The Crashaw Blog

Here's info on the reading tomorrow:

Friday, May 29th at 8:00
Canessa Gallery
708 Montgomery Street,
San Francisco, CA 94111
415.392.1768

Please join us for this most excellent reading at Canessa Park

David Highsmith is the proprietor of Books & Bookshelves in San Francisco. Recent poems are forthcoming in the Antioch Review, Beatitude, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Right Hand Pointing, and Sawbuck. His books include Poison in the System, Fragments from Bernard, The Chatterley Stanzas, and Catalina Island.

Jared Stanley lives in the San Joaquin Valley. He's the author of Book Made of Forest (Salt), I Something Scott Inguito You (Scantily Clad) and The Outer Bay (Trafficker).

Scott Inguito's latest chapbook out from Momotombo Press is DEAR JACK. He's has poems in Shampoo http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooThirtythree/33issue.htm, and his collage-play, Trying to Create Intimacy with a Narcissist http://scottinguito.com/splash.html, was performed at CCA for Small Press Traffic in December 2008.Wine or Tea and Snacks

Poets take up a new muse - modern technology

Tom Chivers is a 26-year-old poet living in East London who in recent years has found he wants to let technological advances in society influence his writing. His witty contributions to the poetic world are fresh, laugh-out-loud constructions about how technology affects our day-to-day lives.

Read more …

Just published, our two USA Crashaw Prize Winners

Jamey Dunham The Bible of Lost Pets		Jared Stanley Book Made of Forest

tags: jared stanley, jamey dunham

JAMEY ANSWERED THE QUESTIONS WE SENT HIM. HERE ARE THOSE ANSWERS. HERE:


Where are you when you write your poems?

I write my poetry sprawled out on the floor of my family room between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. I wait for the late hours when everyone else is asleep and my mind gets loopy. I think the left side of my brain (if I have one) usually turns in around 9:00 but the right side is just getting started. It’s like a raccoon sifting through the garbage floating around in my head to see if it can’t find something nice.

I can’t sit still so I usually spread out on the carpet with a couple of notebooks and a good pen. I have the laptop nearby but it’s just for show, I never type anything until I have a draft on paper. I usually start with a line or an image and see where it goes. My notebooks are covered in sketches and drawings and the really bad attempts get wadded up and shot at the trashcan.

Sometimes I’ll stop writing all together and just shoot baskets for hours; I’ll even keep score in my notebook. It sounds counterproductive, but it’s not. The best games usually precede the best poems.


Picture 1:
This is me on the beach during one of my childhood vacations to Canada. Over my right shoulder you can just make out the skyline of a little tourist trap called Grand Bend. If you look closely in the lower, left-hand corner, you can see the foot of a man in flip-flops jutting into the frame. That man was Pope John Paul II.



You have a one-way ticket in your hand. What is the destination?

Home. I’m not going to lie. There are lots of places I’d like to go, but if it’s a one-way ticket, mine’s taking me home.

I’m like an idiot dog when I come home and see my family; it doesn’t matter if I’ve been away for a week or a day, I get so excited I could piss on the floor.

I have always wanted to see Barcelona, get lost in Park Güell, but I think I’d get homesick pretty quick and Gaudi at night looks too much like the inside of my head.

Maybe one day I’ll hop a train and ride until I’m good and lost. Then maybe I’ll kick around whatever small middle-American town I find myself in. I’ll eat at the greasy spoon, jot down a poem at a little league game, but when the sun goes down, I know exactly where my ticket is taking me.


Picture 2:
This is a picture I snapped of my family last year. I arranged us around the coffee table like da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” I know it's not original but we used it for a Christmas card. The kids got in a big fight over who would get to be Jesus. That's why the dog is sitting in the middle and why she looks so scared.



Who is the first person you speak to every day?

My wife, followed immediately by the kids who are either in bed with us, ransacking the kitchen or calling from the bathroom for toilet paper, or worse.

Really, though, I guess the first person I speak to is myself. The conversation is initially a holdover from whatever dream I'm working my way out of and could entail anything from fond childhood remembrances, to hysterical warnings about squid.

After that, the senses kick in and I begin asking myself questions on a more conscious level, like “what is that horrible light?” and “why is that horrible light shining on me?” Finally, I become somewhat lucid and aware of the subtle but important distinctions between thinking and talking.

I kiss my wife and head off in the direction of the kids, yawning and scratching myself like a serious musician. I am not a morning person. The sun is no friend to me.


Picture 3:
This one is really special to me, obviously.










What will you be doing in five years time?

The same thing I’m doing now I hope, living a happy life. In five years I’ll have been married for sixteen years. I’ll have an eleven-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter and I’ll still be paying off my student loans. Our dog will be housebroken or we’ll have a new dog. I’ll be writing my prose poems and rereading Jacob and Michaux, Johnson and Andrews.

I guess my aversion to the question is that I try to enjoy the now. I’m a really happy guy. I think it is because I’m so happy that I’m able to visit such dark places in my poetry, I feel safe and I trust if I let myself go there, I’ll make it back.

I mean you don’t go down into the dark basement by yourself if you think your crazy uncle is going to lock the door and Grandpa’s body is in the deep freeze. But if Mom is smiling in the doorway and you can smell the meatloaf from the kitchen, you can make it all the way to the furnace before you even break a sweat.


Picture 4:
I had been telling the neighbors for weeks about the lemur. Everybody thought I was crazy. Then one night, I'm coming home from the climbing wall and look who I catch riding my unicycle.






If I could read only one poem from your book, which should it be?

Why would you only be able to read one? Are you dying, because if that’s the case I’d suggest you read Russell Edson’s poem “The Pilot.” Not only is it a great poem but I think it would somehow help you feel better about your looming death.

If you’re not dying, what gives? If you want me to say which poem is best before you buy the book, I can’t do that and frankly, you should know better. I’m proud of every poem in the collection.

Sure every poem is flawed in some way, I mean they all take risks for better or worse, but that’s art. There are poems that have personal meaning for me, but that would be of no use to you.

Why not just close your eyes, open the book and pick one, leave it to chance? What’s that you say? You did? Great, which one did you get? “The Same Only Lower?” That’s a great one, best one in the book. Now buy it.


Picture 5:
This is where I write.











You have $5 in your pocket – how would you spend it?

I log on to the Salt website and make my way to the fundraising page. I’m pretty excited, I love Salt’s website. I could stare at the authors’ pictures for hours, and often have, but this time I don’t.

I log in and proudly make my $5 contribution; I can practically feel the halo beaming. A rush of warmth surges through me, a little like heroin, but more reasonably priced.

Then the question begins to gnaw at me, “if giving $5 felt that good, what would $100 feel like?” In a moment of rare indulgence I decide to find out.


Picture 6:
I think my wife took this picture of me. I don't usually like having my picture taken, but this one suits me. I have my Mom's blue eyes, and my Dad's jaw, wide shoulders. I don't know where the nose came from but the cat that gave me that scar is dead now. See the smile, that's not original, that was given to me years ago by my wife. Everyday she and the kids hang it under my nose like a shingle. Every single day.

JOE DUNTHORNE INTERVIEWS TOM CHIVERS ABOUT HIS FIRST COLLECTION - HOW TO BUILD A CITY



Do you see yourself as writing from a particular tradition?

I was introduced to Barry MacSweeney by my Sixth Form tutor, Jonathan Ward. Barry gave his last ever reading at my school; he died about a week later.

For a while I used to write cod MacSweeney poems, and in a strange way still do. But he was such a brilliant poet, if I was only ever a MacSweeney rip-off, I’d still be pretty happy with my writing!


You’re definitely an urban poet, as the title of your book suggests. What interests you about the city?

Well, it’s where I’m from. I think if I lived in the countryside, I’d probably write about that.

For the first few years when I started writing, my poetry was trying to turn the city into a kind of nature reserve. It’s as if I’d read all this lyrical nature poetry and tried to copy it but from my own, urban, perspective. But the natural world was only ever shoehorned in. It was awkward writing.

I was up St Augustine’s Tower in Hackney today for an event I was running with Iain Sinclair, and I had one last look on the roof before I closed it up, and it was raining and windy.

I looked over the city – it was clear – you could see everything. Hampstead Heath, the Square Mile, Hackney marshes, the Olympic site, Crystal Palace transmitter which used to bounce into my bedroom when I was a kid.

You really got a sense from high up of how it used to look. I felt like the warden of a parish church – looking beyond fields into the city, rather than being right in the city as it is now.


In your poem ‘Rush Hour’ you write about 7/7. Do you have a particular approach to political writing?

If the political is present in this book, it’s expressed through personal experience. I wanted to write about the London bombings because it was an important thing in my own life.

My street was the first not to be cordoned off around the Aldgate bomb. The explosion must have happened beneath me and a few hundred yards to the west.

I remember getting up that morning and walking past the closed shutters of the Tube station, getting into work in Whitechapel, a whole crazy day of phone-calls, sirens, 24 hour news coverage, and then walking back past St Botolph’s in Aldgate surrounded by police and bouquets of flowers.

It was a huge thing for anyone in London. I wanted to write about that whole experience.


So, the collection is in memory of your mum, and in the final poem, 'Thom, C and I', you rework diary entries written by her. What was it like as a process to write that?

I found this diary in her belongings, a diary from a summer holiday to Italy in 1991. I would have been 8 years old. It’s beautifully written.

I thought this was a great opportunity to write something very personal, but which is entirely made up of collaged, found text; something which talks about me in the past, which uses the poetic I, but in a very unusual way.

So I started rearranging her text, and it seemed to work. It had a nice balance between elements you understand and elements you don’t – lines working against each other, sometimes in a silly or light-hearted way, and sometimes, hopefully, in a more profound sense.


You get referred to in the poem as Thom, spelt with an H.

Oh yeah! A friend of mine at the time had an older brother who was very cool and he spelt his name with an H so that’s how I did it for two years.

There are also verbatim quotes by me aged 8, where I’d stolen her diary and scribbled random lines in it, all misspelt.


Is the precise important to you as a writer?

Definitely. I guess How To Build A City is a book of the real – not realist, but ‘of the real’. It’s almost impossible to write about the city without confronting detail. You don’t talk about the city, you talk about the street, the signs, the people, the whole mashed-up palimpsest of it.

I’ve lived 25 years in London. It feels like a place I can talk about. But about 5 years ago, I couldn’t write about the city. I was still writing about leaves in the gutter and so on.

The book’s full of different styles, and I hope that readers enjoy that range rather than thinking that I’m some kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

WE ASKED ABI SOME QUESTIONS. SHE ANSWERED THEM. HERE THEY ARE.


Where are you when you write your poems?

I try to be somewhere in the top of my body.

My relationship to time changes if it’s going well. Time sits on a shelf somewhere and doesn’t bother me for while.

I think about my fingertips. The inside of my head becomes a landscape and everything shifts sideways.

Or, I might be inside a character, putting on their skin like a glove. Or an animal: wearing their fur, stretching into their paws.

As to location: I’m at a huge piece of white paper, in bed, at the table, sitting on the bench in the bus shelter. I often write when and where I’m not supposed to. But never in the bath.

The ideal place to write would be sitting on the edge of a cliff, but I have quite a fear of heights.


Boat.
This boat is the first thing I ever won, in the playschool raffle when I was 3 or 4. I remember thinking I was in trouble because I didn't know what winning was really. It wasn't as thrilling as winning the Crashaw Prize, though.







You have a one-way ticket in your hand. What is the destination?

I’m hoping that this includes time-travel. I’d go back to the mid 1930s, chiefly because men still wore hats, and I think a man looks great in a hat.


Who is the first person you speak to every day?

Myself, though not out loud, often in the form of a question, or in an attempt to recall a dream.

Then I speak to Miles (my partner) about tea, and cereal, and what we might do when we meet after work.

Speaking in the morning is different somehow to speaking at other times of the day; it’s about coming back to life, testing everything to see if it’s still there. I’m lucky enough to have a view of the sea from where I eat my breakfast, and I’ve never seen it look the same twice.


Shoes.
These represent walking. I’m not alone, I'm sure, in having my best ideas when I'm wandering about.





What will you be doing in five years time?

Beginning to write a third book. Living in an underwater community. Being underwater will change my writing. I’ll spend time tending my coral reef and telling my children what dry land used to look like.


If I could read only one poem from your book, which should it be?

‘Tyndall’s Flame’. It was a strange and surprising experience for me; the writing of it was a process of discovery.

I had learnt something quirky and interesting about science and history and wanted to give that a sense of voice; to write a little song for it.

It wasn’t until the end that I realised whose point of view I had inhabited. This was quite uncanny – a feeling I love.


A dog.
The dog's name was Bijou. I've loved animals since I was very little. I made very good friends with this one in Spain, though I don't think she spoke my language. I find myself writing about animals a lot, and also trying to think as if I'm very little.


You have £3 in your pocket – how would you spend it?

Magic beans and a pack of stick-on moustaches.

The magic beans for the green vertical highway they’d grow for me, the moustaches in case I need to travel incognito.

"THE BEAUTY OF HIS COOL FEET"

OK, Capitalism is probably done, at least for a while, so let’s be shallow this one last time! Salt’s crew has asked me to write about myself sort of above and beyond the book, the glamour, the dead trees, and the farts.

What’s left after all that? My favorite shoes, and some adventures I’ve had in them.


CAMPER LOGO

These are the “Smart and efficient shoes” in 'San Pablo Bay'. These shoes kept my feet warm and dry in 20 states, two of which were Mexican. They stopped being waterproof in January 2008, in Manhattan, in downpours, outside the Whitney, where I just got the fears from the Kara Walker show.

The leather is soft, now fairly scuffed, and they go with almost anything, though my mom thinks otherwise. I don’t think they make them as nice, now. The leather seems grouchier, or at least it did when I tried to get another pair.

They have western Europe on the sole, and say ‘Hola’ on the side. I like to think of them greeting the street as I walk. “The name of the name of her feet / was the same as the name of the street.”

These shoes match two poems: 'Decoration of Cloud and Pine', and 'San Pablo Bay'.


ROACHKILLERS/WINOS/SACKHOPPERS/CHOLO SHOES

I bought my first pair of Winos in Middle School because Tom Verlaine wore them. My friends the Cortez brothers saw them in the gym and said “eh, nice Cholo shoes.” They were nice. And cheap. In the Eighties, they cost about three dollars a pair. This was during the advent of the first Michael Jordans.

Tony’s family called them Roachkillers. Scott’s family called them Winos. And to me, they were the fucking shoes Tom Verlaine wore! These shoes contain the secret of the world.

Nowadays I get my roachkillers at the Merced Wal-Mart. This particular Wal-Mart has twenty-two (count ‘em) security cameras astride the crenellations of its front wall. Just on the front! I had my students read about Andy Warhol and then we went on a field trip to this particular Wal-Mart. One of my students said the cameras were there because someone was murdered in the parking lot. That’s what she heard.

These shoes match the poem 'Garage Sale' because the guy with the hat was wearing them.


CLARKS DESERT TREKS SLIP-ONS

OK, so the first time I saw a pair of these shoes, they were on the feet of my ex-girlfriend’s yet-to-be boyfriend. New York City, the Mercury Lounge, March 2001. These I had to have.

Now, this guy was in a band that, at the time, was touring the world, and I knew that you couldn’t get these Clarks outside the British Isles.

So, when I first came to England, Thanksgiving 2002, I bought a pair in London, on the same street as Harrod’s. Phew! I was so happy. My friend Marisa was studying in Oxford, and she approved.

I remember Pret. I remember Kentish Town. I remember the well-appointed buses. I remember motorscooters with roofs. But I have the shoes, and I intend to wear them for a very long time. I remember Olafur Eliasson. I remember the way people made fun of the way I only used one hand when I ate. Man! I remember the streets of London.

These shoes match the poem: 'For Jessica Stockholder'.


SPECIALIZED BIKE TOURING SHOES

Used on a bike tour of the North Coast of California, August 2008. The land of pot, gnomic hippie loggers, rich San Franciscan’s country homes, Wine, serious cuisine, and redwoods.

Included run-ins with logging trucks on windy two lane hillside roads, a Farah Fawcett look-alike flipping us the bird through the sunroof of her BMW (if I were a painter, that image would be my masterpiece), trivia night in Boonville (home of Boontling, the Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Mendocino Shamrock).

Here’s me with a giant gnome on a stump, in Guerneville, a village on the Russian River. My extended family had a persimmon / apple orchard up here, and in the 80s, I couldn’t believe that America could even have a river called the Russian River.

The first place I saw people of all genders in thongs. The first place I ever smelt patchouli oil. The first place I saw someone take a hit of pot while breastfeeding, on a beach.

The shoes match the poem: 'Understory'.


RUSSELL MOCASSINS CHUKKA BOOTS

The next shoes I intend to buy. These shoes are for hunters. If you shoot a deer or an ostrich, they’ll make a pair of these out of them. I just want the regular ones, though, made of cows.

Yesterday, I was showing some students scenes from Padjaranov’s The Color of Pomegranates. There was a scene dramatizing the sacrificial lamb, where they were actually slaying sheep, blood everywhere. Peter said, “it gives a whole new meaning to the sacrificial lamb” and I thought, well, actually, it’s the original meaning, and the actual thing.

Slaughter. There’s something very literal about shooting a thing and having your shoes made out of it. I don’t intend to shoot anything (unless I’m with Robert Stanley or Dave Ploeger) anytime soon, but I love to think about it. Wolverines!

There are four pages of instructions on how to measure your foot to ensure that these are the best fitting shoes ever. Oh!

These shoes match a poem you haven’t seen yet called 'O Dress-Hearing Air'.

We thought you'd like to know a little more about Tom, Jared, Abi and Jamey..... you know, the sort of stuff you don't find on the book cover.

We asked our four winners to tell you something different about themselves.

The following posts show the results of our little experiment.

Just sorted Jamey's cover and Web site.



Check out the book on our Web site. Read samples and discover what readers are saying about this richly rewarding, pet-packed debut.

Jamey Dunham: The Bible of Lost Pets

Sadly, due to unforeseen circumstances, Ian Pindar has had to withdraw from the prize.