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Lisa Hargon-Smith received an MFA from Colorado State University.
Her poems have appeared in Fence, !Factorial, and Fine
Madness.
She lives in Athens, Georgia where she plays keyboard in the band
Paper. She is also the bass player on the forthcoming album by
Don Chambers and Goat.
Question #4: Susan Maxwell writes, “The
poem furrows a way out of the white by running over it, while still
white underneath ink.” Brian Kitely composes “postcard
stories” that are, quite literally, started on the back of
postcards that are then mailed to friends and family, after which
the stories are rewritten and revised. And Bin Ramke finds that, “the
necessity to make the tiny announcements that are line-ends in ‘standard’ verse
becomes sometimes, often, annoying, arbitrary, and ultimately misleading.” Why
do you write pp/ffs? How are your stories and poems brought into
the world?
I’ve been having such a weird time writing lately that I
can’t stop for the line break unless a line break stops for
me. I have to start at the top of the page, then fling myself off
with a pen in my hand like some sort of pick ax marking the momentum/moment
of the decent I try to “get to the bottom of things” by
simply falling off them. Sort of. Not very self-assured but it’s
honest. Anyway, I also started feeling uncomfortable with the distinction
between a poem and a prose poem, fiction, walking, sitting, the
difference between one word and another and the difference between
how a poem is read out loud and how it looks on the page. It’s
not so much that I wanted the performance of a poem to remain true
to its written version, but I became increasingly determined to
keep the space between the poem’s speaker and its listener
as uncluttered as possible. I mean, I didn’t want anyone
to feel like they would have to read/listen between the line’s
(break). For now, I want everything on the page, mainly because
I need to feel like it’s OK to write anything I want in whatever
form I need.
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