Into the Field from Jacket2.org

Angela Genusa is a writer and artist, formerly of Austin, Texas and now living in Louisiana. Her recent conceptual works include Simone’s Embassy (Eclipse Editions, 2015), Spam Bibliography (Troll Thread, 2013), Tender Buttons (Gauss PDF, 2013), and Jane Doe (Gauss PDF, 2013). Angela’s writing has also appeared in Abraham Lincoln, Jacket2, The Claudius App, EOAGH, P-Queue, McSweeney’s, the Post-Digital Publishing Archive, and Library of the Printed Web. She is currently a member of the collaborative writing group Collective Task, and you can find more of her work on her personal website. We spoke via Skype in July 2014.

Ara Shirinyan is a poet and publisher living in Los Angeles. He runs Make Now Press and is a co-founder of the Poetic Research Bureau with Joseph Mosconi and Andrew Maxell. The PRB hosts a long-running reading series, publishes books, puts on exhibits, and generally advocates for experimental writing culture. Ara is also a co-founder of The Smell, a legendary L.A. punk venue. Ara’s books include Syria Is in the World (Palm Press, 2007), Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan-Guyana (Futurepoem Books, 2008), and Julia's Wilderness (Poetic Research Bureau, 2014). You should check out Eric Rettberg’s recent essay on Shirinyan in Jacket2, "Laughing at Your Country is Great."

Steve Roggenbuck is a twenty-six-year-old Internet poet from rural Michigan. He has spent the last several years giving readings and talks all over the country, sleeping on couches, selling books and t-shirts, making thousands of friends. His full-length collections are CRUNK JUICE (2012) and IF U DONT LOVE THE MOON YOUR AN ASS HOLE (2013), both released in the public domain and available at steveroggenbuck.com. He recently founded Boost House, a publishing collective and actual house in Brunswick, Maine. You should follow Steve on Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube.

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, musician, and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Washington-Bothell. His latest book is Failure, A Writer’s Life (Zero Books, 2013).

In this inaugural edition of Into the Field, I talk with Benjamin Friedlander at his home in Bangor, Maine. Friedlander is a poet, critic, teacher, and member of the Flarflist Collective. He currently teaches at the University of Maine. Friedlander reads a selection of poems originally posted on the Flarflist, as well as several from his book A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya, 2000). In our interview, he discusses his years spent living in two of the major meccas of experimental writing in recent decades: San Francisco in the 1980s, and Buffalo in the '90s. We also talk about his use of the tools of Flarf to do the work of elegy, and his interest in widely forgotten poets of the nineteenth century.

I meet Andrew Zawacki in this episode of Into the Field, recorded on the campus of the University of Georgia in Athens. Zawacki teaches in the creative writing program at UGA, and holds degrees from the College of William and Mary, Oxford, the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and the University of Chicago. His books of poetry are By Reason of Breakings (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Anabranch (Wesleyan University Press, 2004), and Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House, 2009). Zawacki's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and The New Republic, as well as in many anthologies and journals. We talk about his ambivalence toward his role as a "professional" poet, and discuss what he's learned from his students over the years. The show begins with a reading from his long poem "Georgia," which explores his sense of cultural alienation after moving to Athens in 2005.

Sina Queyras is a poet and writer currently living in Montreal. She was raised in western Canada, and has degrees from the University of British Columbia and Concordia University. Queyras has lived in many places and held many jobs, and we talk about the ways geography and work have shaped her poetics. Her poetry collections Lemon Hound (2007) and Expressway (2009) were published by Coach House Books, and her excellent blog is called Lemon Hound.

Tao Lin is a novelist, poet, and provocateur currently living in Brooklyn. He has written six books of fiction and poetry, including Richard Yates (2010), Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009), and cognitive behavioral therapy (2008). Lin runs the publishing imprint Muumuu House, and you can find his website here. He also occasionally contributes to the blog Thought Catalog. I spoke with Lin in his bedroom in June of 2010.

Kaplan Harris is a scholar and editor who writes about a wide variety of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, including the work of Ted Berrigan, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, and the Flarf poets. With degrees from North Carolina State University and the University of Notre Dame, he currently teaches at St. Bonaventure University in Western New York. For the last several years, Harris has been co-editing the forthcoming Selected Letters of Robert Creeley with Peter Baker and Rod Smith. His article "The Small Press Traffic school of dissimulation" was recently published in Jacket2.

Souvankham Thammavongsa is a poet who lives and works in Toronto. Her parents were raised in Laos, and she was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978. Thammavongsa's family moved to Canada when she was a year old. Her book Found (2007) describes these experiences, and was made into a short film by director Paramita Nath. Thammavongsa's first book of poems is Small Arguments (2003).