ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Jen Bervin
General Questions
1) Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix?
West of the Mississippi River in Dubuque, Iowa. I’m not sure that I truly grew up there. I think I went away to do that.
2) Who are your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?
There are so many people whose remarkable efforts buoy me up. It feels finite to name them and all the animate inanimate things that feed me.
3) When did you 'become' a poet, when did poetry become part of your everyday life?
When I lived in Bisbee, I read everything I could get my hands on. All this came together in slowness, solitude, and quiet. Eventually I left with that inside me.
Today I value the community I have in Brooklyn—it feels very vital, full of energy and rigor. People are doing remarkable things a stone’s throw away, but they’re all doing it with dark circles under their eyes. (The seventh definition of “rigor” is “insensitivity of a plant due to unfavorable conditions.” Aren’t weeds are underrated?)
4) Your book Nets is focused on Shakespeare and pulling text from it what was your process for doing this work?
Well, first they were drawings. I used typewriter opaquing film on photocopies of the Penguin paperback edition. The white opaquing film is not completely opaque; you can still read through it, but it’s harder. I didn’t touch the text that remains black, so in effect the process is demonstrated in the space around the nets. The sonnet number and guide numbers remain because they show the poems position in time, in the sequence, in the canon.
I intended to do Nets entirely in letterpress but for anyone familiar with printing registration challenges in a text like this (as well as the production cost) it’s not hard to see that this was a rather unwieldy undertaking. I am tremendously thankful for Anna Moschovakis’ idea to do the shadow text in pale grey so that it could be printed in offset through Ugly Duckling Presse. Anna could not have shown greater intelligence or care as an editor and designer. Margot Ecke recently made an extraordinary letterpress broadside of 68 through the Wells College Book Arts Center.
5) What is your favorite food?
A panelle special at Ferdinando’s Foccaceria once made me bust out crying. I’ve never cried over pie but it’s a passion of mine. My Grandma Adeline showed my mom how to make a mean pie while they still lived on the farm. My mom is a very fine cook; I grew up in love with her food. She gave me an imagination for tastes that I enjoy immensely. My Tanté Dorothy always said that there’s a real adventure to be had in cooking. I’m in the middle of writing a pie cookbook with Ron Silver Jr., due out in 2006. I read M.F.K. Fisher, Marcella Hazan, Julia Child, James Beard...I like opinionated, spirited food writers.
6) Sports Team? or Activity?
I seem calm to others but often feel feral. My Raleigh Sprite bicycle is wonderful transport.
7) Vacation spot?
I prefer to go places and live there awhile. I enjoy slowness, layers. You can’t feel them if you move too quickly. I do love being in a new space--to study it, feel it out.
8) Curse word?
I admire salty old ladies who’ll swear like sailors but am waiting until I qualify to start up in earnest.
1) How do you form a poem? Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?
Paul Celan said a poem is a “reality that must be sought and won.” Winning is very hard and I don’t think I get to determine if I have. I am a slow, aggressive editor, so any work of mine certainly has to put up a good fight as well. Transparency in the process should show—my work suffers too great a loss when it’s sterilized for print. Thankfully, digital possibilities are changing the way we need to offer up our texts. The conventions of print have become conventions of the imagination as well. I hope that changes now that we have more machines to choose from; in this vein, digital archives like Marta Werner’s Emily Dickinson site, Radical Scatters, are leading the way.
2) Where do you write? Is ambiance important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?
I’ll write anywhere—tend towards the peripatetic—but when I really start working in earnest I work in my studio. It’s full of light and has a good view, inside and out. Most of all I like the calm I feel there. The space says to me: enough exists; take your time.
3) In the balance between found language and created language where does your work fall?
Who is creating language? We do the best we can with it, but language is inherently found; even neologisms are from the alphabet. Pound’s “make it new” is much harder. Laura Riding wrote of Gertrude Stein: “None of the words Miss Stein uses have ever had any experience. They are no older than her use of them.” There are certainly many writers who have tried to invent new language systems—many are well-documented in one of my favorite books, Imagining Language: An Anthology Ed. by Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery (MIT Press). In it, Michael Winkler’s alphabetic dials give shape to the spelling/sounds of words in a diagrammatic way that really gives me pause to think.
If matter is indeed neither created nor destroyed, then how are we contemplating and engaging what’s here? To what end? We should care more for “what our deeds effect,” as Eric Gill says. Take the exquisite quilts of Gee’s Bend for instance. Matter speaks.
