Small Press Intravues:
Occasional Interviews with writers working and
publishing in the small press ecosystem
Interview #15: Michael Flatt is the author of I Can Focus If I Try (Knife Fork Book, 2023), Absent Receiver (SpringGun Press, 2013), and with derrick mund, Chlorosis (The Operating System, 2018). His poetry has recently appeared in Seneca Review, Cleveland Review of Books, and Denver Quarterly, and his critical work has been published by Annulet Poetics, Configurations, Polygraph, and Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui. He is the founder of Low Frequency Press, which publishes book-like objects of marginal aesthetics, and Threadsuns, a teaching press at High Point University, where he is an assistant professor of English.
Michael Sikkema: I want to talk a little about your book I Can Focus If I Try from Knife Fork Book.
How did the form of this manuscript come to be? It's pretty central to how a reader understands the content, more so I'd argue than a traditional form, because the reader has to make sense of it as they go along, and then they realize that they are inside of it. Sonnets don't have that effect, I'd argue. How did this form find you?
Michael Flatt: I've always felt most interested in form at the level of the
page and the book. I think it had something to do with growing up on people
like Eigner and Duncan, where form is very plastic but also central to
meaning-making. My first book, Absent Receiver, featured pages split into
columns with poems moving apart and together gradually through the text. My
second, a collaboration with derrick mund, was a bit simpler, but moved from
long prose blocks to shorter and sparser verse as once moves through it. For I
Can Focus If I Try, I first conceived of a book-length form: On the recto
pages, the lines would accrue one by one to gradually fill a 31-line prose
block. The number of lines would then retract to a single line on the last page
of the book. On the verso pages, the text would gradually snake around the
page’s main text box until the book’s mid-point, where the rectangle would
gradually break apart. The center spread would show a solid text block on the
right and a text box rung around with text, like a slip-cover box and its lid
that would fold out of and into one another when the book was opened and
closed. The manuscript’s organization has since been modified, but this was the
project’s genesis.
I decided the subject matter for a book driven
by what happens in and outside of the text box would be the mediation of our
inner and outer lives by the senses, particularly vision. The ways in which our
interpretation of the world is further mediated by digital tools features
prominently in the manuscript, as does the way we experience reality more
directly, in the tenderness of human contact and the violent ways that contact
is often removed. The complex and recursive interplay of bodily and digital
mediations and traumatic or healing events in our lives is the source of the
manuscript’s spiraling energy.
Its form—now broken into four sections to allow
for more manipulations of the text box and page as signifying tools—calls
attention to the content of the poems, linking the visual patterns of the pages
and sections to the codex structure of the book itself. The question of how
what we see is perceived according to the way we position ourselves in relation
to the seen object becomes tangible as the reader is forced to turn the book to
read vertical and inverted lines of text. This movement brought me to the
manuscript’s title, Parallaxis, which could be read as the axis around which a
mobile perspective moves, or as a kind of infection brought on by the
transition between two points of view.
Sikkema: Are you familiar with the exercise that Paul Klee used to generate motion on some of his canvases? Using a line and a circle and then morphing both until there were no proper lines or circles resulted in some amazing poem paintings and painted prayers. The tone of your work is completely different from Klee's but the process strikes me as very similar and equally powerful. Were you thinking about Klee or am I just connecting nonexistent dots?
Flatt: While I hadn't thought of Klee's work or process in
relation to my own, I can certainly see where you're coming from. His famous
quote, "Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes
visible," speaks directly to what I hoped to create in ICFIIT: a poetic
work about vision that makes seeing itself visible, even palpable.
I see some resonance as well in the interest in archetypal forms: the line and
the circle in his painting and the text box and the codex in my writing. Like
Klee, I'm trying to reimagine my relationship to these forms, to explore and at
times obscure them, at times subvert them. In my case, I have to admit I'm not
exactly ahead of the curve. Shaped poetry goes back to Simias of Rhodes through
George Herbert, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and the explosion of visual poetry in
the twentieth century (to say nothing of the centuries of "pattern
poetry" that was written across the globe as described by Dick Higgins).
Even as recently as in the last five or six years, square poems by Layli Long
Soldier and Anselm Berrigan have been published that look a lot like those in
the last section of ICFIIT. So while I love the comparison with
Klee, I would never consider my work as novel as his was (not that this was
your assertion).
But there is one more similarity I'd love to discuss, which is Klee's interest in collage. I've started calling my approach to content "notebook collage," in an attempt to capture both a commitment to dailiness and messiness (over so-called "craft" and attempts at mastery) and a disjunctiveness that comes from my desire to imitate Ashbery (shared, I would argue, by most "experimental lyric" poets).
Sikkema: Do you think this manuscript/you practice a poetics of gesture? I thought of Stein when your speaker says, "“This is the everyday order of things: the line necessarily denotes movement, the block denotes a structure, which can accrete or erode, sometimes both.” and "consider yourself beheld, though I’m seeing not objects but sight.” Specifically I think of Tender Buttons and "A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading." Both your manuscript and Stein's teach us how to read them as we go along, and what the texts are DOING ends up being what the texts are SAYING. I would argue that Berssenbrugge's poetry works similarly and it occupies a space as epigraph in the manuscript. Is the poetics of gesture important to you?
Flatt: I think this brings us back to Klee, in a way. The Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge quote, "I sense structure spontaneously form as when crossing a room to greet you, what I say forms," feels a bit like art's making visible rather than being visible. Readers of poetry necessarily find discussion of form and structure self-referential, and Stein is interested in the poem/word as an object that exists both in and outside of its referentiality. If there's a gesture in common between my work and Stein's, maybe it's pointing around to the other side of the word, in her case, and the page in mine. It's not so much a finger pointing at the moon, but a hand leading you behind it, to see an eclipse. In my case, the goal is to make the body-object of the book feel palpable in the reader's hands. I've always loved the little semiotic flip that occurs when reading concrete or digital poetry, when the medium emerges as the message, and while my work is clearly not concrete poetry, my hope was to incorporate that element in the book's formal constraint.
Sikkema: I appreciate that you point towards the super interesting history of visual and concrete poetry. In my walking around definition, I include all the folks you mention and also William Blake, many comics and graffiti artists and on back to whoever made all the cave art that we're still lucky enough to enjoy (from a distance). Some other writers' names popped in to my head as I was rereading your manuscript and checking out your answers: Jen Bervin, and Inger Christensen, as well as Ron Silliman. I was thinking mostly about Bervin's Silk Poems, and Silliman's and Chistensten's use of the Fibonacci sequence.
Rather than the at-a-flash reading experience of some concrete poetry, I experience a slower realization that your project is alive and constructing itself as I read it. I should mention that autocorrect changed that to constricting.
Can you say more about the "notebook collage" approach? Is it a
way of getting away from your usual approaches? Of getting away from a narrow
set of intentions?
Flatt: I would definitely include Blake and some collage and comics artists in the discussion of visual poetics. The line gets a bit blurry (and arbitrary), of course, but the work that Bianca Stone and Sommer Browning (and you! Tonic!) are doing in the poetry comics genre is brilliant, and there are people like Lynda Barry, David Shrigley who don't use that moniker but I would argue fit in the discussion for the ways they involve the reader in meaning-making.
And definitely, the formal gestures of ICFIIT are distinct from those of concrete poetry, which is why I would use the broader, more capacious category of visual poetry. Perhaps it's a bit of a misnomer if you can't always see anything visually compelling on a single page, but oh well. I like that the project falls between the cracks of these definitions.
Notebook collage is just a name I've given to my approach of assembling poems from fragments in my notebook. Sometimes poems come out fully formed, but it's unusual for me to create anything that feels worth reading that way. I love cohesive, thematically driven poems when other people write them, but often, if I make an effort to do so, I become heavy-handed. By cherry-picking lines and placing them beside lines from other writing sessions, I can do a better job of varying tone, diction, types of imagery. Of course, one of the pitfalls is that a longer project can start to feel arbitrarily composed, so I kind of have to mix in something a bit more narrative or discursive at times, so that the reader can feel there's at least a touch of cohesion.
Sikkema: Also you've done a great job of laying out some of your influences and interests, but can we go deeper there? For me, the notecard based chance operations of Jackson Mac Low are equally important to my idea of Poetics as my creative reading of the Sunday comics before I was literate. I noticed that if you understood punctuation to some extent, you got the "story," even without the words. Can you tell us about influences both early and more recent?
Flatt: Early influences! Oh man. Well, comics were big for me as well. I was and am an ardent reader of Calvin and Hobbes. I was big into Marvel comics in the early and mid-1990s. I've kept up with that interest a bit, dipping my toes into graphic novels and even some manga (Berserk!) every so often. I'm teaching a course on what I'm calling graphic texts which uses a lot of comics and graphic novels, but then leaps off into visual texts like Blake, bpNichol and digital poetry. The discussions around form and content are very similar.
I would also say popular music. I started writing "lyrics" for a band that I hoped to someday be a part of when I was 15. Then I finally started thinking of them as poems, and took a creative writing class in college. That class was with Myung Kim (I being the luckiest of duckies), and we pretty much started off with Oppen, and away I went. But as I was developing as a writer in college and even in the MFA, some of my biggest influences were lyricists in indie, metal, and hip-hop. I loved Pedro the Lion, Okkervil River, mewithoutYou, Every Time I Die, Aesop Rock, MF DOOM, and a host of others. I wrote poetry for a while like I was trying to come up with a good line to chant during a breakdown in a hardcore song. I think, for better or worse, that's still somewhere in my mind when I'm writing.
My poetic influences are in many ways not that unusual for experimental North American poets. Oppen and Niedekcer grounded me in a focus on the significance of the everyday. Ashbery serves as a model for balancing associative leaps and discursiveness. I fell in love with Celan and Vallejo thanks to my professor Sidney Goldfarb, who passed away this year. In terms of visual work, I feel more equipped to follow the example of Susan Howe, but Steve McCaffery's "Carnival" is always in mind. (The couple of pages excerpted in Poems for the Millenium first caught my eye when I was 19.)
Lately, though, I've been pretty obsessed with Lisa Robertson and Michael Palmer. This is a bit of a return to my roots, as I read both of them with Myung first. Robertson is so strong when it comes to sticking to an approach, "betting on herself," as they might say in sports radio. You can feel the depth of her research, the range and intensity of her reading and her general project feels like it exists outside of the contemporary trends. And Palmer is helping find faith in the lyric again. I also just got Nate Mackey's Double Trio for my birthday, so, I have the next couple years of reading blocked off.
Sikkema: As a poet and a sometimes publisher, I find myself a little lost sometimes in the quickly changing literary landscape. On social media, I see magazines shut down fairly regularly, and I see A LOT of constant hustling to try to figure out how to fund the mag or find new readers. A lot of the free and easy web design that was around a while ago seems gone? Social media algorithms bury any non-premium Press posts, and straight up tell you that that's what they're doing. People seem to be buying less poetry while simultaneously thinking that they should be paid for all the poetry that they publish. Now, granted, I've been pretty out of the loop, and mostly chasing my three year old around playgroup and the parks, but that's my take from this POV. What are you seeing of the literary landscape from where you're standing? What is it like to be an editor for you right now?
Lastly, can you drop links to recent work of your, recent work that you've published, or just recent work that you'd like to share? Our readers and I would appreciate it.
Flatt: I hear those frustrations. I've been working to increase the footprint of my press Threadsuns, and it is difficult. There is no guarantee of finding your audience. We do the work on social media and through email marketing, but the best and most useful work is still done in person. Readings, festivals, even the dreaded conference-that-shall-not-be-named. It's the occasions for conversation that keep me coming back. At the moment, I have some institutional support for Threadsuns, but that is not guaranteed going forward, and so those other issues you raise are significant to me. You have to be savvy on all fronts, not just with editorial. Distribution is an ongoing dilemma. Marketing requires a set of skills I am still developing. These business considerations are of course odious to almost anyone who values poetry. I got into poetry in part because it exists outside the market. But while there's no way around the entanglements of capital, I do think there are more ethical and more interesting ways of navigating them. I think a lot about ways to come closer to the approaches Counterpath--where I used to work--and their community-center ethos and the DIY-without-sacrificing-scale approach of Ugly Duckling. I'm trying to embrace the idea of a semi-, or better yet, pseudo-professionalization in the name of creating a larger space for the kind of books I think are badly needed these days.
As for links: First, my book (if you're in Canada and if you're in the US). Here's my website's poetry page, with information about
my previous books and online publications.
Here's Threadsuns (new book by Elizabeth Robinson out now!) and here's Low Frequency.
Thanks again for dedicating your time to this interview. I know how valuable it is. It's the only thing we have!
