Writing & Reading at Centrum

An Interview with Arthur Sze

Poet Arthur Sze has published eight volumes of poetry including, most recently, Quipu, in 2005. (To read an article by Sze on the genesis of that book, click here.) He  has won numerous awards from the Lannan Foundation and, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines. Arthur has a new book, “Quipu,” coming out in 2005.

Sze has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts for more than a decade. Click on the jump below to read an interview with the IAIA Chronicle, which we are grateful for permission to reprint here. In the interview, Sze talks about his influences in the Chinese and American traditions, and where he sees poetry heading in the future.

Sze will be teaching a works-in-progress course at the 2007 Port Townsend Writer's Conference for poets, discussing emerging poets' work extensively in both individual and group workshops. He will also give an ekphrastic assignment to workshop attendees, based on a Joseph Cornell assemblage.

The Work of Brian Evenson

After Brian Evenson published his first collection of short stories, Altmann's Tongue, in 1996, he was warned by the Mormon church to stop writing. Instead, Evenson chose to leave his teaching post at Brigham Young University and, ultimately, to leave the Mormon faith.

Brian Evenson's fiction offers frank, often stark looks at the dark underbelly of religious faith. A recent review from Meridian magazine called Evenson "...a writer so good you want to tell your friends about him, but don't because you're afraid of what they might think of you....Evenson's sure had with pacing allow[s] him to create gorgeous, disturbing scenes that generate a feeling of growing panic that never feels cheap or forced." 

Evenson is currently the Director of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. He is the author of six books of fiction, most recently The Open Curtain. He has translated work by Chrstian Gailly, Jean Frèmon, and Jacques Jouet and received an O. Henry Prize.

Evenson will be teaching at the 2007 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, July 15-22 at Fort Worden State Park. He will be teaching a "New Works" class, helping students develop new strategies for exploring fictional territory they may have been previously nervous to approach. In addition,  Evenson will give a public reading on Saturday, July 21, at 7:30 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater.

Register for Brian's workshop.

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The International Focus of Camille Dungy

"Groups of poems are the culmination of a journey, one more frequently meandering than direct," Camille Dungy says. "This is a journey that should not be rushed. To rush would mean eating fast food in the car while speeding along the interstate rather than waiting for a slow-to-cook meal with four new friends who are eager to relay a few local legends. Poems require time in which to travel and explore."

Dungy is the author of What to Eat, What to Drink What to Leave for Poison. She has won many fellowships, is widely published in literary magazines, and currently teaches at San Francisco State University.

In her new poems, Dungy creates narratives about people who escaped from Southern slaveowners on the Underground Railroad.

Click here to hear Camille Dungy reading from her work. To listen to her discussion of the finishing of her poem "Requiem" click here. Dungy will be hanging out at the Port Townsend Writers' Conference July 15-22, teaching, reading, writing, and sparking conversations about the role of the writer in the global world. 

Register for Camille's workshop.

5/26: Ted Kooser Reading

Ted Kooser—Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States—will give a reading with award-winning Michigan poet Dan Gerber at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater on Saturday, May 26, at 7 pm. Tickets will be available at the door thirty minutes before the reading begins. For more information on Ted and Dan, visit Copper Canyon Press.

A Conversation Between Rebecca Brown and Thomas Glave

Rebecca Brown: As much as part of the good lefty in me would like to do away with certain kinds of “categories” or “ranks,” I think titles are very important. I want to talk about the title of your new book, Words To Our Now: Imagination And Dissent. But first I want to throw you a kind of curveball and ask you, if you had a title, what would it be?

Thomas Glave: It would be that same title. I especially think (and hope) that the “Imagination and Dissent” part speaks not only to and about the work in that particular book, but to and about anything I wrote before this book and to all that will come after it.

RB: After reading the collection, the title struck me as even more rich than it had when I first read it. Because this book contains an undercurrent of the simple power of words— both to you as a writer working in traditional and experimental forms, and as an activist who is working to try to reclaim or reconfigure or engage in dissent against words like “masculine” or “male” or “race.” So, a few things to ask you: Have you always had a sense of the power of words? Always wanted to live so vitally with them? How do you see the role of writers—or you in particular—insofar as either maintaining or tending old words, as opposed to redefining or invigorating them?

TG: I think that especially as a black person living in a racist society, and as child of Jamaican (and thus Caribbean) immigrants living in an essentially anti-immigrant society (or at least a society that shuns immigrants who are poor, of color, or perceived as being “ill,” as in having AIDS), I began to learn early on about the power of words. I said “especially as a black person” because, while I have also experienced, as a gay person, the demeaning and defining power of words hurled or whispered in homophobic assaults, the fact that my skin is racially marked (that is, my skin is not white) in this race-obsessed society means that I began to learn very early what it meant not to be white. In a society that values whiteness above all else, as the United States does, one learns quickly—especially, but not only, if one isn’t white—how powerfully words impact on one’s very life, survival, and possibilities for freedom and accomplishment.

In a different way, these dynamics, vis-à-vis words, play out in the most fascinating and disturbing words when we use and listen carefully to everyday language. Depending on who we are and where we are, do we say, “The woman went to the store” or “The black woman went to the store”? Who—and what—are we really talking about when we use not-so-subtle encoded references like “the inner city” or “urban crime”?

I advise my students all the time to be extremely vigilant about the language they use, but I know that such vigilance is really difficult to develop; after all, particularly in the U.S., we’re not encouraged to be vigilant about language. A vigilant, critical intellect doesn’t, I think, make for a strong, forward-charging capitalist state; but even more critically, a vigilant gaze would constantly scrutinize closely and challenge—even defy—freewheeling, cynical, empire-minded government.

George Orwell gave us those wonderful words, in 1984, for the sorts of pernicious, unethical languages that corrupt, overreaching governments systematically employ: “doublespeak” and “doublethink.” As a writer, but also as a conscious person and citizen of the larger world, I feel that it’s really my conscientious duty to continue questioning and severely critiquing all the doublespeak that exists and has proliferated in my lifetime.

Look at the words we hear bandied about today: the “war on terror,” for example, or “terrorists.” But we seem to forget that members of the Ku Klux Klan were—are—terrorists. And members of U.S. right-wing militia groups are terrorists. The U.S. government practices routine terrorism in all the Latin American and other nations it attempts to dominate, subvert, and economically exploit for its own ends. The U.S. public’s amnesia and ignorance about such realities is a sad, actually tragic example of a lack of necessary vigilance over disingenuous, misleading language. But writers can forcefully address that amnesia.

Arthur Sze On Ancient Inca and Chinese Narratives

A poet is above all else passionate about language. And quipus have been my recent vehicle to explore what language can do.

The eleventh edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines a quipu as “a device made of a main cord with smaller varicolored cords attached and knotted and used by the ancient Peruvians (as for calculating).” The word quipu is from Quechua and means knot.  

I became interested in quipus many years ago when I discovered that quipus might encode language. In my last book, Quipu (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), I was interested in harnessing dyed strings of language along with forms of knotting. One form of knotting, it seemed to me, could be simple anaphoric repetition. In the next-to-last section of “Didyma,” I used the word “because” fifteen times to initiate a series of causes, then I used a section divider to create a gap before presenting fifteen different effects. Because no cause leads clearly to a subsequent effect, no one is able to see the universal nexus of causes and effects.

In the title poem, “Quipu,” I employed a different form of knotting where the word “as” is used again and again, with varying meanings. The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary lists three meanings of “as” as an adverb and eight meanings of “as” as a conjunction. I utilized the word “as” in each of its possible meanings and then revealed them in section seven. My wife, the poet Carol Moldaw, studied with Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard and has often mentioned how he talked about “elegant variation” as a means to create rich layers in poetry. I thought of repetition with a twist and consciously worked with this polysemous form of knotting when I kept repeating the word “as.”