Author: Liz Axelrod

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Rough Cuts, End Thoughts and Poetry – Liz Axelrod

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don’t cheat with it. – Ernest Hemingway

If you start with a bang, you won’t end with a whimper. – T.S. Eliot

Every disappointment is an opportunity in disguise. You’ll overcome this and move on to better things. This is what your friends tell you when you get those awful declines and rejections. Yes, it may be true and yes it may help to soothe the deep hole under the diaphragm that gets larger with each rejection letter, each ending, each failed appointment, each time we’re told, So sorry, yes, you were excellent, but there were others before you, better candidates. Yes, you’re at the top of the list, but we only have so much room. Try again next year.

I ask myself each time I’m rejected by a literary journal, magazine, an online outlet, a reading series, the school I love, the men I want to love— Why continue? Why not just give up and settle?

But this is what scholarly pursuits, writing, and I suppose even life is all about—Blind 
submission, acceptance, rejection, not-so-blind submission, rewards, and then some more rejection.

Since I read my first book and put my first words on the page (in red crayon) I’ve been on this path of exquisite torture. For every success, for every featured reading and published piece, there are seventeen rejections. A professor once told our class she papered her bathroom wall with her rejection letters. She’s got two published novels now and a slew of awards, so I guess the effort was well worth it. But how do we continue to find the courage to put ourselves out there and keep from falling into the pit of desperation and despair? How do we handle the fact that this is a solitary effort and maybe only a handful of our contemporaries have even an inkling of understanding the pressure? I’ve written way too many poems about why I drink too much, and my self-medicating habits don’t even come close to some of my fellow writer friends. There are days I just throw my hands up in the air and want to scream when the words won’t come, and days when I just sit and stare at the blank page, eyes and fingers crossed…

However, this is not about success or failure, it’s about lessons learned, and the will to go forward. It’s not about intelligence, ego, jealously, or empathy. It’s about shared experiences with fabulous, talented professors and fellow students, and mostly, it’s about growth. Our 12th Street team grew tremendously over the past two years and two issues. We sat at the table together and drank wine, poured over submissions, devised our strategy for the journal, and then worked to create the best undergraduate literary journal in the country (as awarded by AWP this year!). We have much to be proud of and will be leaving a strong legacy to uphold.

Real writers never settle (though we do tend to overindulge). We polish and perfect, re-write and edit, beat ourselves up over syntax and language, cry over misprints and typos and then start with a fresh clean page. So, with this in mind, I’m writing my farewell letter as Editor-In-Chief of this website and as Managing Editor for the last two issues of 12th Street Journal. My years at New School in The Riggio Writing & Democracy Program have whittled me down to a fine tuned, open mouthed, well honed, Honors Graduate and yet I still feel unfinished, in need of strong cuts and edits. I’ve been trying to take some time for growth, give space for new opportunities and learn to see just where those cuts and edits make the most sense.

The new team is getting set to take over and I’m getting set to let go, but first, I want to present you with a taste of what we came out of the program with. Following are poems by 2011 Riggio Graduates – Sylvia Bonilla, Rebecca Melnyk, Luke Sirinides and me. We all possess creative strengths and weaknesses, we all owe much to the Riggio Program, to the concepts of Writing and Democracy, to our shared experiences, rewards and disappointments, and we will all move forward in the writing world in our own individual forms.

To the next group coming on board this fall, I offer my warmest wishes for a wonderful learning experience, a shoulder to lean on when the going gets rough, and my support, encouragement and aid wherever and whenever needed in order to continue this most worthy and excellent endeavor.

Always be a poet,  even in prose – Charles Baudelaire

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Lynne Tillman: Imagination, Art & the Internet

Interviewed by Liz Axelrod, Editor-In Chief

“She could do with her body what she wanted, everyone knew that; the body was just a fleshy vehicle of consequences. Her mind was virtual—free, even, to make false separations”— From “The Substitute” a story in Lynne Tillman’s latest collection, Someday This Will Be Funny.

As a New School Professor, Lynne Tillman brings a fresh angle to her courses. In her close reading seminar, students look at writing from many different angles: through the camera lens, via the film director’s eye, and into the novelist’s vision and writing process. As a fiction writer and essayist, Ms. Tillman’s work brings to mind freedom of expression, masterful creation and a love of language. Tillman’s novels include No Lease on Life, Cast in Doubt, Motion Sickness, Haunted Houses and American Genius, A Comedy. Her first collection of short stories, Absence Makes the Heart was followed by The Madame Realism Complex and This Is Not It. Her nonfiction work includes The Broad Picture, a collection of essays that were originally published in literary and art periodicals, The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-1967, and The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.

Lynne Tillman will be reading from Someday This Will Be Funny at the 12th Street Online Launch at Barnes & Noble on Thursday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m., and discussing writing and media with Ross Kaufman, an Academy Award Winning documentary producer whose short film “Wait For Me” can be found by clicking on the Audio and Video link above.

12th Street Online crafted this interview over the internet, via email.

12th Street Online: You’ve studied theories of different media, such as film and photography, as well as writing. How has that affected how you approach the scope and scale of your work?

Lynne Tillman: All art forms have specific materialities, problems –scale, for instance, in a photograph, framing in both film and still photography. Painting is usually done on a flat surface, in a rectangle or square. Then there’s color, positive and negative space. Questions of time exist in all forms. So, thinking about these questions in various art forms and practices, I might subject my writing to them; I can borrow or steal an idea and try to adapt it, or be helped by ways visual artists have made their work. Other imaginations soothe me, and spark my own.

12th Street: Do you find that your stories favor certain “styles”—narrative distance from the subject, pace, length, time-frame, genre, etc., or does the style vary depending on the story?

TiIlman: I try to find a shape or style that fits the story I’m telling. But the story I’m telling necessarily develops along with the way it’s being told. Usually I have no idea of how I’m going to write it. I’m hoping to find it as I proceed, word by word. I consciously try to come up with ways of approaching a story that challenges me, in any way I can, mostly to keep myself interested.

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Fond Memories in the Belly of the AWP Whale

AWP Recap by Liz Axelrod

Every year thousands of writers, professors, school teachers, students, Ph.D. candidates, publishers, booksellers, bloggers, posers, and other assorted literary peddlers and pushers convene en masse in a chosen locale for the annual Association of Writer and Writing Programs Conference—a locale most definitely not ready or even aware of the magnitude of this population’s thirst for words, wishes, deals, dollars, companionship and alternative states of wordly being. That said, Patrick Hipp—our 12th Street Interview Editor—noted the very best Tweet of the conference: “Dear Marriott, next time 8000 writers descend upon your premises, it might be a good idea to have more than two bartenders.” I add to that that it also might be good if those bartenders were able to move at a pace a bit above that of a leisurely slug. If you’re going to charge us twelve bucks for a rum and Coke, it would be nice if we could get it before the ice melts. Thanks.

This year’s conference was held in Washington, DC, just a short hop, skip and Amtrak away from New York City. Optimal for me. I arrived a day before my crew to help set up our table at the Book Fair and in hopes of a private night of fun and debauchery. Unfortunately, my wishful candidate for said night opted for a younger, thinner, taller, more Asian version than me. Without warning I was thrust upon the two of them at the hotel bar after spending the earlier hours at Busboys & Poets watching the Word for Word readers make Mindmeld graphs on a wall—don’t ask, I have no idea. I was fortunate though to hear Brittany Perham read some sexy poems right up my alley, and not fortunate to hear an editor read his poet’s work. Note to editors: even if your poets are snowed in, it might be better to have them phone into the reading. This way you won’t get tangled in their line breaks and the poem won’t end up sounding like Forrest Gump with a mouthful of chocolate.

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Mark Nowak Interview

Rebecca Melnyk, 12th Street Journal’s Poetry Editor read Mark Nowak’s work in Modern American Poetry class and was impressed with his experimentation. When she brought him to us as a potential interview, we agreed. Mark Nowak perfectly highlights our vision of Writing and Democracy and the writer’s place in the world.  His latest book Coal Mountain Elementary gives recognition and voice to downtrodden workers.  His work fuses poetry, prose, photography, film and music into a fascinating hybrid that provides a window into the struggles of the common worker. His unique views demand attention and raise consciousness and conversation up from the level of human experience – bypassing the gloss of mass communication. We hope you’ll enjoy and be enlightened by our latest 12th Street Online interview feature.  – Liz Axelrod, Editor-In-Chief

12th Street Online: You’ve said that when you began writing poetry, you were fueled by music. Does music still play a large part in what you write?

Mark Nowak: I first came to art-making as an electronic musician in Buffalo, NY in the early- to mid-1980s. The first band, Aufbau Principle (or Aufbau—German for construction or building-up) was a two-person group that I formed with a fellow undergrad student—we dreamed of being a U.S. version of Kraftwerk. We were living in a city that was absolutely, and sometimes literally, collapsing around our us. And that music was our soundtrack during that time. The second, a three-person group called People Have Names, tried to fuse that German krautrock tradition with early 1980s electronic and industrial music—Cabaret Voltaire, the Factory Records releases from Manchester, the Wax Trax records from Chicago, etc. Even my MFA thesis at Bowling Green in the late 1980s was (very bad!) a four-track cassette recording of a completely sampled, chance-generated text called Factors Other Than Frequency. Today, I still tend to think and create less like a poet and more like a musician at a multi-track recording system. Most of my work is composed of multiple voices mixed on separate tracks, all fused or articulated into one final artwork that might include testimony on one track, newspaper reports on another, photographs on a third, and rules of capitalization or pro-coal curriculum on another.

12th: Do you spend a lot of time editing what you write?

MN: The way I work is probably more time consuming at the research and construction stages than at the editing stage. I’ll spend literally hundreds and hundreds of hours researching—sometimes for projects that never see the light of day, like the year where I spent almost every day at the microfilm machines at the Minnesota Historical Society researching the I.W.W. led strike against U.S. Steel by iron miners in Minnesota’s iron range. Likewise with Coal Mountain Elementary, where I had to read and re-read more than 6,300 pages of testimony with miners and mine rescue team members at Sago, West Virginia, in order to locate just one of the voices in that book. I also spend a good deal of time, once that research is completed, working and reworking the construction or framework of the piece—usually on either an Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft Word table. Those spreadsheets or tables allow me to create an almost musical score or orchestration for the piece as whole; they allow me to see the overarching patterns and timings in the voices or tracks. Then, there are adjustments, changes… maybe that’s where “editing” comes in.

12th: In Shut-Up Shut Down many of your poems are based in recorded observations. In some of the poems, the prose unravels into disjunctive rhythm—is there something specific you are communicating? Is that the way these people sound to you?

MN: The form I was experimenting with most in Shut Up was the haibun, a form in which a prose block is followed by the haiku. Basho, of course, was the master of the form. And Fred Wah, a writer from Canada whose work I admire, brought the form back in ways I found to be quite innovative in his fabulous book Waiting For Saskatchewan. So, no, it wasn’t representative of how people sound but rather of the effects of neoliberalism and globalization on the manufacturing sector in the States in the 1980s (and in the new millennium in the final piece, “Hoyt Lakes Shut Down”). I was trying to capture that fracturing, that collapse, that disintegration of industry and community and self that I had been a witness to in Buffalo and Toledo and Detroit and the Iron Range, i.e., the “rust belt.”

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Light and Language in True Grit

True Grit –  by Mario A. Zambrano

There might be a better reason why I was impressed after seeing True Grit, the latest Coen film, other than that it was a film masterfully put together; from soundtrack to dialog to cinematography. I didn’t watch Westerns growing up, even with the insistent coaxing from my father. It wasn’t in my interest to watch cowboys ride horses and spit tobacco while abusing Indians making them out as if they were lesser than the horses they rode. John Wayne was mentioned more than a dozen times, and there was a particular tune my father would sing when he’d feel he’d performed some heroic deed. If I tried to sing it now it’d sound like the opening track to an Indiana Jones flick, but if I heard the melody I’d recognize it and be half-certain that a man was nearby with his chest filled with pride because of some stunt he’d performed to make him feel like John Wayne.

I’m not sure why I agreed to see True Grit, if it was because I was on vacation at home in Houston during the holidays⎯meaning that days are spent mostly making meals and waiting to see what my parents would like to do⎯or if it was because I’d heard hype about Jeff Bridges’ lead performance. I didn’t know at the time that this new adaptation, inspired by the novel by Charles Portis, had already been made into a film in 1969 with John Wayne himself, whom won an Academy Award for his role as Rooster Cogburn. I have my father to thank for letting me know. As the movie began, he leaned over to me and said, “Let’s see if this is as good as the original.”

Before an image is revealed, a track played, the movie begins with a young girl’s voice, prim and strong-willed, and a faint golden light slowly illuminating at the center of the screen. Mattie, the young girl, tells the story of how her father was killed, who killed him, and her plans for finding the man so that justice prevails. She finds the U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, a drunk, one-eyed official known for his easy hand in shooting criminals, and offers him fifty dollars to find the man that killed her father. He hesitates at first, shocked and amused at the fourteen-year old’s insistent proposition, but finally accepts.

As I reflect on the film I realize that there are different kinds of films for different kinds of interest. If one wants to be wowed with the latest technological feats and cinematic effects then one could choose a film like Transformers or Harry Potter to sit back and be bedazzled. But if one prefers character and dialog then there are recent films like The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right to satisfy the itch. True Grit is one of those films.

There is a scene where Mattie haggles with a vendor trying to sell back a few ponies that her father had bought before he died. She’s only fourteen, and yet her wit and brilliance pierces the scene like a shaft of light in a dark tunnel, the way she handles the language is sharp and acerbic. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss for vocabulary and conversation, something that has gotten loose and easy over the years, especially amongst our teenagers. I was sitting atop a moment of irony: the most impressive highlight of the scene was the speed of mind and eloquence of rhetoric, yet there were no interchangeable vehicles or sweeping visual effects that could turn a human into a mongoose, and make it seem ‘real’. And there I was in a theater with a TMX sound system next to a young woman who a few minutes earlier had chanted with her husband such sophisticated phrases like, “OMG,” “For real?,” “She is so not right.”

What’s happened to our language? Was a Western film really impressing me on the grounds of verbal skills in a way that I thought could only be done in an English novel? Yes, it was. The Coen brothers, who wrote and directed the film, were doing a fantastic job in transcending me to a literary experience not commonly felt in blockbuster hits.

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Stephen Elliott Interview

 

Stephen Elliott, the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries, and the Editor of the online literary site, The Rumpus http://therumpus.net, sat down with 12th Street’s Jennifer Sky to discuss the politics of writing and the lure of the website for the literary world.  This is the premier interview of 12th Street Online’s monthly author series.  Enjoy – Liz Axelrod, Editor in Chief

12th Street Online: What was the catalyst to starting your online literary magazine, The Rumpus?

Stephen Elliott: I was done with The Adderall Diaries—that was my seventh book—and I didn’t really have the urge to write another book. I wanted to do something else. I thought, “Well, I should get into editing,” because that’s kind of what I know how to do. If you write long enough, eventually you learn how to edit because editing is such a huge part of writing. So I thought I would start editing somewhere.

I was actually talking to Arianna Huffington about joining The Huffington Post. I had all these ideas—pages and pages of ideas—about how I wanted to build a book section for The Huffington Post and all these cools things I wanted to do with it. Then at some point I thought, “Well, it’s just a website. If I have all these ideas why am I giving them to Arianna Huffington?” You know, I’ll just do it myself. So I started The Rumpus. I didn’t know if I was going to make any money or if anyone would read it. That’s the same way I write. You start it and see what happens. It’s like I do everything.

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