Marthe Reed reviews Chris McCreary’s undone: a fakebook (Furniture Press)

Agile and savvy, both music and meditation, Chris McCreary‘s undone: a fakebook takes the reader on a
deliciously strange journey, playing on and against popular culture, delving through the mine/mindfields of
his (and our) adolescence. McCreary borrows ―Yesterday‘s Songs‖—title of both a poem and a Neil
Diamond song. From The Talking Heads, Echo and the Bunnymen, Billy Joel, and, of course, Neil
Diamond, these songs become occasions for composing his own ironic riffs on past and present alike, pop
culture a means of entry into a critique of our own moment.
―Black Star‖ adopts the hard rhythms and alliteration of hiphop, driven by McCreary‘s enjambed lines:

I could joke
of thrombosis but this

frostbite‘s
for real like the harm

in the charm if our lips

get eclipsed

Against the persistent beat and music, McCreary woos us, speaking a vision of collapse:

& we hush
but even the slush can seem

iceberg horizons when our stars

start to fall

regardless.

The alliterative impulse, paired with hard enjambment, does not falter, even as he switches to The Talking
Heads or Neil Diamond, these techniques the driving impulses and intuitions of McCreary‘s tunes. Taking his
epigram from Roxy Music‘s ―Mother of Pearl‖, McCreary bends the narrative of a girl to his own sound play,
satirizing himself as he acknowledges his passions: ―Serpentine sleekness was always my weakness, like a
simple tune…‖, though there is nothing simple here. As in Section III of ―Song Sung Blue‖ of ―Diamond
Sutra‖—an ironic take on Buddhism‘s Perfect Wisdom, insights drawn from Neil Diamond song titles—the
wisdom on offer comes voiced in ironic improvisations on writing, politics, war, and relationships.

The car alarm was not

the ice cream

man was not the missing

ATM pin & when

the key broke off

in the lock, I opened

your diary
using a rock & read all those

notes about Oz
an abstraction but I meant it
 in jest, it was just
a distraction.

McCreary does not confine himself to pop music. His ―Fiend Folio‖—a title borrowed from Dungeons
and Dragons‘ Monster Manuals—mediates on monsters both literary and fabulous: from the albatross, Ethan
Frome, Paris, and Ophelia to a chupacabra, a juju, and screaming trees; more prosaically, Yoda and the
privileged adolescents of private high schools, like the one at which McCreary himself teaches. Culture, pop
culture, adolescence, and the writer‘s art are all ―undone‖ in McCreary‘s ―fakebook.‖ Reworked to open onto
the present, the poems re-attune the listener‘s ear to a music questioning silence, easy expectations, willful
ignorance—monsters of our own making:

A thin bit of cotton

shoved aside & hope

croaks over gums

in torn verbs, turpentine.

The same old starch

sewn over every orifice,

the tight smile

pulled tighter
by hidden strings. Taut,

tauter this tinkering

until fit to tear.

Nor is sound play is the only play here. In ―Yoda,‖ the speaker desperately writes his Jedi master, sending
reports and seeking support, a deliciously tongue-cheek satire of the crazy-quilt of icons the mash-up of
culture and pop culture forms: ―Dear Y., Code name Erato is now in play. Pls send backup. Request
Ganesh, but will accept Gilgamesh, Green Arrow, a lesser Power Ranger if necessary.‖

In the final section, ―Pretty Monsters‖, McCreary‘s monsters and music return us to ―The starting point,
smears of phosphorus marking our recent descent‖—into hell? : ―Fiend Folio‖ ends with ―Zenith‖, its
escaped canary ―going / supernova, / exploding // into sun,‖ foreshadowing our fiery demise. The final
piece of the collection takes the tenor of a cryptic bedtime story. Our guide, or DJ—―The Sherpa,‖ ―The
Firewall,‖ ―Chocolate Chicken,‖ ―Dr. Riddles‖—vanishes, his koan-like guidance lost on us, ―I like to crackle
through the wires. I leave the climbing to others.‖ Haunted by shadows, by the ―spider / at the edge of the
text,‖ our guide‘s directions, ominous and unintelligible—“Open your eyes. Don’t take a breath. Open your eyes.
Hand me a suitcase. Don’t breathe. Hand me that DVD. I said don’t smile. I said don’t take a breath”—we find
ourselves ―amid the wreckage,‖ what passes for our ―blessings‖ only those ―written…atop vanilla cake.‖
Happy Birthday? Ironically bending the tale‘s blissful close, McCreary tucks us in to a bed of ―happy endings‖
where ―myths / blend‖, as our monstrous comfies ―Typhon and Echidna‖ console us against the dark,
against the lapsed wisdoms with which we surround ourselves. Against coming undone, all evidence to the
contrary, ―we‖ remain assured by those
wending paths of bread

crumbs never eaten

enchantments

never cast &

this way, then, our odyssey

never ends, our oracle

never poisoned

after
all.
 Chris McCreary reviews Marthe Reed’s Gaze (Black Radish Books)

Marthe Reed‘s Gaze opens with ―False pretenses,‖ a multi-layered, rapid-fire succession of commands,
questions, and glimpses ―of a fragmented body suddenly flashed and then obscured.‖ That this ―body‖ may
be the human form or the text itself is worth considering, as the poem presents multiple kinds of ―wooing,‖
too, from the ―self-propagating wave of fear‖ that leads a society into war to a woman who, like a magician,
must decide what of herself to reveal and what to hold back. While it might be possible, at first glance, to see
this book as being comprised of two distinct strands – one group composed of more explicitly ―war poems,‖
the other a commentary on the poses of femininity, particularly in the Middle East – ―False Pretenses‖
foregrounds the fact that these two sets of concerns are, when one looks more closely, deeply intertwined. ―A
gun presents itself as an earring,‖ while a woman ―veiled in a film of light, in latex, in Murano beads…
unbinds sex, arms herself in it.‖ Throughout the book, Reed‘s examination of the power of femininity is
particularly fluid and intriguing. Just as the politician and the poet lure audiences through their manipulation
of language, the women in Gaze don jewelry, makeup, and expensive clothing in an attempt to manipulate the
world in which they find themselves.

Often presented in dense paragraphs reminiscent of Rosmarie Waldrop‘s prose poems (which, like these
pieces, also are deeply philosophical and inescapably erotic), many of Reed‘s pieces twist in on themselves
until more questions than answers remain and we find ―(t)erms of war bedded in a fictitious sex.‖ Are some
veils (either literal or more figurative) donned by a woman for protection, or possibly as a means of personal
expression, or are they always forced upon her by society at large? Reed ends what is perhaps the book‘s most
powerful piece, ―without boundaries,‖ by writing, ―Poetry, revolution, couture cast separate nets, perform
veiled pentimenti of their own.‖ This idea of layering, of writing on top of what already exists, infuses these
pieces, where even the beautiful art of calligraphy is ―ruminating on revolution.‖ Indeed, the book‘s epigrams
suggest femininity as a deliberate role to be played (Simone de Beauvoir‘s ―One is not born but, rather,
becomes a woman,‖ for example), and many of Gaze‘s poems allow these women a certain agency. But by
the book‘s coda, ―740,000,‖ we have ―(t)his ‗woman‘ performing obedience to our burdens and sacrifice,
begging at checkpoint car lines.‖ Then, a few sentences later, ―She straps a bomb to her breasts, abbaya
shroud the veil‘s conceits.‖ In this last instance, the woman has once again used her femininity (in the case,
the floor-length, long-sleeved abbaya) to conceal her real goal, but how did her body end up becoming a
weapon of war itself? Is this suicide bomber empowered, in a sense, and acting on her own volition, or is she
merely a victim of circumstance, lashing out in the only way that seems to be left open to her? And to what
extent are we, as viewers, complicit in this horror? ―Are you paying attention?‖ Reed asks in ―False
pretenses,‖ and Reed leaves us with little choice but to hold our gaze steady and witness what happens next.
Interview

MR: Chris, what is immediately striking in undone is the insistence on music, both in the language and in the
impulses driving the poems. Could you talk a bit about those impulses which are both occasions for writing
and compositional structures? I am thinking here both about improvisation (your ―fakebook‖) and that deep
investment in engaging with popular culture and music.

CM: Early on, my poems were loaded up with pop culture references – I don‘t think it was a deliberate
decision to include them so much as a response to the world around me. Then, at some point, I decided that
my poems should seem more overtly serious and, therefore, would probably have less humor and fewer
references to lowbrow culture. So many of the poets whose work I admire – Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian –
tend to have a certain austerity to their work, as do many of my closest poet-friends, and I think there was
some part of me that felt like I was doing something wrong by trying to be both slapstick and deadly serious
at the same time. My first book, The Effacements, had a piece called ―Poe in Philadelphia,‖ in which Edgar
Allan Poe wandered the streets of contemporary Philly, and that book‘s reference points were predominantly
literary in nature, a pattern I continued with the next Dismembers. With Dismembers, though, I realized that I
was sliding in references to music and movies as subtly as I could, mainly just to amuse myself, and once I
started to write the poems that became Undone, I figured, Well, why not enjoy this? Also, with my first two
books, there weren‘t many pieces from them that I truly liked to read aloud, so I wanted to be sure that I
could read any of these newer poems at a reading and feel like I was capable of using them to grab and hold
an audience.

With the newer poems in Undone, the ―Diamond Sutra‖ series evolved out of some fragments of a longer
poem, and as they reshaped, I started looking for a way to string them together. I‘ve always had an attraction
to Neil Diamond‘s music – I guess at first, in college, it was somewhat ironic (―Listen to how schlocky this
is!‖), but there are songs like ―Solitary Man‖ that I think are, really and truly, pop masterpieces. I like that I
adore much of his music on those two levels, which I think is pretty much how I process my relationship
with the world – half irony, half serious engagement, depending on the moment. I‘d embedded references to
his songs in some of the poems in Dismembers as the sort of semi-private joke that I mentioned above, but this
time I decided to really embrace his songs as well as a whole host of references to TV shows, movies, and
other people‘s songs, stringing them all together to try to create a thematic whole. With the ―Great American
Songbook‖ section, I was trying to frame a bunch of urban legends about pop stars I‘d heard as a kid, but I
ended up straying from that concept a bit. In both of those sections of the book, there‘s a broad sort of
humor at work, clearly, but I was also trying to use them to echo more serious thematic concerns that run
throughout the book as a whole. The idea of the ―fakebook‖ for me had more to do with the fact that I could
dive in and out of more traditional structures and use of rhyme, then divert course again as necessary.

In terms of being interested in the sound of the poems themselves, I suppose that started in graduate school
for me, where Rachel Blau DuPlessis slowed us down and made us pay close attention to the sonic elements
at work within any given poem. For one thing, it gave me a new appreciation for people like Creeley, who I
already admired, but it also tuned me in more deliberately to the sound of my own work. That said, while I‘ve
been conscious of the way my poems sound aloud for at least a decade, Undone is the first time where I‘ve
wound things up this tightly. It wasn‘t really a deliberate decision early on, but as I kept revising these poems,
I realized that I was becoming more reliant on rhyme and, at times, a cadence that was almost like a jump-
rope song. My fear was that it became too goofy (for lack of a more technical way to say it!), but I also felt
like, if a poem like ―The Black Book‖ can use this almost silly sound pattern at times while exploring some
fairly sinister corners of the soul, well, that could be an interesting juxtaposition to explore.

My first question for you, Marthe, has to do with source material as well. Two of your poems draw directly
from speeches by George W. Bush, and other pieces draw from a variety of journalistic and historical sources
as well. When you first heard Bush‘s 2002 speech, for instance, did you know that you would bend it to suit
your own needs, or did you go back and collect all of these sources at once with the overall project of Gaze in
mind?

MR: Gaze had a multi-pronged focus from the start. At first there was the simple confluence of my parents-
in-law‘s travels through the Silk Route and my subsequent attraction to the architecture and culture of that
sprawling realm. ―Operation Enduring Freedom‖ and the subsequent War in Iraq refocused that attention
profoundly: the collision of brute mentalities against the backdrop of all the strength and possibility that
culture affords was/is profoundly disturbing. As you note, the unscrupulous manipulation of language and
information that ―permitted‖ the wars to unfold became immediate sources not only of anger but material for
the writing. Finally, as the wars peaked, haute couture became passingly intrigued with war, terror, militarism,
etc. Women‘s bodies were draped in fetishized costumes suggesting medieval armor, body bags, fencing
masks and gear, &c. Their faces were often obscured either by net, masks, ―veils,‖ or paint, some of these
explicit references to the niqab of conservative Islam. These representations, in a sense, brought me full
circle to the West‘s own alternately naive and cynical uses of veiling and its subtext, the control of women‘s
bodies and sexuality.

Thus the project became a means of investigating the visual languages of photography, painting, and couture
vis-s-vis women and war, along with a paired attention to the ways the issues sketched above were being
manipulated and presented politically and in the media. At the center of the work, for me, is a concern with
looking. Who speaks and to what ends, and how is the guise/gaze inextricably bound to that speech? The
question of position and power in that looking, or gazing, the way the gaze is controlled and/or wielded in
dysfunctional binaries, whether East/West, male/female, Christian/Muslim, or Muslim/Jewish, and the
manifold permutations of gazing and control that result. In that looking, the eyes‘ attention (both in action
and in language) adopt the force of the bullet‘s graze or penetration, a force of violence and disintegration
obliterating the possibility of connection, sensuality, communion. When that figurative graze becomes literal,
we blow each other up.

In composing these poems, I appropriated language, manipulated it anew, cross-pollinating the discourse
with multiple voices, both of my own making and those of others, seeking a wider, more equitable,
compassionate interchange. A way out of our monstrous blindness.

My second question for you, Chris, returns to your comment above about play and humor, about needing a
permission to play in the writing. That willingness to let irony turn not only outward but inward also, to
laugh at oneself as a part of the wider cultural milieu, is delightful. Charles Bernstein can be wonderfully
ironic and playful, but what you bring here is a willingness to make yourself (at some level quite happily)
complicit in the tropes of pop culture. I would like to learn more from you about pop culture‘s influences,
how it serves as both a personal referent and as a means of entry into our culture‘s ―collective unconscious‖,
to borrow a term. What does pop culture offer you, in terms of a window onto your own work/process and
onto the wider society? What are those concerns you allude to above?

CM: I‘m not sure how conscious I am of this while I‘m writing, but I suppose my use of popular culture
could break down into a couple of categories. First, there are pop culture references that are really just for my
own satisfaction. For instance, in ―Black Star‖ I was highlighting whatever themes were at work through
allusion to American Beauty, the Radiohead song ―Black Star,‖ and a song from the musical episode of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer, all of which, in my mind, capture a certain sort of ennui that I felt was relevant. For the poem
to feel complete to me, I wanted to have them in there and it became a bit of a game to get them all
embedded, but I‘d like to think that the poem works without knowledge of them – I don‘t feel the need to
annotate it, a la Eliot and ―The Wasteland.‖

I guess the closest I come to actual social commentary is ―Play Me,‖ which offers up lots of examples of
artificiality and manufactured entertainment (video games, an American Idol contestant, etc.). Overall, though, I
never want it to seem like I have contempt for popular culture. In fact, the tone of ―The Great American
Songbook‖ was supposed to be a bit pretentious (and at times flat-out illogical) in an attempt to parody
academic essays I‘d read about TV shows like ER and Buffy. In a lot of those pieces, I felt like there was this
real air of contempt for, or at the very least distance from, the subject, as if it would be beneath the writer to
actually, you know, take pleasure in what they were writing about. (Those pieces are also indebted to Garrett
Caples‘s sophisticated, hilarious, and at times scathing essayistic work in The Garrett Caples Reader.) There are
plenty of aspects of popular culture that don‘t interest me at all (almost any organized sport, most reality TV
shows), but in general I feel like I should have an awareness of what‘s what on The Jersey Shore, for instance,
even if quite a few people seem to see it as the latest nail in the coffin of Western Civilization. Like it or not,
this is our cultural moment, and as far as I‘m concerned, it‘s all fair game.

By the way, you mentioned Charles Bernstein, who is certainly an example of the available forms of play, and
I especially admire Rae Armantrout‘s ability to switch registers within a single line.

Getting back to the idea of our source materials, I was wondering if you could talk about your interest in
fashion a bit more. You mentioned collections that were clearly referencing Middle Eastern culture and
military conflict (and, as an aside, I‘d love to know what designers you‘re referencing there). Is your interest in
couture purely political, in a sense, or do you follow contemporary fashion for other, more aesthetic, reasons
as well? (And do you get caught up in cultural moments like Project Runway?)

MR: My interests in fashion are almost entirely political/critical, though couture can offer transcendent,
extraordinary work. For the most part, however, it reads as a game of sex and money to me. As to ―Project
Runway,‖ reality tv, like most tv, I find pretty unbearable. Perhaps I OD‘d as a kid, watching too many
reruns of ―I Dream of Jeannie,‖ ―Bewitched,‖,―Star Trek,‖ ―Mission Impossible,‖ and ―Wild Wild West.‖
Though no amount of old style ―Star Trek‖ camp could, on its own, dissuade me!

The designers whose work particularly drew my eye were John Galliano and Jun Takahashi, two designers
who in Fall 2006 took very different approaches in engaging with war and veiling. Galliano created these
strange fusions of medieval armor and gilded, silk gowns, the models‘ faces marked with black bands of
make-up over their eyes, like assassins, or their heads and necks wrapped in beaded helms and chain mail.
The architecture and dress of war were played against the armor-like qualities of women‘s (historical) dress--
corsets, panniers, bustles--exposing the sexual tropes of war and violence in these blendings. Takahasi‘s
outfits moved across a range from slender paratrooper-like uniforms and funereal wrappings to body bag-like
sacks, the models‘ faces obscured entirely, hooded like those of prisoners or torture-victims; sometimes their
bodies were suspended from above, as if dead. Their wrappings had strange metal piercings, as if the cloth
was a surrogate for flesh, a collection of hooks, rings and chains stitching over/together the
transgressive/collapsing body. Viktor and Rolf covered the models‘ faces with fencing masks. Gareth Pugh‘s
transparent drapes played with the notion of the abbayah or niqab, using transparent plastics that revealed
rather than obscured, though often simultaneously entirely covering the model‘s faces or heads, creating a
jarring dichotomy, so that the observer's gaze fixated either on the obliterated face or the exposed body.

These designs strongly resonated both with our culture‘s fascination with the military (to the absurd point of
driving humvees around suburban streets) and our dichotomous relation to the body and sexuality, using it to
flog anything and everything while simultaneously bearing a deep cultural shame vis-avis our physical, animal
selves. Equally, when soldiers come home, limbs and lives radically severed, we are horrified, preferring not
to know, while paradoxically revelling in, even exalting, the violence and tropes of war in popular culture
along with the ―patriotism‖ and ―honor‖ of military service and war.

At the same time as I was looking at the work of fashion designers, MOMA had a show of contemporary
artists from the Muslim world, Without Boundary, works engaging with their culture and history, as well as with
the West‘s treatments of Islam and ―the East.‖ These images, too, became occasions for writing, for
engaging with war, violence, gender, the body, sexuality, as did the photojournalism emerging from Iraq and
Afghanistan. In fact, many of the images in the current issue of Daylight Magazine (Issue 8) figured in the
writing.

For me, the ―cultural moment‖ which fascinates lies in the complex, web-like interrelationships connecting
these disparate elements, my pursuit of them a way of making sense of the apparently non-sensical. --All of
which makes me think about process, my own and how that informs the writing. I wonder if you could write
a bit about your own process. I am interested, in particular, in the work that precedes the writing--reading,
research, journals, &c-- what is important or useful in the early work, for you? Also, how does the writing
itself unfold? Are there specific mappings your create/follow/imagine--points of departure, which needless
to say may ultimately go elsewhere than first imagined? For this particular collection, did you imagine it as a
collection from the start, a set of concerns/themes/practices you wanted to attend to, or did you come to see
disparate pieces as forming a whole, perhaps in looking back at them?

CM: I always carry a journal and keep notes in it, which becomes just a collection of words or phrases I like,
little lyric fragments that occur to me, memorable dialogue that I overhear or quotes that I read somewhere.
Very rarely does a poem emerge as a whole that early on. I‘m generally collecting lots of scraps for several
months at a time, then typing them all into a single Word document, which I print out and then hand edit,
usually over a span of a few days. I then key in those changes, reprint, and shuffle more text over and over
again.

The poems in ―Fiend Folio‖ all came together that way, and there was quite a bit of shifting around of
material early on – where does this certain fragment belong because of theme, sound, etc.? While those were
underway, many of the ―Diamond Sutra‖ poems began to take shape, too, but there was a fairly clear division
in my mind – the ―Fiend Folio‖ poems tended to be more violent, darker, more of a companion to ―The
Black Book,‖ while the Neil Diamond poems were generally more humorous and tended to be focused on
growing older in various ways, which has to do with some of the actual Neil Diamond songs that I used as
reference points (―Two-Bit Manchild,‖ ―Girl, You‘ll Be a Woman Soon,‖ etc.). The ―Fiend Folio‖ poems
share some similar concerns – generational conflict, gender conflict, etc. – but it‘s generally portrayed in more
overtly Freudian terms, whereas the Diamond poems strike me as being more about the poses of masculinity.

At one point, I wasn‘t sure that all of the pieces that ended up in Undone could hang together. I knew that
―The Diamond Sutra‖ worked with ―The Great American Songbook,‖ and I envisioned ―Fiend Folio‖ and
―The Black Book‖ together, but it took me a while to see that the other pieces helped to bind it all together.
Also, the more I revised the poems, the more the manuscript started to seem like a whole to me, and when I
look at it now, I can‘t really think of anything that I would have done differently, either in terms of individual
pieces within the book or the collection as a whole. It‘s a good feeling.

Most of my poems begin to coalesce around some fairly traditional autobiographical impulse, I suppose, but
one of my goals during revision is to disrupt that process so that I can, in a sense, have my cake and eat it,
too. I have little interest in writing in a more straightforwardly autobiographical manner, and I enjoy the
process of obfuscating, creating these layers of screens until what‘s left has, in fact, very little left to do with
my life at all. ―Pretty Monsters‖ retains some of the clearest autobiographical references, but I still worked to
destabilize them for the sake of creating a more interesting, multi-layered poems. In large part, it‘s about my
kids, and I‘m very wary of the trap of sentimentalizing, romanticizing, falling back on cliché. As a workshop
teacher, one of the toughest things to handle is when a student brings in what is clearly an autobiographical
poem based on the death of a loved one. It is clearly a poem that the person needed to write in order to cope
with the situation, and I want to honor that impulse. At the same time, it then becomes nearly impossible to
discuss the mechanics of the poem because the subject matter is so fraught with pain. While writing about
one‘s young children is, in a sense, the opposite of writing about the death of one‘s grandparent, I think it‘s
really hard to do either of them in a way that‘s interesting to anyone beyond the author. Which isn‘t to say
that it can‘t be done, of course, but it‘s as tough as writing a ―love poem,‖ I think.

What I‘m reading does factor into my poems, absolutely, but I rarely set out to read something as research for
a poetic project. A lot of what appears here, especially in ―Fiend Folio,‖ I‘m realizing, are references to books
that I teach or have taught – Hamlet, Ethan Frome, Their Eyes Were Watching God – as well as a smattering of
distorted quotes from students and colleagues. On the poetry front, it‘s clear to me that I was reading
Armantrout and Graham Foust at various points while I was writing these poems, so I was especially pleased
that Ron Silliman recently connected my work to Foust‘s when he wrote about Undone on his blog. Aside
from reading Jenn McCreary‘s work with great regularity (and she‘s been exploring some fairly creepy
territory, too, so there‘s some give and take there), I‘m a bit in awe of Kirsten Kaschock‘s poems and short
fiction by Kelly Link, whose book, Pretty Monsters, provides the name for the final poem in the book. While I
suppose that my general word view is ―postmodern,‖ whatever that means, I haven‘t engaged very deeply
with literary theory since graduate school and have little interest in doing so, so my ―poetics‖ can‘t really be
couched in that language, but I will say that the one thinker who interested me the most was Jacques Lacan.
As an undergrad, I got to take a seminar in Joyce with a fantastic Lacanian scholar, Sheldon Brivic, and
applying that frame to Ulysses made perfect sense to me and continued to help me as an analytical thinker
moving into graduate school and beyond, even if I haven‘t read a word of Lacan‘s in years.

Marthe, I‘d be curious to hear about your writing process as well, and I‘m particularly intrigued to know how
the various pieces of the book were made to lock together so tightly, both on a larger scale and in terms of
those images, even (calligraphic writing, the color blue, etc.), that flit throughout your work. Also, aside from
the source material you‘ve already mentioned, were there any poets or other thinkers you were reading, for
instance, who were a touchstone?

MR: I wondered about Link‘s Pretty Monsters! Though I have not read it, I have been tempted, now even
more so.

I, too, keep a journal, however I have never gotten in the habit of carrying it with me everywhere. Sometimes
I come close to that ideal when traveling, but largely my journals function as repositories of notes and
engagements with readings (whether books or public readings or talks at conferences). Those readings can be
very focused on a writing project, or simply ―grazing‖, reading what reaches my eye or ear or hand. For the
work on Gaze, the reading was as always some of each, and always in some way integrative for the writing.
The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (ed. Nathalie Handal), Women in Praise of the Sacred (ed. Jane
Hirshfield), Women and Gender in Islam (Leila Ahmed), The Hidden Face of Eve (Nawal El Saadawi), and Najmieh
Batmanglij's Silk Road Cooking, along with Irigaray, Said, Foucault, and Kristeva, all entered the journals as
source material and in that way the writing. Reportage in The New York Times and elsewhere of the war and
fashion, and speeches by the Bush/Rumsfeld cabal also informed the work. I was also reading a range of
poets, important among them Rosmarie Waldop, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Laura Mullen.

Deeply drawn to Berssenbrugge‘s work, I find her collage compositional process particularly relevant to my
own intentions as a writer. I bring together a disparate set of voices: borrowings, either literal or modified
from my reading notes and musings, along with new writing more specifically ―poetic‖. I try to create multi-
voiced texts that braid together disparate elements, impulses, and emotional tenors. Attuned to sound and
rhythm, to the musical qualities of language--an attention informed by an early and enduring passion for the
work of H.D.--this also shaped the writing: the honing of the disparate elements, then, is driven by the ear
and mouth, the sounding of the text, as well as an intention to move against narrative coherence. Similar to
your description of your own work, I seek to obscure both narrative and biography, establishing a range of
potential narrative threads that emerge from the text and braid together into a synthetic whole formed in the
process of reading.

Disruption was particularly important in this work, especially the work most directly engaging with war and
violence. The borrowings from Bush, et al, were often highly constraint-driven. ―Arsenal of terror,‖ for
instance, is composed of a vocabulary using only the letters from Bush‘s phrase. ―Weapons of mass
destruction‖ is composed from lines, taken in order, from Bush‘s speech justifying the opening of war on
Iraq. Other poems were composed by elision; for instance ―Girls and dolls‖, is taken from Cathy Horyn‘s
NY Times review of a 2006 couture show.

Finally, ekphrasis was a fundamental part of the process. The catalog from Without Boundary, along with
other works by those artists, and photo journalism of the wars, haute couture, and Islamic architecture were
all drawn upon as source images from which to enter the ‗realm‘ of the project. My interest in calligraphy
came via the work of Shirin Neshat, an Iranian artist who writes upon the exposed faces, hands, feet in her
enlarged photographs of Muslim women. This work then led exploration of Arabic and Islamic calligraphy
and its relationship to the Qur‘an, both of the images themselves and the history of that art. As to the color
blue, its role in the book derived largely from the imagery, though I will not disown my own passion for the
color (see ―Consorting with wedlock‖): the blue Iznik ware of Suleiman the Great, the blue tiles of the
mosques (Istanbul‘s Blue Mosque or Baghdad‘s Ramadan Mosque, for instance), and the blue niqabs of
Afghani women (one of which you can see on the cover of Daylight Magazine
http://www.daylightmagazine.org/store/issue-8-afghanistan), all of which are extraordinary in their beauty
and intensity.

Though, as described earlier, the text grew somewhat organically from an interest in the Silk Road, the
disparate threads quickly came together into a coherent project. In assembling the collection I tried to move
in a similarly organic fashion between those elements, pursuing underlying concerns with sound, sensuality,
and political critique. As I was particularly interested in forms in this collection, moving across and between
forms and the kinds of content and emotion each carried, I worked, too, to balance those voices/impulses in
assembling Gaze.

One last question for you, Chris. Could you write a bit more about ―The Black Book‖: its genesis, the
impulses driving that poem, and its relation to the collection as a whole, especially coming, as it does, on the
heels of ―The Great American Songbook‖ and leading into ―Fiend Folio‖?

CM:―The Black Book‖ is a Frankenstein‘s monster in more ways than one. I started it as a response,
somewhat tongue in cheek, to Orhan Pamuk‘s novel The Black Book, and that initial effort more like ―The
Great American Songbook‖ in tone, which is still evident in the more prose-like sections. As it morphed, the
―book‖ itself became more of a character, somehow both a written text and a person (or persona? I not sure)
all at once. Also, I began thinking about the concept of the bachelor‘s ―little black book‖ of women‘s phone
numbers. I was reading Berryman‘s Dream Songs at the time, and somehow I began to apply this concept to an
exaggerated version of his biography, in a way, imagining a drunken, lecherous, ravenous id wandering the
earth. As I built the poem, I also interwove quite a few older lines that I‘d always wanted to revamp and
reuse, some of these bits from a Potes & Poets chapbook I released in 1999, and even an image or two from
a grad workshop in the mid-1990s. Again, aside from the obsessive pleasure of finally using those lines in a
way that pleased me, I liked the idea of creating this new ―monster‖ out of older parts, old images groping
their way back from the dead for one last bit of human contact.

In a way, I see ―The Black Book‖ as the dark heart of Undone, and I was trying to use it to transition from the
seemingly silly ―Songbook‖ essays, repositioning some of those same themes in starker terms that would
carry through much of ―Fiend Folio.‖ Then, with any luck, ―Pretty Monsters‖ brings things back into the
light a bit!

One last question for you, Marthe. Undone took me so long to write and revise that I‘m only now coming to
grips with the scope and form of what my next poetic project will look like, and I‘ve been cleansing my
palate, in a way, by writing some short fiction, too. What about you? I‘m very curious to hear where you‘ve
been headed, post-Gaze.

MR: The interweaving of so many impulses in ―The Black Book‖ fascinates me: a Frankensteinian marriage
indeed, yet intriguing and engaging all along the way. Such heterogeneous, manifold attentions lie at the heart
of my own work, also, sketching a kinship between us.

At present, I am immersed in tying up the threads of a new manuscript, engagements with the Thousand and
One Nights, female narrator/narration, the deployment of gender, and Sir Richard Burton, as well as other
writers‘ engagements with this most engaging of story-cycles: writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Jorge Luis
Borges, John Ashberry, Fatima Mernissi, Italo Calvino. Nights Reading is a marriage of many impulses, itself,
held together by a sustained attention of the nature of narrative and Scheherazade as narrator. Because the
cycle posits Scheherazade as redeemer of not only herself and her sister virgins of the kingdom, but of just
rule and King Shariyar‘s humanity, I wanted to explore the tropes of gender as these operate in the cycle,
alternately affirming and undermining socially constituted male power and authority. Her own narrative and
Shariyar‘s point out the fundamental ability of the seemingly powerless (women, slaves, blacks) to erode and
challenge the status quo. In response to such inevitable and disordering transgression, Scheherazade offers
renewed faith in the possibility of love/self-respect/self-determination to creatively and constructively
transcend socially sanctioned authorities, at least to a degree. When you add in the wild egoism, theatricality,
and brilliance, not to mention polyglot sexuality, of Sir Richard Burton, a wondrous domain for exploration
of gender, power, and authority unfolds! Which is to say, I am having a glorious time working on this new
manuscript.

Thank you so much for this conversation, Chris, and to Christophe Cassimina and Nicole Mauro for
organizing: it has been a rich and satisfying pleasure. I wish you all the best with undone, Chris, and I look
forward to continuing our conversations elsewhere.