Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Attributed to the Harrow
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Iowa City
STATE: IA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Married to poet Robyn Schiff; one son.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| HEADING: | Twemlow, Nick |
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| 100 | 1_ |a Twemlow, Nick |
| 670 | __ |a Josh Gibson, 2001: |b CIP t.p. (Nick Twemlow) |
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PERSONAL
Born in KS; married Robyn Schiff (a poet); children: son.
EDUCATION:Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Editor, writer, poet, filmmaker. The Iowa Review, Iowa City, IA, senior editor; Canarium Books, editor. Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA, assistant professor of creative writing and film.
AWARDS:Fulbright Fellow; Princess Grace Honorarium in Filmmaking, 2011; Poetry Society of America, Norma Farber first book award, 2012, for Palm Trees.
WRITINGS
Contributor of poetry to publications, including A Public Space, Best American Non-Required Reading, Boston Review, and Lana Turner.
SIDELIGHTS
Based in Iowa City, Iowa, Nick Twemlow writes about history, duality, supernatural phenomena, and violence of the American Midwest. A Fulbright Fellow, he is an editor, writer, contemporary poet, filmmaker, and professor. He is senior editor at the Iowa Review, and coedits Canarium Books. A recipient of a Princess Grace Honorarium in Filmmaking in 2011, Twemlow has also made short films and videos that have been shown at festivals, such as SXSW, Tribeca, and Slamdance. At the University of Iowa, he worked on an immersive media installation called “The Directory of Possibilities” that incorporated video, photographs, otherworldly recordings, texts, and an iPhone app that highlight paranormal activity. In 2002, Twemlow wrote the book, Josh Gibson, part of the “Baseball Hall of Famers of the Negro Leagues” series. The biography of the home run hitter presents a history of black baseball players in organized baseball, the establishment of the Negro Leagues, and racial tension in American sports. Twemlow is an assistant professor of creative writing and film at Coe College. He is married to poet Robyn Schiff.
Palm Trees
Twemlow has published Palm Trees, his first book of poetry, which won the Norma Farber first book award from the Poetry Society of America, and he has published poetry in various sources, including A Public Space, Best American Non-Required Reading, and Boston Review. Palm Trees acknowledges that palm trees were imported into America, like most of the people have been. The poems involve topics as varied as new century globalism, foreboding, pride, dementia, and spent consequence. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a contributor noted how Twemlow’s poems are both holy and scary as they thrum and jitter through late-capitalism America and that “It’s rare to see a poet celebrate our contradictions like this.” Noticing Twemlow’s relentlessness, Denise Jarrott said on the Writing University website: “At once lasting and ephemeral, like the sting of a wasp or a solid punch in the stomach, the poems in this collection distinguish themselves by their immediacy as well as their violence.”
Explaining the structure of many of Twemlow’s poems, Kent Shaw said online at the Rumpus that they start with the speaker dissatisfied with everyday life, then realizes there is a world around him and that he is not the center of the universe, and then an Other complicates his definition of humanity, thus creating a paradox. Shaw acknowledged: “The Twemlow poems I’m most drawn to are filled with a sublimated anxiety. Like the poems are inside the speaker’s mind numbing and disintegrating and evacuating all the content that should matter but won’t. They are destructive poems. Shaw added: “Life is supposed to be charged with all this energy, but really living life is a strange experience, and sometimes it feel like life is more about coping than living.”
Commenting on his obsession with paranormal and surveillance, Twemlow explained in an interview on the Austinist website: “I’m interested in how we self-surveille. Poetry to me seems like a type of surveillance. It’s surveilling your own imagination and reporting on it…I just can’t help but feel a little paranoid when I’m writing because I’m studying my own thinking, and the world outside of me as well, in this scary intense way.” He is also interested in dream-states and dream interpretation. “I found that within my own work I often think of the poem as a third dream-state … where virtually anything can happen. So I suppose that accounts for some of the psychological texture of some of the works,” he said.
Attributed to the Harrow Painter
Twemlow published his next collection of poetry, Attributed to the Harrow Painter, in 2017. The title refers to an ancient Greek artist who painted red-figure pottery who was known as an ordinarily competent painter and only a minor talent. In the collection, Twemlow faces off against fatherhood, nostalgia, and the commodity world of art. “Reading this collection felt like I was watching a father raise his son, teaching him about art, sculptures, and the classical period, and simultaneously getting glimpses into the reflections the father has on his son growing up,” according to a reviewer online at Infinite Text.
Poems in the collection consider minor talents and minor voices in discourse on art and life in the Western world. He guides the reader to transcendence through art, seeing the world in a childlike wonder of awe, and delving into Twemlow’s own thoughts about fatherhood and sharing his love of art. In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer said: “Subtly and provocatively, Twemlow questions the value—practical, aesthetic, humanistic—of the work of art outside of the discourse that prompts it.” The reviewer added that the poems are refreshingly self-aware and reflect on the politics of their own making. Praising the collection for being self-referential, experimental, and always engaging, Rob Cline commented on the Gazette Online: “Twemlow is skilled at allowing a phrase to morph from one meaning to another as the lines pile up and the momentum of a poem builds.” Cline added that the rhythms of the language carry the reader along.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 15, 2013, review of Palm Trees, p. 40; November 2017, review of Attributed to the Harrow Painter.
ONLINE
Austinist, http://austinist.com/ (March 28, 2013), author interview.
Infinite Text, https://infinitetext.blog/ (May 30, 2017), review of Attributed to the Harrow Painter.
Gazette Online, http://www.thegazette.com/ (November 25, 2017), Rob Cline, review of Attributed to the Harrow Painter.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (May 7, 2014), Kent Shaw, review of Palm Trees.
Writing University Website, https://www.writinguniversity.org/ (November 8, 2012), Denise Jarrott, review of Palm Trees.
Nick Twemlow lives with his family in Iowa City, where he writes and makes films. He also co-edits Canarium Books.
Nick Twemlow
http://nicktwemlow.com/
Poet and filmmaker Nick Twemlow is a senior editor of the Iowa Review and co-editor of Canarium Books. His first collection of poetry, Palm Trees (2012), won the Norma Farber first book award from the Poetry Society of America. Judge Timothy Liu noted of Twemlow’s work, “Reading Twemlow gives one a deep sense about what's exciting about the lyrical possibilities embodied not in just of a first book of poems but any book of poems. . . . I was enticed by verbal savvy, consequential wordplay, cultural élan.”
Twemlow’s films have played Athens, FLEX, Slamdance, Shnit International, SXSW, Tribeca, and other film festivals. In 2011 he received a Princess Grace Honorarium in Filmmaking. He lives in Iowa City with his wife, the poet Robyn Schiff, and their son
Nick Twemlow’s first book of poems, Palm Trees, was published this winter. He is a senior editor at The Iowa Review, and co-edits Canarium Books. His short films have played many festivals, including SXSW, Tribeca, and Slamdance. He received a Princess Grace Honorarium in Filmmaking in 2011.
Nick Twemlow
Princess Grace Award:
Film Honorarium, 2011
Born in Kansas, a state haunted by its civil war history, and raised in a house reported to have been haunted by a mysterious presence, Nick Twemlow is a filmmaker and writer whose work is preoccupied with the juxtaposition of altered states, dualities, paranormal worlds, and supernatural phenomena with the violent realities of the bucolic Midwest. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a former Fulbright Fellow, and the author of a collection of poems entitled Palm Trees, forthcoming in 2012 along side a collaborative compendium of short films. Twemlow is currently working on his MFA thesis in Film & Video Production at the University of Iowa, an immersive media installation called "The Directory of Possibilities," which includes video works, photographs, otherworldly recordings, texts found and original, and an iPhone app, which investigates the paranormal world he grew up in. There will be ghosts and wolf packs, poltergeists and voices of the dead. His short films have screened in many festivals, including Tribeca, SXSW, Slamdance, FLEX, and Athens International. He recently finished The Trapper, a short narrative film set in rural Iowa.
Nick Twemlow
Biography
Bibliography
Writing Samples
Award
Links
Plam Trees, Book Cover, Nick Twemlow
Biography
Nick Twemlow was born in Topeka and now lives in Iowa City. He serves as a senior editor of The Iowa Review and co-editor of Canarium Books, a publisher of contemporary poetry. He is also a filmmaker whose films have been screened at festivals around the world, including Tribeca, SXSW, Slamdance, and Athens.
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Bibliography ( - housed in Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection)
Books:
Your Mouth is Everywhere (Racquetball Chapbook Tournament, 2010
Josh Gibson:Baseball Hall of Famers of the Negro Leagues (Rosen Publishing, 2002)
Poetry:
Palm Trees (Green Lantern Press, 2012)
Films:
American Glyptix
The Laying on of Hands
Wolfivision
The Trapper
The Fast
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Writing Samples
Topeka, Topeka
Topeka, half the moon is rotten with shadows pooling in the Sea of Topeka. Topeka, where first I wet my brain with a 40oz bottle of Topeka.
Topeka, is place name, is damn shane, is a mirror made of sand & Topeka. Topeka, you are substandard. I am not. Yet I'm the one on my hands & knees
searching for the lost key in the prairie grass, ripped on acid, loving the
fallacy that the black keys equal melancholy, the black keys being
Topeka.
Topeka, miscast capital, you're not more political than a handshake with your
dream-self upon waking, in my case dream-self lives & dies in Topeka.
Topeka, the sickness cannot be cured of Topeka.
Topeka, tigers laze about the yards, a man with a box balanced on his head, his
possessions stuffed to brimming trots down Topeka Ave.
Topeka, the sickness will go unnoticed. The vaccine is composed of rare
sentiments, the kind that love & hate with equal abandon, love & hate,
love & hate, love & hate. Topeka.
Topeka, there was a night when the moon didn't appear but it appeared
everywhere else in the world, what happened that night? Topeka?
Topeka, I fear for your life, the intersection of 29th & California is a portal to
Hell. I died there twenty times in my youth. Today, driving through, I toss
a bouquet of roses to mark my third death, the one that had a soundtrack
I can't shake free. My sister sings it from the shower every morning.
Forecast calls for occasional showers, with the possibility of late-morning
sleet, in Topeka.
Topeka, cast off the reliquaries! Call your men to war! Me? I'll be tugging one
last hit from the bong I fashioned out of the shrapnel of Topeka.
Topeka, pop. rarely exceeds one, as in each trip home happens in rewind,
stepping back across the creek, bird in hand throwing up the worm,
further back, unbreaking its wing, bird flying off as it resurrected but
from among the living, there I am, eight years old, seven, six, now a slug
of semen sucked back into my father, now, as the waters roll back across
the plains toward the river, a dog coughs up water, lifts its head, sees
nothing, puts its head back down, this, Topeka, is your history, although
it never happened.
---From Palm Trees
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Awards
Princess Grace Foundation Honorarium in Filmmaking (2011)
Norma Farber First Book Award from Poetry Society of America (2012)
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Links
Nick's Website
Re
Poet Of The Week Nick Twemlow
June 2–8, 2014
Nick Twemlow’s first book, Palm Trees, won the 2013 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Best American Non-Required Reading, Boston Review, Lana Turner and elsewhere. He is a senior editor at the Iowa Review and co-edits Canarium Books. His film and video works have played Athens, Slamdance, SXSW, Tribeca and many other film festivals. He is a recipient of a Princess Grace Foundation Honorarium in Filmmaking and is an assistant professor of creative writing and film at Coe College.
Nick Twemlow’s second book, Attributed to the Harrow Painter, will be published in fall 2017 in the Kuhl House Poets Series, University of Iowa Press. He co-edits Canarium Books with Josh Edwards, Robyn Schiff, and Lynn Xu. His film and video works have screened at Athens, Slamdance, SXSW, Tribeca, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He teaches at Coe College in Iowa. His website, where some of his films are parked, is nicktwemlow.com.
Palm Trees
Publishers Weekly.
260.15 (Apr. 15, 2013): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Palm Trees
Nick Twemlow. Green Lantern (www.press. thegreenlantern.org), $15 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-9884185-1-6
Twemlow's debut thrums and jitters its way through late-capitalism America with a voice that can feel holy and scary as hell at once. Though he may search for the ecstatic in his workplace doldrums and "the lone gunmen" who "sync their watches," Twemlow reaches his fever pitch by way of associative bleeds and jumps. "Last night," he writes in "Glycerin Folio," "watching you walk/ through the clearing smoke,/glass pebbling your arm, I was so proud./Proud to say that I don't know/you anymore, or never did, or never/will. You're welcome here anytime." This blend of pride, dementia, and self-disagreement is placed under further duress in the book's title sequence, a 21-poem toast to the maddening splendor of everyday life, in which "the war is happy to be alive" and Twemlow recalls with remove and numbness "the last thing I remember before I left Kansas was how easy it was to forget I was there." It's rare to see a poet celebrate our contradictions like this. You might want to sing for joy when "your bourbon's/ warmed to a nosebleed," even if you don't know whether that's sadness or mirth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Palm Trees." Publishers Weekly, 15 Apr. 2013, p. 40. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A327108772/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=54e4ebd7. Accessed 25 Feb. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A327108772
1 of 1 2/25/18, 10:55 PM
March 2013
Rebecca Silber
poetry
Palm Trees by Nick Twemlow
Nick Twemlow, senior editor of The Iowa Review, co-editor of contemporary poetry publisher Canarium Books, and acclaimed short filmmaker, has recently published his first poetry collection, Palm Trees. I was excited when this slim book arrived in my mailbox. It is published by Chicago-based Green Lantern Press and designed by the Chicago-based graphic design firm Sonnenzimmer -- and quite frankly, it is beautiful. Large cream-colored pages, elegant typesetting, I looked forward to the quiet afternoon when I could sit down and reward my eyes, and my mind, with these poems. And that day came under snowy conditions (no palm trees in sight here), perfect for curling up to some poetry. Palm Trees contains just under fifty poems, twenty-one of which are sandwiched in the middle of the book and titled as consecutive "Palm Trees" poems, "Palm Trees / 1," "Palm Trees / 2," and so on. I was anxious to get to the "Palm Trees" poems, as they surely hold some sort of significance based on the title of the collection, but I conservatively chose to read the poems in order.
I immediately noticed that Twemlow writes his poems in a continuous stream of consciousness. And I mean the most random of random thoughts and transitions. Perhaps dreamlike, maybe drug-induced; I don't really know, and it doesn't even matter. What matters the most is that I really like Twemlow's style, no hiding behind carefully chosen prose for this man -- his poems are completely exposed. Twemlow writes of Chicago, Kansas, karate, confetti, wanting to keep someone locked up behind a Richter (as in, Gerhard), and he writes of sterile offices.
The office poems are fantastically layered between very unofficey, often crass words. Those are my favorites, the office poems, mainly because even though I've never met the man, I just cannot picture Twemlow sitting in a cubicle. There's a poem called "The Hum" -- can't you just see the fluorescent lighting and that one stubborn segment that won't stop flickering? Back to the poem. Twemlow writes, "...I give all of me all the time, / but cannot manage to stop. Please don't mistake my office persona for the real / thing, except I spend the good parts of myself at work, so what is the not-office / persona, who is that? ..." Many creative people who have, at some point in their lives, found themselves confined to a cubicle in an office job, could relate to this poem. It is written, as a large portion of them are, in a big block of writing, line breaks dictated by the right margin, rather than by the poet, only adding to the running-in of thoughts, stream of consciousness style.
The thoughts are all likely Twemlow's own thoughts. Almost all of the poems in Palm Trees are written in the first person. Twemlow, also unconventionally, occasionally includes his own name in poems, when he is being addressed by someone, and also on occasion, when referring to himself. Writers don't do this frequently, but maybe they should. By doing this, Twemlow is bringing himself into his work, in a very noticeable way. One of the poems that he does this in is the final "Palm Trees" poem, "Palm Trees / 21." In it, Twenlow writes, "...When we got to the / park, I suggested we walk backwards, retrace our path exactly. I had / missed something, though unsure of myself, and asked Ben if he / felt the same. I never feel the same, he said. The sidewalk unspools / under each heavy step. Twemlow, he added, your sickness is your / lack of sickness; this puzzles me..." I know that he is likely writing from his own life. It would not have the same effect if he had put a fake name, or just left a name out altogether.
There are, as one might hope, twenty "Palm Trees" poems that come before "Palm Trees / 21," and like "The Hum," they are all written in uninterrupted chunks of prose with no short line breaks. A few of the "Palm Trees" poems stood out from the others. One of those is "Palm Trees / 3." This poem is about Kansas, and he doesn't seem particularly fond of the place, and this poem is no exception. It ends "...The last thing I remember before leaving Kansas / was how easy I knew it would be to forget those things, and that all I / really wanted was to not die there." Almost all of his poems, like this one, are conversationally real. Twemlow writes as if he could be sitting across the table from the reader, describing out loud a time in his life. His writing is so casual, approachable -- even if the reader's life experiences don't have much in common with his experiences. Another poem, "Palm Trees / 13," begins, "My anger is a clock pulling yesterday into it. When I read about / amputee children in Darfur, I quietly click through to the iPhone / demo..." This distracted self-absorption makes me smile, probably because I too am guilty of it and I feel guilty about that, guilty about my own, sometimes, myopic worldview. An irony-induced smile is likely the response that Twemlow is after.
In Palm Trees, Twemlow openly writes about his feelings, but these feelings are not the kind of sentiments one conjures up when envisioning a stereotypical poet. Twemlow's honesty is what makes his poetry, and in turn himself, seem so accessible. The poems in Palm Trees are delightfully smart and daring, different -- in a way, much like an actual palm tree. Twemlow's poems are a lot of gutsy tough guy mixed in with observationally sensitive poet, and a little bit of pompous. There is a running around kind of energy to this collection, Twemlow's energy. It's an energy that is addictive enough, contagious enough, to make a reader want to keep running right alongside.
Palm Trees by Nick Twemlow
Green Lantern Press
ISBN: 978-0988418516
77 pa
Palm Trees by Nick Twemlow
Reviewed By Kent Shaw
May 7th, 2014
It’s tricky when poetry starts to form a serious relationship with spent consequence. Because, first, everything’s probably already happened in your poem. What you’re writing about? It already happened. The stapler was stapled. The paper was folded. The grass was grown, and growing, and you cut that grass so the next grass could be grown. But even grass growing might be a site of too much consequence. Or rather too much potential for consequence. And yet that’s where Nick Twemlow starts out in his book Palm Trees. Yeah. Sure. There’s karate at the beginning of this book. And what a gifted, miraculous, fantasy-world karate is in the beginning. There’s the Jonestown massacre. There’s Walt Whitman being Walt Whitman in a state of great singing. But even these moments that are undoubtedly of great moment are reduced to some very heavy negating.
It’s like a George Saunders short story, that’s set in some shitty place with a bunch of shitty people being shitty to each other. And the whole time you’re reading the Saunders story, you’re thinking, am I ever going to get out of this? You’re not. Because we all know that that’s what life is. Which is kind of like high school all over again. High school, that simple structure committed to normalizing expectations, performed by teenagers who think they already figured out life, especially if it involves judging your life. But can’t you see, you’re all just in high school? No, of course you can’t see that, because you’re all just in high school.
So what’s the point to a poetry whose Powerful Implication is Everything Was Done, Is Done, Is Done More Than You Would Have Done It or Could Potentially Do It? The point is that is our culture. That’s dissipation. That’s the special kind of boredom we suffer through when everything we could imagine has already been turned on, the world of information is in continual bloom, and we’re still not satisfied. Is there any doubt that the 21st Century has been spoken for? Of course it has. But who here actually wants the 21st Century? Who wants to be the speaker in “The Hum” or even the cleaning lady the speaker just noticed and who he figured should maybe be treated like she was a human being. No, Confessional Poems of the World, the 21st Century doesn’t care for your measured epiphanies or your suddenly seeing a human as another human like you. Humanity as a concept? It’s spent already. Get the drift! From “The Hum”:
Let us ask her. “I was wondering if you’d let me tape you while you clean.” Does she sleep best after a good night’s work? And yet, what passes for thinking today in poetry, one might call it voyeur porn, is carefully staged to appear to have happened casually, such as in this office, after hours, on the boss’ desk. “I want to be a better person. I want to be known as ‘feeling better.’” Carefully staged to appear to have happened causally, as if one thing always leads to another.
Twemlow fills in the narrative poem formula: Speaker dissatisfied with everyday life. Speaker realizes there is a world around him. He is not the center of the universe. Extra points if he can present an Other that further complicates his definition of humanity in the epiphanic moment. And so the paradox of contemporary poetry, that wants to be so potential about itself, but poetry has already been potential. It has already been human, as in aware of the human beings that make up this world. And poetry has been language, language-ish and non-language-like. So what’s left? If the only thing left for poetry to talk about is shittiness, then maybe we’re destined to a world that can only come alive when we are applying the most severe act of critique.
Nick TwemlowNick Twemlow, what’s the point of my life? Is this the poetry of cynicism taken to its furthest degree? I don’t know. But it feels like this cynical, spent consequence is the site of a lot of contemporary poetry. There are the surreal-logic poems of, say, Heather Christle that seem to bloom with wonder, like in the middle of the sentence the speaker can’t help but let the sentence go blooming out of control. Then there are the surreal-logic poems of Nick Twemlow or Brenda Shaughnessy, an image-driven lyric that has been has been brought in to service cynicism. Where the surreal manifesto has been turned approximately 150 degrees (not all 180 degrees! there is hope yet!) to say that this life even when provoked by the active imagination is still this life. How do you write about a culture supersaturated by everything you could imagine? You make poems that anxious. Unnerved. Here, from “Palm Trees / 10”:
Even turning the sheet down, the skeptical alliance of thirsts, man overboard, crack rock making a comeback, so we kept things to ourselves, mostly. All this fuzzy interior, gondola of the mind, from this distance, the mountains appear to be covered in grass. Last night my addiction to you resurfaced, so I detoxed on the U.S. Open.”
A nothing event (like turning down the sheets) is skeptical is inconsequential (“man overboard,” oh, and “crack rock making a comeback” but the speaker doesn’t actually respond to these alarms) is nothing is nothing is nothing is nothing. The Twemlow poems I’m most drawn to are filled with a sublimated anxiety. Like the poems are inside the speaker’s mind numbing and disintegrating and evacuating all the content that should matter but won’t. They are destructive poems. But part of their destruction requires an implicit recognition that the wonderful exists. Unfortunately, there is no validating the wonderful in a world like this. A world filled with cubicle dwellers trying to be human beings. A world where denying yourself any emotion or fascination seems like a pragmatic solution to heavy feelings. And the result to me is like pairing the words dulled and titillated when describing erotica. Life is supposed to be charged with all this energy, but really living life is a strange experience, and sometimes it feel like life is more about coping than living. Does that make Nick Twemlow an erotic poet? Why not?
Kent Shaw's first book Calenture was published in 2008. His work has appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, Boston Review and elsewhere. He begins teaching at Wheaton College in Massachusetts in Fall 2016. More from this author →
Filed Under: Books, Poetry, Reviews
Palm Trees and Paranoia: An Interview with Award-Winning Writer Nick Twemlow
1Twemlow_Pic.jpg Being a writer is hard work. So is being a film director. So is being a journal editor and co-editor of a small press. Iowa-via-New Zealand-and-elsewhere's Nick Twemlow has been that rare success who has yoked himself to all of these intense labors of love, and he's recently been thanked for his passion with the prestigious Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America for his debut collection, Palm Trees. His films, as well, have been shown at such festivals as Tribeca, Slamdance, and SXSW, and he'll be in Austin again this Saturday for a performance at the excellently curated Fun Party Reading Series, reading with renowned writers Joshua Edwards and Lynn Xu, who along with Twemlow run the fabulous small press Canarium Books. In advance of this, we had a chat with Twemlow about palm trees, paranoia, and whether it's actually possible to adapt literature into film.
Your book is called Palm Trees, yet you live in Iowa—how on earth does somebody who lives in Iowa come to write a book called “Palm Trees”?
I've thought a lot about this. It wasn't always called “Palm Trees.” The book is about a decade in the making, I would say, and for a long time it was called “Black Helicopter,” which was one of the poems in the book. And I was really interested in conspiracy theories and paranoia. I researched a lot about black helicopters and I had actually worked with a guy who told me a story of his son. The son was outside, teenage kid, maybe twelve, and he just felt a presence and looked up and there was a black helicopter hovering over a yard, but not making a sound, and then it took off. I had actually never heard of black helicopters until this guy told me this story. He used to work for, I think, General Dynamics and designed these sketch drawings for spaceships and missiles and things like that. Anyway, I totally take this guy straight because I've no reason to not trust this guy's story. So I started researching it and incorporated that story into that poem.
So, I noticed that paranoia was a theme of mine, and this is an indirect way to answer your question, but at some point I started writing these prose poems that became a series in the book, called “Palm Trees.” I was living in New Zealand at the time, which is where my family is from. I grew up in Kansas, but my brother, sisters, mother, and father are all from New Zealand and emigrated when I was one. And there were sort of, palm farms—I don't know if there are real palm trees in New Zealand but there is incredible vegetation everywhere. And the palm tree just became a symbol of a particular place where I wasn't really ever going to be rooted. It became a kind of proxy for some sort of utopia that I know doesn't exist. I don't think I ever longed for palm trees as a kid or anything like that, but they serve a function for me as a reminder, and they're not even native to Los Angeles for example…they're transplanted by family and so forth. There's also a connection between “The Palm at the End of the Mind” and palm trees, Ashbury and Stevens kind of coming together, I guess. I don't know if I consciously thought of that, but it was pointed out to me.
That's really interesting, how it's almost representative of an alternate reality. You mentioned the word “paranoia” in there, and your work is not shy to plumb the depths of the mind. How does paranoia, or the subconscious, or psychology play a role in your poems?
Well, I think one way to contextualize it is that my father is a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and moved my family to the United States after he became a doctor in order to study psychiatry, which was not, at the time, available to medical students in New Zealand. It is now. We moved to Topeka, Kansas, and my father was a student at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. But also, a couple of years after he finished, he also became a psychoanalyst. He’s been a psychoanalyst for a long time.
I don’t have any doubt that that played a major role in my interest in emotional states and psychological states, even though I’m also very introspective. Dream interpretation was a huge part of my childhood, in the sense that my dad would ask about my dreams. Then he would actually sometimes break down particular elements of the dream with me.
I had a lot of night terrors as a child, so I probably was sort of a test subject for him. He got to practice a little bit on us. But I also, especially when I was having these night terrors, found it very helpful to discuss them with him. Parents in general, I think, if they’re good at their jobs are going to be sensitive to their children’s dreams and nightmares and help them through it. But my dad did pay particular attention to it and understood them as being very important, especially to a small child.
I have a son who’s three, and he definitely has had nightmares as well, and I’ve been talking to him about his nightmares. Not analyzing them or anything of that nature, but he’s not able to separate, I think, his reality of day-to-day life with his parents, and something that happens when he goes to sleep. He can’t articulate really what’s even the content of his dream. Sometimes he can. But I know that it must be very strange place to go.
I found that within my own work I often think of the poem as a third dream-state just in the sense that I’m entering, when I’m enjoying the writing, into a place where virtually anything can happen. So I suppose that accounts for some of the psychological texture of some of the works. The paranoia is just…I don’t think of myself as paranoid, but I know it’s there in the works.
So you must be?
I must be, yeah, especially if I’m denying that I’m paranoid. I’m just interested in surveillance, and all forms of surveillance. A lot of my film work has been concerned with modes of surveillance, and I did some political studies of modes of surveillance.
I’m interested in how we self-surveille. Poetry to me seems like a type of surveillance. It’s surveilling your own imagination and reporting on it. I read your interview with Dorothea Lasky, just talking about confession and how all poetry a form of confessional poetry, in the sense that there is an inventory of our imagination that's happening. And I completely agree and think that is true. And I feel that all poetry is a form of surveillance as well, of course, self surveillance. I just can't help but feel a little paranoid when I'm writing because I'm studying my own thinking, and the world outside of me as well, in this scary intense way.
You’re currently working on the adaptation of a book for a movie, and people always say that cliché phrase that they liked the book better than the movie. Do you believe it's possible to do a true adaptation or does that even matter?
I'm not sure really. I'm just thinking about it now, and it turns out I've adapted a lot of texts from short films. The new thing I am working on will be a feature, a short feature, probably 60-70 minutes. The very first film I made, outside of stuff I did in high school video class, was an adaptation of a Dennis Johnson poem, one called “Talking Richard Wilson Blues, by Richard Clay Wilson.” He in a way had adapted that poem to a new poem, like at least taken it out of context and changed it, and then I had made that into a film. And I was pretty new to making film. And when you’re adapting something, I at least am looking for, what is the spirit or the tone of this piece? How can I not literalize it? Especially in poems I don't want to take an image that corresponds directly to an image in the poem. It sort of seems pointless. But I also want to create an emotional environment that is suitable, and I find it really hard.
I collaborated with my wife on a few things that she had written that then turned into video works, but I think the difference between that and a novel is tremendous. I mean Hollywood films obviously take great liberties once they have a book and then adapt it. I just read Shrek for the first time, the children's book, which is beautiful and a great book. I mean, it is like twenty-five pages long and like three films have been made out of Shrek so far. And obviously you take a lot of liberties and you add and you create different worlds. But, that's narrative, so it’s a lot different. So, in my case dealing with poems I still don't know if I have done anything particularly well in terms of adaptation. In a way, I’m very much less interested in the text and more interested in the process of making the film.
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Nick Twemlow will be reading at the Fun Party Reading Series this Saturday, March 30th. Doors at 7:30, reading at 8:00. Free.
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Book Review: Nick Twemlow's Palm Trees
By Denise Jarrott
Early twentieth century playwright, poet and madman Antonin Artaud believed all writing was garbage, but wanted to write a book that would “drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.” Not only Artaud, but I believe every artist wants to write this book, or at the very least have a book such as this in the world. The closest thing I have come to the book that Artaud describes is Nick Twemlow's Palm Trees.
At once lasting and ephemeral, like the sting of a wasp or a solid punch in the stomach, the poems in this collection distinguish themselves by their immediacy as well as their violence. Some of these poems exist as if they were said through gritted teeth, some through a mouth filled with blood, and in rare moments, as if from the first light of the morning, when the only person awake is you. The speaker of these poems seems to come from a past that is shockingly painful, and yet the confessional impulse has been tamed, as a dancer or prizefighter tames his or her body---by whatever means necessary.
Time moves sometimes in breakneck reverse, other times in sharp, cinematic cuts. Yet, Twemlow has mastery over the movement of the poems and the manipulation of their pace, pitch, and sound. Through driving anaphora, the poems have engines. This is most beautifully executed in "Topeka,Topeka" in which each line begins and ends with "Topeka", with devastation lying between : "Topeka, cast off the reliquaries! Call your men to war! Me? I'll be tugging one last hit from the bong I fashioned out of the shrapnel of Topeka."
What knocked the breath out of me when I read these poems was the way Twemlow can transform a word one hears all the time into something utterly different. At the end of "Palm Trees /6", after a couple knocks over a Brinks truck in front of the Starbucks and concludes that "it's better to feel alive than to be alive" the poem ends with "Skinny latte!" A phrase that I had, embarrassingly, gotten used to. Twemlow does not allow us to get used to phrases or even individual words. It is the relentlessness that give this collection its necessary force.
Nick Twemlow is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Palm Trees is available from Green Lantern Press and is available at Prairie Lights Bookstore. Twemlow and fellow Green Lantern poet Joel Craig's reading can be streamed here:
Listen: Nick Twemlow and Joel Craig reading | Nov. 8, 2012
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ttributed to the Harrow Painter | Poetry Review
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Red-figure Hydria is attributed to the Harrow Painter
The Harrow Painter was an ancient Greek painter of archaic red-figure pottery. Approximately 39 vases have been attributed to him and he got named ‘The Harrow Painter’ by J.D. Beazley in a 1916 article titled “Two Vases in Harrow.”
In the conclusion to this collection Twemlow writes about the Harrow Painter:
“though he has been justly called ‘more than ordinarily competent,’ the Harrow Painter was indeed a minor talent, notwithstanding the undeniable charm of some of his works. If, however, one looks beyond the quality of his line and his relatively low standing in the artistic pantheon, one discovers in him many elements of interest and more than a few delightful pictures.”
35010723The collection of poems Attributed to the Harrow Painter by Nick Twemlow depicts the highly personal bond between father and son (respectively his son Sasha who is named in the poem and dedication) almost like he is talking directly to his little boy as he grows. Both father and son have an eye for art: sculptors like Brancusi, Hellenist sculptures and frescoes, natural landmarks like Burnett’s Mound, etc. There are many classical references throughout the collection of poems, mixed in with Polonius-like advice for his son:
“& don’t worry so much / About whether they think / You’re a boy or a girl. / You have much / To look forward to / In the matrix / Of gods & trends.”
Reading this collection felt like I was watching a father raise his son, teaching him about art, sculptures, and the classical period, and simultaneously getting glimpses into the reflections the father has on his son growing up:
“armed with your vicious / Youth / Your tabula rasa affect / Your deep understanding of nothing.”
Overall the effect achieved by catching a glimpse into one particular father-son bond over art is one of intrusion. Unlike poets who discuss more general “applicable to all” kind of poems, Twemlow’s collection feels like it was written specifically for his son and no one else, and we, the readers, are mere observers.
Strangely enough I feel like this poetry collection belongs more with art majors than poetry majors. I would recommend this work to people who have an eye for reading into classical art, who enjoy sculptures, and who want to catch a glimpse into one particular father-son bond.
This book is scheduled for publication in November from University of Iowa Press.
Posted in Poetry and tagged advice, art, classical, classical art, father, father son relationship, growing, harrow painter, personal, poems, poet, Poetry, pottery, son, youth on May 30, 2017. 1 Comment
Attributed to the Harrow Painter
Nick Twemlow. Univ. of Iowa, $18 trade paper (98p) ISBN 978-1-60938-541-5
Despite exhibiting elements of the new sincerity movement’s blurring of earnestness and irony, this sophomore volume from Twemlow (Palm Trees) slyly and miraculously escapes the looming trap of the movement’s tendency towards triviality. He achieves this by situating a childlike wonder, an awe that borders on parody, within the context of a thought-provoking conversation about the problematic economies in which writing circulates: “I wrote,/ To paraphrase/ Myself, to interpret or/ Delay/ My words, to rework,/ Remix, mash up,/ Redefine, defile,/ Lift, smash, plagiarize,/ Borrow, beg, steal,/ Augment, as homage.” Here Twemlow subtly instructs the reader about how the text was intended to be engaged with: as an ars poetica as well as a deconstruction of Twemlow’s own awestruck meditations on fatherhood. As the collection unfolds, Twemlow nimbly explores the ethical problems of a system in which a deeply personal narrative inevitably becomes a commodity. He elaborates: “The word, I don’t/ Want to repeat it/ Anymore, it has taken on/ Its own blemished lore.” Subtly and provocatively, Twemlow questions the value—practical, aesthetic, humanistic—of the work of art outside of the discourse that prompts it. Filled with poems that reflect on and interrogate the politics of their own making, Twemlow’s collection is a refreshingly self-aware variation on the innovations of contemporary poetry. (Nov.)
Poet 'bends language to his artistic purpose' in 'Attributed to the Harrow Painter'
By Rob Cline, correspondent
Poet Nick Twemlow employs short lines and long poems to explore his past and the possibilities of language in “Attributed to the Harrow Painter.” The collection, published by the University of Iowa Press, is self-referential, experimental, and never less than engaging. Indeed, readers are asked to engage with both the subject matter and the unexpected ways in which the poet bends language to his artistic purpose.
Twemlow, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who teaches at Coe College, explores his relationship with his father and with his young son, offering up reflections and memories that are sometimes crystalline and sometimes opaque. The poems refer to one another, offer concepts from other art forms and artists — at one point a website address is included in the text of the poem to highlight an artist — and veer sharply in new directions at unexpected moments. Twemlow is skilled at allowing a phrase to morph from one meaning to another as the lines pile up and the momentum of a poem builds.
The title poem, which closes the collection, considers the notion of a minor artist, using as an example a painter of Greek vases — the “harrow painter” of the title. It also recounts a troubling relationship and its aftermath, good and ill. The poem manages to be both sprawling and tightly controlled, the poet’s narrative voice strong and expansive.
While it is possible to lose one’s way in Twemlow’s work, the poems’ surprises are pleasing and the rhythms of the language carry the reader along until firmer footing can be found.
“Attributed to the Harrow Painter” is highly recommended.