Look/Listen

You may know Jessica Baran's name from the Riverfront Times, where her economical and dazzling little art capsules appear each week. She is also Assistant Director of White Flag Projects. Baran studied visual arts as an undergraduate at Columbia, but while there, took a poetry class from Kenneth Koch—and completely changed track. She went on to earn her MFA at Washington University, where she studied poetry under Mary Jo Bang. Apostrophe Books has just published her first collection, Remains to Be Used, and there's a great story there (keep reading; we'll let Baran tell you herself). Her chapbook Late and Soon, Getting and Spending: Prose Sonnets on Dailiness is also the inaugural title in a newly launched poetry series from local letterpress shop, All Along Press. To celebrate both these things, Baran reads tomorrow night at 7 p.m. at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and invited Bang to share the stage with her. The reading is scheduled for 40 minutes, followed by a wine reception and book signing. We talked to Baran last week about her new book, Metallica, Cherokee Street and the process of writing poems out of visual art.

St. Louis Magazine:  So the book is how many pages? About 80?

Jessica Baran: Yep, thereabouts, and then the chapbook is more like 50.

SLM: Did All Along leave? I drove down Cherokee the other day and didn’t see the storefront.

JB: Yeah, they did move—they’re closer to the intersection with Jefferson, in the old Proper Shoe Store. It’s a really neat space. It’s adjacent to where Globe Drug used to be. It’s a gorgeous storefront space.

SLM: And there’s a store called Peridot where All Along used to be.

JB: They switched spots with STL-Style, so it’s been a funny card trick, they’re all switching spots. So STL-Style is in the old Typo space, and Beverly is the Peridot store. STL-Style really looks amazing; they’re really a good fit for that space.

SLM: Well, they’re the anchor tenant now.

JB: Yeah, they are! It’s a really good fit. It’s weird to think about businesses being so nimble...it’s amazing how they were able to switch around so quickly.

SLM: Well, I wanted to get back to the book, but I feel kind of bad, because I haven’t read it.

JB: (Laughs.) Well, you shouldn’t—nobody has! You’re not alone. Mary Jo’s read it, but for the most part most people haven’t.

SLM: When I talked to Mary Jo, she talked about how you guys have a similar aesthetic, but that your poetry’s very different. I guess it’s the writing-from-art thing. I can never pronounce the word…

JB: (Laughs.) Right, ekphrastic. It’s one of those terms that just by default I’ve gotten used to over the years, but I guess it’s an important one, because it’s appeared in all of the descriptions of the book. Basically, ekphrasis is an ancient Greek term. It’s this tradition of putting art into words, but not through criticism, and not through mere description, but through another kind of written project with its own discrete identity. It can also occur, for instance, when a film is made of an artwork, or an artwork is made based on a poem. So it’s a way of embodying another art form with another art form. In terms of how it relates to my own book, a lot of the poems are about art, film and literature.

SLM: Including Sergio Leone!

JB: (Laughs.) Yeah, there’s definitely….I feel like the book is definitely a product of my generation, and that it’s the blending of high and low culture. And maybe the democracy of culture coming out of the advent of sampling, and the PoMo legacy, and the immensity of history, and how to navigate inheriting history, and trying to find something authentically your own amidst all of that.

SLM: Yeah, Derrida makes a little cameo appearance, too, apparently?

JB: He makes an appearance in the longest poem in the book, “Some Kind of Monster,” which is titled after a Metallica song. And also the film of the same title by Joe Berlinger, with I think [Bruce] Sinofsky as his partner. It’s a funny doubling. It’s such a great title first of all, and I think it was very much about this notion of disassembling and it’s sort of Derrida and Barthes all kind of balled up together, and this way of parsing symbolism and that whole idea of simulacra.

SLM: I’m really curious about how this collection came together—what the timeline and the process was like.

JB:  These poems actually were written between 2001 and 2006. They more or less comprised my MFA thesis. And there’s been an addition or two after that, and there’s been some very current edits. Weirdly enough, I got a call this past spring about the collection being published…it was like rescuing something out of the ocean. It was neat. I’d submitted this to them [Apostrophe] right after I graduated from Wash. U.

SLM: So they’ve had it for a while?

JB: Yeah, they’ve had it for a while. I’d missed the submission deadline, and they said it was a very interesting book…then three or four years later, they call me and said we’d like to consider this again for publication. Would you like to just re-submit it? And so I re-submitted it and they accepted it, so that was pretty exciting.

SLM: Whoa! That’s kind of an amazing story.

JB: (Laughs.) It really is. They’re very much defenders of experimental writing. I’m the fourth book that they’ve published. It’s Mark Tursi and Richard Greenfield, who are both poets in their own rights, accomplished poets at that. They met doing their PhD work at the University of Denver, and created this, and maintain it from their separate spheres. It’s really a privilege to be working with them. Because they’re both poets, they’re willing to take a lot of risks, and they’re willing to support difficult work, because they like things that challenge them. Which is not always the case with popular publishers, I think, and they’ve also been very active in giving a lot of thoughtful feedback about the work.

SLM: So there were some revisions after they accepted it for publication?


JB: They more or less handed it over to me, and said how would you like to think about this differently? Is there any thing you’d like to revise since we last read it several years ago? There was one new poem. There were a few I excluded. There are a lot of sources listed in the text. Part of the book is formatted for the reader to negotiate this notion of being almost incapacitated by influence and source material. Also, I think part of the temperament of the book is to be a real supplicant of things that I admire. Almost to the extent that I don’t know that I can really make anything new or better, but I can maybe shape something out of my love of these things. I think representing those source materials was probably the biggest revision. They had some very elegant solutions to representing what would otherwise be footnotes. They’re a type of footnote, but I think they function very interestingly, and in a different way. I think it’s difficult to describe it without seeing the work on the page.

SLM: So there’s a graphic thing going on.

JB: Yes, I’d say so. Apostrophe’s also a very interesting press because they feel very dedicated to their graphic identity, which is all typography and they have a very explicit design philosophy, not to include an author’s photo, or blurbs, or a bio. It’s all typeface. There’s no imagery. You’re very much confronted with the reality, and the idea, of text.

SLM: With the chapbook—those are more recent pieces?


JB: Yes. The subtitle is “Prose Sonnets on Dailiness.” They’re sort of a series of prose poems, which actually a lot of the work in Remains to Be Used is also prose poetry, but these are explicitly prose poems. The title comes from Woodworth’s sonnet that begins “the world is too much with us, late and soon.” And it’s this idea of the sonnet being very loosely re-embodied just as a kind of, from the perspective of its penchant for minutiae and I think the lyric "I." That’s something I was interested in. They’ve all been written recently, which was a really neat opportunity. All Along approached me, saying they wanted to begin a new chapbook initiative, and wanted me to inaugurate that. So they will be doing more, after this. They designed it, and it will contain their original artwork. They see it, and I see it, as a kind of collaboration. It’s just such a neat thing to be a part of. Having published nothing, and then to have two books out! (Laughs.) It’s been a total education. I don’t know what it’s like for people who make the big leap to something with larger presses, or publication labels, but it’s neat to be working with people who want the writer to be so intimately involved in the process. What’s been interesting to witness from an armchair perspective in St. Louis is this revival of print shops, and the sheer number of them speaks to me of this desire for tactility, intimacy and something small, something close, something not digitized or mass broadcast. And also something beautiful.

SLM: So do you have your set list figured out?

JB: No, and I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat over it! It’s funny when you have some distance from the work, I’ve been able to develop a lot of … well, maybe it’s more like when a band comes out with a new album, and they feel really close to their songs, and they’re ready to just belt them out. But then time passes, and they realize that some of them were kind of crappy. (Laughs.) I don’t know! But I feel very unblind about my work. There’s no illusions about it. It’s hard for me to put it out there...I really actually am excited to have the opportunity in this reading, and maybe others, is to do something I never thought I would do, but actually create some exposition about the work. Not explaining it, but giving some context for it. I think the process of how it was made, and the thinking behind the project, it can be kind of interesting. Maybe sending that out there, in addition to the work, will make it more interesting to the public as opposed to just “What the f--- was that about? I have no idea what this woman is talking about and it makes me feel weird!” I’m not looking to alienate.

SLM: So I wanted to go back to this notion of writing out of art...

JB: Maybe where this impulse to write ekphrastically came from, my first poetry class was with Kenneth Koch, at Columbia. He was a New York School poet, and he taught a modern poetry class, and I’d always loved poetry. My dad, who was a steelworker for 35 years, was a really great reader of literature, and even from when I was little kid he had “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” memorized, you know? We’d be driving in the car over train tracks and he’d be reciting this thing! So I think somehow I loved it but felt like it was never anything I could possibly create. So I took the poetry class—I was an art major at the time—it actually was a year-long course divided into semesters. Koch has written extensively on poetry pedagogy, this idea that you can teach contemporary poetry, which is often seen as obscure, to anyone, even children. Perhaps he’s better known as a teacher than he was as a poet, but he basically taught in the classical tradition of mimesis. So we started with Whitman and made our way up to Ashbery. And he would have us imitate every poet that we read. And it was this great thing, because it was like being able to wear a disguise. You could be making something, but you didn’t have to feel like you were stepping on the toes of a process that you had a lot of respect for. You were just imitating Whitman, or Stevens. But then I realized that outside of class, I was writing, suddenly. It ended up being a great relief from visual art for me, which somehow had become very burdensome and difficult for me to make. But then this idea of imitating art and imitating poetry, gave me permission to write. Where I would see an artwork and think to myself, this is just so moving to me, I don’t know how I could possibly bring this into my art practice, but I can maybe make a little poem about, and give it life. It was this journal of things I was looking at, and wishing to possess, but then also finding it as a diaristic conduit as well.

SLM: Anything you want to add about the actual reading?

Well, it is extremely meaningful for me to be reading with Mary Jo…I actually heard her read in Columbia years ago, when she must’ve just gotten out of grad school, when she was reading on behalf of Louise in Love, which is just an extremely beautiful book that was very influential to me. She’s just a very special person that I feel grateful to have had such a long and continual dialogue with. It will be really meaningful to read with her at the art space, also because of this connection with art, I think. So the exhibits will be open, and there will be wine—incentives beyond weird poetry! (Laughs.)

Jessica Baran and Mary Jo Bang read at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Wednesday, January 26 at 7 p.m. CAMSTL is located at 3759 Washington. The reading is free and open to the public.