Contemporary Authors

• Arcadia, Indiana - 2017 Plays Inverse Press,

• Poets & Writers - https://www.pw.org/content/toby_altman

  Toby Altman
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  Chicago, IL
  E-mail:
  altman.toby@gmail.com
  Website:
  tobyaltman.tumblr.com/
  PUBLICATIONS AND PRIZES
  Chapbook:
  Asides (Furniture Press Books, 2012)
  MORE INFORMATION
  Listed as:
  Poet
  Gives readings:
  Yes
  Travels for readings:
  Yes
  Identifies as:
  Caucasian
  Prefers to work with:
  Any
  Fluent in:
  English
  Born in:
  Chicago
  Raised in:
  Chicago, IL

• Toby Altman Tumblr Profile - http://tobyaltman.tumblr.com/

  My name is Toby; I live in Chicago with my dog and friends. I’m a poet, playwright, performance artist, and literary scholar. I’m tired all the time.

  Ok here are some of my publications: I’m the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and five chapbooks, Security Theater (Present Tense Pamphlets), Tender Industrial Fabric (Greying Ghost, 2015), Same Difference (Shirt Pocket, 2015), Asides (Furniture Press, 2012) and Life of Richard (Damask, 2011).

  My poems can or will be found The Best American Experimental Writing 2014, The Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Diagram, Lana Turner, The Laurel Review, and other journals and anthologies.

  These are things I do for fun: with Anne Shaw, I co-curate Absinthe and Zygote, an experimental reading series in Chicago. With Liana Katz, I co-edit Damask Press: we publish chapbooks in small, handmade runs. With Emily Barton Altman I co-host Make (No) Bones, a tiny radio show about poetry. At Entropy, I write a monthly column on new and recent chapbooks.

  I’m currently completing a dissertation in poetics at Northwestern University, “Text out of Joint: Toward a Diachronic Poetics.”

• Littsburgh - https://www.littsburgh.com/4-questions-toby-altman-arcadia-indiana/

  4 Questions: Toby Altman (Arcadia, Indiana)
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  Toby Altman‘s Arcadia, Indiana is a mutant tragedy, a five act-sonnet sequence, staged in the trash-choked landscape of pastoral fantasy. It plays with narrative, labor, sexuality, and form, starting with a murder in an Indiana steel factory and ending with the Sphinx refusing all of Oedipus’ solutions to her riddles. This play is a Renaissance tragedy in contemporary drag, destabilizing literary boundaries to develop a poetics of trash, in which the repressed and discarded parts of (literary) history return to strangle their point of origin.

  Arcadia, Indiana is published by Pittsburgh’s Plays Inverse, “an independent publisher of dramatic literature, publishing plays and performance texts based on literary merit rather than production records from new, established, and cross-genre writers.”

  Don’t miss out: Altman will be visiting White Whale Bookstore on May 24th (joined by Brian Broome, Dakota R. Garilli, and Candace Opper)!

  Event

  “At times this work reads like a crucial report from the poisoned heart of America. At other times, it reads like an ecstatic source book for how to destroy/remake theater. “— Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book

  What comes to mind when you think of Pittsburgh?

  Ok so I’ve only been to Pittsburgh once and it was in the middle of the night; I was on a hallucinatory, multi-day amtrak trip, and I stumbled out into the city in desperate search for a slice of pizza. So for me, Pittsburgh is a city of metaphor and myth; a city of heroic labor struggle where pinkertons murder dirty-dancing union activists in the streets when they’re not dismantling steel plants and shipping them somewhere cheap and off the off-shore. Can I say (moment of solipsism) that my mutant tragedy—Arcadia, Indiana—takes place in just this mythical space of devastation (code name: America), that it is about nothing except the emptiness of factories and the toxicity of masculinity, the power of the landlord and the cleanly hands of the CEO. But as a little flower once said, “I didn’t come to praise the landlord, I came to bury him.”

  What books are on your nightstand?

  No exaggeration: I have a stack of books a foot and a half high on my nightstand right now. I have a problem when it comes to buying [books]I just shovel them into my mouth and they lie there unchewed and undigested for years while I slowly decay among them. So hi I’ll just mention the two most recent books I read: first, Emma Ramadan’s translation of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day. I mean, I adored the queer oulipian noir of Sphinx, Garréta’s first novel (also translated by Ramadan). It’s a love story but the gender of the lovers is never revealed, a feat of sheer linguistic acrobatics in French (and in English), and yet somehow also a deeply affecting book that plunges its readers into the dissolving substance of sexuality; this one too is an elegant and spare meditation on desire, gender, and memory. Can’t recommend her work highly enough. Second, Kim Hyesoon’s Poor Love Machine, just published last year in translation by Action Books (& translated by the unparalleled Don Mee Choi). It’s a book of such dense disgust and bodily slaver; its syntax is so tortured and bruised; it reads as a cry of protest broadcast through a vocoder: “I wake up and find / a gigantic tongue licking me / Look at the saliva dripping all over my body.”

  Is there a book you’d like to see made into a film?

  I’m going to nominate Daniel Borzutsky’s The Performance of Becoming Human—a brutal book about the everyday brutality of capitalism. Imagine an endless film in which endless rows of corpses buy stocks and bonds, accrue debt, give grades, are tortured by the police, cross borders illegally (and as they do so they die repeatedly of dehydration and their bodies are lost in the desert), are thrown out of airplanes by the military regime, all of it rendered in clinical detail. Donald Trump, six months dead, makes a cameo flanked by a pair of deceased playboy bunnies and breaks a bottle of champagne over the bow of a hearse. The soundtrack is the low hum of a diesel engine as it pumps out particulates into the lungs of corpses who live in high-rise condos along the arteries of international trade. How blue their bodies have become. Did I say “their”? I meant “ours.”

  Who would you most want to share a plate of pierogies with?

  I really don’t have an answer for this question but as I was googling around trying to come up with something clever I found this Shutterstock page and I’d gladly spend some time there with you: https://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/perogies/

Arcadia, Indiana
264.20 (May 15, 2017): p34.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Arcadia, Indiana

Toby Altman. Plays Inverse, $12.95 trade paper (62p) ISBN 978-0-9914183-8-1

In this daringly avant-garde collection designed as a stage play, Altman chronicles an epic clash between his hero, "Steelman," and the villainous CEO and board members of Arcadia Steel. The play is presented in five acts (plus "deleted scenes"), and includes other characteristics of a traditional drama, such as set descriptions ("packed with pastoral trash") and stage directions: "enter the poet, with insufferable need." In addition to the employees of Arcadia Steel, their wives, and the poet himself. Airman's characters include Oedipus and the Sphinx, the biblical Adam and Abel, and characters referred to as "the Verb" and "Ego." <>, though frequently stirring; unfortunately, such gems as "April ocean and insatiable folding./ How do we know this storm of withholding" must be mined from a vast reserve of non sequiturs, including such context-less lines as "Come beat the genital drum, skeleton." The story is "a corporate pleasure for a corporate age" that involves a martyred working-class hero, <>; ambiguous stage directions--"he stabs him"--make it hard to nail down a plot. Altman has done some interesting things with form, however. Readers willing to set aside the need for clarity and embrace instead<< the compelling imagery, sounds, and performative aspects of the drama>> should find a gratifying and immersive experience. (June)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Arcadia, Indiana." Publishers Weekly, 15 May 2017, p. 34. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A492435600/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cd2c3a3a. Accessed 10 Jan. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A492435600

• Entropy
  https://entropymag.org/review-toby-altmans-arcadia-indiana/
  Word count: 1132

  REVIEW: TOBY ALTMAN’S ARCADIA, INDIANA
  written by Guest Contributor October 18, 2017
  (Alexander Dickow)

  Toby Altman. Arcadia, Indiana (a tragedy). Pittsburgh: Plays Inverse Press, 2017.

  The finest metrical verse, and even the finest free verse that maintains an attention to rhythm, has an inner tension, a tautness perhaps akin to what Gerard Manley Hopkins referred to as “instress,” a quality that seems to separate poetic language from “ordinary language”. While this separation is illusory, it is an admirable illusion to which few recent poets attain; Philip Larkin does not, William Carlos Williams does not, Seamus Heaney does not. Some poets attempt to compensate for an absence of this quality through sheer sententiousness or oracular gobbledygook.

  Toby Altman, like many postmodern poets, contrasts the trivial and the lofty, high and low culture; a Shakespeare quote may swerve into a reference to Dorito’s Cool Ranch tortilla chips. The stage, littered thickly in garbage, belies the Racinian, formalized quality of the archetypical figures that form the poem-play’s center: Foreman, the industrial superego of the down-and-out, unemployed factory worker Steelman, and Theas, Steelman’s wife, who commits adultery with the superior Foreman. Gestures contrasting our contemporary condition with a bygone loftiness ought to have little novelty today. What distinguishes Altman’s work is not that he blends high and low, but that he successfully <>, even in this jaded reader. Those who attempt to combine the wacky and the sublime usually produce mere wackiness. Not so in Toby Altman’s work.

  One honey hour walked her waterways

  and drink still the dark perfume of her thought. (“Aubade (o, bawd!),” 10)

  Lines such as these, in which Steelman sings Theas’ beauties, adhere rigorously to the rules of English scansion; their irregularities do not significantly disrupt the dominant iambic pentameter. The tone is properly Byronic, nearly seeming to allude to the latter’s famous “She walks in beauty, like the night.” These lines even display the false clarity of Byron’s completely vague line (how does the night walk? What is “walking in beauty”?). Even Altman’s prose has the tautness of meter, just as Thomas Wyatt’s irregular verse still maintains an illusion of metrical rigor.

  One often reads the best metrical verse without truly understanding, merely to enjoy their rhythms with their impressions of order and rigor of form. While Toby Altman’s verse is often obscure, this obscurity is compensated by a global clarity of conception that gives the poet the freedom to play, and the reader the chance to enjoy that play without losing sight of the larger stakes of the play’s plot. The action of the play acts as a dispositif, a transparent framework. Usually, such structural frameworks have a troublesome externality, like an exoskeleton forced onto uncooperative flesh. But<< Altman’s framework is>> instead <> Even the didascalia become part of the play’s inner poetic texture.

  Arcadia, Indiana also demonstrates the viability of a genuine political poetry, without sacrificing the demands of formal innovation to the necessities of political discourse. The play’s corporate context – a factory town – makes of the corporation a relentless Fate. While the anti-corporate message is loud and clear, and constantly signified by the garbage-littered stage, the play is never constrained by that message: only Aimé Césaires Notebook of a Return to the Native Land has so masterfully fused experimental language to a political cause.

  Absence plays a major role throughout the poem-play. “The text of this play is unfinished, even empty,” writes Altman (58). The dead and the absent are often designated as gaps: “They leave the factory. And they name his battered [ ] in the streets” (“Viscous cinema (from first principles),” 28. First among these absences is Theas, pure, virgin projection without autonomy or substance, a cardboard-cutout of male desire: “Her gender is like a badly-pasted poster,” Altman writers in “Dramatis personae,” “sloppily, incompletely imposed from the outside by anonymous hands. Beneath which: animate absence. A loose weave of nerve and brick.” Yet Foreman and Steelman, along with the Congregants, Abominations, and corporate servants that constitute the play’s many figurants, are no more true characters than Theas: they are, as their names suggest, part of a corporate machinery, or rather, the machinery of our contemporary tragedy. They are empty roles, hieratic masks, or sleepless cogs. And just as Theas acts as poster-girl for a vapid, passive femininity, Foreman and Steelman (indifferently, since the character is only designated as “He”) also play the unglorious role of the callous, stereotypical male that responds “Not my problem,” relevantly or not, to Theas’ impassioned discourse (“Song (personal business),” 14-16).

  Most of Arcadia, Indiana’s poems have two parts, each acting as a kind of clarifying commentary on the other, each facing the other on the page. Sometimes, this doubling also occurs inside one of the two poem’s parts:

  I shaped him to his urn– I peeled

  the fabric from his flesh– I sculpted

  the pliant thing in him– to pleasure glass—

  I answered his urgency– with liquid sighs— (“Doubting Thomas (an Anatomy),” 29)

  The double column may be read as two distinct poems, each read vertically and independently, or the two columns may be joined together and read as a single whole, with no ruptures in syntax. Anyone who has attempted such formal constructions will realize how monumentally difficult such syntactic harmonizing is; this is formal virtuosity akin to the construction of sestinas.

  I first encountered Toby Altman’s work in the pages of the admirable journal The Offending Adam. His work immediately imposed itself upon me as a major new voice. I was surprised to discover the writer elsewhere claiming a kinship to conceptual poetry. In fact, Altman indeed quotes Goldsmith as epigraph to his play: “Remember how bad it was yesterday? Here we go again” (“Dramatis personae (the personated persons),” 7). Yet while Altman has clearly read and digested the lessons of conceptual poetry, his work is not reducible to any current or trend, especially those, like conceptual poetry, with systematic approaches to writing. “This book was composed through extravagant acts of plagiarism and theft. I stole anything that wasn’t bolted to the ground,” Altman explains (59). But this thieving is once again made part of an organic whole, and only creative writing – not Goldsmith’s uncreative writing – can accomplish feats like it. Arcadia, Indiana is the product of no recipe. Its concept is as compelling as its realization.