critical Introductions
“‘That Exact Register of Annoyance or Non-Annoyance or Whatever’: Alice Notley’s Feminist Tones.” The “Alette in Oakland” Reader. Eds. David Brazil, Brandon Brown, Frances Richard, Alana Siegel, and Laura Woltag. Oakland, CA: Hearts Desire Press, 2016.
“Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, edited by Tony Trigilio.” Sink Review 14. Spring 2015.
“Hello Selfie NYC and the Sad Girl Sobject.” Review of Kate Durbin performance. Poetry Project Newsletter no. 241. Winter 2015.
“On Jennifer Tamayo.” Critical introduction. Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. Eds. Carmen Gimenez Smith and John Chavez. Counterpath Press, 2014.
“Jennifer L. Knox Is Still So Funny It’s Sad.” Review of Jennifer L. Knox’s The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway. CutBank. April 2013.
“Anchoring, Hankering, & Signifyin(g): Punning, Parataxis, & Syncretism in the Poetry of Harryette Mullen.” New Jersey College English Association. College English Notes 2014.
“The Femme Outré & Other Real Fakers: Going Gaga for Artifice and Femininity in the 21st Century.” Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art about Lady Gaga. December 2010.
“Blowing Up the Law: On Foxfire, vigilante feminism, & abandoned buildings of their own.” Delirious Hem. January 2013.
“‘Deaths Elsewhere in Arts & Entertainment’: Adrienne Rich Is Gone and We Are Not Somewhere Else But Here.” VIDA: Women in Literary Arts website. April 2012.
“Signs of the Real.” Review of Gina Myers’ A Model Year. Open Letters Monthly. October 2011.
“‘Always Trying To Get To You’: Alice Notley’s Feminist Disobedience.” Bone Bouquet 2.2. Summer 2011.
“Darker Than a Country Song: On Kim Gek Lin Short’s Run.” Denver Quarterly. Spring 2011.
Review of Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini. H_NGM_N. Fall 2009.
Review of Daniela Olszewska’s The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe. H_NGM_N. Summer 2009. •
Review of art exhibit LADYLIKE: A Proper Take on Feminist Art. Proximity magazine no. 2. Fall 2008. •
Review of Brenda Coultas’s The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations. Tarpaulin Sky. June 2008.
Review of Kate Greenstreet’s case sensitive. GutCult. Fall 2007.
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===home===
Becca Klaver
Bio Books Poetry Prose Projects Readings
16 Jun
Empire Wasted reviewed at SCOUT
Thanks to SCOUT, one of my favorite review sites, for this review of Empire Wasted!
“renews the New York School with a contemporary slant”
“a commitment to continue the riot of poetry, which still thrives despite the wasting“
3 May
two bits of prose + postcards for poetry month
Thanks to Evie Shockley for asking me to contribute to her “Power of|and|in Poetry” forum at The Volta (here’s my piece: “Poetry, Power, and Social Media”)
& to Rosebud Ben-Oni for asking me to write about one of my editors at The Kenyon Review blog (spoiler alert: I chose Shanna Compton).
I drafted poems all month by sending postcards to my friends, which you can read on the Bloof blog.
9 Mar 3 notes
The Allies Prepare Politely
tapppoetry:
by Becca Klaver
All the men go a day without women
All the men pick up a Chore Boy® to scrub the pans
All the men wash and rinse and dry and know cycles
All the men notice subtle cues
All the men ask follow-up questions with curiosity
All the men smize while handing us a glass
All the men knew to buy a peachy rosé
All the men nod their heads knowingly
All the men feel u
All the men apologize when they walk in our paths
All the men keep their knees togetherish on the train
All the men admit their salaries
All the men sit with their softness
All the men take back what was taken from them
All the men breathe before cursing
All the men walk away before throwing things
All the men point to faces with feelings on laminated sheets
All the men open up to all the other men
All the men take the time to wonder about privilege
All the men do all these things without ever mentioning them at all
All the men head to bed with the humble glow of care
Check out TAPP, a flash anthology I edited in response to some unpresidential tweets.
13 Jan
#NowPlaying The 2016 Mix by Bex by Becca Klaver
(Source: Spotify)
6 Jan
Empire Wasted Reviewed in Hyperallergic
Check out Gina Myers’s review of Empire Wasted in Hyperallergic!
The state of America seems to lie at the center of this book, which was written before the 2016 Presidential election, but foresaw what was to come, as if Klaver consulted a Magic 8-Ball and received the message, “Outlook not so good.” “Decade Zero,” a lengthy poem in the center of the collection, serves almost as a “Wasteland” for Klaver’s generation. However, unlike T.S. Eliot, Klaver is not condemning those around her. Yet she does capture a particular sense of the time –– a generation stalled and directionless, composed of people who are “underused / underemployed / underimagined.”
25 Nov
Publishers Weekly’s review of Empire Wasted, which you can get from Bloof Books.
Publishers Weekly’s review of Empire Wasted, which you can get from Bloof Books.
1 Nov
I met my book today! Contessa approves.
I met my book today! Contessa approves.
1 Nov 40 notes
bibliomancyoracle:
To learn which side you’re on
you pick someone to follow
through the city streets
then see how far you’ll go.
*
from “EVERYTHING’S BEEN RECRUITED" by BECCA KLAVER
5 Sep
Empire Wasted in the works
3 Jun 2 notes
Bernadette Mayer in Conversation with Jennifer Karmin and Stephanie Anderson
3 Apr 1 note
NaPoWriMo and the 7 x 7
Crash friends’ anniversary
to find him dunking corn chips
in the pond “because the geese
like them that way” and now she’s
gripping the tree trunk as she
hovers over the water.
Congrats on not jumping in.
I made up the 7 x 7 (seven lines, seven syllables per line) for NaPoWriMo this year. There are some other constraints, too, but those might morph as the month goes along.
You can read my 7 x 7s every day in April on the Bloof blog, GirlPoWriMo, and RU NaPoWriMo, where the poetry parties have already begun!
22 Mar
GIRL TALK TRIPTYCH Now Available
image
Our collaborative poetry play, Girl Talk Triptych, is now available from dancing girl press!
Here’s the beginning of my afterword to the chapbook:
The publication of Girl Talk Triptych makes a physical object out of a play that has already had several performative lives. These words were first uttered in conversation during gatherings of (G)IRL, or Girls in Real Life, a writing group of feminist poets that began meeting in New York City in 2010. After a little wine and poetry, a kind of collective personality would seize us, and much wisecracking, confession, taboo-breaking, and goofballery would ensue. Girl talk: the most intimate, weird, outrageous talk there is—so girly and yet breaking all the rules of decorous feminine behavior. Behind the closed doors of each other’s living rooms, we pushed the bounds of propriety and selfhood until we seemed to speak in unison—or, indeed, as if performing a very witty absurdist play.
19 Mar 2 notes
My poem “‘Everything’s Been Recruited’” (whose title is borrowed from Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away) is on the back cover of the March/April 2016 issue of APR.
My poem “‘Everything’s Been Recruited’” (whose title is borrowed from Caryl Churchill’s play Far Away) is on the back cover of the March/April 2016 issue of APR.
9 Feb
My favorite songs of 2015
Better post this now that I’ve already started my 2016 contenders list! Liner notes are up at Coldfront.
24 Aug 1 note
Empire Wasted Coming from Bloof in 2016
I’m really excited to announce that Bloof Books will be publishing my second collection of poetry, Empire Wasted, next year!
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Becca Klaver
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016) and LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), as well as several chapbooks. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she earned a BA from the University of Southern California, an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and a PhD from Rutgers University.
As a scholar, she writes about the feminist poetics of the everyday, or women's writing practices at the intersection of life and art. With Hanna Andrews and Brandi Homan, she cofounded the feminist poetry press Switchback Books; with Arielle Greenberg, she is coeditor of the digital anthology
Electric Gurlesque
(Saturnalia Books, 2017).
Klaver curates salons, workshops, writing groups, and talk series that bring together writers and scholars to discuss poetics, publishing, and gender. She is also cohost, with Lauren Besser, of the podcast The Real Housewives of Bohemia.
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poet
Becca Klaver
Related Schools & Movements:
Contemporary
Becca Klaver was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She received her BA in English, creative writing from the University of Southern California and her MFA in poetry from Columbia College. She is the author of LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the founding editor of the nonprofit feminist press Switchback Books. She is a PhD student in English literature at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
by this poet
poem
Fall Parties
Becca Klaver
2013
I cannot wait for fall parties.
The invitations have begun to roll in.
I used to think I loved summer parties
until they got this year so sweaty and sad,
the whole world away at the shore,
sunk in sweet and salt.
Goodbye, summer:
you were supposed to save us
from spring but everyone just slumped
into you,
first
browse all 1 poems
EMPIRE WASTED by Becca Klaver
Empire Wasted now available!
We are thrilled to bring you this perfect-for-an-election-year-at-the-end-of-the-world new book from one of our favorite poets, Becca Klaver.
"Empire Wasted is an astonishing book, anthemic in its catchiness and the power of its arguments. From the suite of 'Decade Zero,' the years so vacant they don’t even have a name, and the concomitant attraction of the very dreariest productions of the 90s, through to the neo-di Prima fervor of the revolutionary letters, it hits all the right notes." —Kevin Killian
Preorder for $12 + free shipping. That's $7 off. (Reg. $16 + $3 shipping.)
$16 + $3 shipping*
*Domestic shipping for US and Canada only. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.
Plus, the first 50 orders come with a limited-edition postcard set featuring poems and excerpts from the book.
Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, forthcoming 2016), and several chapbooks. She's the cohost of the Real Wives of Bohemia podcast with comedian Lauren Besser, and the curator of a new series of Tiny Talks currently underway at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop. (More.)
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One of the limited-edition postcards
More about EMPIRE WASTED
Think of the empire waist as a dress with a lot of breathing room, in which the body can move within ample space while still remaining hidden. A comparably generous poetics suffuses Becca Klaver’s Empire Wasted, a collection that aims to fashion for the world new space to move inside. Using technology as an instrument to stitch together materials as disparate as tweets and autobiography, this book pays homage to schools it has inherited while thrusting dizzyingly into its own brainy vortex.
Empire Wasted metabolizes the twentieth century into the fashionable neons of a numbing regime. In a fit of collage, the Internet speaks from its most comfortable of media troll outfits, Manhattan gleams in apocalyptic shine and false prophecy, and the 90s deploy a feminist artillery of bell-bottoms, Discmans, and snapping barrettes. As readers, we witness a poetry that shimmies away from its capitalist, patriarchal heirs in favor of a feminist documentary lyric, a poetry that opts to stay in its room all night with Frank O’Hara, Bernadette Mayer, and Reality Bites rather than reenter the party booming below.
Sample poems
"Everything's Been Recruited" at American Poetry Review
From "Decade Zero"at Sink Review
"On the Night Before TV Goes Digital" and "More Lyrics for My Favorite Band" at Eleven Eleven
at 9:44 AM
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Labels: 2016 releases, Becca Klaver, coming soon, Empire Wasted, new releases, Nonstop Pop, preorder
Reactions:
QUOTED: "First, the book takes LA as a symbol of a lot of things: of paradise; of (manifest) destiny on a national and individual level; of hyperreality, postmodern reality, or something other than reality (my movie pun on this is reel/real); and, of course, of liminality. I could give you a top-ten list of LA's liminal qualities, but this paradox pretty much sums it up: people go there to follow their dreams, but it's also a place at risk of sliding into the sea. When you live there, you feel that tension."
"LA Liminal is also a book about being young and homesick and losing trust in master narratives and trying to make sense of your own gloominess in a place where the sun's always shining."
Bookslut
HOMEFEATURESREVIEWSCOLUMNSBLOGCONTACTSTOREABOUTADVERTISE
JULY 2011
ELIZABETH HILDRETH
FEATURES
AN INTERVIEW WITH BRANDI HOMAN AND BECCA KLAVER
In July 2011, Bookslut interviewed Brandi Homan and Becca Klaver, founding editors of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, about their respective poetry collections, Bobcat Country and LA Liminal. Both collections focus on place -- Brandi's on working-class Middle America, and Becca's on Los Angeles.
In this interview, they discuss, among other things, the risk of sliding into the sea, recording crazy shit, growing up and making poems that enact ambivalent feelings, being called "the most successful person to come out of Bobcat Country" on Facebook, level-7 reality, memory theater, the state of Iowa (specifically: as an easy place to put things), and, finally, LA-Milwaukee-Chicago-Brooklyn-New Brunswick amalgamonsters. �
How would you describe your books? For instance, I might describe Brandi's Bobcat Country as an exploration of personal identity and class, using Marshalltown, Iowa as an anchor. I might describe Becca's LA Liminal as an examination of the underbelly of the American Dream, "citizenship," and national identity. But how would you describe them?�
Homan: Wow, first can I say that I had a physical reaction to seeing my hometown called out so clearly as one of the subjects of this book? I mean, yes, you're spot on, Liz, about what the book is and how it functions. But it was startling to see the content so blatantly aligned with Marshalltown by name in writing.�
Other than the title, and the corresponding poem from whence it came, I don't think Marshalltown is mentioned specifically, except in the last poem. Maybe it's because you know me personally, Liz, that you made the connection so clearly. Otherwise, there's a Bobcat Country radio station out of Virginia, and the phrase is used for marketing a university in Texas, another place where Bobcat Country exists. A reader once told me he didn't know for sure where I was from, but he guessed it was the south. I like the idea of "Bobcat Country" being small-town anywhere, I guess. Small-ish town, really, because a population of around 30,000 makes Marshalltown one of the biggest cities in the state.�
And yes, I do think the book works just like you said, Liz, but I think that along with class, you have to include gender. How gender affected my life and the lives of others was extremely important to me when writing this book.�
Klaver: I feel like I have a different answer to this question every time I'm asked, so let's see what happens today. First, the book takes LA as a symbol of a lot of things: of paradise; of (manifest) destiny on a national and individual level; of hyperreality, postmodern reality, or something other than reality (my movie pun on this is reel/real); and, of course, of liminality. I could give you a top-ten list of LA's liminal qualities, but this paradox pretty much sums it up: people go there to follow their dreams, but it's also a place at risk of sliding into the sea. When you live there, you feel that tension.�
LA Liminal is also a book about being young and homesick and losing trust in master narratives and trying to make sense of your own gloominess in a place where the sun's always shining.
Can you explain what motivated both of you to write these?�
Homan: I'm continually fascinated by people from bigger cities or different parts of the country and the world who think that small-town Midwest, or small-town anywhere, is somehow more simplistic, naive, innocent than where they're from. In some ways that's true, but people are the same anywhere, and a lot of crazy shit goes down. I wanted to record some of the crazy shit. �
Also, after moving to Chicago, it was like I had lived and was living two separate lives -- who had I been in Iowa, who was I in Chicago? Are these people the same? What do other people expect from them? What do they expect from themselves? I'm still working on that last one.�
Klaver: Compulsion, I guess. Once I'd graduated from our MFA program, I took apart my thesis and noticed I had enough poems for an LA chapbook. So, that was what it was going to be for a while, but as soon as I put them together in manuscript form, more LA poems kept coming out of me. I also realized that the book was about place and narrative, and the relationship between the two, so I started putting in poems about cities, storytelling, screenplays, or dreams -- poems that didn't hit the "LA poem" category so squarely on the nose. At that point, it had been about four years since I'd left LA, and I'd lived in LA for four years, so I think it was a magic number -- I had to be gone as long as I'd been there in order to see things clearly... or distort and mythologize more effectively. Take your pick!�
Now that you've looked at your own set of perplexities through the frame of poetry, which questions of yours have been answered? �
Homan: Some rather large ones, actually. I looked at my time in Iowa juxtaposed against my time in Chicago, and decided I needed another alternative. For me, this meant packing up and moving to Denver. And I love Denver. Love!�
Klaver: When I lived in LA and went home to the Midwest and told people I lived there, they would often say something along the lines of, "Omigod, do you love it?!" I disliked it so much at the time that I found it really funny to make a face and reply, deadpan petulant, "No, I hate it." Writing LA Liminal vastly complicated my feelings about Los Angeles. I couldn't just get pouty and say I hated LA and write some poems that dissed the place. I had to grow up and make poems that enacted my ambivalent feelings. So, when the manuscript was done, I found myself confronted with an unexpected result: I felt a fondness for LA that I hadn't felt before. We had made something together! And that something was my first book. And I was who I was partially because I had lived there, so how could I hold onto my scorn? I had to let it go. In the end, it was healing, a reckoning -- but I never wrote the poems with that goal in mind. It was like a surprise ending.�
Last fall, I went back to LA for the first time since I'd left -- seven years -- to do a reading at USC, and I was bracing myself to feel really overwhelmed about being there, but instead I just thought, Hey, this is kinda fun. My friends live here!�
You're good friends, you studied together at Columbia, and you're both involved with Switchback. With your close personal and professional relationship, I just assume you have a close artistic one, too. Did you ever share poems with each other when working on these collections? How much were your collections influenced by each other?�
Homan: This is kind of the best question ever. I wrote the texts at Columbia and during the two years immediately following "Me and You and Everyone We Know" came from Arielle Greenberg's class that Bex and I took together. Ian Harris was a peer of ours at Columbia. "Welcome to Bobcat Country" and "A History" were inspired by David Trinidad. Becca's and my shared experiences are all over this book, and some of the text was workshopped in our official academic environment.�
More importantly, though, after school was over, it was Bex who provided me with the fairly constant reassurance I needed to write this type of work. We traded manuscripts and gave each other comments, but it was the support that she gave me that was most desperately necessary. �
I once was asked during a Q&A session who my ideal reader was, and I said "Becca," who then replied that she was hoping I would say that! It was a great moment. �
As a reader and editor, there is no one better than Becca, excepting maybe Hanna Andrews, the other founding editor of Switchback, who is equally as astounding. Both of these women have an immense capacity for getting to the heart of a poem and respecting what the poem is trying to do, seemingly without projecting any of their own aesthetic preferences on it, although I know that's impossible. �
Klaver: As a matter of fact, we swapped these manuscripts while we were working on them. Brandi was actually the only person who saw LA Liminal in its entirety and gave me notes, though others commented on individual poems, in workshop or elsewhere. It's funny -- at the time I didn't think they had anything in common -- Brandi's book being so much about family, home, and high school, and mine being about solitude, homesickness, and college, but now I can see how much they have in common. Even formally, there are things in common: the use of prose, the trust in dream logic.�
I also learned a lot from watching Brandi order and rework her first book, Hard Reds, while we were in MFA school. A thesis workshop together plus Switchback meetings meant that we were talking about manuscript structure all the time -- besides our professors, BHo was probably my biggest influence on that front!�
What do the natives think of your work? Any comments from current or former residents of Marshalltown and LA?�� �
Homan: You know, I don't know for sure if anyone -- other than my mother, that is -- from M-town has read the book. But I did get one of the best compliments of my life on Facebook after posting about the book's release. A woman I went to high school with posted that she thought that maybe I was the "most successful person to come out of Bobcat Country."�
I cried. I cried a lot.�
Klaver: I'm really not sure what they think. I think they recognize the LA in the book as mine or ours. Or maybe it fills a gap, like, Here's why I left and never came back. ("It's complicated.")� None of my LA friends have called me out on anything yet, even though the first poem in the book sort of dares them to!� �
Whether or not they love LA, people seem to respond to this idea of LA being unreal or surreal or hyperreal or postmodern-real. LA gets called "fake" all the time, but eventually I realized that it's not fake at all -- it's like level-7 reality! This has to do with Hollywood and weather and geography but there's also an element of it that is just felt, and I was trying to wring that ineffable feeling into words.�
Other people who have never lived in LA seem to be able to relate to the book because they, too, have lived in a place that was odd or unreal, or where they just didn't feel like they belonged. I don't think the book's all sad -- at least, I tried to make it funny or playful, too -- but it's made at least two people that I know of cry. Out of homesickness, world-weariness, that sort of thing.�
How important do think these particular places and settings will be to future works? In other words, is this a one-time thing? No more snapshots of L.A. or Marshalltown?
Homan: I've just discovered the idea of memory theater. (For an educated person, I need to read a lot more.) Anyway, I was talking to a friend about it last night, and he was all like "What do you mean you just discovered it? That's what you do in your book!" And he's right, that's exactly what is happening, especially in the Recurring Dream House series, to some extent. Iowa is where I grew up, the place and space that I'm most familiar with. It's childhood, the springboard that all other ideas come up against, bounce from. Iowa is an easy place for me to put things.�
Also, I keep reflecting on a specific time as a teenager that was hugely influential, realizing as I get older to just what extent. There are stories in there that need to be told, and I'm working on how to tell them. So yes, there may be more Bobcat Country, but probably not in the very near future. Consider yourselves warned.�
Klaver: A few months ago I wrote a poem called "Last LA Poem," and when I was done, I thought, That is such a lie. There's a poem in LA Liminal called "Leaving the Matinee" that probably gives a more accurate vision: "you make it across the bridge as the late spring sun sets on the cities layered like lemon cakes inside you." All my future poems will probably be some sort of LA-Milwaukee-Chicago-Brooklyn-New Brunswick amalgamonsters. A little sweet, a little sour. The sun's out, but it's going down. And so on, and on and on...�
Elizabeth Hildreth lives and works in Chicago. Sometimes she blogs at The Effect of Small Animals. http://theeffectofsmallanimals.blogspot.com.
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January 27, 2011
Book Notes - Becca Klaver ("LA Liminal")
LA Liminal
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
I don't drink coffee, so when I need a jolt of energy during the workday I usually turn to a book of poetry (one is in my messenger bag at all times specifically for this purpose). For a couple of weeks this past year that book was Becca Klaver's brilliant debut collection LA Liminal.
Klaver paints a lively picture of Los Angeles, both past and present, with clever poems from various perspectives.
NewPages wrote of the book:
"This is a smart and obsessed poetry, a long meditation on a city unreal. Even with details of film school and smoking cigarettes on the balcony of her apartment, Klaver knows her own memories are abstractions. In “How to Abstract A Place,” she instructs, “Never go back,” and while the old saying, you can’t go home again, is always in the background, Klaver faces it head on in one of the prose pieces: 'You can’t go home again, but I did and I refused to listen, so that certain things were taken from me, or I made certain sacrifices. There seems to be a distinction there, but the results are the same. You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.'"
In her own words, here is Becca Klaver's Book Notes music playlist for her poetry collection, LA Liminal:
With the exception of one song (The Mynabirds' "LA Rain"), all of the songs below made up the actual mix I listened to while writing my first book of poems, LA Liminal. If the book figures LA as a way station, this is the music playing through shitty speakers in the depot.
This mix does some things better than the book does. For example, the California dreaming of the first two tracks never quite appears in LA Liminal, which starts out in the mire of disillusionment. Although I couldn't access that sunny mood in my own work, I liked that the songs could conjure an irretrievable old feeling: the idea that things were bigger, brighter, better in Los Angeles.
The playlist has an arc separate from the book, too. While LA Liminal is interested in breaking down mythologies, and indulges these myths in the first section or two before finally doing away with them, the arc of the LA mix goes something like this: excitement and anticipation (tracks 1-2), embrace (3), scorn/derision (4-6), satire/farce (7), death (8), melancholy (9-13), and farewell (14-16). Arranging this arc of pure feeling and listening to it over and over again allowed the poems to go where they needed to.
The Ramones, "California Sun"
I love this version of "California Sun" because it has enough power to convince you to get up and do something as big as moving across the country.
Micah P. Hinson, "Letter from Huntsville"
I saw Micah P. Hinson perform this song at Schuba's in Chicago, and I couldn't quite pin down its tone then, just as I can't now. There's so much achy longing in "I'll get to California someday," but then the horns that follow make you think, "Who needs California someday when we've got today?"
Four Tops, "L.A. (My Town)"
My dad raised me and my sisters on the Motown Sound, so there's something about the slow groove of the Four Tops and the ocean and traffic wooshing through the background that makes this song the ultimate childhood fantasy of Los Angeles. I've never heard anyone call Los Angeles "L.A. city" outside of this song, and here it both adds to the luster of the golden land and makes me giggle.
Pavement, "Unfair"
Stephen Malkmus singing "Let's burn the hills of Beverly!" feels so irreverent after living in a place constantly worried about wildfires. I also like think of this song as a great Northern-to-Southern-California eff-you: "Manmade deltas and concrete rivers / The south takes what the north delivers."
Dar Williams, "Southern California Wants To Be Western New York"
Southern California was a weird place to go to college. Western New York must be a really regular place to go to college. Or so I thought as I sweated my way through LA Decembers. When my favorite singer-songwriter from high school sings, "I think Southern California has more pain than we can say 'cause it wants to travel back in time, but it just can't leave L.A.," I was afraid that I was Southern California.
Magnetic Fields, "California Girls"
I cackled with glee when this song landed on a battle-ax attack fantasy against all of the plastic women of California. Also, "put on airs" and "faux folks sans derrieres" is a pretty stellar rhyme.
The Decemberists, "Los Angeles, I'm Yours"
In a way, this is the twin to "California Girls," full of hilarious, mocking rhymes ("Oh ladies, pleasant and demure / Sallow-cheeked and sure / I can see your undies"). This song also inspired the title for the poem "Touching You Again, Los Angeles," where hopefully the tongue can be heard in the cheek.
William Hung, "I Love L.A."
American Idol contestant Hung's cover of Randy Newman's song, buried in the center of the mix, is here for a few different reasons, depending on your mood. If you're feeling cruel, it's here to laugh at. If you're feeling a bit more reflective, you might think about that Idol pronouncement, "You're going to Hollywood!" and then think about how Hung ended up there anyway, though not by the usual rules. If you want to take it one step further, you could consider how Hung's version of Newman's celebratory tune has a more-than-ironic tone: there's something late-capitalist, end-of-days-y about how Hung was exploited so transparently (and so willingly) that there's no way to tell if his "I love L.A.!" is sincere or not. Those were the kinds of how-do-I-scrape-off-this-icky-commercialism feelings that LA could inspire in me on the worst days.
Elliott Smith, "LA"
I left LA in May 2003, and Smith killed himself that October. I was far from Echo Park, tucked away back in the Midwest, but his suicide and this song took me back to some of LA's darkest places.
Neko Case, "In California"
I first heard Neko Case's cover of Lisa Marr's song at her show at The Derby (RIP) in Los Feliz, during the tour for Blacklisted. It was the first time I'd seen Case live, but I was pretty sure I knew who the redhead was standing next to me in the crowd in a leopard-print cowboy hat while the opening band played. When she got up and started singing, I was standing a few feet away, and my jaw literally hung open: I couldn't believe her voice was real and not some kind of studio trick. Within the first few bars of "In California," I started sobbing for the first and only time at a live show. I'd never heard the song before, but it was instantly my LA anthem. My boyfriend and I were dead broke, but we raced to the ATM down the street to get $20, then raced back and bought Canadian Amp directly from Ms. Case, who is by now a Grammy-nominated, Billboard chart-topping superstar.
Loudon Wainwright III, "Grey in L.A."
The deep sadness of "In California" had to be followed by some sadness-with-levity, so I chose this song to let a little light back in. The song is—a bit ironically, then—about the disturbing effect that too much sunshine can have on people like me, who prefer to be linked to seasonal cycles. While I lived in Los Angeles, the constant sunniness would start to feel mocking at best, and at worst, menacing. When I finally went back to LA after seven years this October, it was grey (my preferred spelling, too—just seems greyer) every day, and LA seemed almost charming.
The Olivia Tremor Control, "California Demise, Pt. 3"
I like that it takes three tries to enact California's demise, I like how its passing is jaunty (almost celebratory), and I love any odd apocalyptic vision of LA, especially the angels, saints, and seatbelts of this one.
The Mynabirds, "LA Rain"
Perhaps because I heard it for the first time once the book was already out, I think of this song as a sort of gentler reprise of "In California." It's how LA feels to me now that I've stopped hating it and am grateful for the experiences, and the poems, it gave me. There's plenty of LA melancholy to indulge in here, but it's benign, and even comforting: "The sirens came and they went away / they told me I'd be fine." "LA Rain" is also the soundtrack to a little video I made of my trip back to LA this October.
Stephen Malkmus, "Trojan Curfew"
This song is included for a pretty literal reason: I went to college at USC, home of the Trojans, and when my parents came out for graduation, my dad ended up in the hospital for emergency hernia surgery. His doctor pulled a few strings to make sure he could get out in time for commencement, and as we drove from Centinela Hospital toward the university for the ceremony, this song came on just at the moment when we turned from the 105 onto the 110. Anyone who's ever driven from LAX toward downtown Los Angeles knows this place: it's a majestic moment where you're high above the city and can see for miles and miles, and soon you're driving straight toward the lights of downtown LA and the mountains behind it. This was my first image of Los Angeles at 17, and it was one of my last as my time there neared curfew.
Jolie Holland, "Goodbye California"
I think Jolie Holland is one of our great songwriters of place (see also "Mexico City"), and so I feel grateful that she wrote a song about California that allowed my feelings about the place to evolve. This song helped me say goodbye to LA over and over again; its bittersweetness felt sweeter and sweeter as I listened: "Goodbye to your waving trees / To your succulent wind and all my friends / fare thee well, goodbye, so be it."
The Mountain Goats, "It's All Here in Brownsville"
My sister Annie gave me the gift of a book trailer when LA Liminal came out, and The Mountain Goats were kind enough to let me use this song in that trailer. The music of The Mountain Goats was a steady companion during my final year in LA; it's mentioned in a poem in the book called "Southern California Gothic," which is an aesthetic that I made up to describe the deep dark feelings inspired by the land of endless sunshine. There is no more representative rhyme of SoCal Gothic than this song's "California" and "warn ya."
Becca Klaver and LA Liminal links:
the author's blog
video trailer for the book
Huffington Post review
NewPages review
The Poetry Foundation guest posts by the author
also at Largehearted Boy:
other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)
Online "Best Books of 2010" lists
Online "Best Music of 2010" lists
52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
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QUOTED: "“Los Angeles Liminal” arrives at the end of the first section of the book, a section of “myths,” because it’s both the beginning and the end: it’s the end of self-mythologizing and the launch pad for what comes next. The following two sections try to explore other ways of organizing experience. The second section of “dream-scripts” tries to mash dream logic with film logic, logics that rely heavily on sequences of images."
"And then, the final section of “poems” is the inevitable place to land in my first book of poems, I guess! It’s not as if I’m saying that the earlier sections aren’t poems, but they aren’t poems in the same way the ones in the final section are. The poems in the final section are the ones that I feel trust the alternative logics and narratives of poetry; they’re the poems that no longer require the neat closure of story."
"In college, in LA, I realized that poetry was the form that could accommodate experience in a way that didn’t require oversimplification, or a search for higher truths and master narratives. When I was young I wanted everything to make sense, and that demanded autobiographical prose narrative writing; when I got a little older, I abandoned adages like “everything happens for a reason” and allowed myself to accept the unpredictable and the illogical. That new worldview required a form, and that form was poetry."
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Snapshot with Becca Klaver (in two parts)
FEATURES, INTERVIEWS | MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4TH, 2013
Coldfront Magazine is pleased to bring you this two part interview with Becca Klaver conducted by Eva Heisler. In part one, Heisler explores Klaver’s relationship with LA and its influence on her book LA Liminal. In part two, Klaver will talk about the work she has done as an editor. Enjoy.
Becca Klaver on LA and Real Magic
EH: LA Liminal, published in spring of 2010 by Kore Press, is a playful, energetic series of poems that recollects a period of time you spent in LA. The book is also about coming of age as a writer. Although LA appears in your book as a mirage – a screen image, attitude, and free-floating threshold—could you begin by saying something about your local experience of LA? What neighborhood did you live in? How long did you live there? Did you go to LA just for school?
BK: I went to LA in 1999 to attend the University of Southern California, and after a year in the dorms, I lived for the next three years in the neighborhood surrounding USC. This neighborhood is technically South Central Los Angeles, but hardly: there’s a buffer zone around USC’s gated campus that’s constantly surveilled by USC police. There was pretty much nothing college-y about the neighborhood, though, and I didn’t have a car, so I relied on friends with cars for city adventures. I took public transportation, too, and people found this very amusing — or quaint — or something! In those years there was only one subway line, so the bus was usually the only option. An hour and a half ride to the beach is a long time, though, and so I felt pretty concrete-weary most of the time.
I’d lived in the same house in the suburbs of Milwaukee, WI my entire life, and I felt so intensely attached to my home that I was afraid to leave (I’m a Cancer!). I was a big believer in signs back then, and it was up to me to pay for my college education, so when I was accepted to USC’s Filmic Writing program (now called Writing for Film & Television) on a full scholarship, I never looked back. It seemed glamorous and miraculous. I wasn’t a huge movie buff, but I saw myself writing for teenage dramedies like those on the now-defunct WB network: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Felicity, Gilmore Girls. Once I started film school, I quickly realized that I had no interest in participating in “the industry”: it was cutthroat, misogynist, and generally not for the thin-skinned. My skin was pretty thin, and I valued that, so I became an English major halfway through college. I’d considered myself a poet more than a screenwriter all along, anyway.
EH: Many of your poems are preoccupied with place and with the idea of landscape, and with the contrast between the “concrete-weariness” of getting around and the Arcadian image of endless sun and sandy beaches.
In “Describing Description”, you reflect on landscape representation, specifically that of LA. The poem is in list format. There are 14 points, and the cumulative effect is an exploration of the internalization of landscape, or landscape as a trope for interiority. The narrator invokes Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal and then—oddly—internalizes it:
When I think hyperreal, I replicate skylines and horizons inside of me, I feel them right below my ribcage, I sling the nets of them over each new field of vision, superimpose them like a stack of film stills. (56)
What is interesting about this passage is that you take a concept—one that is really about disembodiment and simulation—and you respond to it with your gut. The concept is quite sharply internalized and becomes an experience of the body—a paradoxical conflation of surface and interiority. Later, the line “landscapes glow in my gut like alien probes” is a vision of the hyperreal as invasive.
BK: Thank you for reading “Describing Description” so closely, and for pointing something out that I hadn’t noticed before! That poem was an attempt to be very direct and “surfacey” about things I’d coded using figurative language elsewhere in the book: as #12 reads, “I’m also trying to be transparent but maybe I’m coming off opaque or phosphorescent” (you could probably make a link between Baudrillard and postmodern theory and an interest in surfaces, too).
As I was writing LA Liminal, I started to read other descriptions of Los Angeles, in theory and literature, and Baudrillard’s was the one that really got me. I could point to it and say, “That’s my LA.” For so long after I left, thinking about LA meant feeling that pang/ache below my ribcage — so, I suppose feeling that pang while reading Baudrillard was recognition, the same as you might get from a poem when a vague sense you’ve been carrying around with you suddenly matches up with language. The thing about poems is that “real” feelings, especially bodily sensations, that sound metaphorical sometimes need to be tagged, or else everything starts to sound like metaphor! But the visceral feeling was real (instead of hyperreal?).
“Describing Description” also turned out to be LA’s favorite poem about itself. When I went back to LA in October 2010 for the first time in seven years, to give a reading at USC, my screenwriter friends threw me a party and late in the night we read “Describing Description” around the table in a circle, at someone’s request. When it was my turn, I was supposed to read the line “all my landscapes are internal,” but instead of “internal,” I slipped and said “eternal.” If you believe slips carry their own meaning, then I guess what I meant was that part of the feeling of internalizing landscapes is that once they’re in you, they don’t leave. That can feel as invasive as an alien probe, but it also interests me intellectually. So, I suppose “Describing Description” tries to say something about what it means to theorize your own feelings, which is perhaps a clinically or extraterrestrially invasive process!
E.H: You do such a nice job describing the experience of consuming film, of the afterglow of Hollywood narrative. In “Leaving the Matinee,” you write:
Your life becomes the protagonist’s, anyone’s, and the shiny sealed package of story is yours, is slathered all over your shaved calves like sunless tanning cream, and you are walking, marching alone across a bridge into the sunset, really you are… (42)
BK: I think so-called “Hollywood magic” is real magic. I tend to think of anything transformative as magical: I think that’s what magic is — something that can perform a conversion. Something that casts a spell and changes its spectator/subject. I’ll often have the feeling of leaving a movie theater feeling transformed, as if my every gesture were magnified. I told my partner Andy about this once and he attributed it to me being a very visual person Maybe it’s just being a poet or a woman, reading theory and watching movies and feeling those things later in your body, and then translating them out of your body into words. The body as an alchemical machine. It reminds me of Adrienne Rich’s “Planetarium.” I had these lines from that poem on my bedroom wall in college in LA, actually:
I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
What she’s describing is a healing process, and I think that spoke to me as an adolescent. Now I think that the translation can be fun, too, and doesn’t have to start from a place of pain.
EH: I’d like to ask you to talk about the title poem, “Los Angeles Liminal.” A complex poem, it moves from the experience of heat in mid-October LA to tabloid representations of “famous girls my age” to a moment in which the narrator throws Wuthering Heights to a childhood experience of “the vastness of my own backyard.” The poem ricochets among places but the center of the poem is the throwing of the landscape-rich Wuthering Heights:
I threw Wuthering Heights across the room
wild with the fever of schism
My professor explained where I was
scrawled liminal on the board
I’d love to hear you talk more about the experiences (“the fever[s] of schism”) that gave rise to this poem.
BK: I read Wuthering Heights in my first semester of college, in an amazing class with Joseph Boone called “Varieties of Love and Literary Form,” and it affected me as much as any book ever has. It also made me feel kind of nuts. I was doing a thing that I probably did throughout all high school and college English classes: I was reading the book as if it could be a code or a key to my own life. Looking for signs again: reading and writing as superstition. I’d start to see synchronicities between my life and the text all over the place. Not everyone reads books in this sort of mystical way, I’d learn later, and the truth is that it doesn’t happen to me much anymore, either. Or, I don’t do it much anymore. I’m not sure which it is — whether it happens to me or whether I do it on purpose — because it never felt like something I was choosing, exactly. In any case, it has to do with self-mythologizing your life: the idea that you are the center of a narrative and the book is peripheral. The book’s narrative attaches to your own. It’s a pretty adolescent impulse, one that I saw myself giving up throughout my 20s, but at the time it gave me a lot of pleasure, and a sense of literary and personal discovery.
As for the other myths in the poem: Los Angeles is a place that mass-produces mythologies, of course (“famous girls my age”). Then, the image of the childhood backyard is a myth in the form of an origin story. When you suffer from homesickness, the overwhelming desire is to return to the origin, but I couldn’t let myself do that. I was too ambitious — or, maybe “curious” is the better word. Wuthering Heights – especially Catherine’s deep longing for her home at the Heights while living at Thrushcross Grange — is for me the mythic text of liminality, of longing, of how you can be physically in one place but feel that you exist psychically in another. Like Baudrillard’s, it was another image I needed, and so when I got it, I had a moment of fever, and threw Wuthering Heights across my dorm room. It may be the only book I’ve ever thrown (that didn’t have someone to catch it on the other end, anyway!).
“Los Angeles Liminal” arrives at the end of the first section of the book, a section of “myths,” because it’s both the beginning and the end: it’s the end of self-mythologizing and the launch pad for what comes next. The following two sections try to explore other ways of organizing experience. The second section of “dream-scripts” tries to mash dream logic with film logic, logics that rely heavily on sequences of images. And then, the final section of “poems” is the inevitable place to land in my first book of poems, I guess! It’s not as if I’m saying that the earlier sections aren’t poems, but they aren’t poems in the same way the ones in the final section are. The poems in the final section are the ones that I feel trust the alternative logics and narratives of poetry; they’re the poems that no longer require the neat closure of story. So, part of the story of coming of age as a writer in LA Liminal is the story of someone very seduced by traditional narrative (as in, Aristotle’s Poetics, Syd Field’s screenplay formulas, Freytag’s triangle, the trajectory that goes exposition –> rising action –> climax –> falling action –> dénouement), who then becomes disillusioned with it. This is, I suppose, what college and exposure to critical theory did to me; now I’m in a PhD program, and maybe one day will sort it all out!
EH: Your poem “The Safety of Exposure to Signals” is in part about listening to the radio, about the companionship of the radio and its distractions. The radio signals are described as “armor.” What you are evoking, I think, is an aural landscape inhabited by the narrator. Could you talk more about the aural landscape of LA, or aural landscapes in general? I ask because you have such a keen ear for the disembodied chatter that surrounds us, as in poems such as “Signs & Slogans”, “Ext. Los Angeles – Night”, and “Trying to Talk to My Teen-Age Self.”
BK: I love overheard sidewalk sound-bytes and slang and witticisms and epigrams and hearing (or saying) the inappropriate-yet-true thing. I think paying attention to all of that stuff, or producing it, is a big part of the poet’s job. Part of the reason I wanted to be a screenwriter in the first place was because I loved dialogue: my favorite works of fiction in high school — like Salinger’s — were the ones that relied on dialogue heavily; my favorite poems were speech acts, persona poems. I’ve probably only grown to love “chatty” poetry more and more; as an MFA student, David Trinidad gave me my first real introduction to the first- and second-generation New York School poets, and Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and especially Alice Notley have taught me a lot about how to put a self in a poem that’s not really a mythical/confessional nor a real/autobiographical self, but something of each of those, with plenty of performative energy on top.
EH: What music were you listening to while drafting the poems in LA Liminal?
BK: I’ve actually written a piece about this for the Book Notes section of the music blog Largehearted Boy. You can read it here if you like.
EH: Several poems mention diary entries, such as “Page Limit” (a poem not about word count but about the existential limits of tracking one’s life) and “Ars Diarista” (“I was the Great Red Memorializer / X-ing crimson plot points on the map of my life”). The present (as in the here-and-now) is one of the most difficult of “places.” “Ars Diarista” concludes “O the present is a present inside a present inside a present.”
Could you speak to the relationship between diary-writing and poem-making? How do you know when entry becomes poem?
BK: At some point I realized that my compulsive diary-keeping — which began when I was around nine or ten, and reached its apex of grandiosity when I began reading the diaries of Anaïs Nin during the summer before I moved to LA — was hindering more than helping me. And this has everything to do with living in the present, as you point out. The greatest diarists, like Nin, tend to live their lives in a dramatic way, one that provides fodder for the diary. And then, of course, they fictionalize and amplify “real life” later, as they’re writing. The more I thought about these issues, the more I felt uneasy with the idea of anyone living her life in order to write about it later, and became afraid that I was doing that, or would begin to. At the same time, I had to acknowledge that what I wrote in my diary was a partial, distorted, cherry-picked representation of my life. This is always true of diaries and memoirs, but there came a point where I just couldn’t sit comfortably with the idea anymore. By keeping a diary, I was trying to give my life a structure and a neatness that just didn’t exist.
After that, I found myself feeling newly capable of sitting with the messiness, and experiencing the desire to do so for the first time, and this is maybe when I figured out what it meant to be a poet. I’d written poems since middle school, but the relationship between diary-writing and poem-making was much closer during those years. Later, in college, in LA, I realized that poetry was the form that could accommodate experience in a way that didn’t require oversimplification, or a search for higher truths and master narratives. When I was young I wanted everything to make sense, and that demanded autobiographical prose narrative writing; when I got a little older, I abandoned adages like “everything happens for a reason” and allowed myself to accept the unpredictable and the illogical. That new worldview required a form, and that form was poetry.
This ties into everything I said about self-mythologizing and a distrust of narrative, which is the poet’s distrust par excellence. I think this distrust is sometimes misunderstood as dislike: the truth is that I’m nostalgic for the time when I could unselfconsciously consume a neatly-told story. Who was it who said you’re never really nostalgic for a place, but for a time? Well, I think that’s true. In LA, I became nostalgic for a time when story seemed like magic, like a salve. I also heard it said, in film school, that studying narrative structure would cause you to never be able to blindly enjoy a movie again. You’d always be looking for the plot points, and you’d know when they’d arrive, almost to the minute (see “Film School Dropout” in the book). Because I was a peculiar combination of diarist, screenwriter, and poet at the time, I guess what happened to me was that this inability to enjoy traditional narratives became true not only of movie-watching, but of life in general. As comforting as it seemed, I could no longer watch my life as if it were a neatly plotted story of progress.
EH: A few years ago, you collaborated with Arielle Greenberg on an essay-conversation about Sylvia Plath and the girl-poet. “Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence,” published in College Literature in the fall of 2009, discusses the reading and writing habits of young girls and their complicated encounters with Plath. What I found particularly fascinating was the attempt to understand and articulate the kind of energy that appeals to girls who are sensitive to language but also emotionally high-strung. Usually the adjective “adolescent” or “juvenile” is negative, implying dramatic posturing and intellectual immaturity, but you two managed to take very seriously a certain kind of reading and writing in the shaping of a young girl’s identity.
On p. 199 of the essay, you talk about the difference between describing the teen-age self in retrospect, from an adult position of irony and embarrassment, and enacting teen-age sensibility in a poem that, as Arielle puts it, documents but does not judge. You write: “This seems to be the challenge particular to writing poems for/about teenage girls: how do you write about melodrama or write drama into your poem without letting it all dissolve into treacle?” (200)
This is a wonderful question that I’d like to put to you. How do you do this as a poet? Many of your poems—such as “Slippery Slope,” “Teeny Tautologies,” “Fabulists in Love”—evoke the imaginative intensities of teen-age girls. Can you talk about the challenges and pleasures of channeling the verbal and emotional high-jinks of teen-age girls?
BK: Thanks for thinking that I was able to accomplish that channeling at all! For me, the poems that are especially for teenage girls in LA Liminal are “Trying To Talk To My Teenage Self,” “Epic Girlhood,” “O Drama,” and the title poem, but I’m happy to know there might be others, too. I’m not sure that they don’t dissolve into treacle, but that was a risk I needed to take. I remember a friend reading the manuscript and telling me that I might want to go back and take a look at how many times I included the words “heart” and “ache,” which made me laugh. I did go back and look, and maybe I changed a couple, but mostly I kept them.
Arielle and I have talked about the risks of melodrama, and I also learned about taking those risks in David Trinidad’s workshop. His advice was to let my poems come to the surface. I took that to mean that I should decode some of my most metaphor- and metonymy-dense poems. Learning to speak/write more directly was an important lesson, and maybe that impulse opened the floodgates of melodrama in some places. Honestly, if Kore hadn’t decided to publish the book, I’d probably still doubt that I could get away with the level of “gush” that I sometimes include. That gushiness might make some readers uncomfortable, and I get that, because at a certain point it made me uncomfortable, too. In many places, you’ll find the heightened emotion of a “confessional” poem served up in nontraditional form. LA Liminal is a weird combination of the theoretical, the experimental, the achy, and the gushy, and many people probably don’t know how to read that, but those are modes in which I live and write, so learning how to be more direct meant letting them in.
Stay Tune for Part 2.
Becca Klaver is the author of LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and the chapbooks Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009), Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, forthcoming 2013), and Merrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, forthcoming 2013). She is a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, and a PhD candidate in English at Rutgers University, where she is writing a dissertation on experimental women’s poetry, feminism, and the everyday. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Eva Heisler is an art critic and poet who currently lives in Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic, a book of poems, is forthcoming from Kore Press. Drawing Water, a book-length poem on the line, is forthcoming from Noctuary Press.
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QUOTED: "Attuned to and critical of pop culture spectacle, Klaver charms and skewers with a sense of audience-conscious magnanimity."
8/10/17, 5)55 PM
Print Marked Items
Empire Wasted
Publishers Weekly.
263.47 (Nov. 21, 2016): p87. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Empire Wasted
Becca Klaver. Bloof, $16 trade paper (116p) ISBN-978-0-9965868-4-9
Klaver (LA Liminat), a cofounder of Switchback Books, exudes soul and wit in equal measure as she dissects the artistic mind, the idea of the millennial, and life in a metropolis of "hot dog steam, Bergdorf Goodman/ umbrellas and Prada." Describing the liminal space between reality and imagination, Klaver wanders "the long halls maybe of my mind/ But maybe of a city that's real." She pokes fun at the subversive aspirations of her millennial co-generationalists in a litany about "The revolution," where she writes, likely with herself in mind, "The revolution has vowed to use its chin-up bar every morning/ The revolution left its keys in the door." But she really nails the rapturous yet frequently beleaguered domestic partnership New Yorkers share with their city: "underemployed/ under-imagined/we lack the slacker's/ romance/and hardly even crave/ or hear of it/ anymore/here in the mourning/ metropolis/of/ lassitude." Klaver's work is casually erudite, wryly observational, and thoughtfully whimsical. Those characteristics, when combined with her persistent and hypnotic use of repetition, swift wordplay, and punch lines delivered between moments of lush symbolism and satire, would qualify her as a member of a 21st-century New York School of poetry. Attuned to and critical of pop culture spectacle, Klaver charms and skewers with a sense of audience-conscious magnanimity. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Empire Wasted." Publishers Weekly, 21 Nov. 2016, p. 87+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471273943&it=r&asid=06ab44492acc13120b52ad10cb825a8f. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471273943
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QUOTED: "Becca Klaver‘s second full-length collection of poetry, Empire Wasted (a pun on empire waist dresses) taps into the current zeitgeist, capturing the mood of a lost generation of thirty-somethings as they drift through the American landscape guided by an anchorless yearning for something they’ve never experienced, for something that has yet to be invented."
"Her voice has a greater maturity in Empire Wasted, a greater sense of the knowledge gained from life experience. And while there is still a sense of directionless and longing, there’s also a commitment to the present."
American Drift: Becca Klaver’s Empire Wasted
Divided into five sections that could function as stand alone chapbooks, Empire Wasted opens with a nod to Andy Warhol.
Gina MyersDecember 3, 2016
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ew_cover_1400pxIt seems somewhere along the way, the great American experiment went wrong. So here we are now at what feels like the end of the empire and all the hopes for this nation — its ideas of democracy and equality —have never been realized and ultimately seem wasted. Becca Klaver‘s second full-length collection of poetry, Empire Wasted (a pun on empire waist dresses) taps into the current zeitgeist, capturing the mood of a lost generation of thirty-somethings as they drift through the American landscape guided by an anchorless yearning for something they’ve never experienced, for something that has yet to be invented.
Divided into five sections that could function as stand alone chapbooks, Empire Wasted opens with a nod to Andy Warhol. In “Death & Disasters Series,” Klaver turns her discerning eye to the disasters of the day as relayed by the media, just as Warhol did in his series of the same title. Of course, in this era we can watch disasters as they unfold by scrolling down computer screens and cellphones, one tweet at a time. Two poems in this section pull their language directly from Twitter, complete with text speak, misspelled words, and irregular capitalization and punctuation. “’We Got Him’” compiles reactions to the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death and “Derailed” compiles tweets by media organizations at Former Congressman Patrick Murphy following the Philadelphia Amtrak derailment:
Glad you are okay. Looking to see if Fox News and affiliates can get permission to use your photo.
CBS News here can we have permission to use this photo? we will credit, Hope all are okay!
glad you’re ok & helping Mr. Murphy. May 6abc/WPVI-TV & its licensees use your photos without limitation in all media?
Glad you’re OK. Do you mind if United Press International uses your photos across all platforms with credit? Thanks.
yo pat this picture is rad as fuck this is ron over at buzzfeed please add me on instagram if I can profit from ur pain
Becca Klaver
Klaver cleverly eviscerates the tragedy-as-entertainment industry through this isolation of tweets whose repeated hollowness of “glad you’re okay”s serve as an ugly reminder of what is lost when news companies race to be first rather than right or even humane.
The state of America seems to lie at the center of this book, which was written before the 2016 Presidential election, but foresaw what was to come, as if Klaver consulted a Magic 8-Ball and received the message, “Outlook not so good.” “Decade Zero,” a lengthy poem in the center of the collection, serves almost as a “Wasteland” for Klaver’s generation. However, unlike T.S. Eliot, Klaver is not condemning those around her. Yet she does capture a particular sense of the time –– a generation stalled and directionless, composed of people who are “underused / underemployed / underimagined.” The poem, set in a “mourning metropolis of lassitude,” i.e. New York City, explores the first decade of the 21st century, which she refers to as “a decade of zeroes / but we never gave it a name.” The poem explores nostalgia and yearning while searching for a new slacker hero; instead of Eliot’s Fisher King, Klaver asks for Ethan Hawke in the 1994 film Reality Bites:
someone lazy,
principled, pinko
last of the postwar
whatever-I-damn-well
pleasers.
Now our heroes have to care
even less than that
The poem concludes with a long litany–or perhaps dirge–declaring “the 90s will be the last nostalgia” with the final line stating, “we’re done feeling that way,” as if nothing authentic can be experienced or felt now.
However, the collection is not all doom and gloom. It includes a number of fun and experimental works: there are list poems of discontinued motion picture products and what was on television the night before it went digital; a Mad Libs-style poem with the blanks filled in with corporation names and trademarked products (“B®and Loyalty”); celebrations of movies (“Leo as Gatsby”); a New York School-style elegy (“The Day Farrah Died”); and formal experimentation using Brion Gysin’s permutation method (“Everything Changed in a Flash”). A sonnet, “Across from Clark Street Station,” which mentions male influences on the author, seems more likely inspired by Bernadette Mayer. There’s a subtlety to much of the work in Empire Wasted as the poems seamlessly shift between seriousness and humor. In “My Twentieth Century,” Klaver asks, “how could we / ever make anything / new again,” and, tongue-in-cheek, she continues, “but I’ve stuck around this long / because I heart art.”
Klaver’s previous collection, LA Liminal, was centered on Los Angeles, but Empire Wasted is a very New York book, with brief stops through the Midwest on a cross-country drive. The city serves as a backdrop, as does September 11th, the 2003 blackout, and the rising of the Freedom Tower. One short poem, “The New York Miracle,” effectively serves as a reminder that despite everything we must go on. It reads in its entirety:
in spite of all
that stops you
in your tracks
you trudge along
New York also looms large in the book’s influences. Throughout the book there are lines pulled from Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Alice Notley, and others. The concluding section is named for Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. A strength of the work is that it is not necessary to get all of the references to still find pleasure in the poems. However, Klaver does include a list of notes in the back for readers who may want to dig deeper.
With her first collection, Klaver captured the life of a twenty-something coming to terms with the idea that things don’t turn out how you hope they will. Even in her new collection, the speaker acknowledges the lost dreams of the past: “once you have been west / and know the west is not worth dying for.” Her voice has a greater maturity in Empire Wasted, a greater sense of the knowledge gained from life experience. And while there is still a sense of directionless and longing, there’s also a commitment to the present: as the speaker in “Bogo” says, “grind down your heels / in the here-now available dirt.” While the empire seems at its end, the people are still here. Despite everything, we must trudge along. We must resist. We must persist.
Empire Wasted (2016) is published by Bloof Books and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
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