In the second installment of our poets/reading series interviews is Chris Hosea. He and Cecily Iddings are married poets who publish the poetry newsletter The Blue Letter, which has recently been expanded into a reading series as well.
We discuss the early impact of e.e. cummings' capitalization as well as an eccentric performance reading at Ugly Duckling. ("So I was removing all these different articles of clothing that were brands, I was naming those.")
"This doesn't rhyme, it doesn't have capitalization, what's going on here?"
RC: So Chris tell us about The Blue Letter and how you came to expand it into a reading series.
CH: At graduate school, Cecily and I were thinking about a way to publish poetry that we loved and have it reach an audience of people we either knew or admired. We considered a website, but both of us maybe because of the generation we're in had difficulty really connecting to a poem on a screen in a meaningful way. So we decided to start sending out the Blue Letter as a poetry newsletter.
For making it into a reading series, actually I had the good fortune to be included in an issue of 6×6, which is a magazine publishing by Ugly Duckling Presse, and I ended up doing some promotion for an event for that issue. I was carrying around these beautiful posters that were designed in a kind of constructivist fashion. And everywhere I went people were happy to talk to me as soon as they saw these posters, they looked so good. I walked into a restaurant on Court Street, Watty & Meg, and the assistant manager there, Sharon Clark, recognized the names of some of the poets on the poster. And she herself had studied poetry at Pratt with Christian Hawkey, and we got to talking and she and the owners were very enthusiastic about having a reading series, and so it wasn't really something that I planned on doing—
RC: Was it their idea—I mean, did they suggest it?
CH: Well it kind of just came out of talking to Sharon because she looked at the poster, and she's like wow this looks really great, and of course we'll hang it somewhere but what about, could we do a reading here? And so we were just like okay, and started thinking about it, and now our third one is coming up next week—it’s Joshua Beckman, Jeannie Hoag, and Rachelle Rahme.
RC: Tell us a bit about your experience as a poet yourself, how you first became interested in poetry.
CH: Probably my first encounter with poetry that I really remember strongly was in a textbook, like a fourth-grade English or Language textbook, that was pretty factory-made, but it had this little sidebar, it had this poem by e.e. cummings called "old age sticks," and I'd never seen someone start a sentence without capitalizing the letter, and that was like a revelation to me. I was like this doesn't rhyme, it doesn't have capitalization, I was like what's going on here—because I'd seen poems before, but they were like nursery rhymes or something, and so that was really cool. I was like, oh that's something else.
RC: How do you think running a reading series will interact with your poetry? Do you see these as completely separate things you're doing, or is there a connection?
CH: There's definitely a connection. I've been going to readings a lot, usually at least once a week. In a way it’s got a kind of quality almost like a religious observance or something, to just go and sit with a group of people and listen. And so listening to readings is a big part of my understanding of poetry, and it has been since I was in college and I listened to tapes of poets like Ashbery and H.D. and Wallace Stevens and all different kinds of poets reading their work, and hearing the voice really helped open up and unlock the poetry for me and animated it for me.
RC: I'd be interested to hear more about your Ugly Duckling reading, which was really kind of exciting and eventful.
CH: Well it was a party so I was thinking, what kind of reading is appropriate for a party, because, you know, I certainly don't always read in such a performative way. Right now I'm very interested in the way objects of pop culture can be removed from one context, like a supermarket shelf, and put into another—it's a very old idea, going back to dada and Duchamp and Warhol. So I was thinking, alright this is a party, there's going to be pop bands, there's going to be people drinking beer, so I wanted to claim, to celebrate all of the sort of brands that were on my body, so I was removing all these different articles of clothing that were brands, I was naming those, naming all of the different substances, people, and different things, and commodities that had got me to where I was.
Language is communal
And then I lead the audience in a singing of "With a Little Help From my Friends." Because I think poetry can be pretty lonely, and you know—language is shared—I mean for a poet, I mean even Wordsworth to say I'm an individual and this is my language—there's something noble about that, and it's also kind of a farce though on one level because obviously language is just communal. And I feel like singing that Beatles song is probably more meaningful to most of the audience than my poem right because that reaches to a primordial level of when you're a little kid, when you heard it on your dad's eight track or whatever. So I just felt like it was a way to reach out to the audience. Also the poem that I read, "Songs For a Country Drive," I wanted each of the six parts of the poem to be like a number on a cassette or CD, so I felt like that was a way to segue there.
RC: How would you describe your lyrical style, or the way you approach your writing?
CH: In general the work that I've been doing, recently at least, is drawing more from a tradition of collage and the visual arts and poets who work using collage so that there are unexpected breaks between pieces of the poem, a lot of leaps that the reader needs to make, and hopefully that's enjoyable. I think the aim of it is to be pleasure, of some kind.
* * *
The first section of "Songs for a Country Drive":
1.
reach for a passenger side handle
the forest it stops it now
out of car morrow marked on drained device
to stay Tuesday roll in back
seat all knotted shirts
from plants that billow
and embellish the trail's
rest area tale of diet coke warning
warming skin within
her argument sudden but not understanding it
whispers false shoe sawdust seen
tracked upon arrival in country
house memory goes below river party talk
an orginal pair on wheels
they like each other are like
spreading fluids over them
selves attractive so to
sing to move
all guests
gone
Chris Hosea was born in Princeton, New Jersey and received degrees from Harvard and the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA program. His poems appear in 6×6, Conjunctions, Swerve, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, VOLT, LIT, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, Horse Less Review, Route 9, and more. He co-edits The Blue Letter, a sporadic direct-mail poetry newsletter, and curates the monthly Blue Letter Reading Series at Brooklyn's Watty & Meg restaurant; see http://theblueletter.org. He lives in Brooklyn. Visit http://chrishosea.com for more.
Rob Crawford is the author of Brilliant Families, forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. An editor at Overlook Press, he attended Phillips Academy Andover and Yale University. His writing has appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review and Publishers Weekly, and he lives in Brooklyn. @rcrawford7