In Stereo Press

On Sunday, April 26, we met up with Ryan Clark at the Trident Cafe in Boulder, Colorado, to discuss his recent chapbook and his ideas on Panda Bear Pedagogy, the pun, homophonic translation, curveballs, and fake mustaches. Clark is the author of And Bring My Developing Hands, available from Con/Crescent Press (formerly Polter Press). A graduate of Naropa University’s MFA Writing & Poetics program, he will be attending Illinois State University to begin his studies for his PhD in English this fall.

Brendan Hamilton: So, we’re going to talk a little bit about Ryan’s chapbook, And Bring My Developing Hands, available through Polter Press, which is now Con/Crescent Press.

Ryan Clark: The artwork is from Christopher Edwards, who’s very good.

BH: Yeah, I saw that. Is he a friend of yours?

RC: Yeah, he was my roommate for a while and then he moved to Albuquerque earlier this year.

BH: And was the decision to put pictures in here…did he draw these from your poems?

RC: Yeah. He pretty much…I said, you know, here’s the chapbook…he’s an artist, so I said, here’s the chapbook, you can make whatever pictures you want, and so that’s what he did. It’s his visual conception of my poetry.

BH: So, reading your chapbook, I went back to a lot of stuff…you were in Reed Bye’s Radical Prosody class with me, actually…

RC: Yeah.

BH: And one thing that came to mind, which I thought was really interesting in your writing style, was a word that I had to go back and look up, was “anacoluthon.” Which sounds like a prehistoric snake of some sort.

RC: Yeah, or a sea creature.

BH: Yeah. Which is appropriate enough. But it’s that moment in writing, in poetry, or also in rhetoric, where you break the syntax, the sentence structure, to create whatever effect you’re going for. And I notice that you use anacoluthon a lot and you’re very conscious about it, too. In fact, you have, in the poem “Things You Do Under the Table,” this great stanza, “switch the switch as though the / syntax of our irony can exist.” And I was wondering about your writing process, is this a “first thought best thought,” do things flow the way they do because you’re just writing it as it is? Or is revision a heavy part of your process?

RC: Revision is sometimes a heavy part. I mean, I kind of revise as I go in my head. You know, I’ll think of a line, and then as I write the line, I might go back and change the line until it’s at least good enough to go on. I don’t spend a whole lot of time with it, but I don’t write a line just from stream of consciousness. I think about it first. That poem in particular was a found language poem. I just grasped…wrote down overheard phrases and halves of phrases from a lecture during the Summer Writing Program. A lot of those poems in there are like that, actually, from that kind of method of construction. And what I would do was—because I don’t want to steal people’s lines or anything—so I’ll cut a line in half, or like a phrase in half, and use just like three or four words and connect it to other ones that make interesting patterns or say more interesting things. I think “switch the switch” was just like a stutter, like someone said “switch the…switch,” you know, whatever. But I liked it, I liked switching a switch, you know, with that poem…

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by Kris Miller and Brendan Hamilton

On Sunday, March 29, we sat down with Olatundji Akpo-Sani and Rob Geisen to discuss their press and the recent release of their anthology, Recipes for the Apocalypse: A Toast to a New Frontier. We talked about poetry, politics, hip hop, cross-genre work, the role of the artist in today’s world, and George W. Bush as America’s stripper girlfriend. Below is a clip and the full interview transcript:

Brendan Hamilton: We’re wondering if you could give us some background on Baobob Tree Press.

Olatundji Akpo-Sani: I think we had both been publishing chapbooks of our own work independently for a while. And, you know, we met years and years ago at the Penny Lane reading series. That’s kind of where it all got started. And we started hanging out, and we said, “If we’re doing this for ourselves, why can’t we do this for other people? What’s stopping us from putting out other local artists that we know or poets and writers that are just fantastic? There’s a lot of talent in this area—why can’t we put that work out there as well and make this community much more known than it is?” And that’s kind of how it started.

Rob Geisen: He had been one of my favorite guys that I’d seen around town and we hadn’t really talked that much in the Penny Lane-type era, but then we got together and he came to me with this idea, “What if we do this?” And I thought it was brilliant. So, let’s do that. Continue Reading »

Interview by Kris Miller and Brendan Hamilton. Photos taken by Miller and Hamilton at the Southern Sun in Boulder, CO (7/28/08) and Oskar Blues in Lyons, CO (7/26/08).

Formed in Athens, Georgia, in 2001, the Packway Handle Band is currently in the midst of a U.S. tour following the January release of their third studio album, a self-titled, independent effort. They play a distinctive style of bluegrass that melds the old and the new in impressive four-part harmonies and energetic live performances gathered around condenser mics. On Monday night, the band was kind enough to sit down with us before their show at the Southern Sun in Boulder, Colorado. The Packway Handle Band is Tom Baker (banjo), Josh Erwin (guitar), Andrew Heaton (fiddle), Zach McCoy (bass), and Michael Paynter (mandolin).

In Stereo: Our first question is a pretty basic one—why bluegrass? We’ve read that you all have backgrounds in rock, so what is it that drew you to this particular genre?

Josh Erwin: When we started playing, it was Tom, and Michael and I, as far as bluegrass and this arrangement. We’d all played rock and everything like you were saying, but this was just a new, creative way to play music. I’d never sang with anyone else before and done harmony. I don’t think anyone else had either. It just happened to be, like, “Oh these are cool songs, let’s try to do this,” and Tom had a banjo and his brother [Doug Baker] came out and everyone was playing and that was that. It was just a different way to have something to do.

Michael Paynter: It actually worked out really well when Tom’s brother Doug came out, because he was very adamant about us learning songs and putting together harmonies, and I think the harmony aspect was something that drew us all into it more. But it is interesting that of all the different genres, we landed in bluegrass, because there are so many different mediums, but it works for us, at least so far.

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