ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Erika Howsare and Jen Tynes Inter-review
by Jen Tynes and Erika Howsare

The Ohio System
(Octopus Books 2007)


J: I know you are interested and influenced by -- what should I call it, "mindful" walking? Walking as a way to explore a place, and also as a means for entering a poem. Can you talk about that a little in reference to The Ohio System? How did this work compare to approaches/procedures in your "walking across Rhode Island" (name?) project?

E: When we wrote The Ohio System, or at least its first incarnation, it was before I really started to think much about walking as a positive. At that time I was working on a long nonfiction piece (which I'm currently revamping by pouring poem syrup all over it), a harangue against tourism, a eulogy for the lost 19th-century experience of nonmechanized travel (walking, horseback riding, the problematic but strangely irresistible attraction of "penetrating" "virgin" territory) and a complaint about the disconnect of driving. All fairly negative, and I'd never really taken a walk with a notebook, trying to record the experience as a form in itself. So I think my "walking" in that first Ohio System was mostly a mental walking around in other books (with all the cribbing of found language I was doing, and you too, right?) and in your words and in my memories or fantasies of places far to the west of where we actually were. A quilt of all those things. (Though, of course, the back-and-forth rhythm of the collaboration was like two feet walking.)

A year later, wanting to try something different than the many road trips I'd taken, and get beyond the waste of time/gas/opportunity they seemed to represent, I undertook the walk across Rhode Island. I began to develop a way, almost like a meditation, of adjusting my attention to the surroundings and to the page and sort of managing the tension between those two spheres productively, while trying not to get hit by a car. Remind me to tell you the story about the high-speed train sometime, if I haven't already, which I probably have. It of course resulted in a thoroughly site-specific piece of writing, but it really is a method in that I've since applied it to other places. And, during that same time when we revisited The Ohio System, I suppose maybe the influence of the walking project (a focused attention on sensory experience, for one thing) helped me to be more alive to the language and to revise without so much attachment to who'd written what or how a phrase originally worked. Or maybe it was just that thing that always happens with time, where you let go of your original intentions and treat what you'd previously written as raw material. It really has gotten to the point where I don't remember the genesis of a lot of the language, whether it came from you or me or some outside source.

Interestingly, I think that the form our more recent collaboration often takes – the sprawling prosey lines, but even more than that, the meandering rhythm of it -- is a form that the walking-writing tends toward naturally, and maybe I've gotten more in the habit of this open, seemingly purposeless progression because of the walking projects. It's a stroll here and there, and tightly controlled narrative pace goes mostly out the window (of the car?). And, I tend to write it from the present rather than from the imagined. For me it takes place in Virginia, where I've been writing my part of it.

I spent a week last fall walking and writing in rural New Mexico, getting deeper and deeper into this sense of time that really lacked the kind of "arc" or structure that could have fit on one page, and then at the end had one night in a motel room during which I watched "The Shawshank Redemption" and was totally blown away by the violence traditional "gripping" narrative does to time, the compression and manipulation of what is actually, when you're not out to slap a moral on the end of it, a slow unfolding. I'm getting more and more interested in allowing that slow unfolding to happen on the page, or off it for that matter. Also: In the car, you're enclosed; walking, you're in contact with the air and the ground. Maybe language is thereby rooted and oxygenated too.

Later versions of Ohio System have some of this slower, spacious quality, would you agree? The first version has a more rushing pace and a boxier, tighter form. I think you were actually the one who made that big change to the piece, opening it up and allowing some pauses. Was that around the time you were walking the dog in my old neighborhood?

How do you think of narrative relating to form in The Ohio System and Don't You Have a Map?

Do you think narrative loves you?

J: [Much time passes.] When I first read this response I was completely overwhelmed with important things to tell you, but I was busy and time passed, and now I'm having trouble collecting my thoughts. I mention it because being quite busy with teaching -- where I am often coaching students on time management and pre-writing strategies -- and trying to writing alongside has made me realize more keenly the relationship between writing and time, the act of writing as determining my particular relationship with time and understanding of what it means.

Generally, I notice that my early drafts (of both poetry and prose) tend to have a lot of pauses and breaks. The fragmentation and/or emphasis seems critical at the time, but as I revise I tend to smooth some things over a little, or express those pauses more subtly. When revising The End Of Rude Handles for publication, I spent a whole day just removing unnecessary line-breaks. So I'm not sure why this process seems to have reversed itself for The Ohio System. There were issues of rhythm that couldn't really be decided til the whole thing was ordered (since we didn't write it in a particular order). I recall we put it into some kind of order, then passed it back and forth several times making revisions. Sometimes I'd change something and you'd change it right back, etc. (Which mimics what I do when I'm writing solo too, actually. Who made the famous comment about removing a comma and putting it back in?) Adding some pauses and line breaks did seem to be primary to that revising process, though. I was, indeed, doing some part-time dog-walking then and writing poems while I walked, many of which riffed off repetitions and rhythms of language that would stick in my head. Which reminds me that another thing I focused on, in those final revisions, was resonance -- drawing more clear lines between some sections by way of repeated images, words, syntax.

I think of The Ohio System as a process exposed, an improvisational piece for the most part. It does have narrative elements, though I wouldn't say that any one narrative carries through the piece or that there is any chronology in the traditional sense. I'm interested in how the lyric "I" in the piece functions and is understood by a reader, especially readers who understand that it is a collaboration. Sometimes, when we wrote it, I felt we were speaking to each other, communicating using traditional pronouns, etc. But other times we were each taking part in the same "I" -- not becoming each other by any means, but collaborating a voice that is neither persona nor autobiography. What do you think about that? What is/was your sense of identity in that piece?

I think narrative says it loves me, maybe even believes it, but I'm not sure it knows the first thing about love. Traditional narrative in film only started to jar me a few years ago, for reasons that are unclear to me. I've become really interested in and frustrated by the creative process and the cause-effect relationship as expressed in the traditional narrative, because for better or worse it does have power. How would you describe the depiction of cause-effect in The Ohio System?

E: So do you think writing-time is a different sort of time than driving-time, cooking-time, phone-calls-to-relatives-time? Or is that the rest of your time is arranged in relation to writing, for better or worse?
I often feel that writing happens surprisingly quickly, that writing-time is actually a lot of pacing around, perusing the dictionary, gazing into space and various other wasters. There are short bursts of actual composition. Then there is the fact that writing ebbs and flows in my mind, independently of whether I am “writing a lot” or “not writing enough”—even when I have no dedicated time for writing at all, I will feel a writing spell creep in, become stronger, then wane. I might not be writing a word but I am in a state of readiness to do so. These periods often coincide with periods of vivid dreams. I suppose this is a pretty lazy way of writing, quite different than the sacred and disciplined writing practices of others. Those people have more character than I.

On sharing an “I”—the “I” in your work, never mind in The Ohio System, has a particular quality for me, a shiftiness that many other writers don’t have. I read “I” in your work and picture you, certainly, but some secret or past or future or exaggerated version of you that I don’t expect to encounter in real life. Maybe this is similar to the way that single-letter word functions (for me) in my work; I’m not sure. In any case, The Ohio System has been for me a site of freedom, in the use of “I” in other ways. Yes, there were times when I was sort of shouting to you through the murk, really trying to use “I” to directly mean myself and “you” to mean you—for example when pointing out one of my favorite facts, our relative positions along the Ohio as kids (beginning and end). Then other times “I” was more removed. The process of revisions we undertook removed it even further. I think that I’d feel more compelled to have a clean sense of what such a loaded word was doing, were I writing a solo piece. And even if readers find it confusing here, somehow I don’t mind. It’s part of the general lack of responsibility I feel, frankly, for readers’ experience in collaborative pieces. Also, “They” is just as much me as “I” in The Ohio System. Do you think a variable “I” is a conscious goal of yours, or simply a tendency?

The depiction of cause and effect: Stolen phrases cause an effect. It’s one of curiosity-cabinet, a detachment from things and at the same time a willingness to peer at them closely. But I think you’re asking about narrative—if there’s traditional timeline here I haven’t kept track of it. But I agree with you that “traditional narrative…does have power.” There’s a sort of emotional curve to the piece that very much grows from the ol’ narrative arc idea, ingrained, and that rhythmically the piece relies on tone to set its pace. There are shifts as in uncrossing, recrossing legs, a new posture. Still, cause and effect: Is it present in the piece from a reader’s point of view? Hard to say. It’s odd enough that readers are probably making their own connections, and with an eye to our process. Only the most “transparent” narratives appear self-propelled (invisible author), and this is certainly opaque.

By the way: looking back at a former part of this conversation, a correction: I meant elegy (lament), not eulogy (praise). I think these two terms are often conflated if not actually confused; I just heard NPR do it in reference to Gerald Ford’s funeral. In The Ohio System, do you think you’re praising in greater part than lamenting? Do you think the kinds of things that constitute the piece are dead, even if only because our childhoods are past? Do you think there’s a relation between being praised and being deceased?

J: I have written and erased several paragraphs about my "writing time" and process – I think I'm just saying what most people say. I identify with the process you describe; sometimes I also go through bouts of scheduling. Either process (regular "work" or the more ambling, ebb and flow) has its pros and cons, its time of usefulness and scenario when it's just an obstruction/avoidance of what I really need to be doing. I know when my head is in the right place and when it's not, but the way to get there changes, so I have to try new things, return to old things, etc. I do feel conflict between my writing self and my social (by which I mean mostly work) persona – a day of being "the teacher" can provide some very useful material and pathways for poems, but the shape and attitude of teachering, the ability to lead an hour-long discussion, for example, seems contrary to the ability to write poems. I have to shake one skin off when I climb into the other.

One thing I noticed, in writing The Ohio System, is that I felt these pressures less. I'm not sure that, like you, I feel less responsibility toward the reader, but I definitely – in writing and revising and reading this piece – have felt less need to control, pin things down. I'm not much of a controlled, resolving writer to begin with, but with this piece, knowing you'd get your hands in it next, I always felt a little less concern about placing the edges. It was easier to get into the I, contrary skins less a bother, because by its very nature (having two authors, not to mention elements of collage/borrowed language) it was already more a part of the world.

The first person point-of-view is definitely something I actively question and engage with these days, but I remember being asked what I was doing with the "I" in my own writing long before I'd become self-conscious of it. I'd started writing in series at some point as an undergraduate, and I remember people asking if this I was the same as that one, if they were male or female, didn't X contradict Y, and so on. I didn't know how to answer these questions, knew I wasn't writing persona or character or straightforward autobiography (and Language poetry wasn't even on my radar yet); I felt pretty "at-home" in that I, but I also knew, as you say, that it wasn't the me walking down the street, that no one reading it would probably connect it to my flesh and blood self. I think it's truthful though; if fantasy, not escapist. This all seems very natural and obvious to me when I'm writing, but I still find myself surprised by the contrast between people I "know" and the writerly I's they project.

Your comment about elegy/eulogy relates to a response I've been trying to write to Rebecca Loudon's Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home (No Tell Books); I'd get into it here, but this review/interview is probably already multi-purposed enough. Suffice to say, there's some mystery about where Amelia's voice comes from, some "beyond" but what? Time and space are both fuzzy, and this refers back to a notion of "navigation" and "orientation" that is practical as well as ambient. There are parts when Amelia seems to be remembering the past, sometimes just through listing, describing, recalling it to another person in the way people do, and it had me thinking about the purpose of all this. All the ways that our understanding of time and space, of our context, allows us to proceed. I'm not sure I can identify The Ohio System as either praise or lament, though there are probably tones and moments of each; I don't think of any parts as dead, I suppose, and so it truly does seem a mapping process for me. When I step over into those territories they still exist and they still buzz, you know?

Some last comments? We were intended to review, here; can you think of a way you or I could review this piece apart from our conversation so far? What's buzzing for you these days?

E: I’ve been studying an audio guide to North American birdcalls lately. It’s the first time in a while I’ve tried to learn some defined set of information like this, a la periodic table. Birds, of course, have precise songs and calls that are distinct to each species. Tuning into these while out and about—consciously distinguishing one from the next—and committing to memory the pairings of species-name and sound are two processes that go hand-in-hand. Of course there’s a visual analog in birding—I started casually studying a photographic field guide to Virginia birds a year before acquiring the CD of their vocalizations—but: 1) Remembering auditory information is way harder than visual info; it has its own quality of hauntingly elusive there-ness, something the brain is conscious of reaching for, like delicious food just beyond arm’s length; and 2) Despite that, one type of learning greatly deepens and complements the other.

I think The Ohio System is like that: for me, one voice is clear and obvious (like a visual sign) and one is unclear but enticing (like an auditory memory). Maybe near and far (in time or space) have similar properties; maybe our mapping is a way of locating ourselves between those poles.

Another thought: I was recently telling my dad something I’d heard once, a story about early white settlers on the Great Plains. They’d plow up this massively dense sod—centuries of tallgrass prairie growth—and, according to the story, it sounded like a zipper as it tore. My dad pointed out that zippers didn’t exist then (last half of 19th century). So I started to picture old-timers in the early 20th century, when zippers finally did become commonplace, hearing the zipper noise and saying “Ah! That’s what it sounded like when I plowed up the prairie.”

Erika Howsare lives in Virginia and works for a newspaper. She has work recently published in Verse and forthcoming in the New Ohio Review and Conjunctions online. The Ohio System, her collaborative chapbook with Jen Tynes, is just out from Octopus Books.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island; with Erika Howsare, she edits horse less press. Her first book of poetry, The End Of Rude Handles, was published by Red Morning Press in 2006. A chapbook, See Also Electric Light, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in February, and her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Lit, Typo and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor.