Self Portrait as Use Value
What is beneath the body?
Wound and mildew,
rumor, mismatched
socks, inciting
event, narrative
of a sort, unwashed
(don’t wash), sensuous
as a funhouse
mirror, cannibalism
in a small way, Saint
Augustine (city
or figure), Greek
accent, rat tails
knotted around
each other, fresh
water, the wage
relation, moss,
brightly colored
pills, candles, wax
candies, nicotine,
some blue light
from an early hour
of January.
Flick at the throat
of our clumsy god
filled with camphor
as the rain busies itself.
I don’t want to do anything
well. Eventually I will
be a river with bodies
swimming. The hand
isn’t waving. Assembled
from current and branch
I am not cricket eater,
not soiled, not even
rooted vegetable.
Place an olive pit
beneath my tongue
as this occupation,
all stitched insect,
is born.
Please complete the following:
I am sure of
Wild scallion after
Fingers consecrate and
In Athens, Georgia I will
Wound and mildew,
rumor, mismatched
socks, inciting
event, narrative
of a sort, unwashed
(don’t wash), sensuous
as a funhouse
mirror, cannibalism
in a small way, Saint
Augustine (city
or figure), Greek
accent, rat tails
knotted around
each other, fresh
water, the wage
relation, moss,
brightly colored
pills, candles, wax
candies, nicotine,
some blue light
from an early hour
of January.
Flick at the throat
of our clumsy god
filled with camphor
as the rain busies itself.
I don’t want to do anything
well. Eventually I will
be a river with bodies
swimming. The hand
isn’t waving. Assembled
from current and branch
I am not cricket eater,
not soiled, not even
rooted vegetable.
Place an olive pit
beneath my tongue
as this occupation,
all stitched insect,
is born.
Please complete the following:
I am sure of
Wild scallion after
Fingers consecrate and
In Athens, Georgia I will
A Conversation with David Greenspan
Since you published with Crab Creek Review, how has your work grown or changed? What excites you now that maybe didn't back then?
My poem in Crab Creek was the first of a style of poem I’ve been writing which is looser and more associative than previous work. I want to say more image driven, but even the most narrative, logical poem traffics in image. What I’ve been drawn to over the last six or so months is a poem which creates sense (whatever type of sense) by what’s not included. There’s the poem itself, a kind of fragmented surface, and then the connections, associations, states of being and thinking which hover over, under, beside it. The poem’s negative space creating meaning. The leaps between images/ideas/language. All of this rupturing which leads to something (what I’m not sure) but something new and, I hope, kind. This attempt, and it’s always just an attempt, is thrilling.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
The best advice I’ve ever been given is to read ceaselessly. I don’t always follow it, but when I do my writing is more interesting, more evocative, more generational, more gestational, just more. I also treasure and hold close the advice that a piece of writing is almost always more interesting the weirder you make it. Interesting doesn’t have to mean better, but being encouraged to circle my obsessions, to drill as far into them as I can, has been really generative. And even if this advice doesn’t always lead to a “strong” or “publishable” poem, it does lead to a poem which I’m excited by.
I don’t really have any submitting advice. Read the journals you’re submitting to, of course, but other than that, publishing is kind of a gamble. This is true even for smaller, more niche journals, and even when you send work which matches a journal’s specific editorial leanings. I think knowing that, though, can be kind of freeing.
What are you reading?
I try to read several books at any given time. I can dip into and out of a given one depending on my mood or how I want to be inspired/recharged as a writer. Right now, I’m reading Red Comet, the recent Sylvia Plath biography by Heather Clark, a collection of flash nonfiction by Mike Ingram titled Notes from the Road, Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s really wonderful poetry chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Dionne Brand’s expansive The Blue Clerk. I recently finished Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy which was a treat.
I’m a gluttonous podcast listener and two of my favorite horror/weird fiction shows just dropped new seasons. Jon Ware and Muna Hussen’s The Silt Verses and Steve Shell and Cam Collin’s Old Gods of Appalachia. I highly recommend both.
What are you working on?
Just poems. I’ll sometimes work on a specific project – I was writing “incomplete histories” of nouns/verbs for a bit – but not at the moment. I’ve been exploring the associative, fractured type of poem mentioned above, but also wrote a pretty straightforward poem about failure the other day. I’ve been editing an old manuscript, too, of prose/poems. They’re longer pieces and each explore specific arenas (fantastical, theoretical, documentary) in ways that I hope are provocative.
My poem in Crab Creek was the first of a style of poem I’ve been writing which is looser and more associative than previous work. I want to say more image driven, but even the most narrative, logical poem traffics in image. What I’ve been drawn to over the last six or so months is a poem which creates sense (whatever type of sense) by what’s not included. There’s the poem itself, a kind of fragmented surface, and then the connections, associations, states of being and thinking which hover over, under, beside it. The poem’s negative space creating meaning. The leaps between images/ideas/language. All of this rupturing which leads to something (what I’m not sure) but something new and, I hope, kind. This attempt, and it’s always just an attempt, is thrilling.
Is there a particular piece of advice you received that you found yourself returning to as you've written over the years? Is there any advice you would give to writers submitting their work?
The best advice I’ve ever been given is to read ceaselessly. I don’t always follow it, but when I do my writing is more interesting, more evocative, more generational, more gestational, just more. I also treasure and hold close the advice that a piece of writing is almost always more interesting the weirder you make it. Interesting doesn’t have to mean better, but being encouraged to circle my obsessions, to drill as far into them as I can, has been really generative. And even if this advice doesn’t always lead to a “strong” or “publishable” poem, it does lead to a poem which I’m excited by.
I don’t really have any submitting advice. Read the journals you’re submitting to, of course, but other than that, publishing is kind of a gamble. This is true even for smaller, more niche journals, and even when you send work which matches a journal’s specific editorial leanings. I think knowing that, though, can be kind of freeing.
What are you reading?
I try to read several books at any given time. I can dip into and out of a given one depending on my mood or how I want to be inspired/recharged as a writer. Right now, I’m reading Red Comet, the recent Sylvia Plath biography by Heather Clark, a collection of flash nonfiction by Mike Ingram titled Notes from the Road, Mia Ayumi Malhotra’s really wonderful poetry chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Dionne Brand’s expansive The Blue Clerk. I recently finished Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy which was a treat.
I’m a gluttonous podcast listener and two of my favorite horror/weird fiction shows just dropped new seasons. Jon Ware and Muna Hussen’s The Silt Verses and Steve Shell and Cam Collin’s Old Gods of Appalachia. I highly recommend both.
What are you working on?
Just poems. I’ll sometimes work on a specific project – I was writing “incomplete histories” of nouns/verbs for a bit – but not at the moment. I’ve been exploring the associative, fractured type of poem mentioned above, but also wrote a pretty straightforward poem about failure the other day. I’ve been editing an old manuscript, too, of prose/poems. They’re longer pieces and each explore specific arenas (fantastical, theoretical, documentary) in ways that I hope are provocative.
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence (Driftwood Press). He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. Recent poems have appeared in places like Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Lammergeier, Prelude, and others.