PoetVentures

exploring emerging artists and their habitats

Monday, September 1, 2014

Interviews with Emerging Artists: LynleyShimat Lys

LynleyShimat Lys: Poet, Translator


~


If I could piece back
this broken glass,
screws, bolts, and nails,
I could build a house,
fertilize a garden, and you
would be
a year younger than me,
not frozen in photo stills. 

From "Epicenter: Marla in Jerusalem"

~ 

LynleyShimat Lys is a self-described social media wrangler, polyglot, and poet straddling the boundaries of New York, Wisconsin, West Jerusalem, and East Jerusalem (just to name a few). I skyped in to Jerusalem to talk about her current literary projects, writing during a time of local conflict, and her advice for emerging artists. 


What are you working on right now?
One project that I’m working on is a reading that I did with my poetry group and Bar-Ilan alumni. I had just taken this class with the editors of Verse Wisconsin focused on community building and making poetic communities. So I collected poems from everyone that read and I’m putting together a chapbook. Making a book like that, it brought me together with the other readers. There were many common themes in our reading. A lot of the poems were about being in Jerusalem, talking to relatives in other countries, and thinking, in a philosophical way, about the history and interactions between different communities in Jerusalem. I really enjoyed this project because it meant that I could get to know more of the people who read and could both listen to their poems and read them on the page. 


You mentioned that many of the poets in your reading touched upon place, and perhaps their relationship to place as foreigners, as an important theme. How does living in Israel affect your writing? What is it liking writing English-language poetry in a foreign context?
My poems are mainly in English but there will also be words in Hebrew or Arabic and occasionally other languages. When I go outside and have to speak with people, I always deal with them in Hebrew or Arabic. Living that way, your English starts to get warped. I have the benefit of my poetry group—people who speak English and write about this country. Sometimes in workshop people suggest words that I know but I just haven’t use in five years. 


Salat of the Sus: Carob Juice Hymn--A visit to Gaza

This summer has been a particularly difficult and painful time for Israel and Gaza. What is it like being a poet during a time of war?
For me, it’s helpful to be a poet because then I can write about it. If I didn’t know how to write about the situation, it would be more difficult. I wrote a poem to my poetry group—whatever came into my head. I took it them and they gave me feedback. Even though we have really different political perspectives in the group, it is very comforting to have them around. People in my poetry group, we’ve all lived in Jerusalem. So we’re, I don’t know if you can be used to having rockets falling on you, but we’ve done it before. We all have this attitude that if the sirens rings you go in the shelter, otherwise you just go on with your life. It was nice to have the group around with that sort of attitude because it calmed me down a lot. Also I’ve found some other Palestinian poets, contemporary poets who are writing about the war. It might be interesting to translate poets from Gaza. It’s something that people aren’t exposed to in the rest of the world. 


Who are some of the influences on your writing?
My first real influence was Sylvia Plath. She can put together the personal and the political and make a viable poem with images and ideas that just stick with you. I spent a lot of time in college studying her use of rhythm and formal poetry structures. Her work made me feel that what I wanted to do with poetry was possible.

Then even before high school, I read a lot of African American poets: Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay and now, contemporary poets: Jericho Brown and Danez Smith. For me there is something so commanding and immediate about certain writers and about African American literature on a broader scale. It addresses so much of what America is and can be and also what America fails to be and where it fails to live up to the mythology of America.

More recently it’s the people I’ve been translating like Mahmoud Darwish and Jabra Ibraham Jabra. With Mahmoud Darwish, his first collections have not been translated as a whole into English and that’s actually the poetry of his that I really like. It’s more dramatic and talks about his personal feeling of exile after having left the country. 


What are some of your goals in your own writing?
I’m always trying to find the balance between politics and aesthetics. Also between writing ideas and imagery—writing about landscapes, people, or places. When I first started writing I wrote a lot of poems that had no landscapes, no images. They were just very philosophical. At some point I realized it would be more powerful to have a philosophy communicating with images or emerging through images.  My early writing was also very political and less concerned with aesthetics. Now, I really like poems that are beautiful as poems and also contain political statements. The two back each other up and are both necessary. 


 
The East--A short message to poets inspired by Jerusalem

With nearing 1,800 facebook followers and multiple daily posts on poetry, arts, and culture, you are a poetic social networking hub. How and why did you establish your poetry presence on facebook?
I have friends in so many different countries and I really try to have a presence on facebook in order to keep in touch with them. In college I was involved in poetry groups and getting my work published. But then for a while I was writing and still serious about poetry but I wasn’t publishing. When I started getting back into it, one of my teachers reminded to me that you have to actually follow people writing in English if you're going to write in English. The main English language poets don't live in Israel, so I used facebook to have a community of poets. I follow other poets to see what they're doing and in turn, they see what I'm doing. I really like the idea that poetry can be community. You can share poetry with a lot of people, with poets and non-poets as well. In the past, it felt like I was submitting to journals and they say yes or no and that's it. Now I focus more on the poetry community. I'm still submitting but I'm submitting as part of a community—connecting with with new journals, becoming friends with the editors, and meeting more people. 


As an emerging writer, I’m always trying to figure out how to match my poetry with the right literary magazine. How do you decide which journals to submit to? How have you found success in getting your work published?
If you have a place where you really want to be in that journal, then it’s good to send them something so they know you're out there. Even if you don't get with them the first time, they may want other stuff, or you may send something later and they'll remember your name. Then, find whatever niche you can fit yourself into and then build on that.

For me it was Verse Wisconsin. Verse Wisconsin is a journal based in Madison, Wisconsin that promotes local poets and people who have connections to Wisconsin. My uncle is a poet in Wisconsin, so that was my "in" there. I published a couple of things with them and I took a class with the editors. Small presses can be really helpful in promoting their poets. Verse Wisconsin has nominated my poems for awards and other internet poetry sites. They also wrote recommendations for my MFA applications, which was nice. 
 
~

Look after the city for me
in my absence, walk the length
of Derech Beit Lehem, which never reaches
Bethlehem, and Derech Hevron, which does...

I was here.
And here and here. Record: I translated
the city, transposed myself
from Arabic to Hebrew, Pahlavi to Aramaic.

Excerpts from "The Yerushalmi Returns"
 
~

There has been a lot of recent debate about the value and necessity of MFA's in Creative Writing. Why did you personally decide to pursue an MFA in poetry?
I've always thought about doing the MFA. My senior year of college I applied to MFA programs but I didn't apply to many of them and I didn't get in. After that I discovered film studies, so I went that way for a while. Recently, I was looking into somewhere I could do a Phd in Arabic poetry since that was my focus at Hebrew University. I found there isn't really a lot here in Israel to support a Phd in Arabic poetry, especially modern Arabic poetry. In the States, you get stuck between Comparative Literature and Middle East History. Comparative Literature doesn't do Arabic and Middle East History doesn't do poetry. Then I found out that I could do this program both in translation and writing poetry with Queens College. I looked up the people and it seemed like a good match for me. Queens College also appeals to me because it is a public university. They're inexpensive and they have a real community basis in New York. They have connections with the Poetry Society of America and Cave Canem, a program for African American poets. It seemed like a really great opportunity so I was really pleased when they let me in. 


Of course I have to ask—what’s your day job?
I have a book review gig. That isn’t what supports me, but it’s nice to actually get paid for writing book reviews. I work at an international company writing abstracts and headings for academic articles in different languages. It’s become a thing where I sit around all day and I read in Italian or I read in French or Spanish or occasionally Hebrew, sometimes German if it’s short. It’s one of the few jobs I’ve had that uses my language skills. It also gives me an opportunity to read things that I usually wouldn’t read. I keep telling people that I should have an honorary degree in Catholicism because I get so many Italian articles about Catholic theology. 


Finally, do you have any advice for new writers?
I would tell people to have fun with writing and find other people to write with. Keep reading. It’s so important to find new voices and to hear and read what else is going on in poetry. And community is really important—any community you can find. Try slam and try poetry readings. Try different kinds of things and whenever you can have a new experience with something different, try it. Then, at least, you’ll have something to write about. 


Saturday, July 26, 2014

Does Poetry Matter?

 
Qwo-Li Driskill performing "A Long Story Made Short." I want the pejorative "ding-donger" to become a thing.
 

The avant-guarde op-ed question this summer seems to be “is poetry relevant?” When I see such titles come up on my newsfeed, my automatic response is the always-savvy comeback: “is your face relevant?”

Once I’ve gotten that out of my system, it’s time to be a little more proactive. Not all poetry is relevant. That is true of any genre. And to quote a friend—there’s a lot of boring poems winning prizes.

For me relevant poetry is poetry that connects and expands the voices of the human community. I want a poem to open my heart and mind to human experience. I want the language to make my stomach drop. I want to find on the page the precise language to describe my own truths.

If you want to read a book to prove or remind yourself of poetry’s relevance, take a look at Qwo-Li Driskill’s Walking with Ghosts. Please buy this book. Driskill is a Cherokee, Two-Spirit, queer writer. Hir poems are a song often silenced performed with a tenderness and strength of language from the earth’s core.

Driskill manages to describe Cherokee culture, which for many might be a foreign concept, with such accessible language. Even if this is the first poetry book you ever read, I think you will get it. I think you will feel it. For poets trying to incorporate foreign languages into their poetry—this is a chance to learn from the master.

Driskill walks the line between literary poetry and spoken word—a good place to be in my opinion. I’m tired of academic musing put to rhythm. Let’s read some poetry that matters.

Can’t wait for your copy of Walking with Ghosts to show up in the mail? Check out this poetic appetizer.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Interviews with Emerging Artists: Max Kinchen

Max Kinchen: Screenwriter, Filmmaker




What are some of your most successful projects so far?
I produced my first short film, GROCERY RUN, my junior year of college. It’s a subjective, B-movie thriller. We shot the short on 16 mm film, and the idea is that you're seeing through the eyes of our main character as he goes through his day and slowly realizes he's gone insane. We couldn’t shoot the entire movie straight through in one take on 16mm film because we didn’t have enough film, film’s expensive and it was really difficult to do. To hide the cuts we shot on a mini DV digital camera and we had the main character walk past surveillance cameras or turn his computer on. We experience every angle from something's perspective: either the main character or the various cameras and devices watching him.
My second short was PRISONER TRANSFER, a military drama set during the beginning of the Korean War that explored the themes of enemies in wartime as individuals. That one was a much bigger undertaking. I wrote it the summer of 2011. It took a year to fundraise and then I had to find the right pieces: the right actors, the right crew, locations. In addition to producing PRISONER TRANSFER my senior year of college, I decided to write a large-scale feature screenplay. It was a magic-sci-fi, period piece with Jewish and political themes. I finished both projects but nearly ran myself ragged.

Directing Grocery Run in the fall of 2010
 
How did you realize that you needed to fundraise for PRISONER TRANSFER? What were some of your fundraising strategies?
GROCERY RUN was really small. We shot it in my apartment and on the street next to my apartment. When I realized the scale and scope of what I wanted to do for Prisoner Transfer, I realized that despite my guerilla-style sensibilities and my instinct to do things as raw as I can, I couldn’t fake this one. I had a really great producer, Esha Rao, a fellow NYU Tischie who really came to my rescue. We drew up a budget and realized it was going to cost many thousands of dollars but we were able to find options to get it made.
We used Indiegogo and Fractured Atlas to fundraise. Because we made it through NYU as an educational project and we weren't trying to sell the film, we were able to go through Fractured Atlas and qualified the project as a non-profit. So when people donated they could write it off. That was very appealing. We hit up all of our collective communities. We sent an email out to the Newton Center Minyan my family's synagogue. We got the word out in my dad’s community, in our church, and tried to get as many people donating even five, ten dollars as we could. We did get some donations from the parental financiers and we found a couple of people who were willing to donate equity for the project. It was a dry run of trying to finance for a much bigger project.

Any fundraising advice?
             As passionate as you are about your project and as much as you know it can be the next great thing, you still have to convince someone to open their wallet. You have to adapt a salesman persona. You have to make it appealing, you have to become a smooth talker and get people excited. I think the idea of ‘well I just want to make my art’ is counter to ‘I need to acquire the resources to make my art.’ Your movie has to be worth taking on that mentality. We would not have raised the money for PRISONER TRANSFER if we didn’t get a little smart and make the project appealing to someone other than us. 
 
You mentioned that in order to make the movie you needed to find the right actors and crew. Can you talk a little more about that process and about your relationship with the crew on PRISONER TRANSFER?
My producer, Esha is the big reason PRISONER TRANSFER happened. I would get hung up on the creative parts but she kept track of production. If I wanted to change the script, she would say “we can do that but you have to consider the logistics.” It was also a huge help to know that for all the stuff I was trying to juggle, Esha was keeping track of me and making sure I didn't miss anything. It kept me in a good frame of mind. We had a lot of curve balls thrown at us and I don’t know if I would have been able to make it by myself.
No one will care about your project as much as you do (Esha not withstanding). That’s especially difficult with film. Film is so collaborative. Even if you have a good producer, it’s still difficult to recruit other people, especially on the student level when you are not paying anyone. For PRISONER TRANSFER, I learned that lesson multiple times. We would have a really good crew set up and then they'd get recruited for a paid gig. It was sort of an unwritten rule amongst student film makers: you trade working on each other's projects but if someone gets a paid gig, you gotta let them go.


Directing Prisoner Transfer on location in Hudson Valley, upstate New York, April 2012.

What was the transition like from film student at NYU to filmmaker in L.A.?
After college, I went out to Hollywood, following the big dream. I thought “look at all this great stuff I have. I have two films that I’m very proud of and I even have a great, big budget screenplay.” I entered PRISONER TRANSFER into some festivals. I realized that people were happy to look at my work, but just the fact that I had done these things didn’t mean squat to people in Hollywood. That was a big wake up call. 
In the end, my creative endeavors, as proud of them as I was, were not the things that would directly lead to me getting work. But I will say that what I learned making those films and what I learned working on other people’s projects helped. I could demonstrate that I had a working knowledge of how to break down a script and write coverage, I knew proper set protocols and I could deal with actors. Those were all things I learned in film school that were useful, and put me ahead of some of the other people I'd be on set with. One of the first sets I was on when I got out there, I went from Production Assistant to 2nd Assistant Director after the first week because I was one of the most aware people on set and it set me apart.

Can you talk a little more about finding your day job?
When I first moved out to L.A, I worked freelance on film sets. At first it was exciting because everything was up and down. I was working and then I wasn’t working. When I wasn’t working I had to motivate myself to go and write my own stuff. There was no structure, and I liked that I had all this free time to work creatively. The freelance world is kind of like the Wild West because you are all vying to make movies together, but you're also all trying to get the same few jobs that are out there. It’s competitive and cooperative at the same time. But after a year, the anxiety of never knowing when my next job was going to be and running out of money was too much.
I decided to switch tactics and look for more consistent office work. Eventually, I became an office Production Assistant at Exclusive Media. After spending a year down in the trenches on sets, it was great to work with people on the development side of film and get that perspective. For myself, having consistency in my schedule and knowing I had a weekly paycheck allowed me to establish a routine to go and write at least a few times a week. With a set structure and some financial stability, I was calmer and could just focus on creative endeavors during that designated creative time. I wrote some of my best stuff in that time, which in some ways was surprising considering it was counter to the attitude I had when I first got to LA.


Directing Prisoner Transfer on a soundstage in New York City, April 2012

What are some major changes you’ve noticed in your art since moving to L.A.?
As an undergrad, my perspective was, I’m going to write the things I want to write and not be burdened with the logistics of getting them made. I wrote a large-scale period piece monster movie. I’m still very proud of it but no one was going to buy that script because it's a huge, hundred million dollar movie. Recently, what I’ve written is on a smaller scale logistically, written with the intention of actually getting the project made. It forces me to be a lot more clever. I would still love to write another huge movie, but if I want to get something made, I have to focus on going bare bones: write interesting characters and smart, compelling small scale stories that showcase my abilities.
I’ve also veered more towards comedy. I’m not exactly sure why that is. Maybe it's because I've since realized I'm hilarious. Maybe it's so I can laugh at something when things are difficult.

Networking is a major buzzword these days for artists attempting to rise to the professional level. Do you have any tricks for networking and self-promotion?
It comes down to not just seeing people as someone who can help you. The mantra in Hollywood is definitely networking. It really is all about who you know. Hollywood can often seem like it's impossible to get into as someone new, but by meeting the right people, that's how you can get in and you CAN meet those people. But I have one addendum: its not just about your network, its about relationships. The people that work together consistently or help each other find work are friends. They’ve worked together on projects, they trust each other.
I collected a lot of business cards and had one time coffee with a lot of different producers but that alone wouldn't amount to much. The people I know in L.A., the people that read my work and were interested in my stuff are producers that I worked for, worked with, built a relationship with. When I finally did shoot a project, it was with my friends in Hollywood, not people I’d recruited for their jobs. A network is a good start, but it's the relationships you have that actually will make things happen, and there's a key difference between the two.

What are your future artistic goals?
I have a feature that I want to make. It's called EAST and it's a sort of found footage road trip movie. Basically EASY RIDER for the millennial generation by way of CLOVERFIELD or CHRONICLE. I wrote it deliberately to be a low budget, guerilla style film. But the challenge still has been putting the resources together to try and make it. That’s one goal.
I'm also launching a production company called Bowtie Junior, named after Bowtie, my Dad’s production company when he was in college. He’s been such a huge supporter, financially of Grocery Run and also as a dad.
I have all these shorts, one or two minute little vignettes. The kind of thing you could shoot in a day. My immediate strategy is to shoot these shorts and put them on the youtube channel as a showcase of what I can do. A big lesson I learned out in Hollywood is it's really all about the content you produce. Everyone talks about what they are trying to do, or an idea they have, but that means nothing. You need to show what you can do by just going and creating it. 


Filming Prisoner Transfer April 2012

Any parting thoughts?
You always hear about the starlette or the hot-shot writer/director who gets to Hollywood and is instantly discovered. That's what many people, myself included when I first headed out there, hope will happen to them. But what I realized after being there and struggling for a while is that  those people are the outliers. You hear about them because it's so extraordinary that it's happened to them. The real way it works, that you don't hear about because it doesn't make as sexy a story is that there are people who work for years on the bottom rung, not even getting paid doing it, and then slowly they build up a portfolio and get noticed after years. I’ve been out of college for two years. If you’d asked just-graduated-me if I expected to be where I am right now, I’d have been extremely surprised and probably pretty disappointed. I’ve learned you have to pay your dues. You have to work hard and make stuff and work below your capabilities just to make a name for yourself. It's all about the long game.
Also, I think a lot of people get hung up on the idea of "making it" as if there is one point they'll get to when they can just sit back and say ‘I’ve made it, I’m done.’ If you look at “making it” as a finite thing, “I’ve just got to cross this line”, you’ll never get there. I think a lot of people think, "oh, if this one thing will happen, if one person will read my script, if I can just get my first movie made, I'll have made it." but that's not how it works. If you're lucky enough to get to that point, your priorities will change. What you know you can do and what you know you want to do will change, so the goal will never be the same and there will be a new line to cross. It's just the start of a lifelong process that probably doesn't get much easier. You gotta be willing to always work towards the next goal, knowing that it doesn't just end once you achieve it. It's a long long game and, from where I'm sitting now, I have no idea where it leads, but I'm still working towards it. Does that make any sense at all?

Friday, July 18, 2014

To Wear or Not to Wear Red Velvet: Advice for New Writers

What would you say to your writerly self? On a bad day or a (typical) month of writers' block? On a good day?
e. e. cummings rejection letter to rejection letters
In a short piece for Luna Luna Magazine, Sophie Elizabeth Moss writes an open letter to her writerly self--23 pieces of advice, tough love, and encouragement relevant for all writers.

One of her most important pieces of advice, I think, is to take yourself seriously:

11. And while you’re at it, call yourself a writer. 

I always get the most interesting reactions when I tell people I'm a poet. Sometimes people are positive and excited. More common, however, is a double-take (not sure how to read that one), or friendly advice about how I should make my career writing the articles that people read on planes. It would be awesome if my (soon to be written) books of poetry were slipped into all the seat-backs on JetBlue flights...
OH, REALLY?


But it's important to stay strong. Even Vivian Shipley, whose ninth book of poetry, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, admitted during a recent reading that family members still offer her alternative career advice. At least we're in good company.

And another service announcement (to the self):

15. Drop the writer mystique. It is all bullshit. If you want to write in moonlight, wear red velvet and smoke long cigarettes, by all means: do so. Own it. But just don’t be a phoney – it is cheap and transparent.

To read Sophie's other 21 pearls of wisdom, check out the full article here.
To learn about writers who did wear red velvet and write in the moonlight--visit CNN?!

Feel free to leave some messages to your writerly self in the comments below. See you tomorrow for our first emerging artist interview!


Saturday, June 28, 2014

Sappho Says: A Prompt


Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.
--Anthologia Palatina, Plato

Sappho in Roman fresco from Regio VI in Pompeii. Museo Archeologico Nazionale (Naples).


            Sappho was a Greek musician and poet born in approximately 620 BCE. While Sappho was said to have composed nine books of poetry, only one complete poem has survived to modernity. All that remains of her other works are fragments: single words from the ends of lines, a brief whisper of an image.  

            This week let Sappho be your muse. Write the poem missing from these enjambments:

[] blame
[]swollen
[]you take your fill. For [] my thinking
[]not thus
[]is arranged
[]nor
all night long [] I am aware
[] of evil doing
[]
[]other
[]minds
[]blessed ones

            Or use one of these fragments as a seed for your work, as the stone plunging into the water—let your art ripple out from it:


you came and I was crazy for you
and you cooled my mind that burnt with longing


I would not think to touch the sky with two arms


neither for me honey nor the honey bee  


Feel free to post or link your work in the comments.

All translations of Sappho’s fragments were taken from one of my favorite books, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson, 2002.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Let's Go on a PoetVenture


Hello and welcome to PoetVentures! “What sort of creature is a PoetVenture?” you might ask.

by unknown graffitti artist, Santiago del Chile
Well, perhaps a little background:

One of the most inspiring essays I’ve ever read about women and writing is Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own. In the essay, Woolf discusses female writers’ need for independent space (literal and figurative) in order to participate in the literary world. Working as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Paraguay, for the past two years I had a hut of one’s own—the space, means, and time to devote myself to hours of writing.

my shack during recycled arts club meeting
Coming back to the States, and more importantly, returning to a life with internet access, I realized that it was time to take the next step, to transition from a solitary-hut-writer to a participant in the wider literary world. But how?

The majority of creative writing workshops, classes, and events I’ve attended emphasize the art of writing. Can’t have poetry without that. But the art of writing doesn’t really explain how to get other people to read your writing.

from connie to the wonnie
PoetVentures (poetry + adventure) is a quest to answer that query. Stay tuned for weekly posts about:
  • Monthly interviews with emerging artists--not just poets! Learn how other artists are making it happen.
  • Poetventures/artspirations--prompts, adventures, and events to inspire artistic creativity.
  • (Ghosts of) poets past and present--sharing the work of some of my favorite writers.
  • Toolbox--resources, publications, programs, and (un)solicited advice for emerging artists.
  •  Wildcard--'nuff said.
I hope that PoetVentures will be a resource for other poets, writers, and artists working towards being “professional artists,” and a way for all of us to support each other.

For all of you coming over from my delcorazondeamerica blog, thanks for joining me on the next part of my journey.

Please subscribe! See you all next week!
—Emily