Mark Jay Brewin, Jr., won the 2012 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize of the University of Utah Press for his first book manuscript, Scrap Iron. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, New Madrid, The Hollins Critic, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, Poet Lore, North American Review, Greensboro Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA program of Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. You can read more of his work at his website: www.markjaybrewinjr.com
His creative audio "Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.
Here, Mark Jay Brewin, Jr. talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about noises, remembering the details, and conjuring dead relatives.
1. What made you begin to write “Seven Places I Have Found My Grandmother in the Last Six Years”? (Did one particular lookalike-sighting represent the final straw that made you start writing down all the others?)
Can’t even help it. I must have dozens of penned moments where I thought I saw my dead grandmother. At first, I was attempting to keep a dream journal, random thoughts, caricatures of people I knew, but I saw that she was cropping up every other week. Already in my waking life I am constantly seeing family and friends in strangers, looking for them on purpose, so I couldn’t help but make the connection based on the frequency. How come this woman keeps appearing? Am I conjuring her? Part guilt, part longing I guess. I didn’t call her to wish her a happy birthday before she died, and now that’s opened a floodgate. Everywhere. The woman behind the Mexican food mart in Salina, Kansas. The woman with stiletto heels and a terrible fear of sidewalks in Providence, Rhode Island. She came to me, one night, to tell me that she handpicked my wife (apparently an honest to God match made in heaven) even though they’d never met in real life. Anyway, there was this one time—the scene in Taaffes Public House in Galway—where I’m listening to this traditional group playing in the corner, and a mob of old housewives comes in, smoking and ready to drink, and there she is. I register it’s just another one of these moments, but then my wife even asks if she looks like my lost relation. There have been a handful of pictures, this clipped obituary I have taped to a framed concert poster, but the fact that someone else was able to pick it out, that solidified it for me.
2. What inspired your decision to make this poem into a creative audio project?
One of the reasons I feel like I got into writing poetry is because I don’t think I have a musical bone in my body. I want to one day have that talent, that prowess. Despite the fact I am a hack with a ukulele, I still attempt to record random covers and—every once in a while—some spoken word. It happened that a friend of mine started a label, had a ton of equipment, so it worked out that we were going to go nuts with this thing. I knew this poem was the one to iron out because of the narratives it held, the settings. It seemed like a natural for sound.
3. This piece is a sequence poem in seven parts. How did you know that this piece was complete with seven sections? (You say you’ve had other sightings—how did you select the events you chose to include?)
Much like a record, I would love to publish the B-sides to this poem. I have more scenes and interactions with my grandmother than Carter’s got liver pills. When writing and revising, I tried to keep the sharpest, quirkiest moments. This poem appears in my first book, which is deeply rooted in travel and family, and—since I’m from New Jersey—it has the Garden State as its central setting. I wanted the single, best doppelgangers from all of the places I lived over those years. I needed to bookend the piece with Jersey.
4. How much invention do you allow yourself to do in writing a narrative poem such as this? Or did you try to “stick to the facts” and only describe details that you could remember from these sightings and dreams?
Usually, invention is something I thrive on, something that makes or breaks a poem for me. In the case of this one, though, I tried to stick to the facts. The people and places were strange enough as it is. Instead of pulling these particular threads out of thin air, I tried to sit down, close my eyes, and write out as many of the details as I remembered. The more I got on the page, the stronger and more specific they became.
5. I really admire how this piece takes us to several different locations—from a cemetery to an airplane to an Irish pub—in a short span of time. I imagine this must have been tricky to accomplish. Can you talk about how you achieve this level of efficiency, as well as authenticity, in creating a sense of place for the reader/listener?
I spent a couple of weeks with a field recorder taping everything I thought would work for this audio project. I had six tracks of me chopping celery, twenty minutes of ambient airplane sounds, a whole overheard conversation about pipe cleaners that I eventually scrapped. From Providence to Chicago to my hometown. Luckily, these different scenes gave me a structure, a list of images (and thus sounds) that I could work with, that I could find and capture. After I’d gotten them all down—what I thought would cover everything—I thought the tricky part would be to layer, edit and compile, but my friend with the record label was a genius when it came to making sense of what I’d done. It would have been a lot worse, a lot harder, if he wasn’t there to put it together. For me, I simply wanted to make sure that those small, real niceties cohesively finished each sequence. The dreams were what stopped me up—How do I give a soundtrack to what’s completely imagined? What’s in my head? I hope those sections were successful in evoking that trance-state. This was a first time collaboration for us, so I am hoping as we go along we can make these audio projects as pristine as possible.
6. What writing projects are you working on now?
I’ve got a ton on my plate. Besides the random that creeps up and inspires me, I am working on a series of poems about my walking the Camino de Santiago across Northern Spain. For a month and a half I would walk eighteen miles a day, spend my nights in a hostel with fifty other snoring pilgrims. Crossing cow pastures, centuries old cathedrals. Brilliant. Besides that, I’m working on a few more spoken word pieces; I have this poem (probably the most original thing I’ve ever made) about my dad setting this old camper we had on fire, but I don’t want to use sound effects to just put you in that place. I want to use dissident noise, tones, strange music, to evoke image and emotion. It’s easier said than done.
7. What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?
Wow. This is a tough one. A whole damn bunch. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast Trilogy. Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City. Golden Field Guide’s Birds of North America. Travis Mossotti’s About the Dead—and that is real damn good. Anything by Philip Levine, every single day of my life. And so on.