Alli Warren and Stacy Szymaszek Document Their Encounter at Open Space

Journals, nature, the concept of readiness, Missoula, and New York are some of the many captivating subjects Alli Warren and Stacy Szymaszek explore in their recent conversation published at Open Space. The interview begins with some background by Warren, who explains, "I was a fan of Stacy Szymaszek before we met in… 2005? 2007? We can’t exactly recall." From there: 

I’ve followed her poetry throughout the years, and we recently reconnected over greyhounds (me) and bourbon (SS) after Stacy’s reading in San Francisco in September. In the vinyl booth I gushed about her new book A Year From Today (Nightboat), which she identifies as an “autobiography in verse.” The book displays — in inventive, beautiful verse — Stacy’s acrobatic, expansive attention and her ability to filter the detritus and gems of daily life into an intimate yet inclusive prosody. Stacy’s visit to the Bay Area was brief and I didn’t have enough time to barrage her with questions about her writing and her life, so we conducted this interview to continue the conversation in front of all of you.

—AW

 

Alli Warren: Maybe to start us off I can ask about how the urban environment is a central character or atmosphere in A Year From Today. The diaristic writing throughout the book is personally revealing — it gave me a voyeuristic view of a working poet’s life in New York City. Laboring, loving, reading, thinking, walking around, struggling to find time. In this way it participates in a New York School tradition and brings to bear your own perspective on what and how it means to live in this contemporary moment, full stop. And as an artist, full stop. And in an expensive city, full stop.

My interest in your relationship to NYC is genuine but also selfish. We both live in expensive cities suffering the constant throes of being rendered unlivable by capital. Has your relationship with the Bay Area changed over the years as the city has changed? Do you have a sense of a part of your poetry community being specifically Bay Area-based? When I travel to NYC to read it feels like a kind of pilgrimage, something that I hope to do biennially-ish for the rest of my life (or at least while there are still airplanes and coastal cities). What keeps you coming back to the Bay?

Stacy Szymaszek: Some of the Bay Area poets in the early aughts were the first to recognize my work, even before NYC. So my sense of myself as a poet in the world outside of the upper Midwest began there. Elizabeth Robinson and Colleen Lookingbill published my first chapbook Some Mariners on their EtherDome Press and brought me there, I think, in 2004, and I read at 21 Grand in 2005 and continued to read there annually for years, till I don’t know what happened. A lull. Also Etel Adnan and I started corresponding when I lived in Milwaukee, and I visited her and Simone when they had their house in Sausalito, so that’s a deep association. My relationship to the city is really more about my relationship to its poets. A good friend of mine moved there recently so it’s feeling reactivated for me as a site. It was great to read from my book at Alley Cat in September in part because I got to reconnect with some poets who are important to me and discover that our affection for each other has withstood the passage of time and social shiftings. These are the people that keep me coming back. I’m not in the mood to make a list today, but you know.

When I moved to NYC from Milwaukee in 2005 I was about midway through writing Hyperglossia, where place as we think of place in contemporary poetry isn’t an element. The place is psychic, the beyond, past life. I knew NYC would change my life. That’s a reason why people go there. I don’t make a distinction between my life and my writing life — I try to bring a heightened sense of attention to everything, to live full stop. To the hilt. I had to look up full stop! The end of a sentence and a complete experience or phenomena. Right away I want to think of lineation though — like I want my life to have the most exciting line breaks. So NYC and my form in its form and what the hell was going to happen on the page now that I was public? Public and pedestrian. I listened to the poets, as ever, and walked, and learned to be a seer of things outside of myself. My first book as a New Yorker with NYC as the atmosphere (and The Poetry Project as a character) was hart island, which is kind of a stylistic hinge that led me to be able to write the more ostensible journal books. I think Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals and A Year From Today were survival tactics. Not to diminish them formally in any way, just to note that my need to process the intensity of my days extended beyond what any friend or therapist could provide. Running the Project and tending to all the lineages, being influenced by them, the New York School, and others, was always fraught with complexity/emotional labor. Though it gave my life a complete social architecture, I felt very few could really understand the myriad pressures inside the romance of it. As a calm and patient presenting person, I needed my stress to be part of my content. It has only been seven months since I retired so I’m still acclimating to a new life where the Project is “my past.” It’s very good, and very weird.

Read more at Open Space.