Contemporary Authors

• Trébuchet: Poems University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2016

1. Trébuchet : poems LCCN 2016020561 Type of material Book Personal name Schoonebeek, Danniel, author. Uniform title Poems. Selections Main title Trébuchet : poems / by Danniel Schoonebeek. Published/Produced Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia Press, [2016] Description xiii, 150 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780820349923 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0820349925 (pbk. : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3619.C4538 A6 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• American Barricade - 2014 YesYes Books, Portland, OR

• Center for Literary Publishing - http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/interview-with-danniel-schoonebeek/

  Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek

  Mar 27, 2014
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  by Colorado Review Editorial Assistant Katie Naughton

  Danniel Schoonebeek is a friend, a former coworker, and one of my favorite poets. The first thing I knew about Colorado Review was the Summer 2012 issue, which included Danniel’s poem “Bildungsroman (Spare American)” and some of his Torch Songs in collaboration with Allyson Paty. I’m pleased to have had this opportunity to reacquaint CR readers with his work, on the occasion of the publication of American Barricade (YesYes Books, March 2014), his first full-length collection. The poems of American Barricade are confrontational and generous and are asking all the right questions and in what voice is available at this late date to the people of America, of American families, of American jobs. I feel keenly aware in these poems of the forces of place and history that whip around us like stormwinds, how we hollow out a place for ourselves and our loves to continue to exist by bellowing back into the gale.

  Danniel kindly agreed to field some questions I had about America and about poetry, and tell us what we need to know about violation, punctuation, mother geese, editors, Texas, liberty, and pushing a rock forever up a hill.

  KN: Your poems are made out of lines, but some of those lines are also sentences. What is the relationship between a line and a sentence?

  DS: I’m infatuated with the sentence, how policed the sentence is by the person reading it. But what infatuates me most about this is disgust. I decided a long time ago, when writing the Barricade poems, that punctuation was a small tyranny to me. I want a poem to have tensions. And one of the tensions I love in a poem is when punctuation is absent and the words clash while still pushing ahead. It’s a meddling with how we’re taught to read language. I’d love someone to take American Barricade and punctuate it, because so many of the poems and the lines are long, meandering sentences with the commas and dashes and colons thrown out. Not all of them though, because sometimes there’s no other way, and you have to be smarter than your own laws. Another tension I love in a poem, and one of the major forms of the Barricade poems, is when an utterance is violated by punctuation. The violation I’m talking about happens when punctuation is used in the wrong way. These are the poems in the book where a period end-stops a line in the middle of its utterance, and the next line continues that utterance as though it were a new sentence. The poem in the book that commits this crime the most is called “Genealogy.” This isn’t how we’re taught to talk, taught to read, taught to hear. And that’s what I mean when I say the sentences are policed. The punctuation is enforcing the poem and the language inside it in a way that we tell ourselves is far afield of the rules we agreed upon.

  KN: Some of these poems tell us in their titles that they are genealogies, ledgers, alibis. Some claim to be from an album of family photos. Others remind us they are poems. Why do they do this?

  DS: Expectation’s pushed to the forefront of how we live our lives in this last decade. Our names, what we look like, who we surround ourselves with, what we photograph, what we listen to, where we go—we tend to collect these scraps about a person before we ever meet them, which makes the moment of meeting a person boil over with expectation. With the possible exception of acting, I think expectation occurs in poetry more than any other art. American Barricade, from its title, to the name of the guy who wrote it, to the poems inside it, is a book that wants to defy expectation. I don’t mean evading or thwarting expectation. I mean introducing the reader to a wrongness, an unfamiliarity, that allows a rift to open up in the poem and the experience of reading it. For instance a poem that announces itself as a genealogy is also halted, in a jarring way, by its end-stopped lines, as though the lines of the family tree are being cut short. This same poem thinks it can ignore matrimony and motherhood and fails in ways that expose its own jackshit thinking. But then a poem that announces itself as a “lullaby” will physically take the form of a family tree, while the words that compose the poem are about a violent government overthrow. If this is a lullaby, it’s a failed lullaby at best. The failure of names, our failure to live up to the names we are given—whether those names are son, father, friend, sonnet, United States, mother, wife, lullaby, husband, America, you name it—is a thought I can never shake loose. Like as soon as you name a thing you begin to mark it with its own incommensurability to what you’ve called it to do. I think this is what the poems that announce themselves as “Poems” in the book are depicting psychologically for the voice that speaks them. The titles are suppressions, in a way. There’s four of them: “Poem for Four Years,” “Poem in Three Deaths,” “Poem Four Years Too Late,” and “Poem for a Seven Hour Flight.” These titles all try to pack themselves down into numbers, into units, which is an attempt to hammer the trauma in the poems into something measurable and digestible. They each try to announce themselves as “poems” as a way of saying, I’m not writing about my life, I’m writing a poem. But what becomes clear as you read these poems is that they’re failing to fool even themselves and they are in fact very autobiographical and break the barrier on their own attempts at suppressing their trauma.

  KN: Many of the poems in this book were published previously in journals, including the Colorado Review; the Family Album poems were published in a chapbook last year from Poor Claudia. What are, as you see it, the relationships between the poet, poems, and publications?

  DS: 49% of me loves how rabid I feel when editors grin and show their fangs at a poem like they want to rob the nest and change the work in order to fit their editorial vision. The reason I say 49% is I’m comparing myself to a mother goose defending her young ones from wolves, which is an insane event if you’ve ever witnessed it. 51% of me loves collaborative editing, and I’ve been lucky to work with editors, of journals and chapbooks and books, who understand that I’m not the kind of writer who just turns in a pile of poems and says, Okay you make it a book.

  I think you have to feel that rabies toward your work. It’s not kill your darlings for me. It’s more like: nobody’s killing my darlings unless I kill my darlings and I’ll kill any wolf who thinks otherwise. I’m sorry to use this language of violence but it’s violent, isn’t it. Probably nothing could be less urgent than an argument over a hyphen, but I’ve twice landed myself in wars of attrition with editors over hyphens. They threw the books at me, I waved my dirks at them. One of my best friends in poetry became one of my best friends in poetry because we chewed each other out for days over the final line of a poem. She wanted the last line to be the first line and I said, Do you know this is like you’re asking me to call in a bomb threat on myself. I try to maintain 49% of this confounding hostility, because editor to me, as a concept, has always been a position of authority toward which I feel resistance. It’s another job where someone can police your work. It’s another job where someone legitimizes you. “Don’t lose your arrogance yet,” Berryman tells Merwin in a poem that I love. And because I’m an editor of a poetry series too, I do encourage people to feel this same confounding hostility toward me, to feel arrogance toward me. I’ve called for line edits and title changes before, and I’ll have nothing but respect for any poet who says, Do you think this is some sort of parlor game when he answers. What works for me, I’m grateful to say, is never forgetting that editors are people and not forces of resistance. They want to introduce people to art that moves them, but none of them can write your poem or steal your eggs.

  KN: You traveled a great deal this fall reading from American Barricade, including a reading in Denver. What is the most American place you were this year? How did you know?

  DS: When I think about the time I spent in Texas, it’s always the blue hour and it’s filled with sundown light, like the summer kind. Which is strange because I was there in October. I can hardly say what it was about Texas, but Texas was the place where I felt most dislodged from myself, my citizenship, the country itself. And that isolationism, oddly enough, was the feeling that was most strikingly American to me. I mean the beauty of that word is we have no idea, any of us, what it means. It’s a glimpse of a world that doesn’t exist. And Texas was a lasting glimpse. Talking trash with a taxi driver, drinking in the sun with poets. A bartender handed me some road money, I turned off a shower faucet and a pianist was playing Chopin in the next room. I saw old New York friends there, I drank a glass of wine in a sports car. Saw the bats in Austin and I wasn’t ashamed and I ran in the cemeteries and ate the eggs. One of the headstones in the war memorial says this: out of tragedy we were formed, out of love we continue. I’m not sure how one knows. It’s all a fiction, and when you’re unaware you’re writing it you’re hallowed, or sanctified, or doomed, but it’s different than fooling yourself.

  KN: What is a family? What is a job? What is an American?

  DS: I resist the question, if only because the answers I would give would just as soon crumble in the face of how beautiful and unwieldy these questions can be. I’ve witnessed a few families, on the blood and kin level, who did arrive at that apotheosis of love and money and poise that we tell ourselves is the goal of this country. Which is to say maybe the question for me is what’s an American family, what’s an American job, what’s America. All of which are answerless questions. Where my own family is concerned, it was a strange and wondrous upbringing, full of walls and art and silence and mystery, full of bamboo and war and divided nations, and my upbringing taught me what I don’t want to inflict upon the world. I feel an immense, fatalist debt of gratitude toward my family, because the way in which I was raised has led me into a life where I’m answering this question, and I’m grateful to answer this question. I don’t feel the same gratitude at all when it comes to jobs in this country. I remember learning the definition of energy in grade school: the capacity of a body or system to do work. I was a wily kid, and hyper, and the teacher pointed to me laughing and said, well you’re going to make a great worker. I say this to carve a distinction between work and job. Over the years my definitions of both words have hardened around art and money. A job is what you do to earn a living, maybe. But work is what you do to live. Or a job is what you do to make money. And work is what you do to make life meaningful. I’ve never felt any kind of freedom inside a family or a job because I was never given the freedom to choose. The work you’re undertaking when you make art is the work of making decisions, choosing language and brush strokes so you can say how you hear and see the world, which has felt to me in the past years like what liberty means. Though I still have no idea what an American is, what America is. And maybe that’s where I’ve arrived: an American is someone who is always asking what an American is. And never finding an answer, because there’s never freedom inside his answer. Which is of course what makes this whole fiasco absurd and beautiful and it’s our version of pushing a rock forever up a hill in hell.

• Brooklyn Poets - http://brooklynpoets.org/poet/danniel-schoonebeek/

  Poet Of The Week Danniel Schoonebeek

  July 22–28, 2013

  Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade, will be published in early 2014. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, BOMB, Indiana Review, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He writes a monthly column on poetry for the American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and edits the PEN Poetry Series.

• Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2016/06/the-rumpus-interview-with-danniel-schoonebeek/

  The Rumpus Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek

  By Ben Sandman

  June 20th, 2016

  I’m willing to bet: before you knew the name Danniel Schoonebeek I knew the name Danniel Schoonebeek. Growing up in Delhi, New York—a town of 5,000 on the western fringe of the Catskills—I knew Schoonebeek’s name, in the way I knew everyone’s name. We went to the same small public high school. Schoonebeek was six years older; I heard his name from teachers, and from the older siblings of friends.

  These days I hear Danniel Schoonebeek’s name more and more often. His first book of poems, American Barricade, was published by YesYes Books in 2014. It was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. In 2015, his second book of poems, Trébuchet, was selected as a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series and will be published this year by University of Georgia Press. Schoonebeek’s recent work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Believer and Tin House. He hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and edits the PEN Poetry Series.

  We corresponded over email and talked about the “very rural life” and “very city life,” Amtrak, work, and the frustrations of re-reading “The Dead.”

  ***

  The Rumpus: Reading American Barricade I have the feeling of running against something fully-formed, something solid—the book feels like a place you’ve arrived at. How did you think about that collection? About the process of grouping those poems?

  Danniel Schoonebeek: Place agitates some people who read the American Barricade poems because it’s like this fully formed void. The book’s two years old now and in all that time I don’t think I’ve gotten any closer to answering for place in those poems. I’m being a little coy here: the reason people probably latch onto place in Barricade is because the poems root themselves, in language and in attitude, in two places that we think of as opposed to one another. There’s the very rural life and the very city life, but that’s been my life so far and my attitude so for so that’s the poems.

  The act of gathering is important to me, though it’s just as important to differentiate that from collecting. It’s been said more than a few times that my poems gather their materials at the beginning of the poem and like to dispense and return to those materials throughout the poem. I think that’s true, and I also think collecting—both the word and the act—strikes me as much more pernicious. I love talking about the album as the defining unit in music, so obviously I also love talking about a book of poems like releasing a record. I think it’s undeniably true that we’re a culture that thinks in singles in music and individual poems in poetry, but I also feel hostile toward curator culture and listicles and this idea that art can pruned and catered to bolster our genius individual tastes.

  Rumpus: I haven’t seen you read, but I know you toured around the country for the publication of American Barricade. You also host a reading series in Brooklyn. How important are readings to you? Are there certain “live poems” that always make your set list, and, if so, do these poems have something in common?

  American Barricade FRONT COVER (2) (1)Schoonebeek: Readings are one of the proving grounds for poems, for the poet and for the person listening to the poetry. Hearing how the poems work or don’t work for a crowd, hearing people lean forward or shift in their seats, maybe they belly-laugh or shudder, that time to me is the adolescence of the poem.

  What you hear discussed less is whether readings are a proving grounds for the poet. I personally love being on tour because each day, in front of different people in different towns, you get to audition for some part of yourself. You prove yourself to yourself. You’re finding out which shoes, which pitches, which banter and which handfuls of poems are the ones that are most yourself.

  And everyone has their hit lists, including me, despite my feelings about lists and collecting and pruning. It’s always great to see poets near the tail end of a tour, when the band is tight, so to speak. They’ve sussed out how to open, all the registers and small fires they want to light throughout the reading, whether they want to close with a bang or a whimper.

  Rumpus: You mentioned the “very rural life” and “very city life.” I’m curious how location affects your process—what’s the difference between writing in the city and in the country? You’re upstate, lately, right?

  Schoonebeek: I’m a lot of places lately, which I think is deliberate, I want to be itinerant and unrooted right now. I’m softly recording my answer to this question on my phone in the corner of a restaurant in Brooklyn and there’s a woman screaming at another woman about (these are her words) the other woman’s shitty outdated ideas concerning 1940s cinema. I think maybe that’s the point of choosing uprootedness and moving around a lot; you’re always forced to listen to a different kind of song.

  Living-wise I’m keeping a small and unassuming artist studio in the Catskills right now, which I share with my partner, who also keeps an apartment in Brooklyn that’s home to us too. I try to read and live around the country as much as possible. I need to see how not united these United States are.

  Occasionally I think of each city or town as a place with a distinct emotion or timbre inside which I place myself and become sort of tinged regardless of where I am or who I’m with or what I’m doing. When I think of travel writing or writing about place, so much of the work I love is really about the writer within that place, not necessarily the place itself. That’s a thought that became important to while working on the book I’m writing now, a travelogue called C’est la guerre: it’s me who’s the setting of this story and the landscape that gets traveled through.

  Rumpus: Let’s talk about C’est la guerre. While the poems in American Barricade are full of pauses, full of negative space, the prose in C’est la guerre is solid, unrelenting—the movement down the page reminds me of the Amtrak trains, where so much of the book takes place. How did you arrive at this style?

  Schoonebeek: What’s important to me is that terrific word you use, unrelenting. Part One of the book, which covers about fifteen readings across sixteen cities, is written entirely in unbroken prose blocks that are squeezed, on the page, into these columnar, downward torrents, and the prose is also written in second person.

  The second person, I think, comes from my fascination with rhetorical questions. “You’re trapped on a desert island; how do you survive?” And a lot of the book is argumentative like that, looking and yourself and saying, let’s hear your answer. I have no interest in the second person as a way of instructing someone. I wanted to place myself under surveillance instead. The first month in which the book takes place was a nonstop, under-slept, manic period, a blunder of joy and fear, and I wanted the writing to have that same freewheeling stress placed upon it. Every day I’d wake up, check how much money I had left, check if I’d lost any belongings, check my phone for messages from hosts and loved ones, and then get on a train to the next city.

  In order to place that pressure on the writing, I decided to pinch the margins, almost like the writing’s trapped inside a pipe or drilling down into the solid white mass of the page. I want it to feel like a round’s been fired off in a bulletproof crawl space, I want the clauses—I’m in love with the clause like I’m in love with the line—to ricochet and ricochet within their confines.

  Part Two shifts abruptly to first person and the prose blocks start to break apart and the self-scrutiny intensifies. The artifice of the writing in the first half of the book starts to strip away and the person at the middle of it runs out of places to run, points of view, money, people to call, people to scrutinize other than himself.

  Rumpus: You call the book a travelogue. In addition to the lyric prose, there are photos, essays, movie reviews. Was the project this varied from the start? Or did it begin as a collection of poems and fragments and expand?

  Schoonebeek: In some ways it began as a poem: while I was riding the trains I was writing one long monostich line each day for each city I visited. These later became the poem called “C’est la guerre,” which will be in my upcoming book of poems, Trébuchet. The horse mentioned in the poem was visited at Tin Pan Farm and has since died, as I understand it.

  I was also, during that same time, writing prose about the cities I’d visited, which I’ve done for a while, going back as far as ten years, and those decade-old passages were always written in second person. I put a few of the new vignettes online, along with pictures I took on my phone, and after talking in Portland, about a month into the trip, with some friends who’d been reading them, they urged me to do a book, which hadn’t really crossed my mind until that time.

  From there it took on a whole new life, starting with the decision to include more of the moving pieces and ephemera that are essential to a person traveling alone. That’s where the photos and the movies came in. I love movies, I love the noise and clutter of them, and I love talking about Hollywood lore and the mythos behind films. It’s difficult, from a money perspective, to produce a long book with photos and asides and frivolities like that, so it’s hard to say what the book will be when it’s finally a book, but I’ll also always have the director’s cut, so to speak, in my possession.

  Rumpus: When I was last home, I was shocked to see, on Main Street in Delhi, a new storefront with poetry chapbooks in the window—across the street from Tractor Supply. The non-profit space is called Bushel, and you’re one of the founders. Could you talk about the space? Who had the idea, and what do you all hope to do?

  Trebuchet - final cover (1)Schoonebeek: Bushel actually started on Halloween 2015 of all nights. I was at this party in the woods and ran into my friend Anna Moschovakis, whose poems I love, and I was also introduced for the first time to our other three co-founders, Sunnie Joh, Tianna Kennedy, and Mary Skinner. People were kind of partying and chain-smoking indoors around an ashtray while the Mets lost the World Series. Anna started telling us about this empty storefront space in Delhi, and a lot of ideas get broached at parties and die before the sun comes up, but this was one idea that came alive instantly. Turned out the space was this old video store in Delhi where I used to rent a lot of horror movies growing up. That part felt right.

  All five of the founders have these ranging areas of expertise and interest, from poetry and design to film and farming activism and architecture, bird rearing, photography, cocktailing, body healing, shape-note singing. We’re a non-profit collective by name, funded by donations from the community, and we’re also supported by local breweries, bookstores, friends, goods-makers and food-makers. We’re there so people can engage with art, people in the town are hungry for that.

  It’s been an incredible run so far—people come to us with ideas and pitches all the time, we’ve incorporated a few dance classes and massage classes, and we’ve got an upcoming show by upstate-downstate artist Izumi Inoue, who makes woodcuts of the zodiac calendar each year. We sort of have an unofficial bowling league; we just made some pencils and notebooks. And we’re selling poetry books from Canarium Books, Argos Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, and Siglio Press.

  Rumpus: The project has a great communal bent to it. Do you feel like you belong to a community of poets and writers? Who are you reading right now?

  Schoonebeek: Community is a tough word, especially when you think of the ways it’s been co-opted and disabused by politicians. Every time I hear it, I can’t help but hear the echo of that Clinton line, It takes a village to raise a child. How did that work out?

  I came across this Valerie Solanas quote the other day, via Olivia Laing’s book on loneliness (The Lonely City):

  A true community consists of individuals—not mere species members, not couples—respecting each others’ individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally—free spirits in free relation to each other—and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends.

  In some ways all you have to do is read that quote to answer the question of whether or not we have a poetry community.

  I’ve loved Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War for a few weeks now, and I’m still working through C.D. Wright’s new book of prose-about-poetry, The Poet, the Lion etc., I read it about one page a week, as it’s still hard for me to think about her death. Everything Lo Kwa-Mei-en writes gives me blisters, and I really like her new book, The Bees Make Money in the Lion. Also really love Brian Blanchfield’s new book of essays, Proxies, and Olivia Laing’s new book, mentioned above, The Lonely City, which is a kind of treatise on being lonely and making art in New York City. I’ve also, as part of the work I do for money, been rereading quite a few canonical texts, and I still hate “The Dead,” for what that’s worth.

  Rumpus: Come on, you don’t like “The Dead”? I think it might be my favorite story. Convince me I have horrible, misguided taste?

  Schoonebeek: I was being a bit salty, I’m sorry; I do like parts of the story. The ending I’d say is undeniable, and I do feel a flutter in my heart when I’m reading prose and a scene is written so vividly, which Joyce does with that snowfall at the end. It was cracking me up reading it this time around (which I haven’t done since high school) because I was having the same trouble that I had more than a decade ago: it really grates on my nerves, and my politics in some ways, to slog through pages and pages of rich, upper-crust people throwing shade at each other just to arrive at this brilliant ending. To me there has to be another way to do it. I just can’t hang with these long prose works where wealthy people are shitting themselves about propriety and feeling doleful about their lives. It’s like who cares, you still own a horse-drawn carriage and probably have a butler, go fuck yourself.

  Rumpus: You mentioned the work you do for money—is it crass to ask what this is? For so many writers—especially poets—academia can seem like the only option. Do you have advice for younger poets trying to make it?

  Schoonebeek: I usually need to talk about work by first stating that it’s been necessary for me throughout my life. Which is to say it’s always been an imperative, not a choice.

  When I was much younger, growing up in the Catskills, my father from an early point in my teens was strict and sincere about the fact that I needed to get a job, like now. I remember despising him for it at the time. My brother, who is older than me by a few years, had been working a cashier job at the local Grand Union. He’d walk there each day from our house, kind of a far, embarrassing walk for him, and he had to wear the whole uniform and the pins.

  So I stupidly resented my father for impressing work on us at the time. I worked two jobs then: after high school I’d walk to the local paint shop and mix the expensive, brightly colored tint with the white base paint. That was always a troubling experience for me, watching this beautiful tint disappear in a gallon of white paint. But it was also thrilling: you’d vice the paint can into this insane shaker machine and mix it up, and you had to crack it open afterward to make sure you didn’t get the color wrong. Seeing the new color was always a thrill. It was a little taste of alchemy. And I do think that job, to this day, has informed some of the ways I think about colors in my work. I was also at the time, every Friday, a delivery boy of weekly newspapers, and my friends and I would go and secretly smoke cigarettes and see if we could chuck the papers onto people’s porches from the road. I think it might have paid $5 a week.

  What I’m trying to say, in a meandering way, is that work has always been urgent and ever-present and despised for me, but it’s also a double-bind insofar as that same work has taught me more about myself and my aesthetics and my ethics, about what I love and what I can’t stand, than anything else in the world. And it’s also allowed me these moments of camaraderie and friendship that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

  I worked all four years of my undergraduate college education as an ESL tutor in order to help pay for food. When I graduated with a BA, I was so embarrassingly shocked by my debt—which pales in comparison to most of the people I know—that graduate school was never even really a question. I just moved to Brooklyn with three of my childhood friends and started worrying about money. I was stealing a lot during that time, cans of soup and beers and rice from bodegas. I got the shit beaten out of me once in Harlem, after spending the night with a person at the immaculate Columbia campus, when I tried to steal a can of soup from a bodega. They locked the door and slapped the absolute shit out of me.

  I worked as a server at the Bowery Hotel for almost a year. That was one of the more corrupt places I’ve ever been, but I still loved the employees, and the shadiness, and I saw a lot of celebrities embarrass themselves. Sometimes I’d sneak out the uneaten food—the hotel strictly insisted on throwing it away instead of giving to employees or people in need—and walk down Bowery to the J train at 2 a.m. and give it to some of the regulars who slept outside the Mission, waiting for the doors to open. Those two kinds of work always stood glaring out to me.

  Sometime after that a friend helped me land a job at a university press in New York, where I worked for 2.5 years as an editorial assistant and later as a copywriter. It’s a brutal industry, and the horror stories are true. The pay is insulting and the environment is stealthy and breeds resentment. Somewhere during that time I realized that capitalism not only forces but encourages good people to be cruel to one another and that was the day I stopped forgiving capitalism.

  I moved from there to a job as editor at a non-profit literary advocacy organization. They laid me off from a salaried, full-time job that I loved, and I actually still work for them pro-bono as poetry editor after the fact. When people ask me why I say the work needs to be done. That period of time altered terms like career and quality of living for me, and I think in some ways I gave up on the narrative and never really returned.

  Nowadays I work more jobs than I can count, but I’m not unhappy anymore. You don’t realize the extent to which stress, social climbing, sleep deprivation all wear away at you until you push outside a little. I’m a contributing editor to an arts and culture publication these days, I teach workshops outside of academies, I consult on websites for writers and help build them too, I represent writers for speaking engagements, I do photo research, I line edit. I’ve been very lucky in my late twenties to publish some work in some magazines and been invited to read at some venues that have paid me money to be a poet. So in this strange way the careerist world spit me out, and I quit the careerist world and was somehow able to become a writer full-time. I doubt it will last; talk to me in two years and I’ll probably be back in the belly. Which is why I never give advice. There’s absolutely no way to know where you’ll be and yet you have to fight to be where you want to be every day.

  Rumpus: I’m planning an Amtrak trip in the South, and since you’re the Amtrak expert, I have to ask: any recommendations or warnings?

  Schoonebeek: The trains, like everything else involving travel in this country, are dictated by wealth and class. I couldn’t afford the sleeper cars overnight when I traveled across the country via train, so I did all my sleeping in coach. If you take that plunge, bring a sleep mask, earplugs, maybe download that app that plays rainfall. All of that you can knock out for about $6.99. You’ll want something to drape over your body at night. I learned this by way of a fellow poet’s mother, who gifted me a yellow flannel sheet that I carried with me everywhere. The trains are BYOB so long as you don’t get shitfaced in the observation cars, but even then I never saw a person get kicked off the train. On the long rides some people smoke in the bathroom, or between cars; that was never for me. The food is awful, so I also usually had some bag of disheveled nuts and fruit in my hand. In many ways—and maybe this is just me and points to my own misanthropy—the people are the most disruptive and difficult part of long-distance train rides. Everyone told me I’d meet this world of fascinating, outlier types on the trains, and maybe this was partly because I made myself unapproachable in order to document and write about the experience, but I found that most people I talked to on the trains felt intensely wronged by the trains. There wasn’t enough Internet, their cell phones wouldn’t charge. It was almost like the trains were a sentence placed upon them. And then there was this whole other squad of people who seemed aggressively blasé, like they were in some American limbo. I’m remembering two people who had an hours-long conversation about where to buy wallets, hours and hours, while outside the window the most beautiful Texas desert I’d ever seen was roiling past.

  Rumpus: How would you describe Trébuchet, your upcoming collection?

  Schoonebeek: A trébuchet is by definition a machine and a weapon, it’s the catapult that was used to break down walls and barriers during medieval wars. It’s also my second book of poems, the follow-up to my debut, American Barricade, and I think it’s deliberately clapping back at my first book. There’s the barricade and then there’s the weapon that breaks through the barricade. Trébuchet is a departure from the obsessions that defined AB, which was invested in the politics of family dynamics and the insistence in this country on obtaining power and wealth. Trébuchet is more combative and incendiary. It tackles contemporary politics in a more direct, personal way. It addresses gun violence, poverty, fascism, surveillance, white privilege, the protest movement, the failures of the poetry community, censorship, ahistorical America, technology, torture, net neutrality. If American Barricade was a book that wanted to kick open a door, Trébuchet is a book that wants to pry that door off its hinges.

• PEN America - https://pen.org/user/danniel-schoonebeek/

  Danniel Schoonebeek is the editor of the PEN Poetry Series. His first book of poems, American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014), was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. His second collection of poems, Trébuchet, was a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in 2016.

  In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and beginning in late 2017 he will fulfill an eight-month residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

• Danniel Schoonebeek Website - http://dannielschoonebeek.com/

  BIO & CONTACT

  Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of Trébuchet, winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series and published by University of Georgia Press in 2016.

  His first book of poems, American Barricade, was published by YesYes Books in 2014 and named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers, as well as “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review.

  In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and recent work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Tin House.

  His poems have been featured in the anthologies Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015), Best American Experimental Writing (Omnidawn, 2014), and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean, 2014). A recipient of awards and honors from Poets House, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Oregon State University, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude, he has been the editor of the PEN Poetry Series since 2013 and (occasionally) hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn.

  He is also a co-organizer and founding member of the non-profit arts space Bushel, located in the low-population, upstate New York village of Delhi.

  Reading, workshop, and lecture representation: Blue Flower Arts
  Literary gent: Marya Spence, Janklow and Nesbit
  Contact: danniel.schoonebeek@gmail.com

• OmniVerse - http://omniverse.us/barbara-claire-freeman-interviews-danniel-schoonebeek/

  Barbara Claire Freeman interviews Danniel Schoonebeek

  Danniel Schoonebeek - Photo Credit Trod KochDanniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014), was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and his second collection of poems, Trébuchet, was a 2015 National Poetry Series selection and is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. He hosts theHatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and edits the PEN Poetry Series. Poor Claudia will release his latest book, a travelogue called C’est la guerre.

  Photo: Trod Koch

  barbaraclaire photeBarbara Claire Freeman is a literary critic and professor of literature who has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. She is the author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (U.C. Press), among many other works of literary theory and criticism. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at Harvard, she teaches creative writing in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Incivilities (Counterpath Press, 2009) and two chapbooks: St. Ursula’s Silence (Instance Press, 2010) and #343 (Chapvelope Press, 2014). Selections from these collections won the Boston Review/Discovery Prize and the Campbell Corner Prize (Sarah Lawrence College). Every Day But Tuesday, her second collection of poems, is just out from Omnidawn Press (Fall, 2015). New work is forthcoming in Fence, Lana Turner, and Prelude. She is the publisher of Minus A Press.

  Barbara Claire Freeman: I finished reading the proofs for C’est la guerre and I’m awe-struck: congratulations on this amazing book. It begins in 2013, just after you’ve been laid off from your job at a New York City publishing house; that same day you begin booking a national tour in support of American Barricade, your first book of poems, which is due out the following year. C’est la guerre tells the story of what happens during the seventy-two days that you travel the country, primarily via Amtrak train. It is at once a travelogue, an epic, a memoir, and a searing portrait of American cities and life, dislocating generic distinctions even as it arises from and describes experiences of dislocation: “…and when they lay you off in America you’ll disappear into the very liver of the country. What’s the pickled gizzard of late capitalism taste like in Georgia, how many pounds of dead skin can you leave in the Texas desert?” So tell me: how many pounds of skin did you leave in Texas? What would you like readers to know about this book?

  Danniel Schoonebeek: I’m glad we’re starting with Texas. Texas was a hinge moment during that tour, which I only realized after it was over. A few of my convictions about myself broke down in Houston and Austin, I made a few decisions I didn’t necessarily want to make, and the generosity people were showing me was jarring in a way. I met a stranger with whom I became close in less than 24 hours, I met two poets who are both still friends, it was almost perversely intimate, and I reconnected with a person I loved very briefly a year before.

  Leaving all that behind, for more heat and landscape, took it out of me a little bit. I’d say I left a lot of dead skin in Texas. The train from Austin to Tucson was the longest ride of the whole trip, something like 27 hours. In the back of my head I thought I might just never go back to New York, it would be such a middle finger to all the forces that crossed me, you know, poof he was gone and he found a better life. I think Texas was the state where that feeling was at full throttle. But I say this sitting in New York, so you can see how that turned out.

  What do I want people to know about this book? It’s me, it’s the person I am, but it’s also a person I’ve ceased being, or an incomplete version of myself that I didn’t want to be anymore, which is part of how the decision to write the book came about. The book is written in a form called auto-portraiture, with Edouard Levé playing my Virgil, and there’s a lot of emphasis on being exhaustively candid, not flinching in the face of your worst thoughts and sensations. I don’t think I ever speak disparagingly of anyone in the book, but I tried to do justice to the conflicts I felt in the present, including the uncontrollability of memory and the flaring up of doubt and suspicion. The book is all about portraying the present, the mind unfolding in real time. If I were to write a sequel to this book, I’d write entirely about deliberation, and it’d have to be called something like After Spending A Lot of Time With My Thoughts I’ve Decided This is In Fact the Very Reason I Love All of You.

  BCF: Great title! That would also be a book I’d like to read. Tell us more about the book’s two parts and what happens in Part Two.

  DS: Part One is written in second person, which is anathema for some people, especially devout fiction writers, but the decision came about deliberately. When I first moved to Brooklyn, back in 2008, I carried this notebook around with me everywhere I went, and the idea was I wrote about every address that I visited in the city, whether it was a bodega or central booking or a house party or a job. From day one that journal was written in second person, so in a way I wanted to continue that tradition, because CLG wouldn’t exist without that previous layer of writing.

  I guess I’d call myself an argumentative guy. I like to sit in repose and suss out the angles of an issue or an idea, and when I argue I always use the rhetorical “you.” C’est la guerre’s first sentence, “the question is whether you vanish when they lay you off in America,” is a rhetorical opening. Rhetorical questions are by nature the most aggressive questions, I think. “When they kick down your front door / how you gonna come / with your hands on your head / or on the trigger of your gun,” that sort of question. But I don’t mean for the second person to be anyone other than me, I don’t mean for Barbara Claire Freeman to feel like she’s being told what she’s doing. The second person in CLG is how I chose to cordon myself off for examination, which I think is something I learned from Frank Bidart’s poetry. He’s always speaking to a former self, or a self under fire.

  Part Two shifts abruptly to first person, and even though there’s only about five readings as part of the tail end of the tour, chronologically the book still covers about a month of time I spent in Portland, a cabin in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks in Oregon, and about ten days in Denver, with a few other cities in there as well. Part Two zeroes in and tries to answer the rhetorical questions laid out in the first part of the book. The writing is still discursive, but I think it’s also determined to account for its shortcomings. A close friend asked me recently if I think the book is a penance, and no, I still don’t. I think the book is a record of who I was, and what the poetry community was, and those are both things that continue to evolve.

  BCF: I’m struck by your emphasis on a personal and collective “was-ness” that may or may not be carrying on into the present. As editor of the PEN Poetry Series and host of the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn you’re attuned to the changes in the landscapes and soundscapes of contemporary American poetry. Are there changes that seem particularly striking to you since the time in which the book occurs? In other words, why did you choose the past tense to describe this project?

  DS: It’s a sad coincidence that the first and last readings in C’est la guerre happen at Mellow Pages Library, which recently closed after a pretty amazing run. It’s a New York feeling, being in this meat grinder where vital parts of your community and your culture emerge and even as they’re happening you feel them drifting away. In New York you hear people wax elegiac about neighborhoods, architecture, the closing of a beloved bar or restaurant. I do that pose a little bit in CLG when I’m talking about Dumont, which was my favorite restaurant in Brooklyn. I don’t know if anyone else found the place romantic, maybe I just went there with a lot of old sweethearts. On the surface it was this labored, brazen success. And then you find out beneath the façade that the restaurant is deeply in debt and the owner of the place commits suicide in a parking lot in Pennsylvania. That dynamic feels like an accurate analogy for the CLG tour, albeit darkly, and also an accurate way of scoffing at America, at least from an insider’s perspective.

  Seeing series close down, spaces close up, journals disappear, presses fall apart, poets move away, I pause each time it happens. The PEN Poetry Series was slated to decompose after I was laid off. I believe in what the organization has meant to poets over the last ninety years, and I’ve seen firsthand what it means to living poets today. So the series was basically my severance package. I realize, answering this question, that I have some issues with longevity, permanence, legacy, posterity, the big questions. CLG is about disappearing, both as a threat and as a deep, embodied fear.

  This generation of poets refuses to take shit, both in and out of poetry. We’re politicized, and no one seems to want to discover the soul anymore, at least not in the work that people send to me. That very 90’s aspiration of looking at a trio of piebald mares and unearthing some nugget of wisdom about yourself is maybe dying. It’ll come back, it’ll die again, that’s the war. But right now all the work I read is written by people trying to unfuck themselves, that’s maybe the best way to put it. I think when I left in 2013 a lot of poets were funny, and then the world intervened. I see a lot of funny poets trying to unfuck themselves now too.

  BCF: I’d love to know more about “auto-portraiture.” Who is Edouard Levé and how are you adapting his work? And I’m intrigued by your reference to Virgil. Is CLG also a hellscape?

  DS: Edouard Levé was a French writer and photographer; actually I’d never heard his name until a friend gave me a copy of Autoportrait for my birthday. With the notebook mentioned above, I’d already been documenting myself before I read Levé, but I loved Levé’s insistence that his book was automatic. I think he means something very different from “automatic writing,” which lionizes the “first thought best thought” mantra that’s always seemed like sloganeering to me and has nothing to do with writing. I think Levé’s sentences are in fact very sussed, very honed, and people say the same about my sentences sometimes. Levé’s whole emphasis in Autoportrait is on depiction: he’s obsessed with automatically portraying the self, that is, not trying to revise the portrayal of oneself for an audience. Which is of course impossible, but Levé really drills into himself in that book, and with all the events that take place in CLG, I knew I needed to drill too. Emerson’s journals, which I studied a bit in college, should also be on the record here, they’re an interesting study in performance of the self. The famous example is that his son dies of scarlet fever and a few minutes later, before the kid’s even cold, Emerson goes and records his experience in his journal. That’s a version of drilling too, though I’m not sure I buy what Ralph’s selling. I prefer Levé because Levé is a little too real. This is the same guy who wrote a book called Suicide and then killed himself a few days later.

  So I wouldn’t say I’m adapting Levé so much as Levé is pointing a way through the grass, which is why I call him my Virgil. Up until saying that I hadn’t paid much lip service to the hellscape analogy, but it’s all there isn’t it, I’m with you. I also like that suggestion because writing a book that’s only divided into Part One and Part Two inevitably means I only rack up hell and purgatory in CLG, which, as much as I might be joking when I say it, that’s actually my vision of how this book passes. There’s no paradise at the end, there’s not even a Satan frozen in ice. There’s just the path you traveled and there’s just you looking back at it, in other words a life. I’d be remiss not to give a huge shout-out to Eileen Myles’s Inferno, which queers Dante more overtly and is also broken into three movements more explicitly. Eileen, I think more than anyone, along with maybe James Agee, has taught me a world about sentences. Refusing the sentence, I mean.

  It’s important to me that the social, cultural, and economic glimpses of American life poke through the personal narrative in CLG, but I was aware from day one that that wasn’t necessarily the story. I didn’t set out to write a political exposé, though I do speak pretty disparagingly of Amtrak, but the book is meant to be more of an exposé of the self, “the American self” included. We’re a very anxious country, which pays off big when we manage to be generous and open. I wanted to shine a light on how run down everyone seemed in 2013, myself included, but also show how much people can toss their anxiety aside.

  BCF: The title C’est la guerre reminds me of American Barricade, the title of your first book of poems, (YesYes Books, 2014). Here “la guerre” takes the place of “Barricade”; both books portray the divisions and barriers that populate this country and its subjects. America, barricades, love, and war (or “la guerre” since the word appears in French): these topics seem central to your work as a poet and as a cultural critic. You cite the title near the end of part one. The narrator is at a reading in Los Angeles with a former lover/poet/war-buddy: “For months you needed to shuffle the papers and recite the lines to yourself: she’s open marriage, not poly, ex-drinker, no, sober, seven years your elder, obsessed with black holes, writes poetry a hundred white dwarfs away from your own. Told yourself that’s a riot list of ways you’ll never love a person. And yet here she is standing above you in a town you could never love, split New York almost the same day they laid you off, and she’s walked you into yourself as into the red fog once more, building a solidarity out of toothpicks, season upon season. C’est la guerre, you tell her. And so what if you’re war buddies.” Families and the barricades that do and don’t bind them; love, lovers, and the wars that disrupt and connect a community of poets—is this one way of thinking about the links that connect your first and second books?

  DS: Close friends know me as an occasional talker, and one of the things I love to talk about, painting big broad strokes, is how artists’ bodies of work evolve and speak to one another across their chronologies. You’ve got me to dead to rights that C’est la guerre, as a title, points directly at the title of my first book of poems, American Barricade. First I’ll say that I wanted to fuck with the established narrative of when a writer is permitted to write the memoir, which is usually around book three or four, or like immediately after you win the Pulitzer or Obama asks you to read at his inauguration. Even then my suspicion is that no one wants to write the memoir, there’s just an editor who convinces you to do it, it’s big five marketing. To that end there’s kind of a wryness in CLG, because the events of the book all take place during October, November, and December 2013, before American Barricade was even out, which was another kind of meddling, doing the book tour before the book is published.

  The CLG title itself comes from the script of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. That becomes explicit in Part Two, as I saw the movie for the first time, on the big screen, in Portland. American Barricade, the title, is also lifted from Portland, I’ll leave that ambiguous, but that’s another way the two titles talk to each other. The phrase itself, “c’est la guerre,” comes from the first World War. The strain on resources caused everyday French life, from the trains to the factories to the electricity, to malfunction or function like garbage. So the phrase, much like “c’est la vie,” which is a phrase that feels somehow American, probably because of Chuck Berry, is a kind of resigned toast to a greater, incalculable sorrow. You’re an hour late to meet a friend because the trains are transporting troops to the front, that’s the war. You’re laid off from the dream job you landed at age 26, that’s the war.

  BCF: What’s the relationship between your prose in C’est la guerre and your poetry?

  DS: I like not knowing the answer to that question and I like working through that question. When I write prose I can feel myself trying to squirm free, like my shirt is on backward. Other times it feels like trying to fire a round in a very small room, maybe the bullet just goes into the wall, maybe it’ll ricochet for an hour. That scene from The Shining, where Jack is bouncing the tennis ball off the wall in that huge, echoing room, that’s another sad but true analogy. I’m obsessed with false starts, failed attempts, repetitions, and that comes out a lot in my end-stopped poems and my prose too. In the prose I feel that impulse most vividly in the anaphoras. Sometimes I like to try a sentence three or four different ways, with the reader privy to the different tries, before moving along. I do that because it’s how I talk—I’m a person who needs to poke an idea from a few different vantage points—but I also do it because I used to play music every day before I started writing every day, so I think it’s habit. I love that music continues to fail to drive the band crazy, even though a big chunk of music history is bands playing the same phrases over and over, from verse to chorus back to verse. But there’s a momentum that builds through repeating phrases, and I think that’s the other thing my prose has in common with my poems, they’re both pushed along by a beat you can’t hear. I love James Agee’s prose because Agee gets so sincerely overwhelmed inside his momentum that he often loses control of the sentence and stops making sense. Faulkner too, though his prose has always felt way more atmospheric to me, sort of like shoegaze music, like the sentences are delirious, whereas Agee is ripping up floorboards faster than he can build them. Momentum, especially in American Barricade, is a fact of the poems, and I often say that a lot of my poems are just sentences with the punctuation completely ripped out, so the ear has to locate the momentum without any signposts to help the reader.

  BCF: Have you continued to write poetry while composing CLG?

  DS: All the time, yeah. I’m finishing the manuscript of my second book of poems, Trébuchet. That title occupies an interesting place in the discussion of the chronology of titles above.

  What I love about writing prose is that the studio feels roomier, at least to me, and I can walk around the space and pick up this object and put it down or look into camera 2 or lie down on the floor or swing around a rope if I want. All while writing the sentences. I do a version of that same thing when I write poetry, but it’s physical, I pace around the studio thinking over the lines. In prose the pacing is the prose. And I love doing things like making a smash cut to dialogue without giving any context. At the end of a long, tangential passage about the heritage of Puritan maniacs, someone shouts, “who gives a damn!,” but the quote isn’t attributed to anyone (it’s actually the name of a Sham 69 song), and that interruption forces the camera to change direction and focus on something else and the momentum halts and picks up again.

  For whatever reason, that’s not at all how I write poetry. Off the top of my head, I’d say it’s possible I write prose in a New York School poetry lineage, ponging all over the place, but that’s not my poetry lineage. Whenever I write poems I want them to be hotly focused on the matter at hand, kind of like someone telling a story around a fire. If you’ve ever witnessed a great fire story, it’s not exactly that diversions aren’t allowed, they’re very much a part of the art, but everything is exact, almost like telling a joke. You have to nail it. Prose to me is a loving space because I can smash it and the threads can show. Prose is like throwing a watermelon off a roof.

  BCF: Seems to me that “This Neverender,” the poem that’s included below in this interview, does an amazing job of “throwing watermelons off roofs.” What occasioned it?

  DS: I’ve talked about this strange fact a bit before: I write a few poems that are, to me at least, ongoing collaborations with Lorca and Mandelstam. Neither poet is necessarily a towering poet for me, I love their work and I have problems with their work, but whenever I read their poems there’s this hallucinatory aspect to my reaction. So I set up this schema, which is still evolving, where I try to distill myself through certain of their poems and also write a poem of my own in the process. With “This Neverender,” which was originally published in Bat City Review, I recorded myself reading Mandelstam’s “[Limping like a clock on her left leg],” the Merwin translation, and layered the recording with a series of audio patches, some of them pitch modulators and some of them distortion, until the recording became indecipherable. It’s an eery clip, it sounds a bit like a black box recording.

  “This Neverender” was written by playing that recording over and over again and trying to “translate” the indecipherable sounds into a poem, with the ear more or less grafting the language it hears onto rhythms and tones. The title, in my personal memory bank, was taken from a punk band I remember from about ten years ago—I don’t think they lasted very long—and I believe they snipped it from another band as well. I liked the idea of the title being passed along like that, and I felt some kinship with the phrase, like it claims ownership over something that’s infinite, either a burden or a tradition. It’s both sad and defiant, which is also kind of my vantage point on love poems, of which I write very few, but for me “This Neverender” is also a love poem, or maybe rather a breakup poem, and not just because of the overt mentions of love. Every now and then when a relationship ends, one of the most painful aspects is that it occurs within the vacuum of late capitalism. Like you still have to bundle up your tools and your weapons and lug yourself back to the grocery story or the casino and keep accumulating experience and going to church and paying your taxes.

  BCF: Thanks, Danniel. Perhaps we should let the poem have the last word and begin to end the conversation here?

  DS: I’ll talk about the poem a bit and then let the poem do the talking. I remember there being some mystery, in the town where I grew up, around whether or not I was baptised as a kid. I have zero memory of it ever happening, ditto for my parents, but there was this boy who always swore there was a picture of me being baptised on a corkboard in his church. I never saw it, but I think growing up the looming question of god, or maybe the looming over-the-shoulder presence of god, was something that troubled me. I remember a few childhood instances of walking by trash on the side of the road, not picking it up, but then stopping a few paces later, turning around, picking it up and carrying it with me to a trash can. I don’t think I did this because I thought it was the right thing to do, I think I did it because I feared the butterfly effect of not doing the right thing.

  These god-concerns have carried over into some of my writing, especially in the American Barricade poems, and I think they’ll always be there to some extent. The word “god” is a kind of pixelated smear, or a weird burnt-hair smell that follows you around. I’m obviously compelled by problems within power-driven economic systems, family dynamics, and even the arts, and “god” in some ways, however you define that word, can be defined as the endgame of a lot of those pursuits. I have no idea if I “believe in a god,” no one cares if I do or don’t, and furthermore the words have always melted apart in my mind when I try to think them through. I’ve always been drawn to phrases like “god’s land,” “god’s glory,” “the wealth of god.” They all reinforce a simpering capitalist urge to me.

  The last line in “This Neverender” calls back to the earlier “stranglehold” line, in which a sense of doom is tossed forth by suggesting that a choking, as foretold by a mob, is coming one’s way, but the fact of the choking is the least of one’s troubles. The poem ends—I suppose this is quite bleak, if not sardonic—on the thought that maybe the glory of god is one in which god has the mercy of just choking you out and that’s in fact the most of your problems. Thanks, Barbara.

  THIS NEVERENDER

  There’s a saw discontinues the loved who are void I have seen it.

  I have seen it as I have seen from the mess hall
  their seventh-degree burns rise again.

  As I have seen in the bagnio my consumption it rises again.

  This existence in which I blame god on the tree line through which you no longer intrude.

  This ending in which I withdraw myself from your banks but I’ve seen it.

  When I return from you like a failed occupation.

  And I stalk your geese who make laughingstock of my enemies.

  And into their villages.
  And the clothes I wear gasoline.

  There’s a love that persuades you I’ve seen it:
  beating to death a politico

  on the steps of the white house for another half century

  will equal a riot
  on behalf of the strange who were loved

  who are void
  but I’ve loved it.

  I have loved it as I have loved the mobs who are coming to disfigure my liberty.

  Who say a stranglehold’s coming for me
  that cares least for my throat.

  And this existence in which I blame money on the lowland into which you won’t cloud.

  And they tell me god’s wealth is my throat within reach but I’ve seen it.

  I have seen it as I have seen you bed down in a pauper’s grave
  and the worms tell you god is sketch.

  I have seen them announce
  the airstrikes are here for your mess halls

  but I can’t say if I felt the compunction.

  If I did I was young.

  Or if I did I was you.

  And god’s wealth was my throat within reach.

• Please Excuse This Poem - http://pleaseexcusethispoem.tumblr.com/post/111286681460/q-a-with-danniel-schoonebeek

  Q & A with Danniel Schoonebeek
  image

  Danniel Schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) and a chapbook, Family Album (Poor Claudia, 2013). His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, BOMB, Indiana Review, Guernica, jubilat, Verse Daily, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. A recipient of residencies and fellowships from Poets House, the Juniper Institute, Summer Literary Seminars, and Oregon State University, he writes a column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn, and edits the PEN Poetry Series.

  * * *

  First poems you read or loved:

  When I was a child, I remember opening a book called I Gave My Mom a Castle. Maybe that title felt like an admission of guilt to me at the time. And into my twenties I sometimes called up the end of a poem in that book, “leave me two dogs waiting at the top of the stairs,” which I misremembered throughout my twenties as “leave me two girls waiting at the top of the stairs.” I think the first poem for which I felt love, which is different from feeling deathless or incendiary in front of a poem, was “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime.” That was the first time a poem touched a grief I’d feared nothing could articulate, and for that reason I fell in love. The first poems in front of which I felt deathless were Neruda’s love poems, oddly because and not in spite of their quick fires. I encourage you to steal a copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair from a chain store if you get the chance. The first poem that made me feel incendiary was “l(a” by E.E. Cummings. Before that it’d never occurred to me that a poem, a machine built out of language, could break the rules of the machine by being unspeakable.

  Favorite poems or book of poems:

  This is like asking a bricklayer which brick stays with her the longest. Which is to say they all stay with your somewhere, usually in the form of scrapes on your arms, for better or worse for those arms. The book of poetry I’ve read most in my life is probably the Carcanet edition of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song and The Orchard, the one with the terrifying Egyptian geese on the cover.

  What was the last book of poems you read:

  What was the last book of poems you read?

  Your favorite motto / quote:

  Admittedly I feel low when I keep favorites. It’s a way of ranking the world toward which I feel a resistance. It feels like I’m getting better if I draw a blank when asked this question. What I can tell you are a few quotes that I can’t shake out of my head this past year.

  In Cotton Tenants, James Agee writes: “A civilization which for any reason puts a human life at a disadvantage; or a civilization that can exist only by putting human life at a disadvantage; is worthy neither of the name nor of continuance.”

  Here’s John Steinbeck’s son talking about whether or not his father fictionalized large swaths of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s 1962 book about traveling the country in a truck “in search of America”: “Even Steinbeck’s son John said he was convinced that his father never talked to many of the people he wrote about, and added, ‘He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit.’”

  Your favorite occupation / hobby:

  I’ve worked as a paperboy, a sales clerk, a field hand, a tutor, a housepainter, a waiter, a gardener, a critic, a bartender, an assistant, a roofer, a copywriter, a dish washer. In my life I’ve yet to find a job where the money I earn in two weeks feels commensurate to the amount of life I’ve felt was taken from me by the job. That’s the failure of capitalism to me: I love working, but not when the math is broken. There’s a terrifying, inflammable feeling when you do the numbers and see that you’re making something like $115 a day as a copywriter. And then you work three years on a poem and never earn a dime and that’s invaluable, in both senses of the word. Because writing the poem changes the room in which you wrote it, which changes the body inside the room, which changes the street into which the body enters, which changes the city that is likewise composed of streets. I wonder if poets have hobbies, I wonder if they ever did. There’s a pile of postcards laid out in front of me on the table. Writing to people all over the country is work and not leisure and it’s work I love for which I’m paid nothing.

  Your idea of happiness:

  Often when I’m on trains I believe all my friends will gather some night at a long wooden table, no family, and pass around finger foods or paintings or jars full of bathtub liquor, whatever they’ve worked on and want their friends to handle, and there will be hours of storytelling and no one will ask a question, and of course a few of them will start smoking, I always start smoking, but that won’t drive anyone out of the room, because a film of our deaths will be playing slowly on a canvas behind us, and when one of us dies that friend has to pick up her hat or his jacket and give everyone left in the room a salute, some last gesture of the body, and then they have to leave the room and go look for the next table. I feel very sorry for the last person left in that room.

  Your idea of misery:

  Bringing a child into the world who didn’t ask to be brought into the world, possibly because I follow a religion that says so, raising that child in poverty, and uneducated, watching them dismember the world with their outrage at these facts, these facts which are no fault of their own, but mine, and watching this child conduct these very same miseries, because the house and the culture in which they were raised didn’t hand them any other definition of how a life is committed.

  Your favorite virtue:

  “Ledger (Bildungsroman)” is a poem about my father, before the birth of his first child, as he stands on the verge of a working class life, a family life, a life in which he abandons art for the demands of money and raising children. He was a talented painter when he was young, and I’ve always carried around a tincture of guilt, bewilderment, resentment, and respect that he abandoned his art, intoxication, and city life in order to raise a family as best he could. If there’s a virtue I’m pivoting around here, it’s the virtue of people who recognize the stakes of a situation they’ve been instrumental in creating in the world and do not shy away from it. The poem is likewise about fatalism, about whether or not one can avoid becoming one’s father, for which I have no answer but to the churn the very question of inheritance and fatalism through the gearworks of art itself. And maybe never growing a beard.

  What you appreciate the most in your friends:

  Disbelief.

  Your favorite prose authors:

  Nope.

  Your favorite artist or musician:

  My reasoning behind my answer to this (P R I N C E) is probably too offensive.

  The natural talent you would most like to have:

  Lack of a fear of dying before I’ve finished the work I want to finish before I’m dead.

  What is your present state of mind:

  I feel homeless and jobless and 73% in love, all of which are facts and not states.

  What can’t you tolerate:

  Each day arrives with a new parcel of injustices under its arm. A woman once dumped me on a street corner for saying “every day there’s a struggle” after she knelt down and grumbled about tying her shoelaces. Some days it’s living in a country where everything is for sale and nobody can afford it. You’re thinking this thought and then a person across the room starts shouting with food in his mouth. Some days what’s intolerable is our dismissal of the world we’re not stopping ourselves from ruining. Some days it’s a baby crying on a moving train. Or the policemen who walk. The saints among us are the ones who can feel blessed when each day arrives with its own injustices, but these same days have a way of making fools of these same people.

  What is your favorite food or drink:

  Do you ever feel so exhausted by the demands of hunger that feeding your own body becomes oppressive? Asking this question disgusts me and that’s why it interests me. Do other Americans feels this way? It seems impossible to me that anyone feels this way in Austria. And I find that the only times I enjoy eating are when I’m alone or on a date at a restaurant. That’s the idea, isn’t it. You’re supposed to enjoy eating. If it were up to me, dinner would always be in black and white. I like seeing which tables are full, who’s leaving, how the wait staff is feeling, which order is up, what’s on the walls, what my date is wearing, how much they’ve marked up the chicken, how nervous I am, who’s eavesdropping on my conversation. That’s when I feel like I live in this country. There’s never enough conflict when I eat dinner with friends at a restaurant. It’s like a boring collaboration, and it saddens me when people slow. It’s always a Saturday or a poetry reading when I feel so appalled by having taste that I’d just as soon eat a handful of vitamins and a slice of bread for dinner. The body strikes me as greedy during these hours. Isn’t there enough to taste in the room that I don’t have to place a cracker on my tongue?

  What is your least favorite word:

  One phenomenon that gives me a twinge of misery is when our present-day language of industry or technology reaches back into history and makes a poem ridiculous. In Herman Melville’s “The Berg,” a poem about a ship hitting an iceberg, he writes about “ice-cubes” falling on the deck after the collision. The ice-cubes are meant to be huge and ominous and the poor guy died about twenty years before Americans started buying refrigerators. Robert Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” famously ends blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. This poem is almost a commentary upon itself in this regard, because it also contains the line “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” And I remember seeing C.K. Williams read once. He closed with this long poem about a bird, and the poem had a lot of twitters at the end of it. I’m not saying this isn’t the way it should be, that language shouldn’t go back in time and embarrass poets. But I still feel miserable when I see it happen in living time.

  What is your favorite word:

  I stared at this question for ten minutes and I have no idea how to answer it without going haywire.

  –questions answered December 11, 2013

• Ampersand Review - http://ampersandreview.com/2014/08/an-interview-with-danniel-schoonebeek-by-darby-laine/

  AN INTERVIEW WITH DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK, by darby laine
  Published on August 18, 03:30 AM

  schoonebeek

  I had a brief encounter with Danniel Schoonebeek in Seattle around AWP this year. I didn’t know the guy was reading and at the evening point of an AWP day such a fact is meaningless. Danniel had a FUCK ‘EM tote bag over his shoulder and it caught up the crook of my mouth as a reflection of my mood. I was even compelled to say, “hey nice bag man.” I interrupted his conversation for such; as also reflected my mood. Danniel caught my attention again when it turned out he was reading for YesYes Books. Not everyone who gets up to read poetry commands your tired attention.

  When Danniel read I pegged him for a Yankee. Through my biased cultural experience, I interpreted his presence, confidence, good posture, etc., into “he’s from somewhere round New England town, maybe Boston or New York. No accent though; too well-read.” So my accompanying thought was that he was highly educated because his poems are just as confident and striking as his presence; with the feel of being built as secure as a barricade against something – impenetrable and unmoving with a few words I had never heard, but what I did recognize was a kind of American blues standard piece constructed with words and a voice, difficult-to-name sentiments I somehow know better than any golden oldie.

  This voice he has written is so strong. The weight of this man’s words are to be heard, river stones falling out of the guy’s mouth. As he read on I considered Ivy League potential and how cultured the man’s parents must be, but why was I busy thinking such petty things?

  I’ve traveled America extensively. I’m 31 years old and I’ve just started to discover talented poets of my own generation. I am ecstatic to learn that American Millennials even have poets. I want to know where they came from and how they managed to grow up in this country, in the dusk and dawn of the 21st century. The cultural influences of one American are not the same for another; apply the dramatic issues at hand for my generation of peers and the possibilities are endless. A lot of my peers, the intelligent, the creative, the passionate are going mad in really boring ways, or sad, or both, or maybe they’ve held on to some moral ground despite all evidence to the contrary. But either way we are in great need, just as every generation, for our own poetry. Given this century’s level of cacophony the authentic is difficult to find in anything.

  I grew up thinking the old tomes of my public schooling (or in my case Military Kid schooling) inferred somehow that this type of culturally relevant and revealing writing didn’t really happen any more. In high school, cling nostalgically to the beats, Salinger or Hemingway if you really need. Observant girl? Sprinkle in some Plath and Sexton. Not that I don’t love most of these things; I am, after all, a product of that education and this country.

  All of my biases being thus stated I think the interview below will reveal why Schoonebeek’s work deserves your attention. I was happy to find out that most of my assumptions were wrong. Schoonebeek is a publicly educated man and recognizes the decision to be so, a large, often moral question amongst my peers when considering the state of educational affairs in this country. The refinement of this poetry with its salted and dusty storytelling I have found to be a balm against a deep personal and collective concern for my position in time and country: here I have intelligent, relatable validation for a worldy existence that is too often too awkward. Danniel’s instinct is impressive, but instinct is a difficult thing to get into so you should probably read the man’s words, though I refer more to his poetry over anything including the interview below:

  Darby Laine: I want so badly to call your book Millennial Americana. I will do so partially tongue-in-cheek, until we’ve discussed those terms and I figure out just exactly what the hell I mean. It’s important to me because the flailing culture I was born into concerns me very much. Your poetry lacks the easier attitudes of cynicism and sarcasm that so many of my intelligent peers have given into by mere force of culture, by being raised in late 20th century America. Are you actually a part of the so-named Millennial Generation? Could you tell me a bit of your personal history, your upbringing, surrounding culture and influences?

  Danniel Schoonebeek: I’m a Millennial by definition, yes. Born 1986, though I’d never call myself by that name.

  I lived eighteen years of my life in a village in the Catskills, population 3,008. Sometimes calling it a gasoline town or a cow town—three gas stations within a quarter mile of each other and at one time there were more cows in the village than people. There’s a powerful milk factory. Often it felt like the town was ruled by a kingpin, a wealthy man who made his money selling astroturf. I found a castle in the woods there once; it burned down a few days later.

  This was the west bank of the Delaware River. A racist and homophobic and mostly poor community. But also filled with liberals, anti-frackers, people who held conscientious objector workshops in their furnace rooms. A village drunk named Tater.

  I grew up listening to punk, hitting drums in bands. That’s part of how I learned to be in conflict as a praxis.

  It’s a village that feels like something washed up on the shore of the culture. The nature there feels a century behind. Railroad tracks that have fallen out of use and crumbling barns. Bad winters, violent. It was an upbringing where everyone wanted to break out. The world is happening elsewhere, that’s how it felt for seventeen years. And then some of us returned, got married, lost our jobs, became drunks, had kids, put down roots. In some parlance the word for this is townie. All of this, to say nothing of books, was an education.

  DL: How did your early environment influence how seriously you could pursue literary goals?

  DS: It was an arts family, growing up. Father was a painter, now a photographer. Sister was a poet herself, now a mother. Mother read, still reads. Brother is a painter to this day. All three of the children played instruments. Flutes, cellos, guitars, drums, an alto saxophone rusting in the basement. Parents were baby boomers, hippies with beards and accents, and I think they moved the family to the Catskills to stay morally stubborn and raise children in a place that wasn’t all money all the time.

  We weren’t a family with money, so I never attended the money schools. But my English teachers in high school were goading and critical and they created room for me to become arrogant, which I think’s important.

  Around this time I started stealing a lot. One teacher got a kick out of this, and every Monday when we saw each other I’d say something like, I stole Neruda this weekend or I stole 99 Poems. When I started writing poetry everyone seemed to respect it, maybe in the way one respects an animal with rabies, but my friends also mocked me for writing poetry and they really don’t support me to this day, which is an adversity I try to be grateful for. Family sometimes asks why I don’t write music anymore, you had such talent. Strangely I think these conflicts helped me bolster conviction about the work I was making. Every now and then they still do.

  DL: And I am absolutely assuming that you have a degree (or two or three), and correct me if I’m wrong, but where did you continue your studies and what did you study?

  DS: I don’t hold any master’s degrees, if that’s what you’re asking. I finished with academia about six years ago, with degrees in literature and poetry from a public institution, and I haven’t paid money to study since.

  DL: The way you make the written language function through form is impressive:

  “You’re a runt with a mouth more foul than gash father told me

  you’re a curse word

  for dirt

  You’re worse”

  The culture and vernacular you draw from keeps the reader at home yet the overall effect is not necessarily comfortable; the poems individually and the book at large create feelings of tension. Is this your typical style of writing, or is the tension created between form and language particularly relevant to American Barricade?

  DS: I try to stay in a place where I’m a stranger to language, like finding a pile of weird sticks in the woods, so there’s improvisational energy, a kind of conflict of propulsion, in seeing how one picks the words up off the ground and speaks them ex nihilo. One premise of capitalism is that you can solve the word problem if you traffic in wares that people want, and they want your wares because your wares make their lives more comfortable. That’s why food is fascinating in this country. The food we love most in fact makes our lives terrible, but there’s gratification in punishing yourself with fast food. Maybe good art to me is like slow food that doesn’t kill you, drinking a soda over the course of a year but it actually teaches you empathy.

  To arrive at that place you need to be agitated. That kind of thrumming string. Whitman, of all people, gets tossed around a lot when people talk about the poems in Barricade. Not sure if it’s because he’s a poster-poet for American roughshodness and the book plays its hand, so to speak, as early as the title. Might just be lazy forensics. But maybe what people mean when they say Whitman is something about ecstaticism. If his was an ecstatic poetry in the throes of threadbare optimism, I think maybe the Barricade poems are ecstatic poetry in the throes of the end of “America.”

  DL: Even if the observers are guilty of lazy forensics they manage somehow. You just explained the Barricade poems’ relation to Whitman precisely:

  “Maybe what people mean when they say Whitman is something about ecstaticism. If his was an ecstatic poetry in the throes of a brusk, threadbare optimism, I think maybe the Barricade poems are ecstatic poetry in the throes of the end of America.”

  My compliments to the poet for taking over on that one. From the author’s position I can see how moving away from labels (such as Millennial Americana) is valuable, yet you step out of the shadow here on the Whitman references.

  Do you feel a responsibility to your subject matter, was it rooted out consciously: given the political, and cultural climate of our generation’s landscape, these “throes of the end of America”?

  DS: There’s a moment in the book where I say that I’m “guilty of my beard.” It feels a bit closer to me to say I’m accusing myself of my subject, or charging myself with the injustice of what I need to say, or I’m guilty of what I do say. In part this is a depiction of Puritan heritage in this country. We’re always a little hung over about our moral bloodline, always a little disgusted by our dirt, which makes one of the most compelling symptoms of modern life to me the sensation of belatedness. The great wars are over, we’re late to the party, but in some ways the country’s still a teenager.

  These poems have a hard time with language as damning evidence, with belatedness as a barricade that pushes you apart from yourself. I mean, who wants to be a nation? For me the poems happen more as a pushback against the idea that American is not a choice, and neither is son, neither is employee or love.

  I’ve noticed something that happens in art now and then, but I think I’ve only seen it in music and writing. It’s a way of performing what destroys you in a way that makes it feel like you’re celebrating it. In some cases partying it. A song like, I don’t know, “Careless Whisper,” for example. He’s really hanging his head in that song, and that noir saxophone, it’s so sad bastard. But if you think about a song like “When Doves Cry,” it’s exponentially sadder, and yet you dance all over that song.

  The Clash were probably the so-called only band that mattered because they did this so beautifully. They have so many songs about being poor, threatened, alone, and those songs are some of the most fun music ever written.

  Maybe that was part of what Whitman was poking around inside too. We think of him as the bearded godfather, but I also think of him as an incredibly sad man who just decided to dance.

  People always want to say “anthem” is the word I mean, but I think that’s wrong. It’s something more like “fight song,” but that’s still wrong too. I haven’t been able to find the word I want. I’m writing the poems and hoping someone very smart will point at the word.

  DL: What you “notice happens in art sometimes” is, to me, an indicator of authenticity; is what you describe not the heart of every human and our collective condition? To me this implies one of the greater conditions and motivating origins of art. I instantly think of the blues as an entire cultural phenomena, a vast amount of the massive and ambiguous “folk” music genre, meaning our origins and history. To authentically and genuinely describe and express one’s own mental autonomy from one’s time and place, to do it in an empathic voice, to make the struggle beautiful, isn’t this what all truly good art such as The Clash and American Barricade accomplishes?

  DS: I hate to say this, sort of feel like I’m not supposed to say this, but it’s also what happens in the art that lasts. People will tell you that not all art wants to endure, that the aspiration toward endurance in art is itself a recapitulation of a capitalist desire, and some days I believe that, but I can’t say I believe that today. Even the art that meddles and pranks and fucks with art wants to endure.

  In art made out of words especially, empathy is one of the deathless questions to me. The Greek root of the word is more like “affection,” which is troubling. And the German Einfühlung, which is something like “in-feeling,” has only been with us for about 140 years. “In-feeling” is also suspect to me, it has its hint of violation.

  I was talking to a few poets the other day about this concept of the radical given, which is the term Frank Bidart uses for certain lives, tragic lives especially, out of which art emerges. Your Hamlets and so forth. He says every tragedy starts from an irremediable radical given. But it bothers me that he says tragedy. Because really every story starts with an irremediable radical given. Birth of course being at the top of that list. And I think this happens at the outset of every piece of art too. Sound, the voice, language, color, the body—across the arts these are all radical givens. But I’m suspicious too of this word given. On the one hand, what’s given to you doesn’t mean you necessarily have to keep it. The freedom to leave the room is important to me in art. Because on the other hand, you don’t always ask for what you’re given. Life, again, being at the top of that list. And work that endures tends to be work that writes into life.

  My own mom is going to hate me for this, but I think the argument can be made that life inherently contains a thread of the tragic because it’s the defining part of our existence over which we have zero freedom to choose. We’re born how we’re born, the pop songs go. And one of the poets was throwing mud on Bidart for his poem “Ellen West,” saying here is another white man taking over a woman’s body, a woman’s voice, a woman’s life. I’d love to hear Bidart answer that question, because to me it’s one of the deathless questions about “in-feeling” itself. Is empathy a delusion of grandeur?

  But I think you can also make the argument that one human being writing into a radical given that we all know exists, in this case anorexia, is an attempt to decommodify pain in a way that works toward a commons. When I say decommodify pain, I mean place it in a voice that no longer tells itself we need to pay for our pain. And we don’t need to trade our pain either. Our pain can just do its one job, which is existing.

  Get American Barricade from YesYes Books.

• io Poetry - http://iopoetry.org/archives/2061

  A CONVERSATION WITH DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK
  Posted: March 27th, 2014 ˑ Filled under: Features ˑ Comments Closed

  Danniel Schoonebeek’s first full-length book is AMERICAN BARRICADE, just out this month from YesYes Books. A chapbook, Family Album, is available from Poor Claudia.

  Schoonebeek also writes a poetry column for The American Reader, curates your favorite reading series in Brooklyn HATCHET JOB, and edits the PEN Poetry Series.

  Early this year, Danniel and I split a Google Doc (which lacks the immediacy of splitting a beer, but does give space for responding at length) to chat about his new book, our old country, and what poetry might have to do with anything at all.

  This is the first of two parts of that conversation.

  Wendy Xu: When I think about barricades I sometimes think of Les Miserables, and suddenly am in Paris. But your first book is called AMERICAN Barricade, and I am interested in anything called “American.” What is American about this book, or, what isn’t? What is or isn’t American? How do we even talk about american-ness in 2014? Is it geographical? How does poetry construct a lens (or does it?) through which you bear witness to an America? How do you understand these poems as navigating an idea of “american-ness,” a quality of being, an abstraction of american selfhood?

  Danniel Schoonebeek: The heritage of art in this country, especially when it comes to literature and film, is one that tells you the story of America is a blank check and you write it yourself. But we don’t grow up learning that we can write the country’s story itself. We learn that we can write the story of ourselves as Americans. Call me Ishmael, if you will. But the life I’ve lived in America has never felt that way. Get a job, go to school, get a job, go to school, get a job, pay your debts, maybe die. That’s one charcoal sketch of life in America today, and one example of the icy fatalism surrounding how we think about ourselves and about American history.

  The obsession with names in American Barricade is my way of speaking back to Ellis Island, where a lot of people volunteered and didn’t volunteer to have their names changed in order to become more American. “United States” is a name with a fatalism and a failure written into it. Our name says we’re together, but we all know that’s false.

  I think of the book’s second act as my life in the American workforce, a bit of a kiss-off to Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American lives. These same poems put their hooks into empire and family and want to talk about how they’re one in the same. The job and family for me are just as inescapable as they are inseparable.

  The self too is inescapable and inseparable from the poems it writes. Call me Danniel, if you will. Which is why I sometimes think of this book as depiction: certain of the poems depict and believe in the very idea that one can invent oneself in America in order to expose how false that idea is.

  When it comes to geography, I mean for the poems in American Barricade to be clash after clash after clash. That’s why the title is the title. I was born in a poor, rural village, but I’m a Brooklyn guy who is assumed to be European and not speak English, some people even assume I’m a woman. I’m unnerved by family and capitalism and then I write a book where I play in both of their sandboxes the whole time. The self disgusts me but the self is all I’ve got. In a lot of ways Barricade tries to internalize the geographic discordance of this country. Our founding principle as a nation is absurd, which I can’t help but love. We’re several hundred different countries, climates, dialects, and histories, all living under the roof of a name that tells us we’re one nation. This is an idea I respect because, for one, it’s doomed to fail, and, for two, it’s exactly how people are. My name, this Danniel, is my version of “United States.” My clashes and contradictions are what fail to make me me, and that’s what makes me me.

  WX: “geographic discordance,” that’s a good thing to say. Much of my experience inside AMERICAN BARRICADE was of this discordance, a dissonance, and the tension between this book’s geographies–when you name New York City, for example, and it pushes up against the more ephemeral landscapes of other poems.

  If I make the claim that not only is this book populated by SPACES, but also abstraction and assemblage of CHARACTERS, how does that resonate with you? How is yr America more often made up of “Father,” “Mother,” “Son,” “Sister,” “God,” as opposed to, say, any of those nouns with the definite article preceding? How does this relate to the mode of self-mythologization you mentioned? When we return again and again to this long poem in parts throughout the book, “Family Album,” what does it mean to say this very amazing thing you say: “he swore off god / by this time son was 16% / made of silence” ?

  DS: Silence is a character in these poems, as I hear them. For me it’s silence that grows and spreads like a blight. I’m not talking about that dead old loss-of-innocence narrative. Because there’s no innocence in this book in the first place. I come out of the womb wearing a stolen suit and just as soon that suit is ruined. The blight I’m talking about is the blight of reconciling yourself to not having the life you dreamed of living. In some ways this book begins in media res, after innocence has been sloughed off, and the poems are obsessed with telling you how that loss occurred. You’ve tried out life, money, having a pet, praying to god, glory, and then one day you wake up in a hospital bed. That’s the nature of silence in America. Your failed attempts at milk and honey come washing over you like a pall and they shut you very much up.

  The other major characters in these poems are the desire to be king and the lust for destruction of power. But let’s stop for a second, because characters mean narrative and narrative means you can say what happens. Do you want to try to write a brief synopsis of what happens in this book with me? Like the movie poster sales pitch of the poems. Here’s two of mine:

  1) A young boy rises to power and destroys his own rule.

  2) The life you live as a child will turn you into a dictator.

  WX:

  1) America begets shame, begets America
  2) People are born and die of love
  3) America, in its old age and decay, tells a young boy its mythologized history
  4) A man is made by power and unmade by longing
  5) A man who has amnesia sits with a lover and imagines his own history

  DS: With the exception of a few poems in this book, which take place in either New York City or the Catskills, I have a difficult time placing these poems in locations I can see. The main reason I’ve loved movies my whole life is because movies, when they are great movies, disembody the voice in ways I wish could be my existence.

  I know Terrence Malick is derided by a few cineastes lately, but his scripts, specifically Badlands, Days of Heaven, and Tree of Life, have informed the way I want the voice in my poems to be placed. Which is to say nowhere. The voice speaks up out of the ether and disappears, enters the body, disappears again. This is somewhat of a ridiculous thing to say about Malick, because his films feel so rooted in places, but I think what people miss about Malick is how seriously he considers nature a character.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about nature’s violence and indifference, and violent and indifferent are also ways of describing America, which is so massive that it’s almost nonexistent, which is also a way of feeling about god, at least how we understand god in a Puritan tradition. And this accounts for some of the geographical discordance in the book. At first I considered it a problem that the book had no setting. Over a period of years, I began to feel that it was truer for the book to have every setting a reader could pinpoint, because that’s how America feels. It’s so unwieldy that half the time we don’t feel we are even a part of this country.

  What’s your sense of America? Like do you think about this word while writing your poems, or is it just a fact? We have (somewhat) similar stories, onomastcially speaking, in that we both have names that identify us as one thing or another. And I think it’s also worth remembering that using the very word itself, America, is offensive to history.

  WX: I think my sense of America is a lot of the reason this book resonates with me–I was born outside of it, truly un-American, and the experience of going towards it (as like, a mass of actual land, a through-and-through PLACE that an airplane carrying my physical body had to land and set me down) bred in me a lifelong fixation with “american-ness.” Perhaps this is every immigrant’s experience. And my name, as you mentioned, leads with its foreignness. Written or spoken, there is no way to notice any other aspect of it first. My own book of poems, though it does not even come close to explicitly navigating “identity politics” or the immigrant experience, is by default listed as Asian American Studies as a sub-genre to poetry. So when I, as a reader, approach America and/or a version of america in poetry, it is with this weight of outside-of-ness, and the weight of a history I both long to embody (and fail at) and am repulsed by. I like the idea of linking America and God via their mutual nonexistence, their enormity that creates a sort of disappearance.

  Which is all related to the below, I want to quote one of my favorite poems, “Little Wheel,” from your book here, which appears just about halfway through AMERICAN BARRICADE, and point especially to the final five lines, you write:

  LITTLE WHEEL

  So. The god comes for me with a hole in her négligée.

  And I throw her out of the bedroom and finish my tea.

  So ends the scene that begins when I write you a history.

  The tea, it is gunpowder. The bedroom, it represents me.

  The history is one of men boarding up their windows.

  And here comes Mayakovsky kicking his hole in the wall.

  He hands me his boot and his father’s sawed-off shotgun.

  Bite yrself off! he screams. Fire what lives in belly represents you.

  I say, don’t you see all this gunpowder tea I’m drinking.

  I say, why do you think I barricade the bedroom, Vlady.

  And he finds my cleanest shirt and tears off the sleeves.

  Not enough holes, he says. Now a few words about me:

  Beyond wall, is trenches. Beyond trenches—is jackals.

  Tell Lily, he says. I am waiting like child for my haircut.

  Tell her I wait in bedroom and worship her like bombshell.

  And he shows me the hole where he lost his first roulette.

  And I throw him out of the bedroom and finish my tea.

  So ends the scene that begins with no way out of history.

  I worship a hole in the wall. The wall, it represents me.

  The history is one of men plotting against a little wheel.

  One bet means orphans. One means neighbors of zero.

  One bet means men throwing themselves out of windows.

  And all this time you are failing to write your love poem.

  You are waiting like a child for a word superior to me.

  You are finding what’s left of the tea too bitter to finish.

  The god you refuse, she stands at your door and smokes.

  The hole you worship is false. False as a god and it closes.

  So. You take stock of your inheritance: shotgun, fire, boot.

  Then your belongings too: gunpowder, barricade, sleeves.

  So ends the scene that begins when you say I am history.

  This poem literalizes something for me that the book as a whole gives the sense of, which is a worshipping of emptiness, which is both 1) possibility, and 2) the void, the abyss, whatever you want to call it. It also relates to how I would simultaneously describe AMERICAN BARRICADE as “really historical” and “ahistorical.” Can you say some things about these things? In either the poem above, or, more generally. What is yr relationship or this poem’s relationship to history, inheritance, idolatry, and the fantasy of all three?

  Subsequently: I am interested in units. How does the unit of a film (the scene) which you use above, interact with the units of a poetry book (the single poem) in AMERICAN BARRICADE?

  A literal translation of the word roulette is “little wheel,” and “neighbors of zero” and “orphans” are the names of areas on a roulette wheel. To talk fatalism again, I’m a little dogged by the idea of the wheel of fortune, especially when it comes to history and inheritance. You now, O fortuna, one simple turn of the wheel is the difference between being an orphan and parent of the year. O fortuna, one turn of the wheel is the difference between riches and clinging to a sack full of pennies. The poem was written in April, and in New York there’s an especially riotous and harrowing two-week period every year in April. You wake up and the sun is not only a fact but a feeling, and it’s a feeling of protest and a taste too, and everyone seems to agree upon this taste and say it with their bodies, which means people are eating outside and loosening their ties and wearing sun dresses, and nothing smells like hot garbage and it still gets cold at night among the flowering trees. It’s a disturbing time to desire. And it’s a disturbing time to file taxes in America, especially if you find yourself reading about suicide rates during this time, as I was in April of that year. A lot of this reading was about men throwing themselves out of windows, which itself has become an iconic, almost cinematic, image in the last thirteen years of New York history.

  If I say I don’t believe in the myth that Americans can make themselves into whoever they want to be, I think it’s because Americans in my experience are obsessed with gaming the system in order to express their outrage at the impossibility of the free market. One of our overwhelming narratives as Americans is the story of the outlaw. From the Boston Burglar, to Billy the Kidd, to Stagger Lee, there’s this romance surrounding the outlaw. The terrifying part to me is that this has become the defining narrative obsession of our media. Scarface is probably the most American movie I can think of in this sense. And there’s thousands of examples of movies in which men (why the hell is it always, always, neverending men) break the law in order to make themselves in America.

  I like this idea, that you have to defy America in order to cash in on the promise of America. I mean look at your Madoffs and Snowdens. And interestingly I think we’ve begun to culturally abandon the worship of sleek, infallible men as outlaws, and this is happening everywhere in teevee. Whether they are bootleggers, meth cooks, or corner boys, we’re beginning to see outlaws who are vividly human, primarily because they’re both good and horrible people at the same time. Mad Men is the most infuriating television, because on the one hand it’s a beat-off fantasy of male privilege, and on the other hand it’s realism that no other teevee show has touched. History was in fact this fucked up and horrible and it continues to be this fucked up and horrible and there’s zero redemption story here. It’s a moralist yarn by way of (purporting) to teach us to be better by showing us the worst.

  I think American Barricade dances in this ring. Scene after scene, poem after poem, the book is people cheating the system, getting rich quick, craving power, slacking off, jerking off, failing at sexuality, failing at family, falling into love with corruption, falling out of love with those who love them, thinking of themselves as men and not people, thinking of themselves as Americans and not people, and thinking of their story as the story of America and not one story that composes America.

  To Be Continued ///////////////////////////////////////
  Update: Read Part II here!

  Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade, is out now from YesYes Books. A chapbook, Family Album, is also available from Poor Claudia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, BOMB, Indiana Review, Guernica, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He writes a column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series, and edits the PEN Poetry Series.

• Ace Hotel - http://blog.acehotel.com/post/79774861841/danniel-schoonebeek

  INTERVIEW: DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK

  Danniel Schoonebeek’s poems take back roads and veins to an American place filled with secrets in your ear. Where the barn behind you is lit with the most eerie Gregory Crewdson-like light.

  Last Saturday Ace New York hosted Bound by Chance. Danniel wasn’t there, but his words were. People used them to make stories and bound those stories into pamphlets. Tonight, Danniel reads from his book in Portland at Crema Coffee + Bakery before he sails back home to Brooklyn. It’s going to be an after hours poetry party.

  You recently completed a poetry tour in support of your first book, American Barricade (YesYes Books). Independent musicians tour all the time to support themselves. What was the experience like as a poet?

  When I was seventeen I left high school and toured in a van with four other guys. We were a band, I was the drummer, and we toured the country for a few months, living in the van with our instruments. What’s startling to me is that I did this again ten years later. This time I was alone, I was reading my poems and not hitting a snare, and I took the trains across America instead of riding in a van. The tours were alike in that they were both these depleting, chaotic bursts in which you learn more about yourself than you knew was possible. You aren’t working hard enough are the words I came away with when I was seventeen. Our last date on that tour was at CBGB’s, and there was this holy feeling like we’d arrived. But nobody gave a shit about our songs, not the bands, not the people. I think that experience taught me that you have to demand to be heard, like a list of demands is heard in a hostage situation, and that list of demands is work.

  The tour I just finished leaves me to this day with jubilee. In some ways it was like playing a chess match against my own life. I’d just been kicked out of my apartment, I’d just been laid off, the love life was in the gutter. I booked the tour myself, no agents, no help from my publisher. I needed to see if a poet could do it alone. Friends came out to read and see me off, let me sleep on their floors. Strangers opened their doors to me, handed me their keys, helped me hunt down venues. These people are part of my life now, and they handed me small tokens along the way, tchotchkes and mementos, a little scratch some nights. The trains are their own crash course in how much American disgust you can tolerate within yourself. If you don’t have the constitution within yourself to wash your hair in the sink on a moving train, or deal with drunks, or fall asleep hungry on a dinner of tic-tacs, don’t get on the trains. But there was something unbelievable about waking up on the train, feeling like shit, drinking a styrofoam cup of coffee, and watching the landscape of America peel away outside while you’re surrounded by all these families and drifters and bulleting your way to a poetry reading in a different city each night. It was like not being a citizen anymore.

  I’m finishing a book about this last tour and that’ll come out soon. I’m working with two editors who are challenging the work and pushing it in directions I’m thrilled about. I can’t say who yet, but it’s coming. It’s called C’est La Guerre.

  The poems you write have a lovely ability to at once feel very intimate—even small—while also having ragged edges that touch on archetypes that deal with American culture and values. What’s your creative process when you sit down to write? Do you have an agenda? A guiding principal?

  I try to always keep myself unsettled. I hate flying, so I work on poems while I’m a mess in the sky. Or sometimes I’ll wear nothing but a blanket and wake up in winter and write in the kitchen. I always write poems if I have a nasty fever, or I like to cast out lines aloud if I’m standing, never longhand if I’m sitting. I write a lot in bed, the classic pose, we all do. I would like to write a poem while hanging upside down from the lintels of a doorway. So my process is to always throw a wrench in my process. I’m opposed to regimens, culturally and artistically, because they fail to do justice to the changing face of what composes them. American ways of life, as our culture defines them, always fail the people who are actually living their lives in America, never nuanced enough and always leaving someone locked outside. In the same way, I think having any guiding principal about poetry is a failure to language, how nuanced language is and how fast it changes and disrupts us. I try to always undermine myself, disrupt myself, refuse myself. The terrifying part for me is that undermining yourself, disrupting yourself, refusing yourself—these are also regimens that need to be undermined, disrupted, and refused.

• Poetry Northwest - http://www.poetrynw.org/interview-rich-smith-vs-lisa-ciccarello-matthew-dickman-amber-nelson-danniel-schoonebeek/

  Published on November 18, 2013
  Interview // Rich Smith vs. Lisa Ciccarello, Matthew Dickman, Amber Nelson, Danniel Schoonebeek

  [Note: This interview was conducted by Rich Smith at Oddfellows Café + Bar in Seattle, WA on November 7, 2013. The poets, Lisa Ciccarello, Matthew Dickman, Amber Nelson, and Danniel Schoonebeek drove up together from Portland to give a reading at Vermillion. Amber Nelson organized the reading to celebrate the release of Schoonebeek’s chapbook Family Album (Poor Claudia) and the announcement of his first full-length collection of poems American Barricade (YesYesBooks), PLUS the release of Ciccarello’s The Shore In Parts (graying ghost press), PLUS the release of Nelson’s first full-length book In Anima: Urgency (Coconut Books), PLUS the release of Matthew Dickman’s nothing at all, but if you don’t have his most recent collection, Mayakovsky’s Revolver, do yourself a favor and pick it up.]

  ///

  [We’re sitting at a long table, surrounded by clinking silverware, laughter, boozery of all sorts, pasta, fancy eggs, and the washed out nautical-Americana décor of the restaurant.]

  ///

  RS: Ciccarello, I’m really into 18th century plant hunters right now, the backroom men of flora—men who would and did die for the sake of a flower. Are you currently going down some kind of arcane intellectual rabbit hole?

  Ciccarello: [Laughing] In fact, I am. One of the holes I’m going down is the Newgate Calendar, which is a record of the stories of all the people who were hanged or otherwise executed in this very famous British prison. I love that. I’ve written a lot of poems very loosely based on the stories contained in there. The other hole is less arcane but more bizarre, maybe? I’m rewriting an entire Agatha Christie novel set in ancient Egypt, and it’s written as a set of tweet-able prose poems. Maybe I’m only interested in the archaic? The imagined archaic and the actual.

  RS: Dickman, do you feel, as I feel, that the closet analog to the poet is the standup comedian?

  Dickman: Maybe? I think it’s one that could be. If I watch comedians who are really special—people like Rock, or Ansari—I think both of them are like poets in that they touch on things that are part of our human mystery. I think stand up comics do it. Poets do it. Rap artists do it. I think anyone who is touching upon the wonderment and mystery of being a human being is dealing with poetry in some way

  Schoonebeek: Can I jump in on that?

  RS: You bet.

  Schoonebeek: In practice, comedians remind me so much of poets because you write your poems in seclusion and then you try them out on an audience. I might even respect comedians more than poets. If you say a line of poetry and nobody claps then you don’t give a shit because that’s just what happens at poetry readings.

  Dickman: I think that sucks though!

  Schoonebeek: Right, but as a comedian that’s devastating. And they memorize all their work.

  Ciccarello: They make people laugh at stuff that’s upsetting or touching or offensive or dangerous and they turn that into humor. And I think you specifically [she’s looking at Dickman], you have these moments that are funny, but underneath it all they’re also so terrible. And so in that way it’s a pretty fair analogy.

  Dickman: Yeah, I mean, who has ever been to a funeral and not laughed? And who has ever been to a wedding and not cried? More people have sex after funerals than they do after weddings. That is a fact. That I’ve lived.

  [Lots of laughter]

  Schoonebeek: No one feels alone while they’re laughing. Which is the great ruse of comedy. You can talk about dying or something that’s taboo, and because you’re in a room full of people all laughing about it no one feels scared or offended. That’s amazing.

  Nelson: I got blasted with Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords in Boise. That was amazing.

  [Lots of laughter]

  ///

  RS: Schoonebeek, do you have to be in a mood to write? What mood were you in when you were writing Family Album?

  Schoonebeek: I don’t feel like I have to be in any mood to write, but I am pretty rigid about process. I would never write while drinking. I don’t smoke when I’m writing. For me, writing is a sober space. And it has to just be lucid thought in that way, not informed by anything else going on.

  Family Album was a poem that I’ve been writing for about four years. I was trying to write poems that were as short as a tweet but in the form of a fortune. One you would get in a cookie. I got really interested in pre-determined fatalism in that way. But the poems sucked and so I didn’t do anything with them. But then the poems turned into this collaboration thing that I do with Allyson Paty, and I recasted them as monostich poems—these long, one-line poems that were all stacked on top of each other, each with their own title. I stole that from Ted Berrigan. He’s got this poem called “Rusty Nails,” where it’s just 30 mini-poems under the title “Rusty Nails,” and so I thought, “Oh I never thought of having titled subsets.” And so I started redrafting it. “I” was the pronoun the whole time as I was doing it, and it still wasn’t working, and then I got so interested in what Frank Bidart does—he uses “you” to talk about himself—and so I started writing them with “son,” as the major pronoun, and then ended up writing a family narrative that way, talking about myself in the third person.

  ///

  RS: Very good. Amber Nelson.

  Nelson: Yes?

  RS: Of the arts, which is the most powerful?

  Nelson: I know I’m supposed to say poetry, but really it’s dance. I’m a big dance aficionado. I spend more of my time going to see live dance than I do poetry. I like the dancer’s ability to articulate without words.

  ///

  RS: Ciccarello, the publication of The Shore In Parts marks five chapbooks. You could have had, at this point, two 48-64 pg manuscripts broken into three slightly related sections suitable for inspection by a contest judge, university press, or publishing giant. What’s your plan here?

  [Lots of laughter]

  Ciccarello: I think the plan here is that I really love working with small projects. And the projects all feel really distinct to me. Danniel [Schoonebeek] has given me a lot of crap for being so—”This is a mummy poem”— and he’s like, “What does that mean?” But in my head it means a lot! They are these really distinct projects and I want them to find a life as such. And I don’t want to smoosh them together into a book. That seems so…I’m just not ok with that.

  Schoonebeek: If I could piggy back on that, too—

  RS: All yours.

  Schoonebeek: I respect that so much about you, Lisa [Ciccarello]. It opposes the way you’re supposed to think about getting your book published, and that’s totally fine.

  Dickman: Yeah, it’s not anti-publishing, but it goes against the grain of how you normally publish. You look at the Yale Younger List, and people still look at that contest as a really important contest—which it is—but you look at that list, and even if you’re a really well-read person you’ll look through it and recognize fewer than a quarter of the people on it. So it’s the secular world and the spiritual world. And maybe what Lisa’s doing is being more engaged with the spiritual world.

  ///

  RS: Dickman.

  Dickman: [Laughing] Yeah buddy?

  RS: You, like me, make some coin as an ad man. Some people would say that’s the devil’s work. Do you share their view in some way?

  Dickman: No! Those people are suckers. [Laughter] I think commercials and advertising can be a form of art. They can break social norms. The best kind of advertising works like short films, and I think writing for advertising is something that poets should try to do more of.

  But: I love television. I love watching commercials. The worst commercials out there are ones that are patronizing to the viewer, but when you see a great commercial it’s really moving and really wonderful. And anyone out there who is like, “I don’t watch TV,” or, “I’m not into branding,”—that’s kinda bullshit. Everything is branded. We brand ourselves.

  Ciccarello: “I don’t watch TV” is totally a brand.

  Dickman: Absolutely.

  Schoonebeek: In the car earlier we listened to some commercials on the radio and Lisa and I got some goose bumps. But does anyone here feel at all uncomfortable about using writing in the service of selling a product, though?

  Dickman: No. I don’t feel bad. That’s what I want. I keep going to Coca Cola because I want them to do a commercial with Frank O’Hara reading, “Having a Coke with You.” That’s where I want poetry to be.

  ///

  RS: Schoonebeek.

  Schoonebeek: [Laughing] I’m right here.

  RS: Though it is a great honor to be nominated for the Ruth Lilly, [knowing laughter and general uproar] do you feel that they—the people at Poetry and at other arts organizations—should do away with the whole nomination folderol and announce only the winners of things?

  Schoonebeek: When I read the email that I was a finalist I freaked out. Not in a call-my-mom kinda way, but I just expected a rejection because I’ve sent that to that contest so many times in a row. But when it actually said, “You’re in consideration for this thing,” I went, “Oh wow.” I stared at it for a while. I immediately felt anxious. And then I spent a lot of time until the announcement feeling very anxious about it.

  RS: One month of saying, “Well, 15,000 dollars would change my life.”

  Schoonebeek: Yep. And what I said to people was exactly that. The most money I’ve ever had in my bank account in my entire life is $7,000. To know that you can get that money for work that you’ve written would change my life. The notoriety associated with it would be huge. I’d also found out at the same time that I was being laid off from my job, and I was planning this tour, so the difference between going on this tour with fifteen grand and four grand is immeasurable.

  But to answer your question: no. It keeps people submitting. You don’t pay anything to submit to the Lilly. And people rag on Poetry Foundation quite a bit, but they pay their writers when they publish them. They give fifteen grand to emerging poets. They do the right thing with their money.

  It was amazing to me because I don’t write what I think of as their kind of work. When Don Share took over, one of the first people they took was CAConrad. He’s major to me. He’s experimental in a lot of ways. I think they’re now taking a lot more chances on writers.

  ///

  RS: Hear hear. Amber, did you have a breakthrough moment when you felt like your book In Anima: Urgency was shaping up to be a book?

  Nelson: In Anima was totally different than anything I’d ever written ever. It was a game. I felt an urge to write, and I developed a process, and I decided to write these things, and I didn’t know what they were, and I wrote a lot of them. I wrote about 60 of them, and I enjoyed writing them, and people told me to keep writing them, and I was very unsure about it the whole time. I let it sit for a while, and then I was reading Hélène Cixou’s The Book of Promethea and then my book took shape. I was noticing things and taking notes and making realizations about what I had been thinking about through In Anima, having realizations about my own process as I was reading. The book itself is shaped by a few quotations from her: five sections, five separate quotations that were directly related to what I was working on.

  ///

  RS: Ciccarello, I would like to call attention to your blog, Punching Little Birds in the Face. What do you get out of blogging? Are you in it for the exhibitionist’s tingle, or does it give you access to a kind of community, or what?

  Nelson: And, if I may, what do you get out of punching birds in the face?

  [Laughter]

  Ciccarello: [Laughing] Two parts. One thing is I don’t even think that many people visit my blog, so there’s no community, there’s no reaching out. But that’s ok, because here’s the thing: I’m a person with a really miserable memory. Somehow the blog is like this scrolling, undeletable record of things that I’ve done or seen or photographed or participated in. It’s weirdly a very personal thing. I also think of it as a CV+. All of the publications are there, and all the chapbooks and photographs. It’s an online publications list with a personality.

  The punching little birds in the face thing is related to Richard Siken. On the drive up here we talked about how Crush is an instant classic. One of my friends at the University of Arizona Poetry center mentioned that Richard had this blog, and I said, “What’s the name of the blog?” and she said, “I don’t know, it’s like: ‘Punching little birds in the face.'” And I said really? And she said something like, “No, it’s like, ‘Birds Will Peck You.'” And I said well then the title’s mine. I took that. And it was like five years ago and I have never left it.

  ///

  RS: Dickman, what’s your position on baths?

  [Schoonebeek shouts “Oooohhh”]

  Ciccarello: Where did that come from? I can’t believe that’s on there.

  Dickman: This is my thing. I live in Portland, Oregon. I live in a double studio.

  RS: What the hell is a double studio?

  Dickman: It’s a one-bedroom without a wall. Great little old apartment. I love it. Except: all it has is a standup shower. And I love baths. I love baths so much that each winter—maybe a couple times throughout the season—I rent a room at the Ace Hotel. I won’t tell anyone. And I’ll go there with a detective novel and some whiskey and I’ll take baths for 24 hours.

  RS: 24 hours straight you’re in a tub of water?

  Dickman: I’m in and out.

  RS: How do you regulate the temperature?

  Dickman: I just keep doing new baths. I’ll get up in the morning and take a bath. I’ll read. I’ll get out of the bath and go for a walk. Half an hour later I’ll come back, go up to the room, and start a bath. Then I take that bath. Then I get out and watch a movie.

  RS: You’ve got a whole bath schedule.

  Dickman: I do about four baths a day.

  RS: I feel like I’m too big for a bath. Don’t you feel like you’re too big?

  Dickman: It depends on the bathtub. I spent a month in Marfa, Texas, and they had a bath there that was 7 ft long and 2 ½ ft tall.

  Nelson: That’s so much water.

  Dickman: That’s so much water in Texas. I took a bath every night and read The Three Musketeers.

  Nelson: I’m 5’1 and I think most baths are too small. I get so worried about tall people taking baths.

  ///

  RS: Schoonebeek, to whom do you most often send your first drafts of poems?

  Schoonebeek: Always to friends.

  RS: Would you name them?

  Schoonebeek: I usually don’t send them unless I feel like they’re good, so it’s just kind of this affirmation hotline. I think a lot of people do that, right? They’re not necessarily looking for criticism. I’m not really interested in workshops anymore, having done it for years, and when I send stuff to friends there’s a graceful poise to the way they write back. They’ll say “I’d tweak this one thing or this one other thing.” There’s a tacit understanding that your poem is your poem and I’m not gonna mess with it.

  Ciccarello: I just want someone to high-five me for making something. That’s it.

  RS: You didn’t answer my question.

  Schoonebeek: Name names?

  RS: Yeah!

  Schoonebeek: I’m very close with Allyson Paty; she’s my heart of hearts. Melissa Broder and I trade drafts quite a bit. Lisa and I trade drafts.

  Ciccarello: It’s more like I send stuff to you and I say, “I’m still making stuff,” and you say, “Yes you are.” You don’t need me!

  Schoonebeek: That’s what I’m saying though! It’s an encouragement thing. If you sent me something that was an absolute fucking disaster I’d be like, “Don’t write that anymore.” But ten times out of ten I end up saying, “Ok, I see how this is taking shape. Here’s what I like about it. One or maybe two things I would change.” But you reach a certain point where you can’t be like (he takes on a snooty voice) “Well, put it in prose!” You can’t change another person’s poem.

  Dickman: (also in a snooty voice) “Maybe this is two poems.”

  Schoonebeek: (still snooty) “Maybe negate the ending.”

  ///

  RS: Nelson, do you consider Leonardo DiCaprio a careful and powerful actor, or is he, to you, a squinty-eyed throwback trying to tell you how to live your life?

  Nelson: I haven’t super been into Leo since I was 14, when Titanic came out. But. Let’s be real. It wasn’t Titanic, it was Romeo and Juliet.

  [Laughter and a lot of nodding]

  RS: Romeo + Juliet.

  Nelson: Yeah.

  RS: That’s when I hated them the most. (in a bad Jersey Shore accent) “Let lips do what hands do—”

  Nelson: I was a teenage girl! Give me a fucking break! [Laughing] I actually kind of like him, depending. I haven’t liked him in everything, but he’s been much more impressive than I would have expected. So, something like…the movie everyone loved but I thought was disappointing…it was…what was the one with the dreidel thing?

  RS: Oh, Inception?

  Nelson: Yes! I was a little whatever about it. It had Tom Hardy and Marion Cotillard. They were great. Leo in The Departed, I like. Gangs of New York did nothing for me, but most Martin Scorsese pics don’t do it for me. I’ll still watch a Leo movie, but it’s not going to be the vehicle to get me into the theatre. On the other hand, I own Romeo + Juliet and still watch it sometimes.

  ///

  RS: Cicarello, when someone just so happens to have loose change in his pocket, does your trust for that person increase?

  Ciccarello: Well, so here’s the thing. The real thing. In Oregon I might mistrust somebody that has change in his pocket because you know exactly what everything costs and it only costs that. But I came here and bought a chapstick and it said one price and I paid a different price and I got confused and then I understood that it was tax. So in Seattle I would certainly trust a man with change is his pocket because you never actually know what you’ll have to pay.

  RS: Nelson, heads or tails?

  Nelson: Tails.

  RS: It’s heads. Nelson, relying on our strengths can be our greatest weakness. What poetic rhetorical device do you find yourself falling back on?

  Nelson: The relationship poem.

  [Laughter]

  RS: [Laughing] I’m talking about anaphora, or synesthesia, parallelism, etc.

  Nelson: I compete against it so so hard, that desire. I create all of the processes to make that not happen. But, I think, probably the “of.”

  RS: The x of the y.

  Nelson: Totally.

  Ciccarello: Mine is the “and.” I could “and” forever.

  RS: Dickman, same question.

  Dickman: A full-circle poem. I’ll start off somewhere and then I’ll move onto something else, and then I’ll feel like I need to come back to something to put a little bowtie on it. So more and more lately I’ve been trying not to do that. Just let it fall off the earth.

  Schoonebeek: Anaphora. Refrains. I love returning to a line instantly. I love revising the line after it with the same beginning, like a restart or a false start.

  When I was listening to Dickman’s poem’s tonight I loved hearing the anaphora. You blank over the anaphora itself and it becomes incantatory.

  Ciccarello: But there’s a slight difference. His lines have a range. The first two or so words are the same, but the lines vary significantly. So sometimes you blank out the anaphora, but sometimes it pulls you back in.

  RS: Ciccarello, is there a word or two that you can never spell right the first time?

  Ciccarello: This is so embarrassing but anything with the “e” and the “i.” Like field and ceiling. I always feel like spell check will fix it. Also, apology.

  RS: ABSOLUTELY. Because maybe there’s two p’s, right?

  [Lots of nodding]

  RS: Schoonebeek, would you like to use this interview as a platform to announce your admiration, ambivalence, or plain disgust for the work of Kenneth Goldsmith?

  Schoonebeek: No. No I would not.

  RS: Dickman, same question.

  Dickman: Sure, why not. Who’s Kenneth Goldsmith?

  RS: Perfect. Nelson—

  Nelson: Well, Kenneth Goldsmith: I don’t care, first of all.

  Ciccarello: Even more indifferent than DiCaprio!

  RS: [Laughing] Would you be inclined to agree with me or to disagree with me if I were to tell you that you can only write about poetry in poems and nothing about life?

  Nelson: Ouch. I’m inclined to disagree with you, but I’m inclined to say that all poems can always be read at all times as kind of being about poetry. Even if they’re not. But I could also argue that all poems are possibly about movies that star Leonardo DiCaprio. And I could probably write a paper about how every poem you ever wrote was actually about Leo.

  RS: All, What is your spirit animal?

  Nelson: Oh, that shit is a shark.

  Ciccarello: Alligator.

  Schoonebeek: I hate this question, but I have an answer. It’s probably a goose.

  Ciccarello: Yeah.

  Dickman: Polar Bear.

  [Then we played a game of 3-second animals.]

  ///
  Rich Smith

  Rich Smith
  Danniel Schoonebeek

  Danniel Schoonebeek

  Amber Nelson

  Amber Nelson
  Matthew Dickman

  Matthew Dickman
  Lisa Ciccarello

  Lisa Ciccarello

  ///

  RS: Do you have any questions for me?

  Dickman: Yeah, how do you deal with pain?

  RS: Physical pain?

  Dickman: Both.

  RS: With physical pain I channel my soccer coach. He always shouted, “Pepper that goal!” And so I just channel my coach and say…

  Ciccarello: You just say, “Pepper that goal.”

  Dickman: Yeah, pepper that goal.

  Nelson: I have no idea what that means.

  RS: With psychic pain? I don’t have a therapist, so I call my friend Willie to see if he’s doing anything. Or I get one glass of bourbon in and try to get into a poem. Or use that energy and wrap it around some language. Or I run away from it by doing some physical activity. I recognize it as the physical response it is and I run.

  Ciccarello: Are you ever without humor?

  RS: Yes. When I am being absolutely denied something I want, I’m humorless.

  [Dickman hugs me.]

  Rich Smith is the author of Great Poem of Desire and Other Poems, published by Poor Claudia. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in Tin House, City Arts Magazine, Guernica, Southeast Review, Hobart, Barrow Street, The Bellingham Review, Pleiades, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

• The Conversant - http://theconversant.org/?p=2845

  Kristin Maffei with Allyson Paty and Danniel Schoonebeek
  Danniel Schoonebeek and Allyson Paty
  Allyson Paty and Danniel Schoonebeek

  This interview focuses on Paty and Schoonebeek’s collaborative poetic project Torch Songs.

  Kristin Maffei: When did you begin working on Torch Songs together? How did the idea first come about? And how did you decide on the form the poems follow, with two complementary poems of five lines each?

  Danniel Schoonebeek: I’ve always been prone to antagonism. One of my few childhood memories is writing nonsense on a wall with crayon in the house where I grew up. So it follows, I think, that I want to aggravate forms. “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.” Camus wrote that. And nowadays when I look at a wall I think, how can I undermine this with language? How can I take my own body, my own name, and aggravate it with words? I remember reading the first poem in Cummings’s 99 Poems when I finished grade school. Here was language, a poem, that couldn’t be read aloud. I loved that, a way of undermining the voice. Or the way Beckett uses “[silence]” not as a pause or lack of sound in his plays but as a beat. I suppose I also owe something to Magritte’s pipe. I was writing these poems that assumed the form of the fortunes found inside fortune cookies. They were each three lines. I think I was trying to combine the brevity of haiku with the voice of the fortunes. I was compelled by the way those pieces of paper undermine us. It’s a very antagonistic voice. You will have many friends. Doors will be opening for you. So I was trying to write poems that tell you what will happen to you, whether you like it or not. The first one stole a detail from Melville’s Bartelby, who is, to me, the great undermining and undermined character in American fiction: “Fired from love this year / you will feed / the furnace at the dead letter office.” Not too shabby, but I considered them failed poems insofar as I felt like the form was still dictating the terms. I was talking to myself when I needed to be speaking across a chasm to another person. So I abandoned them for a time. Over the next few months, I was reading the aubades of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu and listening to a lot of Nina Simone and Patsy Cline, both legendary torch singers. I’ve always loved the aubade as a form in poetry because it begins with a fundamental misrepresentation: This song is a poem. What it shares with the torch song is urgency. And I was fascinated by the misrepresentation of calling a song a “torch.” Ceci n’est une chanson, if you’re Magritte. So I felt I’d found two forms that aggravated each other well. I pitched the idea of a collaboration to Allyson about three years ago and she said sign me up. And I realize now that the form needed that second voice, with its own experiences of womanhood, geography and loss, to speak to and undermine and aggravate my own voice.

  Allyson Paty: As Danniel mentioned, the aubades of Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu were one important point of departure. These are five-line poems. They tend to be very direct and implicate a reader. At the same time, they are aubades, poems of separation. While the presence of a reader is keenly felt, it is felt as silence. Here is one of Ono no Komachi’s poems, for example: “How sad that I hope / to see you even now, / after my life has emptied itself / like this stalk of grain/ into the autumn wind.” That one comes with an inscription: “Sent to a lover on an empty seed husk.” I love the way the husk frames the poem as a practical form of communication from one person to another. I think of it as a stand-in for Komachi’s body—the physical entity that delivers her words. But when the husk is animated in the poem it is as a display of emptiness. In the end, it’s the absence of the body that the husk enacts. With Torch Songs I think we wanted the same kind of tension between urgency and distance. We knew we needed brevity such that nothing that happens in one half of the poem has a chance to become so established that it’s impervious to whatever happens in the counterpart. At the same time, each half needs to be enough of a distinct entity that there is something at stake when the counterpart exerts its influence. Likewise, I think the silence between the two halves needs to be palpable. The five-line Komachi and Shikibu poems exhibited that balance between autonomy and vulnerability, so we used that length as a model.

  Torch song: Notwithstanding

  I wanted to tell you the grass

  today when it trembled it looked

  like a crowd of women white

  bonnets all of them shaking

  their heads saying no you will not

  •

  There’s a word for the smell of rain

  after a dry spell not for how it burns

  slowly off what is there to tell you

  the way stillness interrupts a field

  once the horse who sees fire has fled

  KM: What is your process when you work on Torch Songs, both collaboratively and individually? Do you let the work unfold organically, or do you have goals or a schedule you like to follow? Does every first poem get a second, or are some left unfinished?

  AP: Each torch begins differently. Most often, one of us will send a title and the first five lines, but there are other possibilities. Sometimes they come without titles, sometimes it will be only a title, or most diabolically I think, the final five lines. We never write in each other’s presence. That’s important because when a new part of a torch shows up in my inbox it’s an independent entity that comes with this charge to reckon with it in some way. It’s also important to note that although we independently produce a draft of one half of the poem, after that I stop thinking of the poem in terms of “Danniel’s half” and “my half.” The editing becomes more directly collaborative, yes, but also one indication that a torch is close to completion is I stop feeling ownership over whatever half I contributed and am able to read the entire poem as a freestanding whole.

  DS: I’ve said to Allyson that I know I admire a poem when it makes me want to throw a rock. When it shakes up my nerves. Which is to say: maybe the best definition of poetry for me is when language unsettles me. So my process thus far has been to refuse process. I never want to be comfortable in my head or my body or know where the writing will happen. I write at my job on Madison Avenue instead of working. I write in the shower, in my head on the train. I wrote a poem in the dark on an airplane this year. And then shivering in a studio in France. I never write drunk and almost never write longhand. I want to memorize the lines first, walk around and listen to them, spit them out and kick them around. Frank Bidart has a poem, from his new book coming out in late April, that ends with a quote from Heath Ledger: “Once I have the voice, I have the line, and at the end of the line is the hook, and at the end of the hook is the soul.” Soul or no soul, I want to hear the voice until I feel I have to write it. Since I tend to compose longer, more convulsive lines and poems, Torch Songs allows me to memorize and live with a poem in the same way that a song’s hook or chorus will lodge itself in my head. The part I love most is trying to commit that poem to a page. Because you immediately see how you’ve deceived yourself. This word I loved won’t work. This line is too rigid or pleased with itself. And because we try to compose lines that don’t outstrip each other in length, we end up burning a lot of our own crops.

  KM: Have you collaborated on any other works? What is it about the Torch Songs that keeps you both coming back to them?

  DS: Unless you count cocktails or workaday blues, I believe we’ve kept it to torches. People are often a little nonplussed when they find out we don’t write these poems while barricaded inside a cabin or staring each other down in a barn. But for me that’s what keeps the collaboration vital. If you have ten seconds to speak, your words have to work harder to impact the silence that follows them. It’s the same burden Komachi confronts with her seed husk. Your twenty-five words have to travel farther than the wind that scatters them. So each time a torch arrives from Allyson, I try to treat it like a dispatch. And that’s often my sensation while writing them. At times the urgency of an occasion dictates the language and forces it to barrel through without punctuation. That’s something I learned from Williams. He has a poem, “An Exercise,” that ends: “how / shall we / escape this modern / age / and learn / to breathe again.” Torch Songs is one answer to that question for me. You send communiqués to a poet whose work compels you to create your best work. You hold a torch, to use the phrase, for the friends you love. That’s not to say there isn’t a certain competitive spirit, a certain conflict, between the two of us. But I don’t feel it’s a desire to outwrite another poet. It’s a desire to write poems with a poet whose work informs your sensibility and whose sensibility you want to equally inform and enrich with your work.

  AP: I think a question of audience is also at work here. It’s easy enough to accept on an intellectual level that no audience is passive. To see, to hear, to read—all of these are creative, even constitutive, acts. I confront this much more directly with Torch Songs than with anything I write independently. We read and respond to what the other writes from within the poem. And though intimate, it’s not a closed-circuit exchange. While each half of a torch song points at the other, the poem also points outwards to another reader.

  KM: Have any of these poems turned into larger works for either of you? Has working on the project influenced your individual work as poets?

  AP: You know that cartoon sequence of someone sitting and jumping on an overstuffed valise? Occasionally when I’m writing a torch song, the five lines feel like an impossibly small container into which I’m trying to wrestle my poem. Sometimes it’s a matter of making cuts, but more often it means whatever I’m writing requires a longer form, and what begins as a torch song either gets trashed or evolves into something new.

  I do think writing the torches influences my other work in a more general way. And as Danniel and my respective poems and interests evolve, the torches begin to reflect that in some way, too. I don’t know that I could isolate a specific change, but in the process of writing anything, I hope to challenge my poetics and grow as a result. When writing with another poet whose work I admire, that challenge is often more direct, and the effect perhaps greater.

  DS: I’ve stolen once or twice out of my own pocket. I can think of one torch song, which we still haven’t finished, where I took the lines and casted the words out as a monostich that ends a much longer poem. I’d never steal from Allyson in that way though. It’d feel too much like turnpike robbery. More often than not, I think we snatch glimpses from longer, larger works and smuggle that language into the poems. I don’t like the term found language though. It’s more like confronted language to me. I’m also not against calling it stolen language. I know we’ve confronted or stolen from Pessoa, de Kooning, Ted Berrigan, John Cage, Camus, Tom Waits, anyone who makes the mistake of talking to us—Ovid, some Neruda. In one poem I steal twenty dollars from my father. We’re ruthless.

  Torch Song: Hickory

  History began with an apology

  Andrew Jackson staring up at me

  from the twenty my father is missing

  saying sorry men about tomorrow

  I was thinking an apology like that

  •

  My sisters peeled spud after spud

  for a meal we couldn’t stomach

  The paring knife was deft beneath

  their fingers don’t worry they cooed

  to each other it was nobody’s fault

  KM: Given that the two traditions you follow, American torch songs and Japanese aubades, have often fallen into the realm of “women’s writing,” how does gender play into these pieces?

  DS: I don’t think men, neither poets nor musicians, are disallowed from writing torch songs. Sam Cooke will testify to that. Mandelstam, too. I don’t think it’s exclusive to Americans either. The Clash’s “Train in Vain,” for example—that song belongs in the torch song pantheon. Where the Japanese aubades are concerned, the energy of those poems is established by the fact that women just weren’t allowed to speak that way to men in ancient Japan. The poems are protests both in this sense and in the sense that they protest failed love. They stand as personal missives that otherwise weren’t intended to be read by an audience. I think that’s a conflict that we try to inherit. We don’t concern ourselves with fulfilling a man’s or woman’s role in any given torch song, but we do attempt to honor the sense of urgency and risk that generates a poem one might not intend to shout from the rooftops. If you’re loathe to say it, you should say it. I’m always reminding myself of that.

  AP: Just as I never frame Danniel’s contributions as the man’s part as I read, I never think of myself as contributing the woman’s part as I write. However, when we started sharing these poems with people a couple years ago, we found that our audience—sometimes these people were relative strangers, sometimes total strangers to our individual works as poets—would often immediately guess which of us contributed which material and would do so very accurately based on what they identified as a male voice versus a female voice. I recognize, of course, that all sorts of personal and cultural histories as well as other identifying markers get stitched into our individual experiences of language, so it wasn’t exactly surprising, but I was definitely taken aback. As we mentioned, we are interested in writing across fractures and gaps—writing across the physical space that separates two halves of the poems on the page; writing across silence and voice; writing across the public and the private mode, as Danniel just mentioned; and certainly, writing across what separates Danniel and I as two separate individuals. That definitely includes, among many other things, our distinct experiences of gender. We’re not interested, though, in just enacting or affirming these as binaries, so it was somewhat troubling that it was the initial impulse for readers to designate the poem along those lines. That didn’t change anything in our approach to writing them, but we did stop getting that reaction after a little while, which hopefully indicates that this form has found its own language through which to speak.

  KM: When I heard you read these poems out loud a few months ago at Poets House, you each read the halves you’d written. When reading these on the page, though, there’s less indication of who wrote what. Is this anonymity intentional? Are these oral or visual poems?

  AP: I’m not so interested in indicating who wrote what, but I’m also not interested in intentionally obscuring that. What I like about reading The Torches aloud is that each torch is a single poem with two voices, and anyone listening to us read them can hear that and see that directly. On the page, the poems are clearly diptychs, but a reader may not encounter each half as a distinct voice in communication with the other. But there are other formal qualities that are equally important to the Torches—especially the lineation and the way they take up space on the page—which become apparent when the poems are seen in writing.

  DS: I don’t know if I do it intentionally, but as a person who’s prone to antagonism I will admit that I love complicating my own identity. I refuse to say my poems have a speaker in them who isn’t me. And I seldom write anything that doesn’t draw upon the personal life. I expose myself above anyone else in my work, but I don’t necessarily mean autobiography when I say the personal life. What I mean to say is: my life or yours, it makes no difference, because I’m interested in the personal life’s stitching, but only insofar as the stitching comes apart or gets tangled together. I love slander, defamation of character, libel, misquoting. Appropriation strikes me as a terrible word because I’m not here to make anything appropriate. I’d much rather make everything inappropriate. I think I pissed Allyson off once because I encouraged her to make up a quote and attribute it to a real person, to meddle with the historical record of the language. If it makes people uncomfortable or offends them or sends them off on a scholarly witch hunt, I find all of those responses valid and meaningful. The compelling part of writing poetry for me is what Faulkner called the human heart in conflict with itself. I’m only interested in writing about my life if the language itself can challenge and thwart and broaden the definition of what that life is. Sometimes that means weaving a tale, a mythos, out of a fact as small as an old flame who liked to eat almond butter. Sometimes that means being so unabashedly autobiographical that the unadorned fact of a life is unsettling. So I’m invested in the conflict a reader feels when she can’t gender the lines in one of our poems. And I’ve written from the perspective of Allyson before, from several men and women who aren’t me in fact, and I’ve addressed other men and women with those voices while still mining details from my own life. If our voices have begun to blend, I think it’s because these poems are concerned with fear and dread and love and protest and troublemaking, and they don’t give much of a damn about personhood. That’s why we need such a rigid form. It’s the skeleton on which we hang the skin and the life, the clothes and the names. But then, of course, one still has to undermine the skeleton.

  Torch Song: Godelieve

  I loved a man once he was almond

  butter smeared on my teeth he spoke

  man o’war when he kidnapped me

  my father the insurance baron wept

  I sewed his name into my chemise

  •

  Found a bandana in the mud today

  I sucked the water from it shook

  it out saw it was a map your fingers

  at one corner lips at the other I tied

  my hair back and made for the X

  Allyson Paty is author of the chapbook The Further Away ([sic] Press, 2012). Her poems can be found in Tin House, Best New Poets 2012, Handsome and elsewhere. She is from New York, where she is an editor of Singing Saw Press.

  Danniel Schoonebeek’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat and elsewhere. In 2012, he was an Emerging Poets resident at Poets House. He writes a monthly column on poetry for The American Reader, hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and works as associate editor at PEN America.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/danniel-schoonebeek

  Danniel Schoonebeek
  Poet Details
  http://dannielschoonebeek.com
  Veronica Rafael
  Danniel Schoonebeek’s first book of poems, American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014), was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers and was called “a groundbreaking first book that stands to influence its author’s generation” by Boston Review. Maggie Nelson called American Barricade “the debut of a fierce talent and vision” and C.D. Wright wrote that the book is “explosively and assiduously crafted.” His second book is a travelogue called C’est la guerre (2015) and his third book, Trébuchet, was selected by Kevin Prufer for the 2015 National Poetry Series.

  Schoonebeek’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry magazine, Tin House, Iowa Review, Fence, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Guernica, and elsewhere. He has received awards and honors from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Poets House, the Ace Hotel, and Oregon State University. Schoonebeek hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and has served as editor of the PEN Poetry Series since 2013. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation

  back to top

Trebuchet
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Trebuchet

Danniel Schoonebeek. Univ. of Georgia, $19.95 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-0-82034992-3

This second collection from Schoonebeek (American Barricade), a 2015 National Poetry Series winner, finds the poet investigating the implications of capitalism, war, and dissent, both historically, and in a modern context. It's a searing convergence of political commentary and folk tale; the opening poem suggests that America's poor "should rear up and throw books of poetry/ through the walls of the White House." Another poem consists of Internet-search phrases that have gotten Americans placed on government watch lists, hilariously including "who cooks the president's breakfast." The antiwar screed "Poem with a Gun to Its Head" works as a controlled plea for mayhem, while "Russets" provides an apt metaphor for poverty: "We hate potatoes History every day it's potatoes." Schoonebeek also conjures the fantastical, including sylphs, a man with the voice of "a legendary/ backwoods catcaller," and a child called "Red Smear." In "The Dancing Plague," a woman and her village full of husbands are besieged by "hostiles" and forced to dance to their deaths. Schoonebeek's collaborations with Osip Mandelstam, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Sergei Yesenin emphasize the relevance of poetry to political conversation. The collection reinforces Schoonebeek's status as a linguistic talent and dissenter leading a call to arms by example: "The time of writing books that don't send us to jail is dead." (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Trebuchet." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700017&it=r&asid=c07caa0a7d5ae6f15c3f0b9f24e33c6f. Accessed 1 July 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700017

"Trebuchet." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 49+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA468700017&asid=c07caa0a7d5ae6f15c3f0b9f24e33c6f. Accessed 1 July 2017.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-936919-25-3
  Word count: 224

  American Barricade
  Danniel Schoonebeek. YesYes (SPD, dist.), $16 trade paperback (128p) ISBN 978-1-936919-25-3

  Schoonebeek's gripping debut explores one man's origin story and genealogy in a sprawling American family, stalking through a sparse landscape "Like a fire eating its way across a battlefield." The pacing oscillates between grandiose and clipped—there are numerous instances of beautifully employed end-stop punctuation at each enjambment, but at times this serves as a means, perhaps, of the speaker constricting himself. Even with these self-imposed limitations, we experience the speaker watching himself "decompose in the mirror a minute," as if emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the single line. Instead, Schoonebeek relies on a collection of staccato declarations that cumulatively create a new "Colossus," as it were. Indeed, the collection contains many memorable building blocks, but these small masterpieces are often lost in an inundation of verbiage. The Family Album poems serve as examples of distilled brevity ("Father they crown/ son king/ of your rust"), and yet, such impactful moments can be found throughout as long as one is ready to endure the erection of visible scaffolding. The end result is a forged totality that has been shaped with extreme care, perhaps best summarized as follows: "Unbroken thing he said looking up you're the color of everything exploded at once." (Mar.)
  Reviewed on: 04/28/2014

• Entropy
  https://entropymag.org/american-barricade-by-danniel-schoonebeek/
  Word count: 2499

  American Barricade by Danniel Schoonebeek
  written by Carrie Lorig March 26, 2014

  American Barricade
  by Danniel Schoonebeek
  YesYes Books, March 2014
  128 pages / YesYes
  I. Reaction

  “It strikes out pitiless and burning the shit”
  – Ledger (Delaware Boys)

  It’s a strange and splinter juicing time of year. At least where I stand. So far north. The melt is powerful, knotty, full of skin fighting. There are two mini-vans submerged in streetwater near a Taco Bell. I keep taking a million pictures of orange peels sticking out of the snow and dirt ice like chin hairs because they are everywhere. Haunted, as usual.

  #1

  #2

  When I go from inside to outside, I almost balk at being allowed to feel comfortable, at being able to move forward without thinking cold / speed / cheekbones.

  “Like a grease ant
  roaming the fringe of the village”
  – Ivory

  This book, American Barricade (YesYes), by Danniel Schoonebeek embodies this lunging, but quiet change of weather. Thick in re-emerging, sub-merging, a spareness that is potentially deep and changeable. Do you know what I mean by that? The blanket of snow is going to be replaced by a brief blanket of deadness and trash and hesitant / unsteady people all just about to be alive again. Oil and drains collecting at each other. It’s weird and good. It’s a mood that is ambient and ugly and necessary. Every early spring rupture has me convinced this is “my loudest year yet” (Poem For Four Years).

  Words of the season according to American Barricade:

  choke leaves, all this deadbolt night making room for mosquitoes, oxblood robe, dead’s dead’s dead’s / dead’s dead, swagbellied girl, boot knife, This is why in America the idea of a fire is you eat, undersheriff, she was watching a skin heal across her soup, stalking horse, the olives.

  II. Reaction

  Bodies / figures emerge often in this text as they are called upon by a title. A title or a name which can belong to many bodies at once. Some of the titles are intimate. They are the words we learn to associate with the first bodies we encounter (father, mother, brother, sister), with the first body we use to encounter (son, child, boy, girl). Some are more linked to a social presence / hierarchy (god, king, queen, prince, man, woman, militia, brothel).

  “There is me. Loyal only to when I tell myself.
  That boy who has written across his wrist.
  I’m god would make a good son but only if his.
  Voice is a silence in which now I appear.
  Ask about his mother he says mother.
  Let her rip. Men who mean something.
  Different than you when they say we.”
  – Genealogy

  There is wife and there is husband, as well, who fall somewhere between intimate title and obligatory title. At least, they do according to the way those terms often develop, half-instinctual / half-thickly social. I believe in the possibility of their tenderness, the tenderness such terms are meant to immediately disclose. I also believe there are expectations hard set inside those terms and that those expectations are meant to exercise, service, and stage a certain kind of power.

  “She tastes like my wife but she isn’t.
  She’s fromage and baguette and ham in her mouth.
  And she wears her black negligee and bouffant.”
  – Bouquet

  Finally, there are individual names scattered throughout. Deborah Jean, Straw Prince, Tiffany Laurel, Billy, Jessie Lynne, Melinda Anne, Emma Lazarus, Erik, Enrique, Derek, Josie, Danniel. However, these specific names don’t clarify the bodies on the page, but like the titles, they are occupying pronoun position. They continue to maintain a similar roominess and precise ambiguity present in the repetitions of father, mother, son, etc.

  “son yips
  can we
  keep him
  can son
  name him
  Erik no
  Derek no”
  – Family Album, IX. Tycoon

  We affix these words to moving bodies on the page, in the book, because they give the writer and the reader so much room (so much more light and dark / potential for contrast) to work with / to play with. They allow us to immediately relate to a character (or even more radically, they push us to relate to characters, an I or a you, who can imagine and live possibilities we hesitate to), and also to maintain a wide, malleable lens concerning where exactly we are / who exactly we’re dealing with. They possess the potential to create a relationship with a text that is more magic territory, less rigid continent, says Aaron Shurin in a talk entitled, “Narrativity,” given at Painted Bride Art Center in 1989.

  “Pronouns are known as shifters because they are by nature unstable linguistic units, referring not to people but to moving circumstances of speech and audition, visibility and perception. As such they are fictional opportunities; unlike names they permit a character…to ride the Wheel of Person, speak and be spoken of with equal weight, inhabit simultaneity” (2)

  They are good tools, in other words, to get us thinking about the relationship between ever-evolving personhood and language as material / texture. What parts of language are allowing you subject and keeping you object? Through pronouns we can see how language is vestigially programmed to limit (Later in the talk Shurin quotes Sarah Schulman on the difficulties of create a lesbian text without using names. “…she came into a room, she looked at her, she looked at her, she said–and aside from homophobia, what terrors would such unlocations unleash?” (2)) and how we might crack it open “so that the radical fractures would illuminate a comprehensive pluralistic image” (3).

  In American Barricade, Schoonebeek’s work seems interested in delving into the sense of responsibility these pronouns / names / terms evoke in a masculine aligned individual. What happens when you take responsibilities that are assigned to you, both by bodies you love (mother, father, brother, etc.) and by cloudy linguistic positions, seriously? Thinking of all this also makes me think of my students reading Dana Ward / Eileen Myles and asking me (with that LOOK on their faces) what I think a poet IS exactly. Thinking of all this makes me think of how I would seriously and happily do just about anything short of dying to live up to the responsibilities I feel come with being a poet (no capital P necessary). Maybe I would even die for it (don’t laugh at me). Sometimes I feel like I am. Does that responsibility you aim to fulfill or to surpass destroy you? Does it build you up? Is it noble or are you trash? How can we make language reflect or refract this? See this diagram called “Lullaby (Coup)” that begins the book’s third section:

  #3

  These poems want to know how those responsibilities or how a powerful sense / scent of them affects a male individual’s ability to move and relationship within the world. The poems believe the I / man / the Straw Prince / the son / the husband is trash. Those around him see it. “When one of them tastes my name on his tongue / they say he vomits out of violation / alone (and trespass, scorn) and madder” (My Life in Absentia). Those around him are possibly monsters, too. “My friends are monsters they come in a box they die” (Poem For Four Years). The I / man / the Straw Prince / the son / the husband wanders towards an understanding of what abject might be and almost brushes it. What keeps the speaker or the male presences refraining from that territory is a lingering belief in possessing and exuding nobility, which is both rooted in some kind of honesty drifting out of the poems and in inhabiting personas (here the pronoun room really comes into play). Consider this stanza which opens up the poem “Bouquet:”

  God said I tasted that low wind again.
  Like the cork taint and ladybirds of a poor man’s bordeaux.
  Or the musk of a girl fucking herself on Rue d’Aboudir.
  That’s how my bouquet tastes I’m a bachelor.
  When I’m starching my collar.
  Or I’m blacking my boots.
  Or I’m trimming my bale for my birthday.
  God says I taste that low wind again like a breath of disgrace.
  -Bouquet

  There’s a romanticization here of the young, stinking, virile man / flaneur / bachelor that is aware of its hyperbole but also believes it. There’s a romanticization here that wants to acknowledge that belief is part of what gets confusing when it comes to separating what the speaker sees as hyperbole or persona and what the speaker sees as sincerely a part of him. The scale of this opening stanza is immediately so large and sweeping. God, a girl (not a woman) masturbating herself / reclining in male fantasy, the brief afterthought of a poor man as a means to describe a wine’s taste, and a man. This man, who takes care in preparing the male parts of his appearance, the black boots and the bale which could be his beard or his pubic hair, is caught in between all these bodies (both forcibly and willingly). I read it and I feel, extravagantly, how far away all these BODIES seem from each other. That is what the low wind of disgrace is, right? Not that a young man is or isn’t some kind of trash being or noble being. It’s that he might be far away, further than he needs or wants to be.

  “son axed a slit
  in the breaker
  & made for the border”
  – Family Album, XV. Alimony

  It’s important to emphasize that I am not associating nobility with “goodness” at all in this context. I don’t think that’s what’s at stake here. The man of trash is capable of goodness. The irresponsible man is capable of goodness. All the male figures in the book are capable of goodness. But is the I / man / the Straw Prince / the son / the husband capable of admiring the broken American / the broken American landscape / the male figure aware of or sunk into the problematic pressures of manhood put on and perpetuated around him? “I’m blouse crumbs and clingstones and pits in the shape of a man.” -Bouquet What exactly is it that we’ve inherited language-wise, emotion-wise, climate-wise, business-wise, blood-wise? Is he capable of appearing noble to you (the reader) and to himself?

  I’m not sure we’re meant to be able to answer those questions. The bodies in the photo stretched by Gregory Crewdson on the other side of the black cover / almost all of their heads are bent. Or to be more specific, those questions are exactly the thing we need to personally complicate through as readers, as beings aware of how dangerous / disobedient / glorious it is to cast deep portraiture of our togetherness.
  III. Reaction

  “…I am so fascinated by your blogging, and Facebooking, and the way this blends seamlessly with the poetry because it is so much about radicalizing reception, and redistributing cultural production through the occasion of the poem.”

  – Thom Donovan in a letter to Brandon Brown, from a series of immense and glorious lettered exchanges between the two authors published on BOMB in three parts.

  I want to know what makes you decide you’re going to read [or write about] a poetry book. What are the structures of approach? Maybe they are for us. Sometimes I find a book on my desk from E. There is a post-it affixed to it that says, “XOXOXOXO, E.” Maybe a small drawing, too, if the book and the post-it are from B. Sometimes Berryman’s Dream Songs shows up in my mailbox unexpectedly and M’s tiny handwriting on a small sheet inside the book reminds me of how small the spaces were where Kafka wrote his aphorisms. Sometimes I am a little drunk and in a lot of pain one spring ago when I impulsively order Dana Ward’s Crisis of the Infinite Worlds with barely there $s. All I know is that I need DENSITY, a dismantle by careful flood, and this book looks like it has that. C texts me death threats Alice Notley made at those who would have her shut her poetry the fuck up, and I listen to this lecture I sort of refuse to call a lecture (instead, I call it a text / a book) for the thousandth time. What is taste? What is a hunch when you are thinking about what to choose? There is the weather that helps me decide what part of silence I want to occupy and grow lavender in. I always want to read what N is reading.

  What are the structures of approach? I choose books. I choose them in a scholarly way, in an archival way, but I also choose them holistically. Why did I want to read American Barricade? It’s relatively simple in that I read this tumblr post that chronicled the last bit of life for the past 744 hours. I’m having to convince myself mid-sentence that what I’m trying to talk about is necessary to bring up, that I’m not being irreverent or off track from the book in some way. But don’t you watch how writers / how people blend it all together? The way our lives work and are barely quotable but totally a mess of flood / richness. I do. Sometimes things like that tumblr post convince me more than an individual poem (to be extreme in my examples: it convinces me more than prestige / award matter does at this point) that I need to be thinking and sedimenting inside someone’s art and work. Or I simply see such things before I get the chance to see the individual poem, especially given the way our technological lives work and occur and introduce us. I look for the seamlessness, for bodies that radically believe art never needs to begin or end. I look for the care and living and poetry that goes into innocuous spaces. I believe in it. I celebrate it. I think of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, in which Stein knows immediately that Picasso suits her, but Pound doesn’t. Stein likes the way Picasso pronounces and speaks her name. Pound falls out of one of her chairs.

  What are the structures of approach? How do end up folded on each other’s space?

• Boston Review
  http://bostonreview.net/poetry-microreview/john-james-microreview-danniel-schoonebeek-american-barricade
  Word count: 278

  American Barricade
  by Danniel Schoonebeek
  YesYes Books, $16 (paper)

  Few debut collections combine innovative technique, post-confessionalism, and social critique as authoritatively as Daniel Schoonebeek’s American Barricade. Exploring the interplay of economic and psychic obstacles to progress and happiness, the book’s calculatedly irregular punctuation and syntax and diverse forms make for a work of perpetual shifting, uncertainty, and dread. “Waste of a man, says the little god who stands in my doorway this morning, get out of bed.” Efforts to master one’s self and environment don’t quite bear fruit; in “Itinerary (New Colossus),” Schoonebeek writes, “Heidegger tells me three dangers threaten thinking: / one I call liberty, one I call oats, one I call what I owe.” Despite broader social concerns, Schoonebeek’s primary focus is the family, where laconic fathers and neglectful mothers reflect their environment’s economic desperation. “Waiting for her to finish washing her face off and mother // who was king to me in those days,” he opens one poem, enjambment forcing “mother” to shift from verb to noun, emphasizing a desire to be mothered and her looming monstrosity. “Nectarines,” the book’s most conventionally narrative piece, portrays a dejected man-boy whose Faulknerian obsession with his sister borders on the licentious: “I had a very expensive sister . . . . / She had a navel so big / I dreamed I would drown inside.” Formal innovation peaks in “Lullaby (Coup),” a visual poem resembling a family tree, but whose subject matter remains largely political. With its limitless invention, emotional force, and profound social relevance, American Barricade is a groundbreaking first book and stands to influence the aesthetic disposition of its author’s generation.

• Coldfront
  http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/review-54-american-barricade-by-danniel-schoonebeek/
  Word count: 385

  Review #54: ‘American Barricade’ by Danniel Schoonebeek
  reviews | Friday, May 9th, 2014
  D.S.

  COLDFRONT RATING: four-half
  PUBLISHED BY: YesYes Books, 2014
  REVIEW BY: Timothy Liu

  cover-2

  On bad days I think to myself: most people should not be writing poems. Losers and abusers are a twelve-step dime a dozen, and no, the scars on your wrists won’t buy you a one-way ticket to Parnassus, USA.; save the art form for the deranged, the condemned, those who actually have something to say. Well my friends, I have good news: Danniel Schoonebeek has served his sentence, has done some serious time: “When my father found this out he shot me, / once, a look like he wished he had shot me, / and landed me a job remaindering debts. / And I do. In my hands his troubles don’t / endure. In my hands I hold my boss, / whose hands I touch now more than father’s / and when the two are the same man standing / behind me in the doorway, who can say if those / are not the days I steal most from the company.” This Black Sheep has barricaded himself inside the soiled bedroom of an intractable Family Romance that swaggers on and on like a drunken cowboy unbroken by a silence whispering its pathos to a whorish American Sublime whose syntax would make us lurch: “She’s a minx on gin she’s a gin sling isn’t she. / She’s liberty leading nobody. / And she tastes (when she talks) like she fucks (like my wife). / Like a nom de plume on my tongue that means you’re disgrace. / God says her hands on the headboard tonight like she’s beating down Sainte-Chapelle’s door. / God says I dick her and pluck the strays from her scalp. / Saying she wifes me. / She wifes me not.” Fasten your seatbelts, my rough and ravished brides, our Bridegroom has arrived.

  Disclosures: I’ve been anticipating this debut ever since I first taught “Bouquet” to my grad students earlier in the semester. My ship has now come in. In spades.

  Favorites: Debut, Nectarines, Little Wheel, Bouquet, Horoscope, and his long series of short lyrics called Family Album.

  Read two poems by Schoonebeek at Asymptote.

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